Polar Voyages

by Gray, Gordon

  This book is dedicated to my wife Doreen, who shares my love of ships, the sea and the polar regions

  For speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen.

  For scientific discovery give me Scott.

  But when disaster strikes and all hope is gone,

  get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

  – Sir Raymond Priestly

  Antarctic Explorer

  Cover Picture. Top image: Author’s Collection. Bottom image: Taken from a painting in the author’s collection and with the kind permission of and thanks to the artist, Jenny Morgan, RSMA.

  First published 2015

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberleybooks.com

  Copyright © Gordon Gray, 2015

  The right of Gordon Gray to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781445647487 (PRINT)

  ISBN 9781445647494 (eBOOK)

  Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing.

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Contents

  Foreword: The Steamer

  Chapter 1: ST Lord Lovat – A Trip to Icelandic Fishing Grounds

  Chapter 2: The Royal Navy – Officer Training

  Chapter 3: HMS Keppel – Midshipman’s Training

  Chapter 4: HMS Rhyl

  Chapter 5: Wardroom to Fish Dock

  Chapter 6: MV Marco Polo – The Antarctic

  Chapter 7: Professor Molchanov – NE Greenland

  Chapter 8: I/B Kapitan Dranitsyn – Franz Joseph Land

  Chapter 9: The North Pole

  Chapter 10: MV Stockholm – Spitzbergen – In Search of Polar Bears

  Chapter 11: MV Lofoten

  Chapter 12: Fram and Antarctica

  Chapter 13: Akademic Ioffe and the Northwest Passage

  Chapter 14: Three Key Elements – Ships, the Sea and Ice

  Picture Section

  FOREWORD

  The Steamer

  On a blustery, west highland summer’s day in the early 1950s, a black-hulled, mail steamer ploughed its way northwards from Mallaig up through the sound of Sleat between the mainland of Scotland and the Isle of Skye. The spray from her bow wave flew high up her sides and dark smoke was tugged from her bright-red funnel by the wind. On the open deck, by the rails at the stern of the ship, a family group sat huddled in coats on the wooden benches while enjoying the majestic views on each side of the ship. In spite of the wind, the day was fine and the warm sun shone on the greens and purples of the heather-clad hills of Knoydart and deep into the dark entrance of Loch Hourn, while across to the west, on the Skye shoreline, the sun bathed the dazzling white lighthouse in light. A small boy, aged about two or three, wearing a green knitted top and blue dungarees, sat on the warm deck peering through the rails, his face smiling widely with excitement. The gentle roll of the wooden deck, the smoke blowing from the funnel, the sea splashing past in the wake, the seagulls wheeling overhead squawking furiously and the mixture of strange smells all filled him with excitement and enthralled him.

  The boy was called back by his parents, as they were soon due to get off the steamer. They had to go down inside the steamer to a door near the waterline so they could get into an open boat that would take them ashore to the small coastal village of Glenelg.

  A bright-red, clinker-built, open motor boat with just one man at the helm came out to the ship from the village, which was just a line of small, single-storeyed, white houses along the distant shore. The steamer slowed and turned across the wind then stopped to give a lee to the motor boat as it came alongside. A big, heavy, steel door near the steamer’s waterline was opened and the people who had gathered by the door watched as the boat rolled and bobbed through the waves towards the steamer, with splashes of spray leaping from its bows. Mail, parcels and passengers for Glenelg were passed down to the man in the boat. The small boy was aware of being lifted out through the door in the solid steel hull, past the painted iron frames and huge rivets of the door and into the arms of the kindly, smiling man waiting below in the rocking, pitching boat. Above him, the shiny black hull seemed to stretch upwards like a cliff and a few faces peered over the railing way above him. Once everyone was on board, the red boat set off back to shore. From the boat the boy watched the steamer’s black hull as the waters at its stern started to churn into white froth and it slowly turned and picked up speed heading for the Kyle Rhea narrows between Skye and the Mainland on its way to Kyle of Lochalsh. In one small boy a love of ships and the sea had been born.

  MacBrayne steamer. (J&C McCutcheon Collection)

  CHAPTER 1

  ST Lord Lovat – A Trip to Icelandic Fishing Grounds

  ‘Oh please, just let me die.’ The trawler lurched again, and then dropped into another wave trough. The deck beneath me fell away, my knees slid on the deck and I hung on tighter but my arms were too weak and I slipped. The ship’s bow bit into the next wave and the bathroom deck shuddered under my cold knees as I struggled to hold onto the bowl. Icy seas rattled against the outside of the bulkhead as they washed along the deck outside. ‘Why won’t this ship stay still? Why am I still sick when there is no more left inside me?’ Seasickness has hit me for the first time in my life and I am well into the second day of it. I feel weak and totally drained. My stomach feels as though it has been turned inside out and my skin is clammy with sweat, and yet I am cold. Nothing will stay still and all I want to do is die. What on earth am I doing here? I am on board an old Hull trawler, well out into the north Atlantic, somewhere off the Faroe Islands, and heading for the Icelandic fishing grounds and we are in the middle of a Force 8 gale. This is only day three of a planned twenty-day fishing trip with no ports of call, and I am now certain that I will never survive.

  How had this happened to me? How had the small boy who had been lowered out of the streamer all those years before arrived here, at the point of death in an Atlantic gale on a rusty old trawler? What was I doing here? I was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy from a normal middle-class home in Buckinghamshire, and I was hanging onto the toilet bowl of a trawler as it lurched into another wave. Why am I not at home, or out riding my bike round the pleasant leafy, sun-filled country lanes, or playing rugby with my pals on the common, even revising for my ‘O’ levels? Anything but this! How had I managed to get myself into this mess?

  It had really started four years earlier when I was twelve, during a stay in Hull with family friends who had two sons, Peter and Michael, who were roughly the same age as me. We spent all our days out on our bikes cycling around Hull and the surrounding countryside. One day I persuaded my pals that the three of us should go down on our bikes to St Andrew’s Dock, or ‘Fish Dock’ as it was known locally, to look at the trawlers. I had always been fascinated by TV documentaries about life on Arctic trawlers and had read magazine articles about the dangers of the job and the roughness of the life but had never seen one. The romance of the names of the distant polar places that they went to excited me; Bear Island, Iceland, the White Sea, Spitzbergen and Greenland. Places from adventure books and the Viking Sagas, places from the tales of polar explorers, icebergs, polar bears and Arctic whalers.

  Hull trawlers getti
ng ready for another trip to the Arctic.

  Hull trawler Arctic Hunter, H218. (J&C McCutcheon Collection)

  With my two friends, Pete and Mike, I cycled down through Hull and found the way to the shopping hustle of Hessle Road and then through the Victorian streets of terraced houses and down through a dark, dank road tunnel that took us under the railway lines and up and out onto the docks. We got off our bikes and looked around. We found that we had entered a different world from the one we had left behind on Hessle Road at the other end of the tunnel.

  High, flared, black bows of trawlers towered over us and dominated the immediate dockside scene. As we walked towards them we could see that the wide, open decks of the trawlers were littered with toolboxes, bundles of new nets, big round bobbins and shiny new coils of wire all to be stored away for the next trip. Some workmen were stowing some of the gear away below decks while another group worked on a big trawl winch. A tangle of masts and wires disappeared into the distance as vans and cars bustled and tooted their way over the black cobbles and through the dockside jumble of nets, pedestrians, ropes, bicycle racks, parked lorries, cyclists and huge coils of trawl warp. Looking across the dock at the ships on the far side you could immediately see their lovely lines. Their sweeping hull shape had evolved over many years of Arctic fishing; developed to deal with the worst that the weather could throw at them. Although they were only about 700 to 800 tons in size, these beautiful steel ships looked impregnable. As they lay still in the flat, calm waters of the Fish Dock it was impossible to imagine that such strong and powerful-looking ships could be tossed about in a storm, but of course they were. They all had high, flared bows to cut through the waves and throw off the icy, Arctic seas and above the bows the curved whaleback of the fo’c’sle, which gave protection and some shelter to the crew working on the open deck. From the whaleback, the high solid bulwarks then ran back past the gallows, a heavy steel arch from which the fishing gear was towed, to the low midships section, almost at water level to enable the net to be hauled over the side by hand. The midships area was dominated by the superstructure with the wheelhouse at the top. This jutted out forward from the main superstructure and stood high and fine above the deck; aloof and removed from it all. The wheelhouse windows seemed to stare out, far beyond the ship, oblivious to three schoolboys below, to the far horizons; as if they were looking for signs of more fish, or watching for a change in the weather. Immediately behind the wheelhouse was the funnel and then the low flat superstructure led smoothly aft to a rounded cruiser-style stern. Most of the trawlers were rust-streaked and had a battered, weathered look but the rust, dents and scratches could not disguise their fine lines and strength. In the sunshine those that had been freshly painted shone proudly as they lay waiting for their crew and the next tide so they could sail back to those exciting-sounding places in the far north.

  To me it was all pure magic. Here were the ships that I had read about in the magazines, seen on the TV documentaries, where trawling was described as the most dangerous job in the world as well as being carried out in the stormiest, most remote and icy cold regions on the planet. Here on the dock were all the elements that went to make up a fishing trip to the Arctic: the trawler owners in their offices and all the shore support staff; the trawlermen themselves and the trawlers. I could see some of their names, fine proud names like Stella Leonis, Cape Trafalgar, Lord Alexander, Westella and St Dominic.

  As we stood looking about and wondering what to do next (as well as making sure we did not get knocked into the dock by a passing lorry), I became aware of a gleaming black-hulled trawler that stood out from the rest as she was so clean and freshly painted. I walked towards her. On one of her lifebelts was her name, Cape Otranto, and the number H227. She had a high, white-fronted wheelhouse, which jutted out over the deck. The wheelhouse seemed to be so far above the deck that it must be like another world to be up there. As I stared, I saw an old man on board the ship. He was leaning against the bulwark by the aft accommodation. He had a weathered, wrinkled face and was smoking a pipe in the sunshine as he watched the comings and goings of the morning bustle. He wore an old blue jersey and had a scruffy flat cap on and a ragged scarf tied round his neck. I walked over and plucked up all my courage. In my southern accent I asked, ‘Excuse me please, but would it be possible to see round your ship?’ He seemed somewhat surprised at this, took a puff at his pipe, stood up and looked at me hard. He thought for a minute and then with a slight smile said, ‘Aye, I s’pose so lad.’ He took another draw on his pipe then knocked it out against the ship’s side and put it in his pocket. ‘Cum wi’me.’ I clambered nervously over the steel bulwark and jumped down onto the main deck, calling to my two pals to follow, leaving the bikes by a bollard. I later discovered that the man was a watchman, one of many ex-trawlermen who worked as watchmen and stayed on board the trawlers when they were in dock, working twenty-four-hour shifts to keep a constant check for fires, flooding or other ship-borne problems as well as opening up locked compartments for the repair staff. He took us all round the ship.

  We started in the galley. This seemed to be far too small to cater for a ship of this size. Even with the sun shining down through the skylight the galley seemed very small. It had shining steel worktops on two sides and a big black cooking range on a third as well as a number of small cupboards; but that was all. It was warm though and had a homely, warm, floury smell to it. The man told us, ‘Here, when they are at sea, the cook will have to prepare and cook three meals a day for a crew of over twenty in all weathers, summer and winter. Basic food but plenty of it. If all else fails they can always eat fish!’ he joked. A small wooden hatch allowed food to be passed into the bare-looking crew’s mess deck while the officers ate in a separate mess with leather benches and panelled wood across the passageway. He showed us the tidy, four-man cabins down below for the crew and the single-berth officers’ cabins on the main deck. The ship was warm and clean and smelt of a mixture of detergent and diesel oil and had a very secure feel about it. I remember thinking how snug the mate’s cabin was, with its bunk, a little settee, a desk and its own porthole. I did not realise how little time he ever got to enjoy it. Then, the watchy took us up past the skipper’s cabin, which had a day cabin and a night cabin as well as its own bathroom. Then we went up another deck and into the wheelhouse. I stepped to the front of the wheelhouse, past the big wooden steering wheel and looked out of the windows. We could see over the whole of the wide, working deck, beyond the top of the fo’c’sle and along the dock, which now seemed a long way away. I heard myself stupidly say, ‘Gosh, you get a good view from up here, don’t you?’ The watchy, without even looking at me, just said, ‘Aye, that’s what it’s for, lad.’ And with that he shuffled out of the wheelhouse and took us back down to the deck.

  On the way he explained that the Cape Otranto was a brand-new ship that had just returned from her maiden voyage of twenty-one days and was ready to sail again that night to the far north. She had a tonnage of 923 tons and had been built in Beverley by cook, Gemmel & Welton. She was owned by Hudson Bros, a well-established company, which named all their trawlers after capes. She was 196 feet long and was powered by diesel-electric, a new system in those days (though I did not understand what that meant then). I was entranced, and my fascination for the trawlers that sailed from the Humber to the Arctic grew ever deeper. Little did I know then that in four years time I would be back on the Fish Dock.

  Why I should have such an interest in ships is a mystery. No one in the family was connected with the sea, unless you count my maternal grandfather, who was a cabinet-maker for the famous John Brown’s Shipbuilders on Clydebank and had worked on both the original Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth. There was no sea on my father’s side. There I come from a long line of grass keepers and shepherds in Sutherland in northern Scotland. However, after my tour round the Cape Otranto I was determined to take my interest in trawlers further and so a couple years later I wrote to the British Trawler Federation as
king if it was possible to go to sea on a trawler for a trip as a schoolboy during school holidays.

  They said ‘Yes’. Under their ‘Pleasurer’ scheme, schoolboys and youths could go to sea on the trawlers as ‘Pleasurers’ to find out if they liked trawlers and the life and to decide if they wanted to make a career of it. They gave me the names of some trawler owners to contact. I wrote to them all and received a letter back from a Mr Graham Hellyer, Managing Director of Hellyer Bros, one of the oldest and biggest trawler companies in Hull. He said that they were prepared to take me on a trip but I must sign an ‘Insurance Indemnity Form’ and be ready to go at short notice.

  MT Cape Otranto in her original Hudson Bros colours as seen by the author in 1962. Note the lovely lines of her hull and the proud look of her bridge. (Photo by kind permission of World Ship Society and Fleetwood Online Archive of Trawlers (FLOAT) http://float-trawlers.lancashire.gov.uk

  St Andrew’s Dock, Hull, in 1962. The trawlers on the left are being prepared for sea.

  My parents thought I was mad. They had come from solid working-class families and spent their lives working to improve their lot and to do their best for me, private schools, and a nice home, but here I was reverting to a basic working-class environment as a holiday and treating it as a higher form of life. No wonder my mother called me an inverted snob! ‘They send the ex-jailbirds out on the trawlers when they get out,’ my Father told me; ‘The only food on board is fish and you don’t like fish’; ‘Trawlers are full of thugs and layabouts’; ‘You’ll be seasick all the time’; ‘Trawlers smell and you will come back smelling of fish’. These were just some of the many comments that were lobbed my way at home in tones of mischief and incomprehension. It only fuelled the fire. I was going to go!