maritime

 Acklam Hall Grammar School I remember the day the term 11 plus was mentioned. It was one spring day and dad said “son”, he always called me son, your 11 plus exam is soon. Are you prepared? Well, the answer was no, I had not even heard of it. Apparently, it is a written exam. The results of which determined whether you follow a route to university education or secondary school and a trades career like plumbing or building.   A sort of intelligence test as they called them in the 1950’s. The day arrived and we were given a pamphlet full of questions. Of which we had a set period of time to complete. You need to remember that in the 1950’s the UK was not metric, far from it. It had its own weird set of standards. For instance, money, pounds, shillings, and pence. 12 pennies to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound plus half pennies and farthings. Worse was length with fractions of an inch, feet, and yards stop. 3/8 of an inch, 2 feet, 6 inches, etc. Then there was weights a...

  My mothers early years - written by my brother Peter Douglas We were in my Father’s Day cabin.   He wanted me to meet the officers prior to the ship sailing across the Atlantic.   Mother had died 3 years before and I had already travelled on a couple of voyages with my shipmaster father.   This promised to be as exciting as the others. No doubt Dad hoped that somewhere I would find someone who was prepared to put up with what he called my feisty nature and marry me before my 30th birthday.   There wasn’t long to go.   Maybe there would be someone in Savannah our first stop, someone like Rhett Butler the hero in the new book I was reading.   The Chief Engineer was like so many other engineers I had met, a dour Scotsman, the First Mate a Geordie, and the Wireless Operator from Hull.   The second mate was on watch, but my father called the Third Mate up from supervising the last of the cargo loading.    Mum is in the middle and Dad ...

  Trials and tribulations at the airport Lately we have been using group travel to travel abroad instead of all the planning necessary when you do it yourself. It is convenient and you meet interesting people also in the group. The downside is that the itinerary is decided, and timing is sometimes not convenient. Take our last trip to Puglia in southern Italy in October. The travel instructions stated that we meet up at the airport at 0515, that is very early for us and necessitated an overnight stay in an airport hotel. Early morning in the airport was chaos, it seems that all charter companies have early morning departures. We rush to find a free check-in automat, no friendly face just a machine that seems to demand an ever-increasing number of personal details before spewing out baggage tags and boarding passes. Pushed out of the queue by impatient persons behind us we found a free space to attach our baggage tags and store our baggage id tags, not in your passport at it...

  Robin Hoods Bay My first recollection of school was around 1945 when I would be 5 years old. We lived in my grandfather’s large house in Robin Hoods Bay, a small fishing/farming community on the NE coast of Yorkshire. Robin Hoods Bay was really divided in two, those that lived at the bottom of the bank in the old village and those that lived at the top of the bank. Grandfather was a successful Captain, like many men in “the Bay” who bought new and expensive houses at the top of the bank. Our house, “Lincoln” had a large garden adjacent to the car park, a pantry, a “poshtub” in an outhouse where clothes were heated in a water bowl before being poshed, rinsed, and hug out to dry and a set of room indicators over the entrance hall inked to each room. The idea was that this was an indicator for servants where there was a request for service. Not sure why we had them as we had no servants!! School was in the hamlet of Thorpe some one kilometre away up two steep hills, Donkey b...

Free navigation on our oceans? Around seventy percent of the planet is covered by water, and we could be led to believe that everyone can travel and navigate wherever they want. It is a little more complicated than that. There are nations that have jurisdictions in the seas adjacent to their land and there are international maritime traffic regulations. Together these limit the notion of free navigation in many parts of the world. Freedom of navigation on the high seas historically has been governed by customs and bilateral agreements between nations. It was only with the creation of UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) in 1982 that freedom of navigation became a right for all states. [1] So in principle, ships could travel wherever they wanted. However there are many places in the world where passage by sea is hindered by natural or artificial obstacles. Narrow straits or channels or canals or waterways passing through the territory of neighbouring countries. These...