David Williams.
David's fond memories...
My few months working on the Sir Horace Lamb were in 1969 from July to about October or November. I got the job through my friend Bill Trumbull whose father Charlie was Director of the SOFAR station. It was a summer job but I stayed on after Bill went back to school, I had finished year 10 at Saltus Grammar School and didn’t want anything further to do with education.
The overwhelming memory from the blur of my first few trips was sea sickness, the only thing that got me through was Tang the instant orange drink, there seemed to be a endless supply in the galley. In my defense I must say the Sir Horace with its round bottom and token rolling caulks would have rolled on wet grass let alone across an Atlantic swell. Maybe they were Bills invention but I recall the nicknames “Vomit Comet” and “Sir Horrible.”
Some of the work that I can remember includes helping out on deck getting equipment ready to launch, passing explosives out of the hold, guiding wire back onto a winch drum when retrieving a core sampler from a considerable depth. The noise the wire made as it crunched back onto the drum was scary and made me aware of the depth involved. In port we did quite a bit of chipping and painting as well, the mate used to tell us to “Break out the beige…” but he pronounced it beije, drove Bill nuts – he didn’t like the mate.
One of the more common tasks was taking turns with Bill steering and watch keeping. while we were steaming I think it was organized into watches - 8 hours on 8 off and during those Bill and I took turns at the wheel and on the flying bridge. Learning to steer was tricky but fun, the wheel was pretty big – probably 4 or 5 feet wide with a brass rim and painted spokes. The compass was a gyro which clicked around nicely and the art of steering was to make as few alterations as possible without “chasing” the compass card around and going off the wrong way until you realized and had to over compensate to get back on course. On my first few attempts Clem McCann our very likeable Paul Newman almost look alike Skipper would glance back at the wake and shake his head at the snakiness of it. I got quite good at it eventually and one of my strongest memories from the time is steering the boat over swells that were a quarter of a mile apart , there wasn’t much wind but we sailed up the swells and then down the other side at a an angle which meant having to adjust the steering at the top of the swell so the boat didn’t lose it’s heading. It was in the Sargasso Sea I think , and I remember us cutting through highways of weed that seemed to stretch to the horizon.
It was an important time in my personal development, I had come to Bermuda at 11, my father like many other had brought his family from the UK when he took up a position with AIG, at the time the insurance giant had an office on Pitts Bay Rd. I don’t think I was racist in my attitudes – most of my customers on my weekend job at PW’s gas station and my North Shore paper round had been black – and the crew on the Sir Horace were an interesting mix. White American skipper, Scottish engineer (of course) the mate was an ex US Navy black American, but most of the crew were from St David's Island they came in all shapes, sizes and colours and were a fascinating bunch to a 16 year white English boy.
A few things stick in my mind, the quartermaster was Sonny a middle aged (he was probably much younger I was only 16) khaki coloured guy with a shock of white hair, one night I had gone to the head (toilet) when I thought it would be quiet and he came in and sat down beside me – there were three toilets in a row - no dividing partitions. He was a big guy and I just sat there until he had gone.
The mate once took me to task for not cleaning the showers properly, scraping his finger nail along the base and showing me the body fat that I had missed. At the time I was a bit struck that it was a black man telling me off, a few years later it would be Japanese fishermen – just part of growing up I suppose.
Like most single gender environments there was a lot of talk about sex which I found intriguing, I of course thought about it a lot but didn’t have a clue about how to make it happen for me. It was clear that the St David's Islanders were a pretty free spirited bunch of people, I loved hearing about their exploits. I learned about “The Brush” which was used to make men take longer to come, never saw it but it was fascinating.
One of the Islanders was Bruce who had a big hairy belly with the navel popped out, lived on a house boat, cooked a great shark curry and was the keeper of the siren for use when St David's were playing anyone else at cricket. Bruce found it amusing that I had never had sex and invited me to the houseboat one weekend where he said he would set me up with a “high yellow” (mixed race) girl who would be happy to show me what it was all about. I chickened out and when I got to work on Monday morning Bruce informed me that he got tired of waiting and ended up having sex with her himself.
The end of my time on the Sir Horace came when we ran aground in the early hours of the morning on a pitch black night. Clem McCann wasn’t aboard for this trip - it was Carl “Hard a Ground” Hartdegen in command, probably Sonny at the wheel and myself on the flying bridge keeping not much of a look out. As we backed out of the berth we must have gone too far south out into the harbor so that when we headed for the green and red markers on the cutting there was a low unlit island in the way and we ran straight into it. The feeling of the boat climbing up the rocks, loosing stability and leaning over alarmingly before sliding and scraping sideways into deeper water was eerie and stayed with me for years.
The hull was not holed and we continued the short trip albeit with a bent propeller that caused the boat to shudder. When we got back the damage was assessed and the next few charters were cancelled, Charlie Trumbull called us all into the galley and told us that the casuals would be laid off, so that was it for me.
As a non Bermudian I couldn’t expect to get any other work on the Island so I decided to take up my father’s offer of joining him in Australia. For a few years Qantas flew 707s from London through Bermuda and eventually to Sydney and it was one of those flights that took me to Australia.
The main runway runs pretty much east west and BOAC (the old name for British Airways) used to taxi sedately out from the terminal for quite some time before beginning their takeoff run. Not the Aussie pilots; we had only just left the terminal and were half way through a turn when they hit the throttles and roared off down the much shorter runway that parallels the road. This took us out over St Georges Harbour and one of my last glimpses of Bermuda for a few years was the Sir Horace on the slips undergoing repairs.
If we hadn’t run aground I wouldn’t have lost the job and wouldn’t have come to Australia, the wonderful family I have wouldn’t be and my life would be completely different from the way it has turned out. – it’s certainly one of the most pivotal points in my life.
My time on the Sir Horace Lamb showed me that I liked working at sea and after a few more years of reluctant schooling I learned my first trade from Japanese fishermen and ended up driving prawn trawlers in northern Australia for the next twenty years or so.
When I was working with the Japanese I asked one of them why their ships and boats always had names that end in “Maru”. His answer was that “Maru” meant tribe – there are probably other explanations but I think that captures the spirit of it. Boats have never been a “she” in my mind but have sometimes had something special about them, the Sir Horace Lamb was one of those for me. Even though I spent a very short time as part of the Sir Horace it was important to me and I remember the time fondly.
Posted Nov. 2015
My few months working on the Sir Horace Lamb were in 1969 from July to about October or November. I got the job through my friend Bill Trumbull whose father Charlie was Director of the SOFAR station. It was a summer job but I stayed on after Bill went back to school, I had finished year 10 at Saltus Grammar School and didn’t want anything further to do with education.
The overwhelming memory from the blur of my first few trips was sea sickness, the only thing that got me through was Tang the instant orange drink, there seemed to be a endless supply in the galley. In my defense I must say the Sir Horace with its round bottom and token rolling caulks would have rolled on wet grass let alone across an Atlantic swell. Maybe they were Bills invention but I recall the nicknames “Vomit Comet” and “Sir Horrible.”
Some of the work that I can remember includes helping out on deck getting equipment ready to launch, passing explosives out of the hold, guiding wire back onto a winch drum when retrieving a core sampler from a considerable depth. The noise the wire made as it crunched back onto the drum was scary and made me aware of the depth involved. In port we did quite a bit of chipping and painting as well, the mate used to tell us to “Break out the beige…” but he pronounced it beije, drove Bill nuts – he didn’t like the mate.
One of the more common tasks was taking turns with Bill steering and watch keeping. while we were steaming I think it was organized into watches - 8 hours on 8 off and during those Bill and I took turns at the wheel and on the flying bridge. Learning to steer was tricky but fun, the wheel was pretty big – probably 4 or 5 feet wide with a brass rim and painted spokes. The compass was a gyro which clicked around nicely and the art of steering was to make as few alterations as possible without “chasing” the compass card around and going off the wrong way until you realized and had to over compensate to get back on course. On my first few attempts Clem McCann our very likeable Paul Newman almost look alike Skipper would glance back at the wake and shake his head at the snakiness of it. I got quite good at it eventually and one of my strongest memories from the time is steering the boat over swells that were a quarter of a mile apart , there wasn’t much wind but we sailed up the swells and then down the other side at a an angle which meant having to adjust the steering at the top of the swell so the boat didn’t lose it’s heading. It was in the Sargasso Sea I think , and I remember us cutting through highways of weed that seemed to stretch to the horizon.
It was an important time in my personal development, I had come to Bermuda at 11, my father like many other had brought his family from the UK when he took up a position with AIG, at the time the insurance giant had an office on Pitts Bay Rd. I don’t think I was racist in my attitudes – most of my customers on my weekend job at PW’s gas station and my North Shore paper round had been black – and the crew on the Sir Horace were an interesting mix. White American skipper, Scottish engineer (of course) the mate was an ex US Navy black American, but most of the crew were from St David's Island they came in all shapes, sizes and colours and were a fascinating bunch to a 16 year white English boy.
A few things stick in my mind, the quartermaster was Sonny a middle aged (he was probably much younger I was only 16) khaki coloured guy with a shock of white hair, one night I had gone to the head (toilet) when I thought it would be quiet and he came in and sat down beside me – there were three toilets in a row - no dividing partitions. He was a big guy and I just sat there until he had gone.
The mate once took me to task for not cleaning the showers properly, scraping his finger nail along the base and showing me the body fat that I had missed. At the time I was a bit struck that it was a black man telling me off, a few years later it would be Japanese fishermen – just part of growing up I suppose.
Like most single gender environments there was a lot of talk about sex which I found intriguing, I of course thought about it a lot but didn’t have a clue about how to make it happen for me. It was clear that the St David's Islanders were a pretty free spirited bunch of people, I loved hearing about their exploits. I learned about “The Brush” which was used to make men take longer to come, never saw it but it was fascinating.
One of the Islanders was Bruce who had a big hairy belly with the navel popped out, lived on a house boat, cooked a great shark curry and was the keeper of the siren for use when St David's were playing anyone else at cricket. Bruce found it amusing that I had never had sex and invited me to the houseboat one weekend where he said he would set me up with a “high yellow” (mixed race) girl who would be happy to show me what it was all about. I chickened out and when I got to work on Monday morning Bruce informed me that he got tired of waiting and ended up having sex with her himself.
The end of my time on the Sir Horace came when we ran aground in the early hours of the morning on a pitch black night. Clem McCann wasn’t aboard for this trip - it was Carl “Hard a Ground” Hartdegen in command, probably Sonny at the wheel and myself on the flying bridge keeping not much of a look out. As we backed out of the berth we must have gone too far south out into the harbor so that when we headed for the green and red markers on the cutting there was a low unlit island in the way and we ran straight into it. The feeling of the boat climbing up the rocks, loosing stability and leaning over alarmingly before sliding and scraping sideways into deeper water was eerie and stayed with me for years.
The hull was not holed and we continued the short trip albeit with a bent propeller that caused the boat to shudder. When we got back the damage was assessed and the next few charters were cancelled, Charlie Trumbull called us all into the galley and told us that the casuals would be laid off, so that was it for me.
As a non Bermudian I couldn’t expect to get any other work on the Island so I decided to take up my father’s offer of joining him in Australia. For a few years Qantas flew 707s from London through Bermuda and eventually to Sydney and it was one of those flights that took me to Australia.
The main runway runs pretty much east west and BOAC (the old name for British Airways) used to taxi sedately out from the terminal for quite some time before beginning their takeoff run. Not the Aussie pilots; we had only just left the terminal and were half way through a turn when they hit the throttles and roared off down the much shorter runway that parallels the road. This took us out over St Georges Harbour and one of my last glimpses of Bermuda for a few years was the Sir Horace on the slips undergoing repairs.
If we hadn’t run aground I wouldn’t have lost the job and wouldn’t have come to Australia, the wonderful family I have wouldn’t be and my life would be completely different from the way it has turned out. – it’s certainly one of the most pivotal points in my life.
My time on the Sir Horace Lamb showed me that I liked working at sea and after a few more years of reluctant schooling I learned my first trade from Japanese fishermen and ended up driving prawn trawlers in northern Australia for the next twenty years or so.
When I was working with the Japanese I asked one of them why their ships and boats always had names that end in “Maru”. His answer was that “Maru” meant tribe – there are probably other explanations but I think that captures the spirit of it. Boats have never been a “she” in my mind but have sometimes had something special about them, the Sir Horace Lamb was one of those for me. Even though I spent a very short time as part of the Sir Horace it was important to me and I remember the time fondly.
Posted Nov. 2015