By MICHAEL GREY MBE
There is an ancestor in my family tree, a post-captain from the early nineteenth century, who, after a stirring career afloat fighting the French, ended his service in charge of all the press gangs north of the Humber.
It probably was not the most popular of appointments and we have among our records copies of several sad letters to their lordships asking for a return to sea service and command of another ship. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
But in this final mission, the aim of his energetic gangs, as they fanned out all over the northeast coast of England, was to capture "prime seamen", who would supplement those manning his majesty's overstretched warships in their fight against Napoleon's forces. These, in comparison with the ploughboys, clerks, derelicts and drunkards who constituted the bulk of those captured by the press, were human gold. Most would have been merchant seamen, but with all the skills necessary to operate and to fight a warship.
They may have been rather looked down on by fashionable folk in the better parts of the port towns and cities, but these chaps were flexibility in human form that could sign on any ship in port and take it to sea with confidence after learning the ropes. To a prime seaman it would be immaterial whether he was sailing aboard a hoy or a three decked battleship, a frigate or a barquentine, schooner or snow. He would be as comfortable aloft in the towering masts of an Indiaman as he was dealing with the handy rig of a little collier brig. Captain Edward Grey, as he saw one of these chaps paraded among the overnight haul of the press, would have been delighted.
This all-purpose flexibility of experienced seafarers survived well into the twentieth century and made the transition from sail to steam, coal to oil and the development of some quite complicated ships like tankers. The Victorian Navy, which saw the abolition of the press gang and the arrival of better recruiting methods, had earlier divided the seafaring community into those who sailed in merchant ships from those who signed on with the Navy.
But throughout the latter half of the twentieth century we have seen the emergence of more and more specialist ship types, many of them being vessels which require rather special competencies and experience to operate them. Experience in a certain trade, or ship type, became more important than any statutory qualifications, and the days when a second mate or able seaman could nimbly move from one type of ship to another drew to a close.
You cannot argue with the sense of this, even though people running manning departments might tear their hair out trying to complete a ship's complement for a crew change, when the specialists they want do not seem to be available. You wouldn't appoint a mate off a ferry to an LNG carrier, or expect an engineer who had been tending the steam turbines of the latter vessel to happily start up the propulsion system on a high-speed catamaran ferry. And even though there might be a certain apparent universality about their statutory qualifications (all being STCW compliant) you would be looking for all sorts of extras and evidence that they had a list of endorsements as long as your arm before you made any appointment.
None of this should surprise us as people running maritime administrations and classification societies remark upon the complexity of modern ships and their outfits. One of my fellow contributors to this journal once published an autobiographical book entitled Bluff your way to Sea and it was probably possible, with confidence and a commanding demeanour, to quickly learn the ropes on a new ship, when he was doing the bluffing.
Today, as I am writing this I am looking at a picture of a semi-submersible heavy lift ship with about 50,000 tonnes of oilrig perched atop of it and sticking over the side in all directions. You would be looking for real experts to load that baby, keep her upright and get her to their destination safely. I was reading about a new chemical parcel tanker with 48 separate tanks, all with their own pipes and pumping systems, with tanks able to carry hot, cold, flammable, explosive, edible, corrosive, inert, toxic and gaseous cargoes, probably all at once. You would want something pretty relevant in the CV of anyone you would appoint to this ship. It goes on and on – experience is the biggest selling point there is in today's job market.
But if you have been operating one type of ship and would rather like to try your hands at another, it has also become rather difficult. Like middle-aged actors who have played the part of a villain in a long-standing TV soap opera, you have become typecast. And it is not beyond comprehension to conceive of a day when our specialisations have become so narrow (an engineer wanted with experience in one specific machinery type, or a master of some amazing offshore contraption) that it becomes impossible to find sufficient experienced paragons to take the blooming thing to sea. So – and this is just an idea – we ought to be devising affordable, respectable and practical "conversion courses" to address these needs for specialists.