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Custom, practice and intrusive war

David Divine, a well-known writer of middle-brow popular non-fiction in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, successfully caught the mundane social character of the crew of the Heronspool on her departure from Swansea in 1940:

‘Except that she was painted in a dull unloveliness of greys and blacks there was nothing to mark this from a peace-time sailing… perhaps the 4-inch gun mounted on the poop lent a point and purposefulness to the departure, but certainly there was nothing else. There was, for example, no grimness. It is one of the extraordinary characteristics of the seamen of the Merchant Navy that they do not go to sea grimly, even in time of war. They may go bad-temperedly, they often do, but a certain acerbity is the proper hall-mark of sailing day whether in peace or war. It is compounded partly of hangovers, and partly of regret for the absence of hangovers, and it has nothing to do with forebodings, or anticipatory hates.’¹⁴

Another prolific writer of popular non-fiction, Owen Rutter, also looked to realism for his characterisation of merchant seamen, and in doing so went very close to the seafarers’ preferred version of themselves:

‘They have been tough-livers, used to giving hard knocks and taking them, improvident and thriftless by standards ashore… They have always been, and still are, impatient of discipline, fiercely tenacious of their rights, and ready to combat any infringement of their independence… Among the industrial workers of Great Britain they are the supreme individualists… [they] are nomadic in habit and temper, brooking no restraint…’¹⁵

There are two things to be said about this commentary. First, that it is a liberal political understanding of seafarers’ attitudes and behaviour, and second, that the characterisation was only intended to describe ratings and petty officers. At no time in the modern period has it been possible to construct a social character for seafarers that was inclusive of all ranks. The simple popular stereotype of the seafarer as a roistering, insubordinate profligate can be made to work for able seamen and firemen, but not so easily for navigating and engineer officers. There is a great deal of reportage of the former and scarcely any of the latter.

In their own words and voice, the ‘common people’ are as absent in the case of merchant seafarers as they are everywhere else. They are there as objects of others’ observations, commentaries and statistical aggregations, but rarely for themselves. What we have in evidence, when it comes to social behaviour, are descriptions of people acting that are written from within the perspective of people whom we might call the ‘recording classes’. What we do not have are either the ‘common people’s’ understandings of their own actions or descriptions of the social behaviour of the ‘recording classes’ as seen and understood by the ‘common people’. This stricture can be relaxed somewhat when we get to the Second World War, where oral historians have tried to rescue the ‘common people’ for posterity. The rescues, however, have come at least several decades after the event and cannot therefore be used to equilibrate the recording classes’ contemporary accounts. Oral history may be able to redress the imbalance when it comes to perspectives and interpretations, but not often reliably when it comes to the detail of patterns and sequences of events.

For the period immediately preceding the outbreak of war in 1914 there are substantial sources recording the character and behaviour of seafarers. The war years have mainly been recorded in published and unpublished memoirs, diaries, etc, of officers and in the surviving papers of Government records.

Writing in 1906 of his experience as a ship’s engineer, William McFee commented:

‘We were always losing men out of the fo’c’sle. At each port a small, ever-changing reservoir of convalescents, gaol-birds, wanderers and stowaways was drawn on for replacement. Our problem in Bremen was, we were going back to the States, winter North Atlantic, in ballast, the worst combination imaginable. British seamen could not be persuaded to sign on.’¹⁶

Captain John Carrington, highly regarded among his shipmaster peers, told a Board of Trade Committee of Inquiry in 1900:

‘All those who have anything to do with shipping crews know that the majority of sailors are a very rough lot to deal with, and perhaps especially English sailors. The sailor is probably a man who has tried most things on shore, and gone to sea as a last resource, or he may have been a boy so thoroughly bad at home that his parents sent him to sea. That is the class of material we have to work with. Masters are put to a great deal of trouble to manage such crews.’¹⁷

As if writing in confirmation, F. T. Bullen observed at the turn of the century:

‘Foreign seamen, especially Scandinavians, are not only biddable, they do not growl and curse at every order given, or seize the first opportunity to get drunk and neglect their work in harbour. Occasionally a truculent Norseman will be found who will develop all the worst characteristics of our own seamen, usually after a long service in British ships… But insubordination in the absence of any means of maintaining discipline is a peculiarly British failing.’¹⁸

Then, writing in his notebook during a voyage aboard a tramp in 1916–17, J. E. Patterson wrote:

‘In the old days, when he was virile and wicked, [the seaman] got drunk and tried to paint the town red. But [he] paid for doing so… In these times of degeneracy afloat, however, a man may be ashore, drinking instead of being at work; and if he is logged [punished] for doing so, especially in an American port, he just “jumps” the vessel… As for telling a man at sea that he is inefficient, or lazy, or is not sick when he lays up because he has stomach-ache or has tapped his finger with a hammer – well, the only result of such temerity and want of tact is to have the man say: “All rite, pay me off, then…”’¹⁹

While Patterson had an axe to grind and therefore places his descriptions within a coded political, explanatory framework – he complains of a loss of ‘manhood’ and attributes it to ‘socialism [that] has made for the gutting of discipline [and] has put emasculated evils into the places of virile ones’²⁰ – there is no reason to question the actual behaviour. There may have been a war but there was no suspension of normal behaviour. Seafarers in the First War did desert, they did ‘roister’ and they were capable of voicing discontents.

Desertion was customary in the sense that it was long established and regarded by ratings and junior officers as a legitimate practice. In 1908 23,311 seafarers deserted abroad, roughly half in the USA and Canada and another 40 per cent in Australia and New Zealand, and there is no doubt whatever that desertions continued throughout the First War, though perhaps not on the same scale as in earlier years. The rate of desertion was especially high among sailing-ship crews. These were the ships where conditions were worst and therefore where desertion was customarily regarded almost as a means of redressing grievances. Towards the end of their epoch, and as they became more and more marginal economically, sailing-ships commonly depended on the labour of middle-class boys who were indentured as apprentices to learn the skills of a ship’s officer. Apprentice deserters were common and it was not unusual for them to ‘jump ship’ in the company of able seamen. In 1915, when in New York, the Naiad lost four apprentices, one officer and three able seamen. All of them promptly engaged on the Lusitania, ten of whose crew had deserted. This was the voyage when the Lusitania was sunk by U-boat, and six of the ex-Naiad crew members were lost. The two apprentices who survived were brothers, and it was one of them who was on duty as a lookout when the liner was attacked. Leslie Morton, subsequently a key witness at the inquiry into the loss of the Lusitania, was awarded the Board of Trade’s Silver Medal for Gallantry for his part in helping survivors to safety.²¹

Deserters rarely knew such prominence. Like the crew of the Chepstow Castle, almost all of whom deserted after port calls in Baltimore and New York in 1915, they typically melted away, in this case into the US seafarers’ labour market where wages were almost double those paid on UK ships.²² Desertion was almost certainly at a lower level in the Second War. The Ministry of War Transport recorded 1,850 cases in 1942 and 1,420 in 1943, and it is likely that perhaps as many as half of them were cases of crew members missing the ship’s departure, but not deliberately. A detailed examination of desertions in US ports estimated that by the end of the second year of war some 3,402 Allied seamen had deserted, but that British seamen accounted for only 664, or 20 per cent of the total. The USA remained the most popular place to desert – 48 per cent of all deserters left in US ports and 32 per cent in Australasia. As in previous decades (and, indeed, centuries) most deserters found their way back on to ships – often British, but US, Norwegian and Panamanian ships were preferred, offering better wages and living conditions.

Shipboard discipline was almost entirely a problem for ships’ senior officers in ports abroad. The following ‘live’ account from the personal log of an Elders & Fyffes master when his ship, the Tortuguero, was in port in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1940 could equally have been in 1914 – or at any other time, war or no war:

‘August 12th 1940

The usual crew troubles in this port, with some of them getting ashore and getting insensibly drunk on the cheap rum. Firewater.

August 13th

Firemen break into chief steward’s room and steal 6 bottles of whisky, one of rum, 40 tins of cigarettes and 1lb of tobacco. After a search some of the missing goods found in firemen’s bunks.

Nine men logged… They are able to get very cheap rum from the bars and liquor stores adjacent to the dockgates, and in a very short time are drunk and incapable. Blotto, and can be seen stretched flat out on the pavement or the roadside in the blazing sun and police and people walk round these prostrate bodies with barely a glance, and they are left lying there…

August 15th

Greaser has deserted. This particular man is a hard worker and a good man at sea, but when he can get ashore at Kingston or anywhere abroad it is all over with him. This is the third ship this man has deserted from at Kingston. Four men logged this morning were missing at sailing time and deliberately delayed the ship for one hour.

August 18th

At Santa Marta, Colombia. At 0800 hours two sailors came to see me and wanted passes to go ashore to church for confession. That’s a good one, by Jove, I’ve heard some good excuses but that one is near the top of the list. I didn’t let them go of course.

August 23rd

Now homeward bound at sea. The men who were logged are now working well and hard at their strenuous job.’²³

Heavy drinking was not a problem confined to the non-officer ranks. In the First World War a young apprentice recorded two successive voyages with alcoholic chief officers. On the first occasion, during a ballast passage from St Nazaire to Barry, the chief officer had been locked in his room with his knife and razor confiscated. On the second occasion the replacement chief officer had taken to drinking bay rum and on passage from St Lucia in the West Indies to Cuba had been lashed into his hammock.²⁴ A comparable experience was recorded by a young engineer officer aboard the tanker San Gregorio. He noted that the chief engineer was perpetually drunk and so also was the master.²⁵ A similar story with different characters and 20 or so years later went into Leslie Harrison’s diary in December 1939:

‘December 5th

After a visit to a cinema and then a hotel in Port of Spain dropped in to ghastly Croydon Hotel for a few minutes to see sozzled Mate, 3/0, Sparks and Gunner in their element dancing in one of the lowest dives I’ve ever refused a drink in.

December 6th

3/0 in his usual alcoholic haze. Mate dozing on my settee as he sobered up.

December 7th

On passage from Port of Spain to Pte a Pierre ship runs aground. Mate and OM [‘old man’, the master] volubly convinced themselves that the buoy must have been out of position; but according to my (unannounced!) reckonings we’d made our course for Pte a Pierre jetty, and had been due to go aground ever since we started.’²⁶

The official logs for both World Wars were commonly full of entries recording the misdeeds of, mainly, firemen, trimmers, able seamen and ordinary seamen. A sample of the logs of 85 ships for the whole period of the Second World War produced a total of slightly more than 2,000 disciplinary offences, of which 66 per cent were for absence without leave, disobedience in one form or another for 11 per cent, desertions formed 8 per cent, and drink offences 5 per cent. Engine-room ratings accounted for 42 per cent of offenders, catering ratings 30 per cent, deck ratings 23 per cent, petty officers 2 per cent and officers 1 per cent. Offences were predictably clustered where conditions were worst – aboard tramps the sample showed a ratio of eight offences for every ten non-officer crew members. Aboard tankers where conditions generally were much better, there was a ratio of two offences per ten crew members.²⁷

Considering the level of reports of disciplinary offences in the secondary literature, it does seem likely that crew behaviour during port stays in 1914–18 was much the same as in 1939–45. There was, nevertheless, something of an official onslaught on seafarers in the later war and it is plausible to suppose that this was an attempt to prevent a recurrence of what had been seen as lamentable and reprehensible earlier. The Merchant Shipping Acts, which in their disciplinary provisions remained essentially unchanged between 1854 and 1968, provided shipmasters and shipowners with the power to levy fines, prosecute crew members in magistrates courts in the UK and colonies, and petition British consuls to set up special courts called Naval Courts in foreign ports. In a number of foreign countries – but not the USA – Treaty agreements even provided for the jailing of seafarers in those countries on Consular request.

Naval Courts were ordinarily little used – only three were convened between 1930 and 1939. But 505 were held between 1939 and 1944. Most cases – 415 of them – were held between May 1943 and June 1944 and were held in Mediterranean ports controlled by the Royal Navy: 90 per cent of all Naval Courts were held in Algiers, Bone, Oran, Alexandria, Port Said, Suez, Naples, Bari and Taranto. In these cases there seems little doubt that the Navy was attempting to impose on merchant seamen the disciplinary measures available for use on their own men under military law.²⁸ At home, in the UK, there was a comparable level of prosecutions through magistrates courts. From August 1942 the Ministry of Labour was responsible for these prosecutions after a filtering process by local tribunals whose members were employers and union officials sitting with an independent chairman. The range of prosecutable offences was also enlarged by a series of five Orders in Council under the Defence of the Realm Act.

The extent of the use of the legal system to prosecute civilians was both unprecedented and unparalleled in any other industry. It is certainly arguable that dockers and miners in the Second War presented the Government with far greater problems. That the state drew back from a legal attack on these occupational groups was almost certainly due to the kind of effective trade union organisation that was simply unavailable to seafarers.²⁹ There is no evidence to suggest that there was any comparable legal assault on merchant seafarers in the Great War – but enough evidence to suggest that crews were far from quiescent. During the Dardanelles campaign in 1915 a large part of the crew of the Aragon informed the master that they did not wish to work beyond the expiry of their agreement even though the ship was to remain at its anchorage. They were removed from the ship by a party of armed marines.³⁰ A similar event also took place aboard a White Star liner serving as a hospital ship in the Dardanelles. The master, Sir Arthur Rostron, subsequently wrote in his memoir:

‘There was a day in Mudros when I had to go so far as to have a squad of soldiers lined up on deck because certain members of the crew had in fact refused duty – they were annoyed at being set some task when they had expected a spot of leave, but it was a job that had to be done – and I meant that it should be performed. When the soldiers were lined up with their rifles loaded with live cartridges I paraded the recalcitrant members of the crew with their backs to the bulkhead.’³¹

For ships’ officers, particularly those of the cargo and passenger liner companies, the military style of discipline as represented by the Royal Navy was the model of practice to which they aspired.³² But for ratings the point of reference was the shoreside workplace. For them the ship was just another example of an industrial working environment and one, therefore, in which refusal in various forms was believed to be legitimate. Here are two examples, both drawn from the Second War.

In 1943 a 20-year-old seaman was fined £2 by the Tynemouth magistrates for deserting his ship in a South Wales port. He told the court: ‘I just left because the grub was not good. I was at sea before the war but that ship was the worst grubbed one I ever saw.’ Asked by the magistrate why he had not complained to the master, he said, ‘It’s just one of those things. If you don’t like a ship you don’t sail in her.’³³

The second example concerns a crew member of a ship in Port Said in 1944, where the master failed in an attempt to persuade the British Consul to convene a Naval Court. The story ran that the 4th Officer had told crew members to stop throwing bread to the labourers who were discharging cargo. The crew members were said to have crowded round the 4th Officer and abused him. The officer had then said to two men that he would have them logged, one of whom subsequently shook his fist in the officer’s face and said:

‘“Sh—” This was in reply to my repeated questioning as to what his name was, and then he said, “You are only a b—- Petty Officer, and that because you have a piece of braid on your shoulder you think that you can come along here shouting your —— mouth off; well, you can’t. I have got a —— and two —— the same as you. I am just as good a man as you.’³⁴

Here we have, so to speak, ‘textbook’ instances of seafarers’ assertions of the legitimacy of customary behaviour in respect of their own actions, and outrage at officers overstepping customary boundaries.

Defence of customary practice and behaviour aimed at reasserting customary proprieties in the exercise of authority were, of course, only understood to be applicable in normal, routine daily practices where the technical and social division of shipboard labour was uncritically taken for granted. In extremity, pre-existing social arrangements were not necessarily turned upside down. But they might be. When sinking ships were abandoned and survivors subsequently – and literally – found themselves all in the same boat, the shipboard social organisation was never reproduced in its original form. Technical competence in boatwork was essential and it was not unknown for able seamen to be more competent than navigating officers. Furthermore, the limitations of space and provisions made privilege morally abhorrent, and anyway impossible to assert. Then there was the overpowering need for individuals skilful in morale maintenance. Where necessary skills for survival did not correspond with shipboard rank – prior rank became meaningless. However, this rarely meant that the world was turned upside down. Navigational skills were absolutely essential, and it was inevitable that wherever a navigating officer was present and not disabled, he would play a critical role, though he might not be the dominant person.

The evidence of the character of the social order of the lifeboat is ambiguous and is not equivalent for the two wars. In the First World War the submarine’s operational range was limited and that meant that most ships were sunk relatively close to land and survivors were either picked up or made landfalls in boats within a matter of days. In August 1915, for example, none of the ships sunk was more than 100 miles from land. The situation changed somewhat in 1917 when submarine ranges had increased and convoying obliged submarines to hunt further afield. In April 1917 42 per cent of ships sunk were more than 100 miles from land. But in the Second World War, and certainly by the summer of 1940, ships’ survivors were much more likely to be at some distance from either rescuers or land within a few days’ sail. This was a far more testing time for merchant seaman survivors and produced far more cases of what can reasonably be called ‘epic’ voyages. There is extensive evidence of survival experience under such circumstances. A team of medical researchers was actively interviewing survivors, and so too were Admiralty intelligence officers. The former synthesised their data for statistical analysis and the original records have been lost.³⁵ The Admiralty records have survived – the ADM199 sequence in the Public Record Office, Kew – but the Navy’s policy was to interview only the senior ranking survivor, and these persons were not necessarily those who had played key roles.

In August 1942 Captain George Robinson gave a BBC radio talk of his survival experience in the North Atlantic in December 1941. Although it is not mentioned in the broadcast, Robinson had had both of his frost-bitten feet amputated. There is no doubt that he had at least played a key role among the survivors of his ship, but it is equally plain that so also had one of the able seamen:

‘That Christmas, dinner consisted of a mouthful of water and a ship’s biscuit. One of the crew, a Scot named Patterson, used to sit reckoning up how much wages would be due when he got home. He even got to the stage of asking me how much overtime he was entitled to. This man was the toughest man I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet… He kept us all going and kept us all amused by reckoning up his pay in bottles of beer.

As we got weaker I noticed men reaching out for things that weren’t there… and I often wondered what it was they could see. Then, staring into the compass, I noticed a glass of beer go floating past and I realised I was seeing things too. I laid down in the bottom of the boat with a blanket around me and Patterson gave me a kick… and yelled: “Hey, here’s a ship coming!” After 18 days of sky and water one is inclined to think there are no ships left. After the rescue we were landed and hospitalised in Halifax but after a few days Patterson came up to say goodbye as he’d signed on a Dutch tanker that was sailing that night. He’d been ashore too long, he said.’³⁶

One of the more celebrated boat voyages in this war was under the command of a 16-year-old ship’s boy from the Hebrides. The survivor with six others of the Arlington Court, his background as the son of a fisherman equipped him with the skills needed to make a successful eight-day voyage.³⁷ There were many other cases where recognition was given to crew members whose boat skills had been critical. In what is now the standard text on survivors in the Second World War, the authors comment:

‘It was fortunate for [fellow survivors] if pure chance placed them in a boat with someone like the Earleston’s Newfoundland fisherman, the Peterton’s chief engineer keen on yachting, the Aldington Court’s Latvian bosun who was an expert boatman, the Ripley’s West Indian able seaman who had spent most of his life in small boats, or the Larchbank’s Bengali greaser who was familiar with river craft.’³⁸

If there were some extraordinarily successful boat voyages³⁹, others were simply appalling disasters. In 1943 the Liverpool shipping daily published the first of these two reports from Port of Spain, Trinidad. The second was a survivor’s report from the master of the tanker, British Resource:

‘A delirious merchant seaman, who landed here two days ago, his life practically “baked out of him” after 76 days drifting in an open lifeboat… was identified as William Colburn, aged 32, of Liverpool. Colburn, who survived 20 of his companions, could not give details of his ordeal, as he is still unable to talk… As days and weeks and finally months slipped by, the sun and lack of food and water took their toll, and one by one the other seamen died. Colburn did not have the strength left to throw the last five overboard, and when his tossing lifeboat was found he was huddled in the bottom surrounded by the bodies of his dead shipmates.’⁴⁰

‘After ordering the chief officer away in a boat with 30 men the vessel was torpedoed again… throwing a high column of blazing benzine high into the air, setting the ship on fire from the foremast, right aft. The water on both sides was immediately covered with burning benzine. In spite of the port boat being 250 feet away from the ship it was filled with burning benzine and being a metal boat it soon melted. The occupants must have perished immediately… During three hours in the water before finding a raft I bumped into several of my men. I turned two of them over but they were beyond recognition, the flames had done their work only too well.’⁴¹

Both wars generated, among some of the more excitable jingoistic commentators, stories of brutal German warship crews. There were inevitably people who behaved cruelly, but the war at sea provided far more opportunities for acts of generosity and common humanity than were available to armies. When in the First World War the cruiser Dresden encountered the sailing ship Penrhyn Castle, the German captain allowed the ship to set a course for home unmolested on discovering that the sailing ship’s captain had his wife and child aboard.⁴² There were also numerous examples of submarine crews towing lifeboats to safety, providing first aid to wounded crew members, giving navigational advice, sending radio messages to neutral ships, supplying food, water and tobacco. In both wars some of these stories got into the press. The Daily Mirror, for example, reported in 1940 that an Italian submarine, after sinking the British Fame, towed the survivors in their boats to St Michaels in the Azores⁴³. In 1941 an 18-year-old survivor recounted how, after survivors had got into rafts and a lifeboat, the submarine rose to the surface and the U-boat commander handed over a couple of bottles of rum and some tins of bully beef. He said goodbye and submerged.⁴⁴

During the years of each conflict the war at sea killed thousands of seafarers. War is about damaging others defined as enemies, and this is well understood by the participants. But this engagement does not preclude the possibility of expressions of common humanity, whether it were between the formal enemies or among those on the ‘same side’, but commonly at odds with each other. Wars invariably demonstrate the absurdity of the condition itself. They also, and even more absurdly, offer some of the participants the opportunity of rediscovering the essential condition of life itself, that without solidarity there can be no life. Many survivors went to the edge and experienced that elementary lesson of interdependence – then forgot it again afterwards. It was bizarre and often remarked upon that survivors were quickly sorted out into officers and ratings. This was naturally regarded as essential because officers needed to be lodged in hotels of a certain class, and ratings in hotels of another class. Once back aboard ship – and it was the same in both World Wars – the rituals of encounters between persons of different classes carried on as usual.