Royal Mail in the Raw
By Rob Cammack, a Royal Mail cadet
When most people think of Royal Mail they either think of those little red vans or the big passenger liners, which cruised between the UK and the River Plate. However there was the other side of the coin which was much more life in the raw. And the “rawest” of all was the good ship LOMBARDY. Laid down in 1914, they eventually got her off the slip sometime around 1920 which made her a pretty old tub by the time I joined her in the mid fifties.
LOMBARDY
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Built: 1920 by Richardson Duck & Co, Stockton-on-Tees.
Tonnage: 3, 457g, 2, 146n.
Engine : Single Screw, Triple Expansion, 3 Cylinders. 352 NHP, 12 Knots.
Launched in1920 for David MacIver.
Taken over by Royal Mail in 1932, moved on after twenty-four years service to Far Eastern Metal Industries & Shipping Company. Renamed Metal Trader. In November of 1957 she was sold for scrap to Hong Kong Salvage & Towage Co and arrived in Hong Kong for breaking in 1958.
I humped my kitbag down the gangway onto her deck one April the first and I could hear every rivet of her shouting out, “April Fool! April Fool!”
The cadets’ cabin which I had at first mistaken for the mail room was on the starboard side of the accommodation just aft of number three hatch. Squeezing in through the door I found a minute wardrobe or locker to my right followed by two bunks, one up one down with a drawer underneath. At the far end of the cabin there was a two foot six long settee under the port, also with a drawer. Continuing my survey I found that the for’ard bulkhead was quite empty save for a drop leaf table (steam radiator under) and a wash hand basin – the reason for the door not opening fully. The seating arrangement for the table was a matter of perching your bum on the bunkboard of the lower bunk. It was also cunningly arranged so that once you sat down and lowered the table into place it was impossible to open the wardrobe to get out your books or writing materials. Likewise with the drawers under the bunk and settee.
Across the narrow alleyway was the door to the engine room and just inside, an enormous steam engine, which was apparently the steering gear. Huge chains led from this monster into the alleyway and by greasy troughs went all the way aft to the rudder head. Below the deck of the cabin there was another piece of engineering apparatus (I never did discover its purpose) which seemed to have been designed to maintain the cadet’s linoleum at a steady eighty degrees F. Added to this, bolted to the other side of the bulkhead from our table was a huge steam water heater for the officers bathroom. Very cozy on a cold April morning in Albert Dock but I could see that it boded ill for our passage through the Sargasso Sea.
Once at sea I found several problems regarding the sleeping arrangements. One was the fact that the slightest movement by the quartermaster on the ship’s wheel set the steering gear clanking and grinding, while between times it sat there hissing and simmering waiting for its next order. The other problem was the matter of the ‘Phantom Farter’. Well, not phantom at all really as I knew bloody well that it was my shipmate and fellow cadet on the lower bunk. I used to long for the watch and watch about routine while coasting as it at least gave me a few hours of fume free sleep while he was happily farting to the four winds on the bridge wing. The other occupant of the cabin was less trouble since it was the ship’s cat, Gonzalez, who used to doss down on my bunk by way of the washbasin.
After one trip together the “Phantom Farter” floated off to another ship, Gonzalez had gone ashore in one of the smaller Jamaican ports and had obviously preferred it to a life at sea and I was joined by a new cadet, Thompson. Fortunately he had none of the attributes of my former cabin mate, his only vice being the love of knitting. His forte was socks. Socks of every color and design and for every occasion.
When I eventually signed off and went home on leave I found amongst my kit a lonely gray sock of his which had lost its twin. I don’t know whether my mate had just run out of wool or what. My mother grabbed it and turned it into a pot holder for the kitchen. Startled guests would sometimes hear a wail from the galley, “What the Heck’s happened to Thompson’s sock!!” which would convince them all the more that the Cammacks were a really weird mob. I often wondered if Thompson’s mum also had a gray potholder in her kitchen.
On that trip we were outward bound with our usual full cargo of cased whisky, stooging down the Thames when there were the most colossal clanking noises from the engine room. It turned out later that the large nut holding the low-pressure piston to its piston rod had slowly unwound and finally come adrift. The tug which had been accompanying us towed us into Tilbury where we made fast. I had never been into Tilbury before – nor since. I suppose that it must be vastly different nowadays. That night, however, we berthed in a long, long dock, completely void of ships or any kind of life. The dock stretched away into the distant rain where we could just make out an enormous building rather similar to St. Pancreas station. This, we were informed by a knowledgeable East Ender was the best pub in London. As soon as the brow was run out the whole ship’s company rushed ashore in a body leaving the Chief Engineer and a lone greaser to repair the damage down below.
The following day we were free so Thompson and I caught the ferry across the river to sample the delights of Gravesend. At one point we were accosted by one of those street photographers. I was quite sure that there was no film in the camera but Thompson insisted and we stood grinning at the lens while the chap did his stuff. I reckoned that was a few bob down the drain but months and months later a buff envelope dropped through my letter box (delivery in plain wrapper) and there was my photograph!!
We headed back to the ferry but were brought up all standing outside one of those shops full of second hand odds and ends. A notice in the window said, “If you think it’s junk, come in and ask the price.” Next to this was a magnificent brass model of a single cylinder vertical steam engine. “Cor!” said Thompson, “Take a look at that lot”
“Yer,” I replied, awestruck. “D’yer think it works?”
“Course it works! They don’t make ‘em like that just to look at!”
Before I could stop him he was inside the shop bargaining with the owner. As I was broke I kept out of the discussion and in quite a short time some notes changed hands and Thompson had the model wrapped up and under his arm.
Back on board we took a good look at it, moving the flywheel to and fro and seeing everything going up and down and round and round the way it was supposed to – and wondering how we could power it up. We remembered that in the galley there was a quarter inch steam pipe, which led into the washing up trough via a rubber hose – just what we wanted! By this time it was after ten in the evening so the coast was clear. We stood the engine on the draining board and, by bending the steam pipe a bit were able to connect the rubber tube to the input valve of the little engine. Thompson turned the main valve and away she went. Bouncing around beside the sink the thing nearly got out of control until we got the hang of adjusting the amount of steam. Soon we were joined by several of the engineers who all had to have a go at regulating the speed and throwing the little lever, which controlled the ahead and astern movement. We were so absorbed watching the show that we never heard the arrival of the cook.
“What the hell are you all doing in my galley,” he shouted ,“And look what you’ve done to my heater pipe!”
We sheepishly got our stuff together and went back to our cabin. However, this was not the end of our adventures with ‘Puffing Billy’. We soon discovered that we had our own steam outlet on the radiator under the drop leaf table in our cabin. One of the engineers soon found us a length of rubber pipe and we were back in business. Some days later, something went wrong with one of the steam connections and while we were out on day work the cabin slowly filled with steam. By the time we knocked off and went back to change we found our cabin had turned into a proper Turkish bath. All our bedding and clothes were saturated and dripping water while, worse still, all the paint and varnish on the bulkheads and deck head was peeling off and hanging in festoons. It took us the rest of the trip to repair the damage in our spare time and our shrunken mildewed uniforms were a sight to behold.
The contrast with everything on more modern ships was incredible. On the bridge, the wheelhouse was just that. A sort of Victorian telephone kiosk in beautifully polished teak just large enough to accommodate the wheel and a rather thin helmsman. The rest of the bridge had been completely open to the elements until some enterprising skipper had tacked on a sort of one sided bus shelter just forward of the wheelhouse. Dodgers? Flapping canvas on short stanchions – none of your highfaluting wind ducts curving the rain upwards over your head or even forward tilted varnished wood boards. Clear view screen? We could manage perfectly well with a tin megaphone, held reversed, in front of our eyes! The chart room was one deck down on the captain’s deck reached by a nearly vertical ladder with a manrope on one side only. The steps were so narrow that only the heels of your shoes fitted as you descended, hanging on for dear life with one hand while the other held your precious sextant and you counted One – cadet – Two – cadet all the way to the chronometer. The chart table could only take an admiralty chart if everything else was stacked on the various shelves.
Immediately aft of the chart room was the ‘Radio Shack’. I had often wondered why radio officers were called ‘Sparks’. Here was the answer. A huge gray steel cabinet took up the greater part of the space with two circular glass ports in the front. The fantastic dials and switched which covered every inch of the rest of the panel paled into insignificance when one peered through the glass at two gigantic glass globes inside. Further glass knobs, rather like a WWII mine, covered these globes. Curly wires of different colours were attached to each of these. The lower half of the main globe seemed to be filled with mercury and from which long sparks crackles and hissed as they made contact with the different anodes. With all this one could confidently expect to make contact with the moon but in actual fact if we weren’t actually in sight of the other vessel it was impossible to speak to them by radio. We used to sidle up to other ships and ask them to re-transmit our stuff to Portishead - sometimes helping out with the Aldis lamp from the bridge wing if the static was too bad.
Radar of course hadn’t been heard of and though there was a double ring direction finder on the monkey island this appeared to have been added as an afterthought and it was not connected to anything. A gyrocompass was still in the future. In place of an echo sounder we had two hands for’ard in the chains while we were entering the smaller West Indian ports heaving the lead in the old way. For deep-sea work we had the famous Kelvin machine with about twenty miles of thin steel wire. Winding this in by hand (no electric motor) was hard work. The machine was cunningly placed so that the forward handle passed within about a quarter of an inch of an iron stanchion. If the slave on that handle let his little finger slip over the end there was an agonizing crunch as it made contact and usually the chappie sweating on the other side didn’t notice and went on winding . Ouch!
We did have a real live Walker’s log though. As our speed was usually in the region of six knots, this had very little slip and was amazingly accurate. It saved our skins many a time. We also had an Auto Pilot (of sorts). This consisted of a loop of rope thrown over the uppermost spoke of the wheel and the old ship would yaw gently one degree either side of the course for hours on end. With her straight stem and counter stern she was the friendliest ship in a seaway I have ever met.
Communication to various parts of the ship from the bridge was by voice pipe. You had to have plenty of breath to sound the whistle at the far end of the ship but they were quite effective. At some point some Chief Engineer had installed an old ex-army field telephone between the bridge and the engine room – very modern, if the ‘1915’ stamped on the brass plate meant the model and not the date. Instead of blowing the whistle you had to wind a small handle on the side of the box. This didn’t always work and we had to shout down the skylight in the engine room fiddly. The voice pipe to the underworld had been rendered useless because the Old Man couldn’t stand any smoking on the bridge. He used to creep up on you in his carpet slippers but, if you were quick enough, you could drop your fag end down the engine room voice pipe and slam the lid shut. One day, after a particularly frustrating battle with the phone the Old Man called the Chief and brought the subject up.
“We’ll have to get the E.R. voice pipe working again. I think it must be stopped up with something. Perhaps that long wire you use for clearing the drains in the heads might do the trick.”
“No,” said the Chief, “If we do that it will just get stuck in one of the curves. I think I could get a steam hose coupled up to my end of the pipe and give it a blow.”
“You do that,” said the Skipper, “I’ll go up on the bridge and see if I can hear anything from there.”
Once up on the bridge the Old Man sent a message by runner to apply the steam. For a moment it seemed that nothing was happening but then there was a kind of an explosion and a mushroom cloud of fag ends, matches and the second mate’s long lost pipe burst forth covering the Mate’s still fresh paintwork and the rest of the bridge with a thick layer of filth. We never did get the thing working properly. The pressure of the steam must have split the copper pipe somewhere out of sight so that, however hard you blew, you could never get the whistle at the other end to give even a chirp.
I suppose that every Captain has his quirks and you just have to get used to them. This bloke was devoted to his accordion. He would practice for hours on end. Do – Re – Mi – Fa – Sol – La ........Sol – La............Sol – La .............Sol – La.......In all the time I was on the ship I never heard him complete a scale. As he was completely tone deaf and his fingering was up the chute his rendering of ‘Roll out the barrel’ for example would take on a somewhat Arabic sound. One day in Falmouth or somewhere in Jamaica an old chap stopped me in the street and asked,
“Is that the old LOMBARDY down there in the bay?”
“That’s right. I’m a cadet on board.”
“Tell me. Is that old bugger with the accordion still there?”
“Still there, I’m afraid”
“Balls,” said the old boy, “I’ve been invited for drinks this evening.”
“Well. You’ll just have to get yourself stoned before you go on board”
One of my jobs was to pump up the fresh drinking water to the various domestic tanks. Just forward of No. 4 hatch there was a small door and a ladder which led down into a compartment in the upper ‘tweendeck. Here there was a small oscillating steam pump connected to a maze of pipes and valves. The mate explained all these to me before letting me loose on the job but I was never really sure whether I was opening or closing the right ones. The most important one was, of course, the skipper’s personal tank up on the monkey island. This had to be filled first but not overfilled. Sticking out of the top of the tank was an overflow pipe shaped like an umbrella handle. The slightest drop of water coming out of this would bring the Old Man screaming out onto his deck. The problem was that from the pump compartment it was quite impossible to see any of the three or four tanks which I had to fill. It was also impossible to tell when the skipper’s tank was full except when it overflowed. If the level was too low the captain would be half way through his afternoon shower when the water ran out. In the end I resigned myself to his curses and would dive down to the pump as soon as the first dribble appeared, slam his valve shut and open the one for the tank on the fo’c’stle . I had to be pretty smart about this as any delay caused a buildup of pressure in the service line. This was a four inch lead pipe – the only one I had ever seen outside the Roman Baths in Bath – there would be a loud POP and the line would split at its weakest point. Call out Chippy for another cement box. At the last count the old tub had one hundred and twenty cement boxes in various places.
Another of my jobs was to attend to the funnel guys. The ship had a long funnel with the proportions of a Wills Woodbine cigarette. Being a proper smoke stack it used to expand quite a bit as it heated up and one had to adjust the guys accordingly. Likewise early morning, cloudy weather, extra hot weather, snowstorms etc. It required quite a knack to get each guy exactly right or the stack would droop to port or starboard or even fore or aft.
I understand that LOMBARDY was one of the last real iron ships ever built. They said that if you dropped a penny into the bilge it could eat its way through the shell plating in a few months due to galvanic action. She was also one of the first (if not the first) Isherwood ship to be built. She had longitudinal stringers and deep web frames like a tanker. Being iron, there was a lot less rust than on a steel vessel.
For a time, when I was not on watch keeping, I was detailed to work with the ship’s carpenter, Frank Harris – Jamaica’s answer to Luis Armstrong, as far as looks were concerned. He was great fun to work with. His only tools were a two foot rule, an axe and a saw. The back of the axe served as a hammer while the sharp edge, cradled at the correct angle in his huge paw was as good as any carpenter’s plane. His method of measurement was somewhat strange. A ‘fat’ inch meant an inch and a quarter whereas a ‘thin’ inch was three quarters of an inch.
One time we were laying brown paper in the holds prior to loading bulk sugar and he mislaid his axe.
“You seen my axe, Mister Bob?” he asked me
“Course not, Frank. You had it a while back.”
“Bumba, man. He must be under that paper someplace!”
We spent the next couple of hours on our hands and knees feeling around on the paper before we came across it.
Another time I had a go at smoking a pipe. The tobacco seemed a bit dull and the Third Engineer suggested I soaked it in rum. Still no good – so I gave it to Frank. He had a pipe of it after his lunch and went fast to sleep – woken up by the Mate.
“Is this a vision I see before me?” said Frank
“No it bloody well isn’t.” said the Mate, “Get working you old skiver.”
Frank was really quite a wealthy man having a boat-building yard in Kingston and also a house building business which he had his sons run while he went on holidays on the ship. In his spare time he used to knock up small dinghies out of spare dunnage alongside No, four hatch.
From my remarks before I may have given a poor picture of the Old Man. He was a bit of an old fusspot but was red hot at navigation. One trip we were twenty-eight days from the Windward Passage to Dungeness Without ever getting a sight. Everything done by dead reckoning. We all put our noon positions on the chart, my little dot and circle keeping station like a frigate well up to windward! He would then take a mean position – mine excluded – and finally take his own as the most likely to be correct. As we came up to the western approaches we ran into thick fog and got the deep-sea lead rigged. The Mate handled the little brass feeler and attended to arming the lead and fixing the long glass tubes to the line, which would show us the depth of water. Thompson and I stood by the winding handles and we trailed the lead until we felt it bottom on the hundred fathom ridge. Winding in took a while and then we all squeezed into the chartroom and the captain correlated the course sand sticking in the tallow with the depth and marked a large ‘X’ on the chart. This was the first of a long series of crosses marking our way up the channel. We all got quite excited about the way the system actually seemed to work and winding the handles no longer seemed a chore.
Finally the old man told the mate to get forward and prepare the anchor. A few minutes later “Let Go!” and we were home again. A while later the sun rose enough to burn up the fog and a couple of cable lengths off our port bow lay the pilot cutter off Dungeness!
Go to Part Two/A>