maritime

The Chief Officers cabin door was open. I knocked on the door frame and a voice shouted, “Come in”. Somewhat tentatively I entered a room where a man sat a desk with papers strewn everywhere. Clearly he was a senior officer for over the back of his chair was a uniform jacket with three gold bands on it. He was a slight figure with receding hair and a worried expression on a pale drawn face. “Ah”, he said, “You are the last of the new bunch to arrive, welcome to the “Mahout”, we are finishing off loading this afternoon and we sail on the evening tide”.  You will be on watches and share a watch with the Second Officer. This means you will also work aft for leaving port working with him.  For now, get yourself aft to the Apprentices accommodation and settle in. Go out of that door behind you, down the ladder and past number three hatch, up the next ladder to the boat deck. Walk along the boat deck until you find accommodation at the after end of that deck”, Got it? Yes sir, said ...

    Scuttling a ship   Scuttling is defined as the deliberate sinking of a ship. There are many plausible and even honourable reasons for this activity of sinking of vessel. The ship may constitute a navigational hazard and its removal from a port approach, for example by sinking reduces the hazards to navigation. A ship may have a fire or explosion and become impossible to save yet it constitutes a danger to shipping. Sinking it might be considered the solution. A classic example of this was the super tanker Torrey Canyon off the Scilly Islands of South West England. The UK government called in the Air Force to bomb it without the result they hoped for! Today any deliberate or accidental sinking must take account of the environmental consequences of such an act. Oil pollution is often the result from leaking cargo or engine or generator fuel. One environmentally friendly scuttling of a ship is to provide an artificial underwater habitat. These have been successful once t...

  Report on board S.S. Mahout 1400 GMT Birkenhead Friday latest. I don’t remember much about the journey to Birkenhead except it was raining. It would have been one of my first train journey’s alone as a sixteen-year-old boy off to sea. In 1957 the options for getting across the river Mersey were by ferry or by the tunnel. Probably used a taxi and the tunnel to arrive at Birkenhead docks. The ship was berthed in the Vittoria docks, the main dock for ships trading with the Far East. Clan Line, Blue Funnel and Brocklebanks all used this dock. The entrance to the quay where the ship was moored was through a warehouse so I gingerly went through a large door into a world of noise and apparent chaos. Stack of boxes, steel pipes, tractors, cement blocks all lay around in this vast space. There were dockworkers everywhere loading tractors with goods and driving them out to the quay. “Get out of the way, you stupid sod”, shouted a man by the door to the quayside. “You will get...

  The “Stonegate” incident [1] A story of 3 ships and 3 captains in the Second World War by John Douglas, Yorkshireman and ex seafarer. Background My father and grandfather were both seamen in the Merchant Navy at the outset of the Second World War yet neither of them talked much about their experiences. It was much later that my mother provided some insight to their exploits in this period. It started with one document and two photographs: A bound copy of the London Illustrated News dated Saturday November 11 th . 1939   (1) , an original signed copy of the German pocket battleship “Deutschland” (2) and a photocopy of a newspaper cutting with the caption “Mannen med brillene er Captein Randall”   (3) ! My mother handed them to me and then gave her version of events in October 1939 concerning my grandfather, Captain F.G.W. Randall, and my father Second Officer George Douglas, both on the cargo ship ...