by Bill James
‘“Weather and circumstances permitting” – advertisements for the trips carried this caution, Ian. The Bristol Channel can be diabolical. There might not be all that much of it, and some called it only the Severn Estuary, but the Channel could produce real mischief. A ship might set out in fine conditions and the barometer reasonable. Then, suddenly, a squall, or even a storm. Spray up from the ploughing bow so high it hit the wheelhouse. I say wheelhouse, but it had no roof or walls, just rails all round with tarpaulin lashed on to give the helmsman and captain some protection against the hurtling water. And, also during rough weather, the sea would sweep over and soak passengers’ shoes on deck, but some of them didn’t notice because all they wanted was to stand there chucking up into the waves, and feeling so rotten they’d like to chuck themselves over, too.
‘Although these craft were called pleasure boats, sometimes the passengers did not get very much pleasure, Ian. And they’d be sick in the lounge and the dining saloon as well. Such a job, clearing up when we docked. It might be a quick turn-around trip, new passengers waiting, and you could not have public rooms in that condition, the prickly stench of recent ample vomit – often, admittedly, high-quality vomit, with a French touch from the dining salon: genuine hors d’oeuvres, steak tartare, Camembert. And not always neatly piled, but strung out in long, many-coloured, glistening lines on the floor and across the upholstery. People threw it up uncontrolled when staggering about with the swell, or against it, maybe having had, yes, a four-course luxury meal with all the trimmings, plus wine – perhaps red wine, usually dark red, but sometimes brighter, burgundy or claret.
‘A ship could lose its passenger licence if an inspector came aboard and found wholesale, prevalent puke. This was understandable. The ship would not seem comfortable or homely. A pleasure boat had to look like a pleasure boat and smell like a pleasure boat, not a disgorge site. The King Arthur was over six-hundred gross tonnage. She could take a thousand passengers. Not all would be aboard and sick every trip, though still quite a quantity sometimes. But on a nice day, such a brave sight, the King Arthur! Unusually high potential horse power for such a vessel then. This would be quite a few years ago, now, Ian.’
‘Horsepower meaning the energy used to drive the paddles.’
‘And a speed touching twenty knots.’
‘A knot, or nautical mile, is two thousand and twenty-five yards – more than an ordinary mile, twenty knots being twenty-three miles an hour.’
‘There were races, Ian.’ Mr Charteris would sound a little ashamed and confidential about this.
‘Not proper races, with judges and a starting gun, Dad.’
‘Races of a commercial nature to get first to where passengers waited ashore and pick them up, and collect their fares. That was the objective, Ian – collect their fares. The Masthead was not the only fleet. Hardly. Some did very well indeed. People who had some money meant to enjoy themselves after all the troubles of the Great War. Excursions in the Bristol Channel between south Wales and the west country, and vice-versa. Popular. That’s what I mean about the racing. Competition. It wasn’t supposed to happen – of course it wasn’t. It could be dangerous, boats nearly ramming each other to get in ahead at a landing stage. But it did happen. You could call it greed, you could call it enterprise.’
‘And so, that terrible bad accident,’ Ian would say.
‘Very bad. Not necessary. Never take the sea lightly, Ian. There’s a lot of it, with its own way of doing things, such as swamping, battering, rearing high. The Bristol Channel might be limited, but it’s joined to all kinds of other seas and oceans covering much of the globe. The decline of the Masthead operation started here. We won the race that day, but the death – it broke company morale, it put a pall over the fleet for a while. I think the company might have failed, even if the war hadn’t come. I got this dredger job then. It wasn’t any longer a time for cruising and enjoyment; it was a time for sand and gravel.’
‘But back on that special day, you dived in from the port deck rail, determined to make a rescue.’
‘Had to.’
‘The woman’s coat and other wet clothes tugged her down.’
‘The sea there, murky. Hard to spot anyone at a depth. That’s what I meant about the sea. It can be murky, it can be clean and clear, but it is always the sea and unmerciful, summer or winter. It doesn’t just lie there between pieces of land. It’s never still. Go and look at it. What you’ll see more than anything else is movement. That’s built in to the sea – movement.’
‘We had a poem in school: “The sea, the sea, the open sea, the blue, the fresh, the ever free.”’
‘Not always blue or fresh looking, but ever-dangerous,’ Mr Charteris replied.
‘You had to go to what was known as a Board of Inquiry.’
‘An awful time. But up until the drowning, you could say I was lucky to get a job on the King Arthur. Only a deckhand, though good pay, the work not too hard, and passengers usually in a nice holiday mood, unless heaving up sticky, odorous ex-fodder. Luckily, I’d been in the navy during the Great War, so I knew seamanship. I had to take the wheel sometimes, even in a storm. Important to fix her head or stern towards the weather, Ian, so she didn’t broach on. I had to use all my strength to hold the rudder on course, even with the paddles driving her straight forward. The ship would sort of fight me, like an enemy, but knew it couldn’t win against my steady force and skill. I was lucky to have these aplenty, oh, yes, part of my nature.’
‘“Broach on” meaning a ship did not keep her bow or stern to the weather but went broadside on, and the wind and big waves hit her there, made her helpless, got into her engines, and maybe rolled her over, capsized her.’
‘Each voyage we ran safety drills with the lifeboats. Think what it would be like if the worst happened and we had to get a thousand people to safety in big seas. We’d swing one of these lifeboats out on davits every trip, to make sure the lowering mechanism worked, and we’d show passengers their emergency stations. Of course, they thought it was all a bit of a game, a slice of amusing drama to liven up the trip, but it wasn’t, I can assure you. “Only the Bristol Channel,” they’d exclaim, perhaps laughing. There’s nothing “only” about the Channel, Ian.’
‘Davits – small cranes that took lifeboats down to the sea if the ship was going to sink.’
‘The Board of Trade had naturally thought a lot about the Titanic, destroyed by an iceberg in 1912 with many lives lost. They tightened precautions. I’m not saying there’d be icebergs in the Bristol Channel! But ships could sink for other reasons. Our lifeboats were ahead of the paddle box on the port side.’
‘Port is left when going forward, right starboard. Port lights red, starboard green.’
‘Plus some of the benches where passengers on deck could sit were made so they would become life-saving rafts with ropes to hang on to if the ship went down.’
‘These were what’s known as “double-purpose”.’
‘Generally for relaxing on and chatting together, but also a safety measure. And then, a smaller lifeboat at the stern. This could be lowered quicker than the others, and was for the kind of emergency when someone went overboard, or if a line fouled the rudder. We got the stern boat into the water fast on that bad day, but not fast enough. This was 1934.’
‘The dark water.’
‘I want you to think of those two paddle steamers approaching Penarth pier, Ian, the King Arthur and The Channel Explorer. These are rivals.’
‘No love lost.’
‘Channel Explorer, owned by the Pearson company of Bristol and Avonmouth and part of its Ocean Quest fleet, gross tonnage five hundred and fifty, maximum speed claimed as twenty-one knots, master, Captain Lionel Corbitty, buckets of deep-sea experience before taking Explorer.’
‘Age, forty-eight, nickname “Top-dog Corbitty”. He thought he ruled the waves, like Britannia.’
‘Scratch golfer.’
‘Big-headed.’
‘The skippe
r of the King Arthur, himself a bit of a Great I-Am. Perhaps they all needed some of that to become captains. It’s called “dash”. Like Drake and Nelson. Remember Nelson putting his telescope to his blind eye and saying, “I see no ships,” although enemy vessels were bearing down on him. Or Drake snoozing in his cabin while the Spanish armada approached. They were sure of themselves, believed in themselves. They’d make their decisions, give their orders, confident they had things right. Edgar Dominal – in that tradition. And Top-dog. “Britannia rules the waves.” So, the two ships make for the pier, both bound eventually for Ilfracombe and Minehead. About a hundred passengers waiting. Luggage, fishing gear, prams, summer hats, parasols, everything festive. Tickets to be bought as they boarded whichever ship. They’re each coming from the east.
‘So, say you were on the pier there, Ian. You’d see those two vessels, bows pointed your way, black smoke trailing thick from the funnels, the fires primed high for speed, paddles hammering down at rapid rate under their boxes, turning the water white, flags stretched sternwards in the wind, bold and gaudy.’
‘And another poem at school about a ship,’ Ian said:
‘“Whither away fair rover, and what thy quest?”’
‘Quests are, indeed, what ships have. The quest for both these ships is to get to the pier first. They’re alongside each other but about half a mile apart, King Arthur best placed for the pier, because in closer to the coast. The distance is shorter, more direct. But the Explorer has that extra speed – is supposed to have that extra speed, twenty-one knots, not the King Arthur’s twenty.’
‘Twenty-one knots being over twenty-four miles an hour.’
‘Corbitty probably wanted to show that the Explorer did have an extra knot. Some considered it just blab and sales blarney. On the bridge he would put the engine room telegraph to Full Ahead for both paddles, but as well as that, he’d be on the voice pipe, shouting to the chief engineer down below for every whisker of push. Paddlers could take risks dangerous for propeller-driven ships. Paddles helped with the steering. You could get a change of course quicker than from a rudder alone, by stopping one paddle while the other kept working, or by using them at different speeds, or one going forward, the other in reverse. And if both paddles were put hard into reverse they could stop a ship in a shorter distance than a reversed propeller, or even a reversed double propeller on a twin screw craft. That’s obvious, you must agree, Ian.’
‘Well, yes, Dad.’
‘So, Ian, a fierce race that day. Not unusual. Nobody would have admitted it, of course, and nobody admitted it at the Inquiry. Racing was against regulations. Rightly against regulations. It meant playing with passengers’ lives. That’s how the authorities would regard it. Rightly regard it. But a captain like Corbitty – he’d think regulations were there to be got around. Or they were for other captains, not the great Corbitty, who’d seen so much deep sea. Audacious – that’s probably how he thought of himself. Seamanlike, alert to hazard, but audacious. Edgar Dominal would not put up with that from him, wouldn’t be cowed by his swank, though. Edgar Dominal could be stubborn. Most likely he would call it steadfast or un-panicked.’
‘He wouldn’t consider giving way to Corbitty.’
‘Plenty of passenger business to be had around the Channel, but also plenty of ships chasing it hard. And if you didn’t chase it hard, and often get it, your firm died.’
‘As happened to several.’
‘It cost money to keep those ships working – the crew’s pay, coal, dock charges. And the only way to get money was fares, plus the catering. That day, the King Arthur had docked in Newport overnight and called at Cardiff on her way to Penarth. Explorer was coming from Bristol, on the other side of the Channel. So, we had that inner position now, under the Penarth Head cliffs. To Dominal it must have seemed certain he’d arrive first. The published timetable put us at Penarth fifteen minutes before Explorer, although Corbitty might ignore that. His nature would be to ignore it. The Explorer’s call was mainly for setting down some of its passengers from the West Country, not for picking up – except stragglers who’d missed the King Arthur. Or some might especially want to go on the Explorer, maybe to try its speed and see if she got across the Channel quicker, even though she might leave Penarth after us. Dominal would not like that, and nor would the crew on King Arthur. He could be a nuisance and a show-off but he was our captain and we had to give him loyalty. This is how a ship works, unless there’s a mutiny.
‘Some passengers had come aboard the King Arthur in Cardiff, including a young woman, Emily Bass, and her family and several friends. This name would become important. Remember it, Ian – Emily Bass. Our passengers could see it was a race, naturally, although it wasn’t supposed to be, and they were excited – thrilled – yelling up to Captain Dominal to get her going faster and also yelling at Channel Explorer across the gap between the two ships, telling Corbitty he was beaten and should give up. Cheek. People on Explorer shouted back. The insults could be heard all right above the din of the paddles, same as with the Messiah etcetera. But it was harmless – no proper dislike, just a sort of holiday game to both ships’ passengers.
‘Not to Corbitty and Dominal. Like gladiators. They’d be mostly gazing ahead, with no time to look at each other. They stood on the bridge of their ships, giving orders to the helmsman, one hand ready on the lever of the engine room telegraph to alter speed. There was going to be some tricky manoeuvring. Each of them thought he could handle it. Neither would doubt it of himself. Maybe each thought he could handle it better than the other. Neither would want it to go around the Bristol Channel ports that he – Dominal or Corbitty – had lost his nerve and come second out of two. This was the kind of tale that would get repeated and repeated, maybe with some trimmings, to make things even worse for the defeated one. We had a saying, Ian: “The captain’s on the bridge” – meaning everything was under control because the master had charge. If the captain on the bridge failed, though, that saying would lose its force – lose its force for the also-ran.’
‘The bridge being where the wheelhouse was, and the engine telegraph and voice pipe.’
‘Now, the piermaster at Penarth has a problem, hasn’t he, Ian?’
‘Flags.’
‘It’s his job to hoist one to show which should come in first. He has a box with the particular flags for each Channel paddle steamer. The King Arthur’s is silver coloured, like the funnels of the fleet, with a white lighthouse on it sending out golden beams. The Explorer’s is dark blue around the edges.’
‘And a map of the world that showed the five oceans in red, to remind everyone Explorer belonged to the Ocean Quest fleet.’
‘Not easy for the piermaster, Ian. Oh, the rules would say he’s in charge and can hoist whichever flag he wants. But he would be unsure which ship was ahead of the other – just these two prows bustling on towards him, carving their way towards him, rushing towards him, and about level pegging. He knew the timetable said the King Arthur should precede Explorer and take all the passengers who wanted to board the Masthead ship. But he also knew about Corbitty and the sort he could be once he thought someone had crossed him, such as a Penarth piermaster. Corbitty was a ship’s master, and he would consider himself very much more important than master of a pier, because piers just stood there – they didn’t have to be navigated through the waves and tides faster than rivals. Ships’ masters sometimes retired to become piermasters, like out to grass as they say about horses.
‘Corbitty had been cracking his boat on at twenty-one knots and he would expect the piermaster to realize this must be because its captain wanted to beat the King Arthur. He would believe the piermaster could tell from the Explorer’s bigger bow wave that she was going faster than the King Arthur. So, if the piermaster put up the King Arthur’s flag it would be an absolute offence to Corbitty and his ship and her special speed. That’s how the piermaster must have thought. Corbitty could get very unforgiving and rough. If you’d been deep sea you did
n’t like people such as a piermaster messing you around.’
‘The piermaster waited too long with the flag.’
‘He dithered, Ian.’
‘Perilous.’
‘This was a lapse of duty, a bad shortcoming.’
‘Eventually, the piermaster did decide. But only eventually, Dad.’
‘He chose the King Arthur’s flag. As was correct. As was timetabled and published. Oh, yes, the piermaster had the printed official information on his side. He might not have Corbitty, though. I don’t know if you can pull a flag up the pole with your fingers crossed but if you could he’d have been doing it! I was probably the first one to see it rise, before it unfurled fully in the wind and became obvious. And I realized I could be the first so I shouted – bellowed – up to the bridge and Captain Dominal.’
‘You called out to your captain, “Permission for us to come alongside now showing, sir!”’
‘Shouted it twice, to make sure. And then some of our passengers saw it, too, and began to clap and cheer. And a bit more mockery and triumphant shouting from these folk to those on the Channel Explorer.’
‘This was the beginning of the terrible events.’
‘Oh, definitely.’
‘Turning triumph into something else.’
‘The young woman – Emily Bass – is on the port side of the King Arthur, looking towards Explorer, really lapping up all the fun, especially because it looked certain we would succeed. That’s the kind of person she obviously was, keen on fun, very natural to the young, and attractive in them.’
Ian said: ‘She might not have seen the pier flag from there, but she’d hear the cheering and clapping and guess King Arthur had won, or was going to.’
‘She was full of excitement and mischief and noise, Ian – calling across in a jolly, winner’s way at the rival vessel. I was forward on the other side of the ship.’
‘Ready to fling the mooring line to the pier, so they could pull in the heavier hawser tied to it.’
