John Purser: Views from the Nordic Conqueror and Irish Coast

The Nordic Conqueror was discharging at the Loch Long terminal, and since the loch there is less than half a mile across, anyone sailing in with a ship a quarter of a mile long (the crew used bicycles to get to the bows) and with only five foot of clearance under her bottom is bound to take notice of the surroundings.

The surroundings are impressive, but no more impressive than walking into the engine room at main deck level and finding yourself looking straight down 60 feet past twin boilers as big as houses. The place is the size of a cathedral, the high altar being the long console with its all-knowing computers. Everywhere there are pipes – enough for several organs – low-pressure steam pipes, oil pipes, saltwater pipes, freshwater pipes and high-pressure steam pipes for the super-heated steam.

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Despite all this technology, the scene being enacted at the very bottom of the engine room had a biblical quality to it. Thirty feet below the control room, the main condenser had been opened up and inside it were men extracting mackerel in their dozens and throwing them out on the engine-room floor. The fish were pitched out in all directions and the lighting would have done justice to Rembrandt with the men inside the condenser in white suits surreally lit from improbable angles.

This was all highly irregular. First of all, the seacocks admitting seawater to cool the condenser should have been closed long before the vessel reached mackerel territory, but seawater being the cheapest coolant, someone had chanced their luck. The consequence was not merely damage to the condenser but contamination of its contents through fractures created by mackerel hitting the casing. Potentially more serious still was that the repair was taking place while the vessel was discharging. This was, I was told, illegal because it meant the main engines were shut down and had there been an emergency, she could not have slipped her moorings and made for the safety of open waters. Not quickly enough. Money, it was guessed, must have passed hands for this to have been permitted, almost certainly with the connivance of the owners as running repairs saved drydock fees and the loss of many operational hours.

David, having assessed the situation with his habitually cynical and utterly disarming humour, was escorting us along a high gantry when there was a sudden uncanny roar, the crowing of claxons and strident stuttering of fire alarms. One of the high-pressure steam pipes had burst a joint, and since you cannot see steam as hot as that, it is possible to walk through it without knowing and have your head blown clean off your shoulders. We were ushered back into the control room in time for us to see the man responsible running out.

“Anyone running like that in an emergency is probably unreliable” was David’s quiet comment as he proceeded to shut down the innumerable flashing red lights, on the grounds that they were more distracting than informative. What had happened was that a wrong gasket had been fitted and had disintegrated when struck by some of the drops of water that form in the fine spray used to cool the steam. These drops travel with the speed and force of bullets.

We were sent off to the chief engineer’s cabin while things were sorted out but were soon interrupted by the departing chief engineer dashing in looking for plans of the engine layout. We explained who we were and his fervent admiration for David was made alarmingly evident when he exclaimed “Thank God there’s somebody here who knows what the hell is going on!” David was a true product of the great traditions of Scottish engineering. Quiet, reliable, knowledgeable and nobody’s fool. He did manage to get at least one perk for his engineering astuteness. The ship’s phosphor bronze propellor had had a largish bit broken off one of its five blades by a piece of flotsam. The stress of the imbalance had to be dealt with immediately using the spare cast iron prop, but a new phosphor bronze propellor seemed inevitable, and that would be at vast cost.

David, however, persuaded the owners that if they trimmed the other blades accurately to match, the prop would be balanced and all would be well. They agreed and she docked in India where the whole job was done in three days. I do not know if the company ever asked David to account for the scrap phosphor bronze; whether or no, there was enough for them to have to take the deck rails off to unload it and David made a cool £1500 selling the scrap.

The ship, The Nordic Conqueror, is no more. She was hit by an Iraqi Exocet rocket in 1986 with the loss of two lives and scrapped that same year.

The “sparks” was the radio officer on a ship and, as a lad, I was taken under the wing of the sparks on the M.S. Irish Coast, a magnificent vessel which came into service for the Burns Laird line in 1953. She had a cruising speed of 171/2 knots, but I recollect being on the bridge in her early days and the skipper trying how she would respond to full throttle on a calm sea out past Ailsa Craig. She reached 22 knots.

I REMEMBER being on the bridge when one of the three sea captain brothers McGoogan brought her in at 6am to the dock at Merklands to off-load cattle. There was a broad strip of white paint on the dock and a matching one on the ship and they were meant to marry up, but there were no dock hands ready and by the time one overweight sweaty dockhand arrived late and panting, McGoogan had brought the vessel in on the propellors alone. He turned to me with a look of quiet Hebridean acceptance and said: “Do you see that man who has arrived late for his work? I have brought this ship in inch perfect without his help, but he earns more than I do.”

I am glad the live cattle transport came to an end. On rough voyages, you could hear their distress through the night and they were in a state of the utmost misery and, I am sorry to say, were treated brutally by the dock workers charged with herding them off the ship. There are happier things to recall.

Each summer when school closed, I would join my parents already in Ireland, leaving at 6pm on one of the Burns Laird line ships from the Broomielaw in the heart of Glasgow. It took six hours to clear the Clyde estuary, the first four or so down to Port Glasgow being mostly conducted at Dead Slow as the huge placards along the river banks demanded. There were ship-building yards all the way down. In the earlier days, the noise of riveting was deafening. Twenty miles of it and on both sides of the river. Later it was the hiss and spark of welding. In summer, by the time you reached Arran, the sun was setting behind Goat Fell, and by 11pm you were passing Ailsa Craig and it was getting dark and the moon might be rising.

I was tolerated up on the bridge as long as I kept quiet, which I did. The only sounds would be the occasional command of the “South-south-west a quarter west” kind, repeated by the helmsman. I would watch the little balls floating on the tubes that marked the smoke alarm system, and I would look at the Marconigram with its intersecting coloured lines, purple, green and red, by which you could plot the ship’s position. Apart from the binnacle light, the bridge was in darkness, broken only by the faint glow of a cigarette. A little after Ailsa Craig, the officer of the watch called me forward to look at the flag-mast on the bow. “You see that seagull? That’s the last of the Scottish seagulls. In half an hour it will be an Irish seagull sitting there.”

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Eventually I would go down to my cabin. I might well have stopped in on the “sparks” earlier. His name was Jimmy Reader and he had been assigned to me from years before and we had long chats in his cabin. Jimmy suffered from seasickness all his working life, so the new Denny stabilisers on the Irish Coast were a boon to him. He was engaged to a Dublin girl, but the engagement lasted for something over 10 years and she was a girl no longer and the whole thing became a standing joke with his shipmates. I never once saw him anger, though. He would remind them quietly that his fiancée was looking after an ageing relative in her protracted final illness.

His intended was faithful too, for her nursing was dragged out for years and when the relative died, as is so often the case, instead of being relieved, she was prostrated and not well enough herself to go through with the marriage. I remember seeing her, drawn and tired, standing on the deck of the ship beside her faithful sailor who was persuading her to take her medicine – she was supposed to take two bottles of it a day and it was the one thing she disliked most in the world – Guinness’s stout. But she persevered and the Guinness did restore her, and she and her sailor married happily and he retired from the merchant navy.

I only once heard Jimmy boast – when he outsmarted a young radar officer who was delivering morse code faster than it was comfortable for anyone to receive it. He was showing off, but he had reckoned without Jimmy who was faster on the button than any man in the Irish Sea, so fast that his thumb was a blur as he delivered the young upstart a personal message that got faster and faster until it left all chance of decoding behind it.

Sailors have a reputation for unfaithfulness and, given the life of many a long-distance sailor, it is hard to be moralistic. But Jimmy was an outstanding example of faithfulness at its truest, though sorely tested. That was 70 years ago. I never kept in touch; I was just a boy; but his kind and patient nature has stayed with me through the years.