[BITList] Chiefs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[fredmno at aol.com]

Chiefs I’ve
Sailed With



 



Salaams,



              Some sort of response to Hugh’s
last. Films with Chief’s in them or oily rags come to that. Titanic, various
depictions, none any good, et al, always seemed to show engineers, not many of
them either wearing a boiler suit without any smudges but always with their
uniform jacket on, I have seen photos in merchant navy books that concentrated
on the wars and those shown down below show similar attire being worn, usually
pointing at some far off distant object, gauge perhaps!



               Of the chiefs I sailed with in
BI very few came down below, most sending the second for stand by etc. Those
that did enter the engine room on stand by usually stayed at cylinder head
level though some would briefly reach injector level, very few to control
level. There were notable exceptions of course, Donald Binns on both Devonia
and Bedivere, Dave Lasseter on Purnea and A.Stewert on Geraint , the latter
usually carrying his work list for us to occupy ourselves with once F.E.W.’s
had been rung. I can only remember one chief in BI coming down every morning
and that was Donald clad in an immaculate white boiler suit with a polka dot
kerchief stuck out of his top pocket, all engineers were referred to as Mister
and then surname.



             I have to co
nfess having perused
the fleet list that I sailed with some chiefs that I can’t even remember, for
instance who was A.Aird, was it Sandy, I can’t remember him at all, does
anybody else? 



             On the Ferries life was far more
relaxed in the beginning though on joining my first, Free Enterprise V1 the
Chief, Bob Crone, later to be killed on the Herald refused to be addressed as
Sir so when I called him chief rather tentatively he responded by saying ‘well
do I look like a bloody red Indian then’ or words to that effect. After that
bollacking I never really referred to him as anything, I just found it totally
alien not calling him sir, I must add however that his preference was to be
called Bob. When I transferred down to Southampton on the first British flagged
Viking, until 75/76 they had been Norwegian only, because we worked one off one
on there were only two chiefs, the senior being an ex Townsend man called Iain
McIver, he wanted to be called Mac, it fitted so he was, we got on that well we
still speak at least once a month after all these years and for the last
seventeen years he’s sent me the Sunday Telegraph every week. The other little
turd insisted on being called chief and on one occasion when one of our leckies
called him George ashore in a supermarket, he turned and said ‘don’t you mean
chief to which our leckie told him to go forth and multiply. 



0               Anyway I seem to have drifted
off the point. All our chiefs were supposed to come down on stand by but
because of all the stand byes, arrival/departs, up to three crossings a day
when on Cherbourgs they started to delegate the second for some of them, then of
course the Herald happened and it was a whole new ball game. Apart from stand
byes very few bothered to come down below at all and left the engine room
invariably to the more often than not very capable hands of the second. As time
went on the fleet got bigger and as I’d sailed with nearly all the chiefs in
junior positions first name terms became the norm., even heaven forbid captains
as well.



                            BR Fred





PS Isn't John of Dalry a member yet, he lives in Soth Carolina?



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