Page 109 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

The School of Navigation (Warsash) was created on a very small scale in
the 19th century. In the late 1930s Whalley Wakeford, a New Zealand Shipping
Company (N.Z.S., later a subsidiary of P&O) navigating officer, took the position of
head of the school, became its Captain Superintendent (it being the title preferred
for the head of the cadet school, the ‘head teacher’ of 2nd and 1st mates being a far
less grand office), and was successful in transforming it into the leader of the four
pre-sea cadet training schools (at least, that was where he ranked the institution).
He was an austere man who ruled from afar; when I was a cadet prior to going to
sea, he was rarely seen, and then usually to lecture on how to be a gentleman officer.
Some of the programmes that he instituted were useful for me at least; we even
attended dancing classes, a quite needless exercise for those joining cargo or tanker
fleets, but useful for those who intended to be employed by passenger fleets. The
latter, of course, were and are far less numerous than the former. The relatively new
MAR course was his brainchild and was designed to inculcate into the students
more rounded thought and education; it was to be a university equivalent for those
who felt that purely nautical training was too limiting for the average young man
who wished to advance intellectually as well as nautically. It comprised a six-month
course having nautical components (which the Ministry of Transport demanded)
but much extra-curricular training as well.

There were about twenty cadets on the course. We were housed in a
dormitory-like building that allowed us some freedom, but not a great deal,
because we were quite a walk from the village of Warsash, wherein lay the pub
and the bus to Southampton. A few of our number had cars, and the primary
owner was one M. Reid, a P&O cadet who because of his car, had some prestige.
(Though the prestige was to tarnish because it was soon discovered that he owed
this largesse to being a victim in a motor vehicle accident, he having sustained
some significant internal injuries; the settlement obtained for him a convertible
Sunbeam Rapier, a classy car that only came second in the pecking order because
another student owned a 1951 MG TD, one of the world’s most uncomfortable
cars. However, an MG was a thing of beauty to us, and almost everybody coveted
it in preference to the Sunbeam.)

This collection of potential savants was under the supervision of Commander
Southcott, an amiable Micawber-like figure who was almost ideal for supervising
such a group, though we never found out what he had ever commanded; we
never saw evidence of any uniform. The remainder of the teaching staff was a very
mixed group, though there were enough ancillary activities to make classroom
attendance a relative rarity. What I did not like, however, was the twice-a-week
parade-ground drill.

My prior life had engendered in me a severe dislike of ‘drill’. When I was
at school our Combined Cadet Force (CCF) was a putative training ground for
the Buffs (The Royal East Kent Regiment). Weekly, we got into army uniforms

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