Page 62 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

received; before we had joined, the whole crew had walked off the ship in protest,
never to return (whether the order from London was ever rescinded, I never
discovered). Already unloaded, we were a ship, for a time, without a purpose.

But for only two days.

On July 19th, the agency had rustled up a completely new, and Chinese, crew.
This was actually not difficult to do, P&O having a solid presence in Singapore
and being known by the seafaring community to be a good company for which
to work. The only caveat to the crew situation was that very few P&O officers
had worked with Chinese seamen and thus language differences were now to be
something of a barrier between officers and crew (as a point of note, one observes
that in Sherlock Holmes’ novels the Lascar seaman makes frequent appearances,
so well-known were they in East London from the early days of the South Asian
contribution to the Empire). So, I got to explore the ship.

In any cast of characters on a ship, the story starts at the head; the captain. I
met him after a very short time aboard, as he was a person who liked to be ‘hands
on’ with his officers. A man of commanding stature – he was about seven feet
tall – and commensurate girth, Captain Basil Thomson was the commander in
every sense of the word. A tanker being more of a principality than almost every
other type of ship, because it spent an extremely high proportion of its time at
sea and not in port, one’s circle of acquaintances for prolonged periods of time
was very limited, and such was Basil’s personality that he tended to dominate
everything aboard. He was a Royal Naval Reserve officer (termed RNR, a sort
of hybrid officer who would expect to be among the first to be called upon to
become a naval officer in the event of war) and therefore was entitled to fly the
blue ensign on his ship. This flag is the third in a trinity (white for the Royal
Navy, red for the Merchant Navy, and blue for special category, including
Australia and New Zealand (as modified), the RNR, and a few smaller members
of the Commonwealth). But the privilege is conditional; depending upon current
practice as dictated by the Admiralty and the Board of Trade, there needed to be
a set number of other reservists on board, a number that has mutated over the
years. Such strictures, however, were of little consequence to Basil. He was the
only such officer on board but decided to fly the ensign not only while at sea, but
all night as well, and then highlighted by a spotlight! Legitimate … I think not,
but nobody was about to tell him that.

Other peculiarities unique to him included the keeping to himself of all of
the ship’s Rose’s Lime Marmalade, a peculiarly English type of spread that was
everywhere very popular. At breakfast, however, it appeared only at the captain’s
table. Unusually, certainly for tankers, the epitome of utilitarian ships, he also
insisted that officers wear caps when out on deck. This instruction was fairly
sensible in places like the Persian Gulf but rather pretentious for normal life. He

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