by Captain Sandy Kinghorn

Leaving the schoolship H.M.S Conway Easter 1951 I had already been accepted as a cadet by the London company Blue Star Line and had been told I would have to wait as the company was still pulling itself together after the war. Not only had their head London office in St Mary axe been bombed – they had lost 29 ships out of a pre-war 35. Pre-war trades were now being resumed.

Then, on 16th May the long awaited telegram arrived:-

“JOIN COLUMBIA STAR WITH ALL SEAGOING EFFECTS AM 18th 24, ROYAL ALBERT DOCK, LONDON FOR VOYAGE TO SOUTH AMERICA”

Wow! 

The overnight train put me off at Kings Cross at 0630 and a taxi took me to the royal Docks where a long procession of brightly painted funnels over the wall told me the docks were full. I recognised Brocklebank, Union Castle, Ellerman, Port Line, New Zealand Shipping Company, Clan Line, glen Line, Ben Line, P and O and British India and others before arriving at my ship.

She was asleep so I tiptoed up to the bridge and gazed around. I had of course read of the Thames sailing barges and here were four, towing up in between the long line of moored ships, their brown sails limp in the morning sunshine. Dumb barges piled high with reels of newsprint seemed to drift aimlessly across the dock.

The roads were thronged with lorries piled high with cargoes, for in 1951 these docks were the hub of world trade.

I found I was the only cadet onboard so far, my mate would join this afternoon from Southampton so after breakfast in the officers’ messroom I changed into working gear and sorted out newly arrived stores under the fourth mate and studied the loading of the full general cargo – all manner of manufactured articles which ranged from grand pianos to stationary, boxes of toffees and heavy machinery – bound for Rio de Janeiro, Santos, Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Tenerife for bunkers in both directions. all these would be new to me – I had never been abroad before.

That evening I went ashore, in uniform of course, with my old friend Mike Hatton who had recently joined the Port Vindex, one of the funnels I had seen from the taxi. Entering the dockside pub The Connaught (still there in a somewhat sanitised form) we ordered beer. on reaching the old enough age of 18 my father had taken me to his favourite pub (Tynemouth’s Gibraltar rock) and showed me how to drink our local beer, Best Scotch, as it was called – so with a nonchalant air I asked the Connaught barman for “Two pints of best scotch please.” at which his eyebrows shot up, others gasped, and he replied “Son, in this pub we sell scotch in small glasses.” I was learning!

Next day Columbia Star sailed and I was amazed at how quickly order came out of chaos as we prepared for sea. Hatches were covered with tarpaulins, three each hatch, and battened down with Elmwood wedges, derricks lowered in their crutches, their guy ropes neatly coiled on cleats. rubbish vanished. Peter and I finished scrubbing decks and polished the bridge brass in time to change into uniform before the dock pilot boarded. Senior marine superintendent Captain Hunt looked in to see us on his way down from saying cheerio to our Captain Tallack. We were off.

Company dock pilot Fred Carr with his own quartermaster took us out of the dock and into the river lock, all the time cracking jokes. “Port a little Charlie”, then turning to me “Did you hear about the rabbit and the elephant!” So setting off to sea was not such a frightening experience after all!

at Gravesend river pilot Mr Dawson handed over to a deep sea pilot who took us down to Dungeness. one of us was on the bridge all this time, learning all about it and of course making tea, this was before teabags, we used leaf tea and sweetened condensed milk, (connie onnie). “Two lumps of sugar for me mate.”

Shortly before we sailed a young bull in his pen was put aboard, secured on the afterdeck. Peter and I were introduced. “This, lads, is Burderop Joker, and you will be looking after him to Santos.” Which of course we did, feeding him, mucking out – in addition to our other duties, great fun. We soon learned our bull had a sense of humour when he knocked us down and then licked our faces.

The Bay of Biscay was rough and I was disgracefully seasick, unlike Peter who to my feeble indignation seemed to revel in it. I was encouraged to keep working, “with seasickness the first ten years are the worst.” But I soon got over it and was only occasionally seasick thereafter.

We kept bridge watches in our uniforms with the officers to Tenerife – four hours on and eight off, Peter with the second officer on the 4-8s, I with the third mate on the 12-4s. The 8-12s were kept by the fourth mate supervised by Captain Tallack. We were shown how to take sights of various landmarks and put our position on the chart every fifteen minutes. Columbia Star had no radar or gyro compass, in her we were back to basics. The chief officer was on daywork and there were three sailors in each watch, one to steer, one lookout and the other on standby. in Tenerife we cadets were required to patrol the decks “to keep off stowaways”. after Tenerife we were on daywork from seven in the morning until ten at night, with breaks for meals of course, everything over eight hours being overtime, at one shilling and threepence per hour.

Rio de Janeiro came and went, with a trip to Copacabana Beach and horrific pictures of a car crash in the local newspaper. at Santos the Joker went ashore in his pen in good order and entering Montevideo we saw piles of bent and twisted rusty steel on the quay which the pilot told us were the salvaged remains of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee which had blown herself up when forced in by Commodore Harwood’s three light cruisers, Achilles, Ajax and Exeter. our old lamptrimmer Charlie Soderblom had been an AB in the Doric Star when she was sunk by Graf Spee and was transferred to the German supply ship Altmark. Hiding from the royal Navy in a Norwegian fjord she was nevertheless found by the destroyer H.M.S. Cossack and her prisoners released, a great moral booster to Britain in an otherwise despairing 1940.

There is now a memorial on that quayside for the Germans seafarers lost in that battle as well as those men of the British royal Navy, for Graf Spee’s Captain Langsdorf was a humane officer who did not kill one British merchant seaman during his raids on British ships.

Buenos Aires saw completion of our outward cargo and time would be spent here readying our cargo holds, ‘tween and shelter decks for the refrigerated cargo we would soon be loading. visiting the magnificent general post office to post a letter home, I admired the huge map painted on one of the walls. Argentina in all its finery included a few islands off the bottom end which were named the Malvinas. By this time I had several argentine friends with whom I raised this matter. “ah yes,” they said, “You British call them the Falklands but they should really be ours.”

“Would you go and live there?” “Not on your life!”

For by this time I had learned that the argie is a city dweller, a lover of the bright lights, restaurants, and football, and that most of those who farm their southern territories are those descended from the Welsh Utopians who came here in 1865, to farm the wide expanses of Patagonia. “Where’s Patagonia?”

“Down south, where you are now going to load frozen lamb for the British housewife.” For whom meat had been strictly rationed since war began in 1939.

My docking undocking station was down aft with the second mate, seeing to tugs and mooring ropes. By this time, a Saturday afternoon, the lads were well pickled with the local jungle juice and one came up onto the docking bridge to have it out with the second mate who had taken a bottle from a man and thrown it into the dock. a fight ensued in which I gleefully took part and the sailor left us. and that was the only fight I was in during all my years at sea.

The weather became increasingly cold with rough seas as we headed south of the Falklands and Magellan Strait to the north east coast of Tierra del Fuego, a wild, desolate San Sebastian Bay, where we anchored to await our first shipload of cargo. This arrived in the coaster Lucho from the tiny port of Rio Grande, sixty miles south towards Cape Hom, in which it had been decided the third mate and I should return to her port and take up residence in the hotel there, to tally the cargo in, lamb by lamb, as there were discrepancies in the first load count. I was told I was chosen because I had learned Spanish on the Conway. I had in fact won a Spanish prize there which I had foolishly revealed to my shipmates. But the language spoken by these lads we now found ourselves with in very few ways resembled the Spanish I thought I knew.

But we soon began to get on with each other, counting the frozen carcasses in their little rail trucks uno, dos, etc. before the truck whizzed down the railway to the coaster. She was not refrigerated but so cold was the weather that the “lamps” remained hard until being loaded into the Columbia Star, several hours later. The Lucho had no passenger accommodation but the third mate slept in a spare cabin while I was given a bunk in the radio room.

This was early July, the depths of the southern winter, and snow was falling as we came alongside a wooden wharf which seemed to be somewhere out of a western movie. Unsurfaced streets and wooden sidewalks still showed yesteryear’s hitching rails though horses were now replaced by Fords and Chevvies, driving on the right. Driving had recently changed from left to right and we were told they had spread this change out over three days – “to avoid confusion.”

our hotel, the only one, was basic but clean and comfortable and we all adjourned there in between Lucho loadings. of course we English were rare birds in these parts and, after a few beers in the bar, we were asked to sing an English song. I felt it was probably a few years since Blaydon races had been sung so far south. Then our cheerful comrades would teach me a very sad Argentinean song, which they said had to be sung very loudly. When I had mastered the words, whose meaning was quite unknown to me, and got the tune, I held forth at the top of my voice.

Half way through the bar door was flung open by a crimson faced proprietor who demanded to know who was singing such a vile song in his respectable hotel.

When he saw my face he joined the others lost in mirth, and backed out, waving a mock administrative finger.

From San Sebastian Bay we proceeded north to Deseado on mainland Patagonia, where I met some of the Welsh speakers who, when they learned I had spent two years in North Wales (Conway) welcomed me as though I was one of theirs. Deseado was a tricky place to enter, strong and various tidal currents, no tugs and we were ten feet longer than the stone wharf. But Captain Tallack, pilot and sailor on the wheel managed it, and it was only a short walk up to the frigorifico for tallying, by which time we automatically found ourselves counting posts in a fence, bricks in a wall … in Spanish of course.

Last loading port was Buenos Aires, where on every wall were painted in large letters, PERON CUMPLE Y EVITA DIG NIFICA which means “Peron fulfils his promises while Evita adds dignity.” it was only revealed after they had both passed on that this precious pair had liberally helped themselves to Argentina’s old age Persons’ fund.

Frozen lamb completed, we loaded unrefrigerated bags of bones and bonemeal, twelve passengers, and set off for Tenerife and Liverpool.

I was no longer a first-tripper.