[BITList] Fw: hk to bombay!

[HUGH]

Robbo,

There was a time when I could have written the book about boiler metallurgy and design, and boiler water chemistry, but not now, alas.  I never once had to use the information ashore, so it's filed away in some inaccessible part of my brain. All that remains of the "academic" side of sea life, apart from the books, are some notes and diagrams I made on Chakdara, with an unfinished essay on fire safety for a Poplar Tech correspondence course we were obliged to take .... and a chart of the outside temperatures during Suez Canal transit.  Many years ago in a fit of tidying up I dumped my MN study notes.  Oddly enough, I can "see" the notes and diagrams, but I can't read them.  Hypnosis might help.

Ah, the old oil and water syndrome in its many forms is always with us.  When I was a wee lad we would throw stones at, and have stones thrown at us by, those who went to a different school or lived on a different street, but we played football with them afterwards. After leaving my comfortable niche as a gateboy in Duncans shipyard I worked for a few weeks as a sort of boy labourer in a sheet metal works.  On hearing I was leaving to start my time in Kincaids, the journeyman shook his head and gave me a lecture on the difference between the work undertaken by a genuine craftsman such as himself and sheet metalworkers in general, and what went on in Kincaids.  In the first couple of weeks of my apprenticship in Kincaids I was sent to find an air hose by my journeyman.  I came back with one - they were common property and often lying around the floor.  He asked me where I'd got it and why it had taken me so long.  I told him I'd had to go round to the boiler shop to find one, at which he turned pale and ordered me to take it back immediately.  "That's a boilermaker's hose," he said.  I couldn't see the difference, but I complied.  When I left the Finishing Shop to work in the Erecting Shop I was told I wouldn't like it there - rough and ready people with very big hammers and little finesse, was about the size of it.  But I had no choice, and there I went.  Having done my three years as a rough and ready fitter with a big hammer I rold my colleauges I was moving to the Drawing Office, and once again I was in receipt of dire warnings. "We don't need drawings," I was told by one. "You'll get a humphy back," said another.  No sooner was I in the DO than I learned the Boiler Dept didn't rate the Piping Dept who didn't think much of the Engine Dept and vice versa, and the Print Room distrusted all of them (the only way to get a print was to ask Rose about her back).  And in my post-MN days there was a clear social divide between Engine and Ship DOs, even in Denmark.  Where the Electrical DO fitted in I cannot say.

Only the dullest could have failed to note the almost total lack of genuine social interaction between engine room and deck in the MN. This is an observation, not an opinion.  Did I worry about it?  I can't say I did - it was life in the MN, and I had said farewell to life ashore where the Managing Director called me by name and went round the whole place once a week with the Board. I had more to worry me than the attitude of the great and the good. There were exceptions, probably many of them, but these were on an individual basis, and I noted very few.  A co-mingling at a couple of parties in the smoke room in London, a couple of cadets and a 3/O who knew the way to the engineers' accommodation, and that's about it.  I had a brief acquaintance with a C/O on the Clan Maclay or Clan Maclaren when he took exception to my method of making a virtue out of a necessity.  I had found all the ER soda-acid fire extinguishers were out of date, so I organised a mock fire exercise and got the lads to practise their skills on an imaginary fire on deck before learning how to refill the extinguishers.  This made a mess on the deck, easily sluiced away, but it was "his deck", which he insisted made a difference.  I was reminded of the foreman labourer attached to Kincaids "outside squad" (they fitted out the ships). This worthy would not allow his minions to sweep up shipyard dirt - engineers dirt only. God knows how they told the difference.  But life goes on, mostly.

Hugh.
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