Page 216 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

However, my leisure was over; I was to join Cathay as Junior 2nd in the Royal
Docks in London. A nice promotion and quite timely too.

Cathay was as similar to Chitral as two peas in a pod. Orientation was simple,
and the route was to be the shortened Far East run, which is to say that things
were changing. In light of containerisation, P&O had decided to institute a new
sort of ship for the transportation of containers to Hong Kong and beyond and
perhaps to other destinations entirely. These new ships, yet to come into service,
were bigger and faster (and designed entirely differently from, say, Salsette
and Comorin because of their cargo being nothing other than standard-sized
containers). In the meantime, a number of ships, Bendigo, Surat and Sunda
among them (a veritable geography lesson!) had been renamed Pando Cape et
al and taken over the routes to be served by these new fast vessels. Cathay and
Chitral were therefore almost redundant, designed for outdated cargo-carrying
techniques, but, in the interim, useful for passenger service and cargoes such as
rubber, tobacco etc. that did not take so well to containerisation.

The ‘making’ of a ship is, of course, very dependent on those with whom one
sails. I knew none of the officers but quickly became acquainted. Captain Harris
was a gentleman in every respect, having none of the airs of a martinet about him.
I took him to be somewhat forlorn, for on one occasion, when discussing families,
he said that he was proud of his daughter attending Cambridge, but sorry that he
didn’t even know what she was reading; he could look forward only to retirement.
The mate was a small man, but very pleasant to all and sundry; the sort, all too
rare on many ships, with whom one could sit with a beer and talk about anything.
The 2nd mate was very quiet; I barely recall him. (I was Junior 2nd; the twelve
to four.) The 3rd mate, Steve Pinney, I knew, but vaguely; on Mantua the senior
of the two cadets (the sassy one) had been Chief Cadet Captain at Warsash, and
beneath him were three Senior Cadet Captains, each in charge of a ‘watch’; Steve
had a watch different from the one in which I was housed. Viewed from afar, I
had taken a bit of a disliking to him. He was, to me, sallow in appearance, sharp
in speech and without humour. I saw little of him, however, and after he departed
from the School of Navigation, he joined Shaw Savill, one of the best of the cargo
companies but one almost entirely limited to the Australian trade. After a while
he decided that he wanted more variety and joined P&O, thus becoming junior
to me though he had graduated before me. To round out the group we had three
good cadets: Rose, Thorogood and Clowes.
It was only a day or two before I found out that this was an excellent bunch with
whom to work, and far from being a bit of an old misery, Steve was one of the brightest
people whom I knew and possessed of a highly developed sense of the absurd and
humorous. I greatly enjoyed it when I took over from him at midnight; he delighted
in telling tall tales until well after he should have been asleep. My watch seemed all the
shorter for his absurdities. On August 23rd, we sailed, bound for Cape Town.

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