大象传媒

Pity the merchant seamen! With only a small lapel badge to wear, and oppressed by the insistence of the authorities that they were civilians, merchant seamen have faced discrimination which persists to the present day. Despite suffering great hardships, and frequently coming under fire, ex-merchant Navy men can join the British Legion only as associate members, and have no uniforms on which to wear decorations such as those awarded by the Russian government to those brave men who sailed in convoys to the Kola Inlet.

This memory is from the last ship I served on during the European war - the Benrinnes, from the famous Ben Line, of Leith. It ended very sadly, and clearly showed the tremendous strain and tension to which the Captains of merchant ships were subjected, over and above their normal navigational duties.

On this ship I was Radio Officer, and I assisted the Captain with his paperwork, as well as my normal radio duties. In the majority of cases the Radio Officer was not a direct member of the shipping company, and consequently because of this peculiar employer/employee situation a special relationship would build up between the two. Such was the case on the Benrinnes.

Tha Captain's dayroom was next door to my accommodation, only a tongued and grooved partition separated us, and it was coffee time. This break usually took place when cargo working stopped to allow the loaded railway trucks to be taken away, and empty ones shunted in to take their place, accompanied by the usual clashing and banging.

Suddenly the steward who had been bringing our coffee dashed into my room shouting that "The Old Man has shot himself." Together we dashed into the dayroom to find him slumped in a chair, blood pouring from a wound in his head. He must have intended this to happen, for no-one in the confines of the accommodation had heard a shot, which must have been fired as the trucks clashed together on the dockside.

He was still a young man, thirty-five years of age, when we buried him in Beira. It was especially sad for this excellent skipper's family way back in Scotland, for his father, another captain in the Ben Line, had died and been buried at Colombo only the year previously.

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