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Chapter three - page 1
A Merchant Service Officer
1918 - 1923
Some years after Claude retired he began writing a letter to Captain Wilcox, by then the Company’s senior Marine Superintendent in London to request a passage out to South Africa. I say began because this letter within a page ceased being a letter and instead became a narrative of his career with the Union-Castle Line, I have used it exactly as father wrote it;
I recall my father telling me of his initial introduction to the Company. There was a clear cut ‘class’ structure in British shipping, there were the prestige companies, headed by the likes of Cunard White Star going down the social scale to those tramp ship concerns that Kipling wrote about, the ‘dirty smoking tramp ship’.
Union-Castle ranked amongst the lower aristocracy in shipping circles, not to be numbered with Cunard and Orient Lines but certainly the equal of British India Line. Amongst those to be honoured in the Royal Birthday or New Years honours list would be a knighthood for the current Commodore. The Company’s masters were very grand gentlemen, having spent many years reaching the exalted heights of the Captain’s cabin they now lorded it over all they surveyed. It was accepted that such men supplemented their salaries through private incomes; they were indeed ‘Gentlemen Captains’.
My father said that it was made quite clear to him by the Marine Superintendent who interviewed him that the only reason he had got so far as into this gentleman’s august presence was that, due to officers being lost to Royal Naval service, lost at sea and so forth the Company found itself acutely short of men. Father was informed that the Company under normal circumstances never even considered employing officers without a Master’s certificate, and certainly not impecunious lowly beings from the east end of London with only the shortened version of Second Mate’s certificate. Union-Castle had in fact found themselves in this position through an ironical result of their snobbery. They liked all their passenger ships to fly not the common Merchant Service red ensign but what the public considered the more prestigious blue ensign, this only being flown by vessels commanded by Royal Naval Reserve officers and manned with a minimum of Reserve men. It never occurred to these ‘aristocrats’ of Companies that in time of war the Navy would expect these Reserve officers to actually man Naval vessels; they did which left an acute shortage in the Merchant fleets.
The First World War was still in it’s last devastating fourth year; the armistice would not be signed until the 11th of November 1918. Thus Claude’s first voyages were made under war conditions.
“It seems a very long time ago now, during the final year of the First World War, in March 1918 I joined as 4th Mate (Extra 4th) the ‘Kenilworth Castle’. The ship very nearly missed making England, for at midnight on the night our convoy was dispersing for different ports (the ‘Durham Castle’ for London, H.M.S. ‘Kent’ for Portsmouth and the ‘Kenilworth Castle’ for Plymouth) a destroyer came too near our bow and was cut in half. The stern half sank and with it the depth charges which went up under the ‘Kenilworth Castle’. We did not even know we had been in a collision until we made Plymouth where the ship rested on the mud.a The explosion unshipped the foremast and many companion ladders, smashed all compasses, the bridge steering gear and all communications except the engine room phone. We steered from aft and set course by the North Star. The experience taught me one thing, the necessity of having alternative means of communications when normal systems break down. Due to the collapse (of communications) some of the lifeboats were lowered while the ship was still making speed through the water and so life was lost.”
The ‘Kenilworth Castle’ just made Plymouth where she rested on the mud. Here Claude experienced one of those farcical anticlimaxes of life. Every week the mail shipsb carried the gold bullion home to England it was loaded whilst the ship was at Durban and with some ceremony. The appointed time for the bullion train would arrive and on the dot, hauled by an impressive steam locomotive, watched by those on the wharf and ship’s passengers from on deck, it steamed majestically alongside the ship. The whole scene was made the more impressive by the flanks of watching police. Loading was carried out with equal ceremony, each ingot encased in wood with it’s own number was carried passed South African Reserve Bank officials and at least three of the ship’s officers each of whom would tick off the ingot on a pre-typed list.
Well, thought Claude, already not a little apprehensive at his elevation in status, his one very new and shiny gold stripe probably still something he could hardly believe himself to be wearing, if this was the show a colony could put on then what was he to expect when the ship docked in England, would a brass band be too much?
The ‘Kenilworth Castle’ slumped in an undignified heap on Plymouth Sounds mud bank, the expected tender (a small passenger ferry, large passenger vessels only ever anchored in the Sound.) came alongside and a gentleman in a not over smart coat and rather shiny bowler hat presented himself on deck. “Yes” invited my father, as I say feeling very important, “what can I do for you”?
“I’ve come for the gold guv.”
My father looked at this little chap in horror, was this some kind of joke? He went to the Chief Officer who with almost equal nonchalance as my father’s new bowler hated acquaintance, threw him the bullion room keys saying something like “yes, let him have it will you fourth.”
In fact when years later I was to perform the exact same duty nothing much had changed other than there was a little more effort at security, three officers being present and tallying out the gold. But the bowler hated ‘gent’ was the same, no ceremony on the wharf the gold simply being loaded into lorries and driven away. Over the years the mail ships carried the gold only one ingot was ever ‘lost’ and that was on the train bringing the gold from Johannesburg to Durban.
This one voyage on the ‘Kenilworth Castle’ was to be my father’s last for some time on a ship as splendid as a ‘Cape Mail’; he was about to experience life on a much humbler vessel, of which Union-Castle owned a number. The ‘Cawdor Castle’ had been built in 1902 not for the Mail service but as an ‘extra’ ship designed to carry cargo and immigrants.
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