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The Khyber

1 Khyber

his was not at all what I had expected. It was October 1961 and from
Tmy home just over the Thames I had joined Khyber as a navigating
(deck) cadet at the P&O berth No. 1 in the King George V Dock in London’s
Royal Docks. I was eighteen years old and had recently completed a one-year
course at the School of Navigation at Warsash, Hampshire, from where I had
elected to join P&O. The selection of this company was not fortuitous; it operated
glamorous ships that went to glamorous places. But Khyber was a stranger to
glamour of any sort.

For a number of years my family had lived in Woolwich, south of the River
Thames, but within a hundred yards of the river itself. My brother David and I
could see from our bedroom right across the river to the docks, at that time the
world’s biggest commercial docks. There, right before our eyes, we could see the
splendour of the world’s biggest merchant fleet, with an array of vessels trading
to Africa, North and South America, the Far East and everywhere between. One
of the more splendid fleets was that of P&O, whose Corfu, Carthage, Canton,
Chitral and Cathay stood out with their sparkling white hulls and yellow funnels,
bound, we knew, for Ceylon and Malaya (as they then were), Hong Kong and
Japan. Because of our ship-recognition books we also knew of the more mundane
aspects of the company, comprising basic freighters carrying cargo to much of
the rest of the world. However, due in part to the lure of these sparkling passenger

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