Recollections of an Unsuccessful Seaman. Dave Creamer
CROSS-CHANNEL RUN
The 18 months from the middle of 1916 to the beginning of 1918 are the most pleasant and happy times I have in my 20 years at sea. Our steamer is a poor class tramp of about 4,000 tons, but she has been built for a special trade and with a good speed, which are the very reasons for her being requisitioned as a Military Transport to ferry troops and war material across to France.
She has the worst accommodation of any ship for her size I have ever sailed in, but one can put up with that easily enough if the other conditions are fairly good. She is commanded by an easygoing Irishman who leaves things pretty well to his officers once he has found them to be trustworthy and conscientious. A really competent tramp steamer shipmaster is a man in a hundred. He must have a strong nerve, a brain of no mean order, and be a thoroughly good businessman.
We are kept busy all the time apart from the periods of unavoidable delays. We make 112 trips across the Channel in 18 months, firstly from Avonmouth to Rouen and then from either Portsmouth or Southampton to most of the Channel ports in France. The cargoes are a miscellaneous jumble of war material, from motor lorries, cycles, steam wagons, disinfectors, and railway wagons, to guns, provisions, and troops. We make the return passages either light ship or with scrap from the battlefront such as damaged guns or wrecked lorries and wagons. At a later stage the ship carries over 300 army tanks, 30 per trip, from Portsmouth dockyard to Le Havre. Occasionally we load big and beautifully fitted out hospital Pullman cars, four of them to a complete train that were stowed one on each side of the fore and main decks. Nearly all this war material, except the tanks and trains, is loaded and discharged using the ship’s own gear, no mean feat with some of the lorries weighing over ten tons and with our heavy lift derrick being more or less a homemade affair. I think we held the record for doing no damage whatsoever to a single machine during the whole period.
Most of the other vessels running in conjunction with us are sunk either by mine or torpedo, and some with a tragic loss of life. It isn’t until April 1917 that we have any naval escorts. We never see a submarine, but do pass one or two floating mines a little too close for comfort. It will make little difference if we run into trouble; our decks are so cluttered with lorries and so forth that getting to the lifeboats quickly, either from the crew quarters forward or the troops quarters aft, is virtually impossible.
However happy these times are though, the wages still do not do justice to our work:
A moment please! The third officer’s wages on this Military Transport are five shillings more per week than the Arab firemen who, except for the donkeyman (Serang) cannot even speak English! The chief officer, a position just now of very considerable responsibility and this being a troop carrier with cargoes of great value – well, he receives just five shillings a week more than his Chinese steward who waits on him! I simply ask you if that is fair? And now you will see what I meant when I said the mercantile marine should have made money while they could! The homogeneous collection called British subjects who manned the ships did well enough getting practically the same pay as the certificated ship’s navigating officers, the engineer officers being the same. I ask you confidentially, ain’t it sweet? Really I feel ashamed to tell you such things, because naturally you will wonder what kind of men we are to be only worth such a wage! Well, I simply don’t know – we don’t bother about it, that’s all. We have no organisation or anything; we must simply must take what is given us.
The winter of 1917 is a severe one with many gales and great submarine activity. The chances of collision and stranding are decidedly odds on with the navigation lights on the ships unlit and with the lighthouses ashore extinguished. We have one or two horribly narrow squeaks from the former. In one month alone there are 16 collisions in the English Channel, and between February and May, 1,600,000 tons of shipping are sunk.
I feel really sorry for the soldiers when we are sailing as a troopship from the Bristol Channel in these gales. By the time we are off Trevose Head in Devon, most of them look to be more ready for a hospital than fighting in the trenches in France. Even the military sentries, who are supposed to be guarding our lifeboats, have abandoned their posts because of seasickness. They would all far rather be at the battlefront than on this steam packet off Land’s End and heading for Rouen.
The lovely valley of the Seine has never before seen such river traffic. The Fishguard railway ferry, now a white hospital ship, heads downriver loaded with her sad freight, whilst a cross-Channel packet overtakes us, her decks a mass of khaki from bow to stern. A well-known Isle of Man steamer packed with troops lies astern of us; following the hospital ship, a Newhaven packet full of homeward bounders – who give derisive shouts as we pass – heads west towards the Channel.
We pass the castle at Tancarville perched high on the hillside and the canal locks, and head upriver. I’ve been up and down the Seine dozens of times, winding through miles of woodland and lush water meadows fronted by rows of tall poplar trees. To me, the Seine is always lovely. In the springtime the riverbanks are covered by drooping willows and wild flowers; a stately chateau surrounded by ancient velvety lawns and a blazing riot of flower gardens will occasionally peep into view. In the summer I have seen the apple orchards with tethered cattle grazing between the trees, the twisting country lanes with bare-legged and ragged girls driving pigs towards weatherworn farmhouses, and the fields of hay being harvested by the farmhands and children. Now it is winter and there is a terrible traffic on the river. We change the river pilot at Villequier, a neat little village with white houses and cafés nestling under some beautiful woods.
We arrive at Rouen and berth in the middle of town, just above the transporter bridge. There are no docks at Rouen, just several miles of wharves and jetties extending down the river from the city and filled with every type of vessel imaginable. Shortly after making fast, Mac (the third officer) and myself are sitting in a café across the cobbled street drinking our rum and coffee whilst watching the troops disembark and march away. Fortunately, there is no marching away for us because we are civilians responsible for maintaining these shipping dividends – so we have another rum!
As civilians, we also have our share of risks and troubles – some I wouldn’t wish upon any soldier – such as dealing with ‘paravanes’, confounded contraptions for cutting moored mines adrift and throwing them clear of the ship. These things were introduced to the ship in 1917 and seemed very nice in theory, but not in practice. They gave me instant promotion in a way I didn’t like at all when the chief officer’s legs were cut off, as if with a giant pair of scissors, on the first voyage we had them on board. You couldn’t have wished to meet a better officer.
The naval authorities will flatly contradict me. The demonstrating officer with his large crew of trained naval men will prove that the paravanes are quite simple to operate in smooth water and in daylight, but let that same officer try lowering the two-ton iron shoe down the stem, and put the ‘otters’ over the side on a dirty and black winter’s night. The vessel is rolling, the decks are slippery, and the freezing sea spray is not only drenching the forecastle head, but also the four wet, frozen, shivering, and sulky West Indian crewmembers ordered to help me. If I were one of those dashing tars full of reckless courage and daring, then things might be different, but in reality I am a decidedly timid man; I ought to be singing in the village choir instead of having to rig one of these confounded things on a freezing winter’s night. Eventually, we are successful in getting our paravane into the water. The speed of the ship will open out the otters about 20 feet away from the ship’s side and hopefully cut the wires of any mine that should come in too close. I must say I’ve bought better inventions than this at Woolworths, but I don’t intend to be rude to the inventor, a Commanderi whose name I cannot remember. My own invention contains a double whisky, a double gin, a dash of vermouth, a shot of apricot brandy, a couple of raw eggs, and soda water. Which invention is the most easy to work and would do you the most good on a winter’s night? The answer to the question is very simple!
I am able to get home fairly frequently on this run. The railway carriages from Portsmouth are always full of bluejackets. I gather from their conversations that the Germans must have had thousands of submarines; every sailor I meet on the train has either sunk one or helped to sink one! On one journey, I was sitting in the overcrowded compartment wedged between two ladies of generous