A Nice Quiet Life

By Robert Chicken

This is the story of my grandfather’s life in the Merchant Navy, originally written by him during his retirement. He was a Marine Engineer from 1908 to 1945. This book describes a lifetime of adventure, hardship, and joy on all the different ships that he sailed, from grand liners to rusty hulks. He survived the two world wars, the depression of the 1930s, and at one time he even took his family to sea with him.

He sailed on the Oceanic, the Olympic, the Britannic, and almost sailed on the Titanic. During the First World War he spent some time as a volunteer tugboat engineer at the Gallipoli Landings and later saved a ship from sinking from a torpedo strike. During the Second World War he survived two shipwrecks from torpedo strikes and avoided another sinking, thanks to the Enigma code breakers. He met a whole variety of people throughout the world during his career and often gave humorous talks in many ports that he visited around the world.

This book also gives some details on the ships he sailed and a small window into the events, and the world at those times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Dec 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781528991865

Robert Chicken

Robert Chicken was born in 1951, in the town of Newport, South Wales (UK). After leaving school, he attended Bath University, where he earned a degree in Engineering. He then worked in Engineering Design for ten years. After that, he moved to a technical sales support role, and then into direct sales. Following that, he set up and ran his own business. Alongside of his career, he enjoyed scuba diving in his teenage years, and then in his 20s, he became interested in sailing, which led him to building, then sailing his own boat. At about that time, he got married and had two children who grew up experiencing the world of sailing. In his middle age, he began to write and part of that was the collating of information for the story of his grandfather’s life in the Merchant Navy. Now retired, he is a proud grandfather, still writes occasionally, and helps two charities.

Book preview

Background

Alfred was born in Sunderland on July 15th, 1884. He grew up living with his parents, and his younger brother, William, who was born three years later. Their home was a modest terraced house in a decent area of the town, and for his early education, he attended a ‘Penny-a-Week’ school.

Sunderland and Newcastle, at the time together formed the biggest ship-building area in the world, and his father worked in the shipyards as a boiler inspector, checking the safety of boilers, steam pipes, valves etc. on board the ships, and he was also a collector and dealer of machinery parts. We don’t know much more about Alfred’s childhood except for this little story. When he was nine years old, he went by himself to visit his grandparents during his summer holidays. His grandfather, John Learmond was head of customs in Cork, Ireland. Alfred was put on a train under the care of the guard, transferred to the ferry to cross to Ireland, then took another train from Belfast to Cork. During this holiday, he also travelled to Blarney Castle and kissed the famous Blarney Stone to give him good luck. He certainly had that.

After he left school, at the age of 14, he followed the family tradition and became an apprentice. It was during his apprenticeship in engineering that discussions arose about what they wished to do when they were qualified. When it was Alfred’s turn, he simply replied, All I want is a nice, quiet life.

He also became a choirboy in his local church and later played the organ for the church services. Perhaps it was this experience that gave him a yearning to enter the church because after completing his apprenticeship he left the world of engineering and went on to a religious school – Kelham College, in Newark, to study for priesthood.

His fellow students and the lecturers at the College thought he was a very serious young man and not able to lighten up, so one day the students, as a prank, rolled him up in a corridor mat, which ended up outside the principal’s door. Alfred laughed so much that the principal came out of his office to see what was going on. He looked down at Alfred sternly, but then broke into a smile and said, Well, Burlinson, I’m pleased to see you laughing at last, and after that, he became accepted by the other students. But the pressure of trying to master Greek and Latin was too much, and sadly, he was forced to give up this ambition. He had a strong religious belief, which he held with him throughout his life, so being rejected in this way must have hit him hard.

He returned to Sunderland where he was faced with the question of what should he do now? Should he work in the shipyards, or was there something else he could do? He must have watched the new ships leaving the river, and wondered where they were going to. Maybe Australia, America, or China? There was only one way to find out join them. And he would keep his religious activity alive through his visits to churches around the world.

So, using his apprenticeship qualifications, he signed up with a merchant ship in 1908 as a junior engineer.

SS Alston

[Built by Priestman of Southwick, Sunderland, and launched August 1903. 105.8 metres long, and 14.2 metres beam, with a top speed of 12 knots. Built for a small tramp ship company ‘Webster & Barraclough’, of West Hartlepool.]

Alfred

One Sunday morning in March 1908, Alfred was in the choir of the parish church of St Hilda, Sunderland. The psalms for the day brought the words, They go down to the sea in ships. He stopped singing for a moment, somewhat amazed because in his pocket was a telegraph telling him to join the ‘SS Alston’ in Barry Dock at 8 am the next morning. He set off as soon as the service had finished, and after a very long overnight train journey that took him from Sunderland to Cardiff, he took a local train on down to the docks. He got there at 8:30 am on Monday morning, put his gear in his cabin and started working straight away.

He was busy for the next few days, helping to get the ship ready for sea, then on Wednesday they set sail, bound for Colombo in Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), with a cargo of coal. The voyage took them out into the Atlantic, then south past France, Spain, and Portugal, through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, then south again through the Suez Canal, out into the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden and finally across the Indian Ocean towards the southern tip of India, which brought them to Ceylon.

When sailing south through the Atlantic, they ran into rough weather, which gave Alfred his first bout of seasickness. You’ll soon get over it, someone said to him, but like Nelson, he never did and always suffered in bad weather. Another storm hit them as they sailed down towards the Suez Canal, but strangely, there was no wind to drive the huge waves, just a stifling calm. Alfred asked the chief engineer what he thought about it, and he answered that the captain, was of the opinion, that an earthquake had taken place somewhere. But they had no communication with the shore, to confirm this, and the rest of the voyage passed without any other incidents.

When they arrived at Colombo, they were told that Messina (at the north end of the island of Sicily) and many other towns had been destroyed by an earthquake, and this was probably the cause of the storm with no wind. Later, Alfred checked up on how far they had been from Colombo when they had experienced the storm. It was nearly 300 miles.

Three years later (1911), he passed through the Straits of Messina, which is in the same area and saw that most towns had been so damaged by the earthquake that they had built new houses on the ends of streets outside the old towns.

After the cargo was unloaded, they sailed on to Java to load up with a cargo of sugar for transportation to New York. On their way there, they passed near Krakatau, the famous volcano that had blown up in 1883, killing over 35,000 people and destroying five towns. When the island split, the northern part sank, disappearing under the ocean, leaving only a small section at the south which included a 250 m (820ft) high cliff where the split occurred.

The north coast of Java is so shallow that ships have to lie five miles offshore, so the sugar had to be put into bamboo baskets, each weighing about 400 pounds, and these were loaded into smaller boats, or lighters, which carried them out to the ship.

It took several days to load the ship and the crew was not happy with the wait because they couldn’t get ashore to get a break from being aboard, and in that area, the nights could get rather eerie with strange noises coming from the sea below. The ship’s hull below the water line acted like a mighty microphone, and to start with, Alfred thought the weird noises were coming from the engine room. So, on the first night he dashed down there thinking there was something wrong. But he soon realised that the noise was coming from outside the ship. They concluded that the weird noises were a mixture of fishermen’s tonal lures and fish chatting.

In fact, this noise has been experienced by modern-day sailors. It comes from the pistol shrimps, which produce a tiny air bubble in the cup of one arm of its claw. The other arm is cocked like a pistol; then bangs down on the bubble causing a sonic wave which stuns their prey, typically a prawn.

None of the natives dared enter the water for the sea in that area was full of snakes. You just needed to throw a bit of coal into the water and a snake would come up and have a look. One time a snake even tried to climb up a boat rope onto the gangway.

They received orders to go to New York with their cargo of Java sugar, sailing via the Suez Canal and taking in bunker coal at Port Said and Malta. On receipt of this order, the captain immediately sent a telegram to his wife, telling her to join him in Malta, which she did. Her journey there took her and their daughter across France and Italy by train, followed by a sea journey across