The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

the growth in scale and variety of the media had been enormous in order to feed the information demands of a developing democratic state and levels of literacy that were continually improving. On the other hand, the rhythms of the seafarers’ life as dictated by the conditions of employment, passage times, trade routes and port stays changed very little in the inter-war years. In short, the pattern of sea life in 1939 was much the same as in 1918. This was an infinitely more closed occupational community than those of farmworkers, miners and quarrymen. Paid leave was still wholly unavailable to ratings and petty officers in 1939, and not much known among officers either. Being a seafarer meant being aboard ship for not less than 80 per cent of the year provided jobs were available, and that meant almost literally being out of touch with families and having only a sketchy awareness of world events. The enhanced pervasiveness of media messages in the Second World War, the introduction of paid leave and continuous employment, and the development of welfare services can only have brought seafarers ‘closer to home’ than was possible in the earlier war. But as we shall see, to be a seafarer was to live a life apart. All those carefully wrought images, as well as all the thoughtful and considerate good intentions, could not have weightily touched the Second World War seafarer. Although writing almost a century earlier, the Victorian poet Arthur Clough had found a universal measure:

      ‘Where lies the land to which the ship would go!

      Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. And where the land she travels from? Away, Far, far behind, is all that they can say.’¹³

      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