Images and identities
In the Great War the mass media was in its infancy, unable to pick up and put into deep national circulation stories of the doings of merchant seamen. In the early decades of the 20th century far more people read local and regional newspapers than national ones, photo-journalism as a distinctive genre was under-developed, and the same went for cinema (even though the soundless newsreel could present actualité); books were relatively expensive and talking radio was still a few years in the future. In 1939 all these means of communication had reached high levels of technical development and, furthermore, were within the economic reach of the great mass of the population. But it was as much the politics of the Second War as the technical and economic development of the media that made merchant seafarers such an obvious and prominent focus for the attention of newspapers, radio and cinema. Where the First War was a patriotic war fought in defence of great power status, the Second was quickly announced as a ‘people’s war’, to be fought in defence of democracy. The one war required examples of patriotic heroism and helpless victims of enemy brutality, the other needed patriotic heroic instances as before, but especially needed ordinary people being good citizens. Merchant seafarers were well cast for this role and no doubt for that reason received an enormous amount of publicity.
The weekly photo-news magazine, Picture Post, famous anyway for its celebration of the ‘common people’, regularly carried articles on merchant seamen. The following sequence appeared in 1940:
‘ONE OF THE MEN HITLER CAN’T FRIGHTEN
Harry Townsend of the Dunbar Castle Harry Townsend, 60 years old, is just one of over 150,000 men in the British mercantile marine. He had a berth as a cook in the Union Castle Line’s Dunbar Castle. On a Tuesday, the Dunbar Castle strikes a mine off the south-east coast, and sinks in 10 minutes. With other survivors, Harry Townsend is picked up by a lifeboat. He reaches London wrapped in a blanket, a pipe stuck in his mouth. That was Tuesday. By Saturday, Harry Townsend has found another ship. He is at sea again.’5
‘WHAT IT MEANS TODAY TO BE A MERCHANT SEAMAN
Lifeboats pull away from the sinking Clan Stuart All day and all night ships are putting into the ports of Britain. They bring us food. They bring us metal. They bring us the needs of war and the comforts of life. They bring us them in spite of mines and submarines. They bring us them at the cost of heavy risk to our merchant seamen – the men of Cardiff, Glasgow, Tyneside, London; the men of Bombay, Singapore, and the little ports of the Near East.’6
‘AND STILL THE CONVOYS COME…
The strain on merchant seamen’s nerves is terrific, as the ships proceed at snail’s pace over the ocean and nobody knows from minute to minute when disaster may come from under the sea, on the sea or in the air. The merchant seaman is given an inconspicuous little badge, about half the size of an air-raid warden’s. He is paid (if he is an AB – a skilled man) £9 12s 6d a month, plus £3 danger money. For this he risks his life every minute of his day and night, awake and asleep… doing what is in the last analysis, the most important job of all – the job of keeping the nation fed, and its trade flowing.’7
Picture Post’s only competitor, Illustrated, was no less concerned with celebrating the merchant seaman. A seven-page photo-article on the rescue of the crew of a sunken ship by a Royal Navy destroyer contained these captions:
‘Rescued! The face of the Lascar survivor betrays his ordeal. His feet are frozen.’8
‘James Fitzpatrick, junior wireless operator of the torpedoed freighter, is only nineteen years old. “I’m ready to sail again at any time,” says James.’9
‘Chief Steward Dumbill after being torpedoed four times, believes firmly in his lucky star. He was in his cabin rolling a cigarette when the torpedo struck the freighter. “I ran on deck to help with the boats then returned for my shipmates,” says Dumbill, affectionately nursing his canaries.’10
The cinema and the popular daily press were no less attentive. There were seven documentaries, three full-length feature and at least 29 newsreel items. The Daily Mirror deliberately set out to champion the merchant seaman, as might be expected from the archetypal left-populist newspaper, but the patriotically populist Daily Express carried a similar number of stories. These two newspapers were certainly idiomatically different in their approach, but they were nevertheless staunch friends of the seaman. The same was true of the BBC, which broadcast at least 19 talks given by serving merchant seamen recounting experiences. The BBC also broadcast a number of charitable appeals on behalf of seafarers. Its greatest achievement was the programme Shipmates Ashore, which in its first six months went out as The Blue Peter. Devised as a light entertainment for merchant seamen of all ranks rather than about them, it had established a home audience of six million listeners by 1943. It went out at peak period on Saturdays, was one of the very few BBC programmes to be repeated on all its short-wave services, and was the only programme solely dedicated to an occupational group unless one were to include the musical offering of Workers’ Playtime.
The press, film and radio output was supplemented by a number of novels and non-fiction books – at least 30 titles of each category. As we have seen, means of mass communication were of a different order in 1914–18, and there is therefore quite simply no comparison between the publicity attached to merchant seamen in the two wars. There were a number of 1914–18 wartime books that were wholly concerned with merchant seamen – but almost certainly less than ten titles. The idiom of the non-fictional books of this war, if just slightly more luxuriant than those of the Second War, was rhetorically interchangeable. The reader could have heard:
‘Concerning the seafarer the slightest suspicion of degeneracy was never entertained. He toiled on in fair weather and foul, in every clime, in every season, all day and every day. He had neither the opportunity nor the desire to follow the path of the landlubber. Atlas-like, he supported Britain on his broad shoulders despite increasing hazards. The might of the navy is due to a very appreciable extent to the might of the Merchant Service, and it is the latter which is the real binding link of the Empire. Never before in our history have we so much appreciated the men who “go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters”. The present conflict has accentuated our irredeemable debt of gratitude to them.’11
‘Here then are the great arteries supplying Great Britain with survival power in the shape of food and raw materials; and over them every day and every night, in the piercing cold of winter and the blazing heat of summer, through fog and snow and ice and rain, with mortal danger hovering above and lurking below, go the brave obscure men of the Merchant Navy on whom now our hopes and our lives depend.’12
Just how far these images and implicit identities were heard, read and seen among seafarers themselves was finally what mattered. That the public at large and especially seafarers’ families knew that seafarers were valued was of course important. But by being mostly absent for at least nine months in very twelve, it was unlikely that seafarers would themselves have had much opportunity to see themselves as others saw them. If, therefore, the imagery produced and distributed in the public domain was to percolate into the seafarer’s own consciousness, it had to be passed on primarily by intermediaries who in most cases would have been family members.
In the First War at least, this two-step flow of communication was inevitably an imperfect process. The economic costs and the skills needed to consume the printed media must have meant that at best only a substantial minority of seafarers’ families could have been aware of what was being said about their fathers, grandfathers, husbands, brothers or sons. And of those who did receive and pass on to their seafarer relatives the images in circulation, by far the great majority must have been officers’ families. The two-thirds of crews of cargo-carrying ships who were ratings must surely only have seen themselves as they saw each other. Their image was their self-image. In the earlier war it is safe to say that most seafarers’ experience of their conduct in war was little touched or influenced by the perceptions of the wider world.
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