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

These were the ships where conditions were worst and therefore where desertion was customarily regarded almost as a means of redressing grievances. Towards the end of their epoch, and as they became more and more marginal economically, sailing-ships commonly depended on the labour of middle-class boys who were indentured as apprentices to learn the skills of a ship’s officer. Apprentice deserters were common and it was not unusual for them to ‘jump ship’ in the company of able seamen. In 1915, when in New York, the Naiad lost four apprentices, one officer and three able seamen. All of them promptly engaged on the Lusitania, ten of whose crew had deserted. This was the voyage when the Lusitania was sunk by U-boat, and six of the ex-Naiad crew members were lost. The two apprentices who survived were brothers, and it was one of them who was on duty as a lookout when the liner was attacked. Leslie Morton, subsequently a key witness at the inquiry into the loss of the Lusitania, was awarded the Board of Trade’s Silver Medal for Gallantry for his part in helping survivors to safety.²¹

      Deserters rarely knew such prominence. Like the crew of the Chepstow Castle, almost all of whom deserted after port calls in Baltimore and New York in 1915, they typically melted away, in this case into the US seafarers’ labour market where wages were almost double those paid on UK ships.²² Desertion was almost certainly at a lower level in the Second War. The Ministry of War Transport recorded 1,850 cases in 1942 and 1,420 in 1943, and it is likely that perhaps as many as half of them were cases of crew members missing the ship’s departure, but not deliberately. A detailed examination of desertions in US ports estimated that by the end of the second year of war some 3,402 Allied seamen had deserted, but that British seamen accounted for only 664, or 20 per cent of the total. The USA remained the most popular place to desert – 48 per cent of all deserters left in US ports and 32 per cent in Australasia. As in previous decades (and, indeed, centuries) most deserters found their way back on to ships – often British, but US, Norwegian and Panamanian ships were preferred, offering better wages and living conditions.

      Shipboard discipline was almost entirely a problem for ships’ senior officers in ports abroad. The following ‘live’ account from the personal log of an Elders & Fyffes master when his ship, the Tortuguero, was in port in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1940 could equally have been in 1914 – or at any other time, war or no war:

      ‘August 12th 1940

      The usual crew troubles in this port, with some of them getting ashore and getting insensibly drunk on the cheap rum. Firewater.

      August 13th

      Firemen break into chief steward’s room and steal 6 bottles of whisky, one of rum, 40 tins of cigarettes and 1lb of tobacco. After a search some of the missing goods found in firemen’s bunks.

      Nine men logged… They are able to get very cheap rum from the bars and liquor stores adjacent to the dockgates, and in a very short time are drunk and incapable. Blotto, and can be seen stretched flat out on the pavement or the roadside in the blazing sun and police and people walk round these prostrate bodies with barely a glance, and they are left lying there…

      August 15th

      Greaser has deserted. This particular man is a hard worker and a good man at sea, but when he can get ashore at Kingston or anywhere abroad it is all over with him. This is the third ship this man has deserted from at Kingston. Four men logged this morning were missing at sailing time and deliberately delayed the ship for one hour.

      August 18th

      At Santa Marta, Colombia. At 0800 hours two sailors came to see me and wanted passes to go ashore to church for confession. That’s a good one, by Jove, I’ve heard some good excuses but that one is near the top of the list. I didn’t let them go of course.

      August 23rd

      Now homeward bound at sea. The men who were logged are now working well and hard at their strenuous job.’²³

      Heavy drinking was not a problem confined to the non-officer ranks. In the First World War a young apprentice recorded two successive voyages with alcoholic chief officers. On the first occasion, during a ballast passage from St Nazaire to Barry, the chief officer had been locked in his room with his knife and razor confiscated. On the second occasion the replacement chief officer had taken to drinking bay rum and on passage from St Lucia in the West Indies to Cuba had been lashed into his hammock.²⁴ A comparable experience was recorded by a young engineer officer aboard the tanker San Gregorio. He noted that the chief engineer was perpetually drunk and so also was the master.²⁵ A similar story with different characters and 20 or so years later went into Leslie Harrison’s diary in December 1939:

      ‘December 5th

      After a visit to a cinema and then a hotel in Port of Spain dropped in to ghastly Croydon Hotel for a few minutes to see sozzled Mate, 3/0, Sparks and Gunner in their element dancing in one of the lowest dives I’ve ever refused a drink in.

      December 6th

      3/0 in his usual alcoholic haze. Mate dozing on my settee as he sobered up.

      December 7th

      On passage from Port of Spain to Pte a Pierre ship runs aground. Mate and OM [‘old man’, the master] volubly convinced themselves that the buoy must have been out of position; but according to my (unannounced!) reckonings we’d made our course for Pte a Pierre jetty, and had been due to go aground ever since we started.’²⁶

      The official logs for both World Wars were commonly full of entries recording the misdeeds of, mainly, firemen, trimmers, able seamen and ordinary seamen. A sample of the logs of 85 ships for the whole period of the Second World War produced a total of slightly more than 2,000 disciplinary offences, of which 66 per cent were for absence without leave, disobedience in one form or another for 11 per cent, desertions formed 8 per cent, and drink offences 5 per cent. Engine-room ratings accounted for 42 per cent of offenders, catering ratings 30 per cent, deck ratings 23 per cent, petty officers 2 per cent and officers 1 per cent. Offences were predictably clustered where conditions were worst – aboard tramps the sample showed a ratio of eight offences for every ten non-officer crew members. Aboard tankers where conditions generally were much better, there was a ratio of two offences per ten crew members.²⁷

      Considering the level of reports of disciplinary offences in the secondary literature, it does seem likely that crew behaviour during port stays in 1914–18 was much the same as in 1939–45. There was, nevertheless, something of an official onslaught on seafarers in the later war and it is plausible to suppose that this was an attempt to prevent a recurrence of what had been seen as lamentable and reprehensible earlier. The Merchant Shipping Acts, which in their disciplinary provisions remained essentially unchanged between 1854 and 1968, provided shipmasters and shipowners with the power to levy fines, prosecute crew members in magistrates courts in the UK and colonies, and petition British consuls to set up special courts called Naval Courts in foreign ports. In a number of foreign countries – but not the USA – Treaty agreements even provided for the jailing of seafarers in those countries on Consular request.

      Naval Courts were ordinarily little used – only three were convened between 1930 and 1939. But 505 were held between 1939 and 1944. Most cases – 415 of them – were held between May 1943 and June 1944 and were held in Mediterranean ports controlled by the Royal Navy: 90 per cent of all Naval Courts were held in Algiers, Bone, Oran, Alexandria, Port Said, Suez, Naples, Bari and Taranto. In these cases there seems little doubt that the Navy was attempting to impose on merchant seamen the disciplinary measures available for use on their own men under military law.²⁸ At home, in the UK, there was a comparable level of prosecutions through magistrates courts. From August 1942 the Ministry of Labour was responsible for these prosecutions after a filtering process by local tribunals whose members were employers and union officials sitting with an independent chairman. The range of prosecutable offences was also enlarged by a series of five Orders in Council under the Defence of the Realm Act.

      The extent of the use of the legal system to prosecute civilians was both unprecedented and unparalleled in any other industry. It is certainly arguable that dockers and miners in the Second War presented the