‘There was a day in Mudros when I had to go so far as to have a squad of soldiers lined up on deck because certain members of the crew had in fact refused duty – they were annoyed at being set some task when they had expected a spot of leave, but it was a job that had to be done – and I meant that it should be performed. When the soldiers were lined up with their rifles loaded with live cartridges I paraded the recalcitrant members of the crew with their backs to the bulkhead.’31
For ships’ officers, particularly those of the cargo and passenger liner companies, the military style of discipline as represented by the Royal Navy was the model of practice to which they aspired.32 But for ratings the point of reference was the shoreside workplace. For them the ship was just another example of an industrial working environment and one, therefore, in which refusal in various forms was believed to be legitimate. Here are two examples, both drawn from the Second War.
In 1943 a 20-year-old seaman was fined £2 by the Tynemouth magistrates for deserting his ship in a South Wales port. He told the court: ‘I just left because the grub was not good. I was at sea before the war but that ship was the worst grubbed one I ever saw.’ Asked by the magistrate why he had not complained to the master, he said, ‘It’s just one of those things. If you don’t like a ship you don’t sail in her.’33
The second example concerns a crew member of a ship in Port Said in 1944, where the master failed in an attempt to persuade the British Consul to convene a Naval Court. The story ran that the 4th Officer had told crew members to stop throwing bread to the labourers who were discharging cargo. The crew members were said to have crowded round the 4th Officer and abused him. The officer had then said to two men that he would have them logged, one of whom subsequently shook his fist in the officer’s face and said:
‘“Sh—” This was in reply to my repeated questioning as to what his name was, and then he said, “You are only a b—- Petty Officer, and that because you have a piece of braid on your shoulder you think that you can come along here shouting your —— mouth off; well, you can’t. I have got a —— and two —— the same as you. I am just as good a man as you.’34
Here we have, so to speak, ‘textbook’ instances of seafarers’ assertions of the legitimacy of customary behaviour in respect of their own actions, and outrage at officers overstepping customary boundaries.
Defence of customary practice and behaviour aimed at reasserting customary proprieties in the exercise of authority were, of course, only understood to be applicable in normal, routine daily practices where the technical and social division of shipboard labour was uncritically taken for granted. In extremity, pre-existing social arrangements were not necessarily turned upside down. But they might be. When sinking ships were abandoned and survivors subsequently – and literally – found themselves all in the same boat, the shipboard social organisation was never reproduced in its original form. Technical competence in boatwork was essential and it was not unknown for able seamen to be more competent than navigating officers. Furthermore, the limitations of space and provisions made privilege morally abhorrent, and anyway impossible to assert. Then there was the overpowering need for individuals skilful in morale maintenance. Where necessary skills for survival did not correspond with shipboard rank – prior rank became meaningless. However, this rarely meant that the world was turned upside down. Navigational skills were absolutely essential, and it was inevitable that wherever a navigating officer was present and not disabled, he would play a critical role, though he might not be the dominant person.
The evidence of the character of the social order of the lifeboat is ambiguous and is not equivalent for the two wars. In the First World War the submarine’s operational range was limited and that meant that most ships were sunk relatively close to land and survivors were either picked up or made landfalls in boats within a matter of days. In August 1915, for example, none of the ships sunk was more than 100 miles from land. The situation changed somewhat in 1917 when submarine ranges had increased and convoying obliged submarines to hunt further afield. In April 1917 42 per cent of ships sunk were more than 100 miles from land. But in the Second World War, and certainly by the summer of 1940, ships’ survivors were much more likely to be at some distance from either rescuers or land within a few days’ sail. This was a far more testing time for merchant seaman survivors and produced far more cases of what can reasonably be called ‘epic’ voyages. There is extensive evidence of survival experience under such circumstances. A team of medical researchers was actively interviewing survivors, and so too were Admiralty intelligence officers. The former synthesised their data for statistical analysis and the original records have been lost.35 The Admiralty records have survived – the ADM199 sequence in the Public Record Office, Kew – but the Navy’s policy was to interview only the senior ranking survivor, and these persons were not necessarily those who had played key roles.
In August 1942 Captain George Robinson gave a BBC radio talk of his survival experience in the North Atlantic in December 1941. Although it is not mentioned in the broadcast, Robinson had had both of his frost-bitten feet amputated. There is no doubt that he had at least played a key role among the survivors of his ship, but it is equally plain that so also had one of the able seamen:
‘That Christmas, dinner consisted of a mouthful of water and a ship’s biscuit. One of the crew, a Scot named Patterson, used to sit reckoning up how much wages would be due when he got home. He even got to the stage of asking me how much overtime he was entitled to. This man was the toughest man I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet… He kept us all going and kept us all amused by reckoning up his pay in bottles of beer.
As we got weaker I noticed men reaching out for things that weren’t there… and I often wondered what it was they could see. Then, staring into the compass, I noticed a glass of beer go floating past and I realised I was seeing things too. I laid down in the bottom of the boat with a blanket around me and Patterson gave me a kick… and yelled: “Hey, here’s a ship coming!” After 18 days of sky and water one is inclined to think there are no ships left. After the rescue we were landed and hospitalised in Halifax but after a few days Patterson came up to say goodbye as he’d signed on a Dutch tanker that was sailing that night. He’d been ashore too long, he said.’36
One of the more celebrated boat voyages in this war was under the command of a 16-year-old ship’s boy from the Hebrides. The survivor with six others of the Arlington Court, his background as the son of a fisherman equipped him with the skills needed to make a successful eight-day voyage.37 There were many other cases where recognition was given to crew members whose boat skills had been critical. In what is now the standard text on survivors in the Second World War, the authors comment:
‘It was fortunate for [fellow survivors] if pure chance placed them in a boat with someone like the Earleston’s Newfoundland fisherman, the Peterton’s chief engineer keen on yachting, the Aldington Court’s Latvian bosun who was an expert boatman, the Ripley’s West Indian able seaman who had spent most of his life in small boats, or the Larchbank’s Bengali greaser who was familiar with river craft.’38
If there were some extraordinarily successful boat voyages39, others were simply appalling disasters. In 1943 the Liverpool shipping daily published the first of these two reports from Port of Spain, Trinidad. The second was a survivor’s report from the master of the tanker, British Resource:
‘A delirious merchant seaman, who landed here two days ago, his life practically “baked out of him” after 76 days drifting in an open lifeboat… was identified as