Lisa : It is the 15th November 2018, and this is an interview with Graham Hall at his home in Bembridge. Could we start by you telling me your full name please?
Graham : My full name is Graham Richard Hall.
Lisa : And what’s your date of birth?
Graham : 1939.
Lisa : And where were you born?
Graham : Whitstable in Kent.
Lisa : How did you come to live on the Isle of Wight?
Graham : I was transferred down here by a firm, an organisation I was working for at sea, Trinity House, who transferred me down here to serve on their ship, The ‘Winston Churchill’, based at Cowes, and I moved down here as it was required of me because we worked week days but not weekends and I’ve been here ever since, 50 years ago.
Lisa : 50 years ago? That was my next question, when abouts was that. 50 years ago. OK, could you tell me … could we go back to that time and could you tell me a bit more about Trinity House and what it is, what it was?
Graham : Well Trinity House is the Government organisation that looks after safety at sea. Basically, is responsible for providing all the Lighthouses, buoys, navigation, it looks after any wrecks that occur that are non-naval wrecks, it investigates obstructions and generally keeps an eye on all the safety of navigation around the coast of England and Wales. At that time there were six depots around the coast of the United Kingdom, of which Cowes was one and the Cowes District, so to speak, went from Dungeness to Portland Bill and the District was responsible for that area, or that happened at sea and we would do any jobs that were required by the Government as well as our own routine jobs.
Lisa : Could you tell me a bit more about your job and responsibilities when you were in Cowes?
Graham : When I joined the ‘Winston Churchill’ I’d been at sea for some years by then and I had qualified as a Master Mariner and I then joined Trinity House for a variety of reasons. One of those that long sea voyages and family life weren’t very compatible, but I was interested in Trinity House and always had been and I joined them as a Second Officer, Navigating Officer on the tender in Cowes and my responsibilities were for navigation obviously, being a Navigating Officer and various other, but as a Junior Officer I was also required to do all the things like jumping on buoys, climbing up the sides of Lighthouses and anything that was a little bit wet and dangerous. We all had to do it but that’s how we started, and we had quite a few exciting times doing that, very interesting times. No two days were ever the same, there was always something different going on but as far as the Isle of Wight’s concerned, particularly, I mean our two big Lighthouses that we serviced were The Needles and the Nab Tower. We obviously being …covering all that coast we did a lot of others as well and they were the immediate Isle of Wight sites that we did, The Needles and Nab Tower because St Catherine’s was accessible by road so you know, although we had an oversight on it we didn’t actually go there very much because everything could be delivered by lorry. Our function was to deliver things to these Lighthouses, make sure they were working, check that everything was working properly. We used to take out personnel like mechanics to fix things if they’d gone wrong; we provided them with their food, their oil, their water, their coal. In those days we used to take a lot of coal out to The Needles because it was all coal-fired; the boiler, the fires, had fires and boilers, you know, these stoves, coal-fired stoves so they used a lot of coal and we used to carry all this out; we used to go anchor somewhere near The Needles. There’s a special anchorage we went to, put the boat down and our boats used to deliver all these things. We couldn’t get alongside it with a ship of course, it was too dangerous and because we had to relieve Keepers there on a monthly basis we actually went, because they were staggered, we went on a fortnight there, there was a relief every fortnight. We used to go there because it was a schedule, the weather didn’t come into it very much, so if it was a really rotten rough and horrible day we still had to go and we had quite a few exciting times at The Needles as a result of that, we didn’t choose our weather. There was a local boat that used to go out there, Tubby Isaacs from Totland and he would go and fill in between as if somebody had to come off or go on, to save the expense of bringing a big ship down there to do it but he would only go out in fair weather. We were the people that went out there when the weather wasn’t too special and there were several exciting moments there when seas broke over the landing when we were getting off and everybody had to scramble a bit quickly to get out of the way of it, you know, but it was a useful thing to do. It gave me a lot of satisfaction to be able to do things like that. It was quite demanding, it was better than perhaps just routine watch keeping which one gets used to when you’re crossing oceans so that was it. The Nab Tower provided a totally different situation. You could get close to the Nab Tower, there’s no rocks around there or anything like that and it was a man-made structure, but the seas used to break around it and you couldn’t always get to the base to get people on and off. It was quite a big tower, the Nab. During my time there the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works refitted it inside there for … because Trinity House only rented the top two floors. They refitted the inside there and they put in great galleys and bedrooms and all sorts of things there. They were never used but they were all nicely fitted out with Formica kitchens and all the rest of it and the idea being that it was a Listening Station for cables during hostilities which never obviously came so it was available for that. It obviously fell into disrepair and the whole top of it has now been knocked down and it’s just a little light sort above the base but it did replace the Light Vessel that was there, the Nab Light Vessel which was, you know, very useful because Light Vessels do have their problems and permanent structures like that are far more reliable. You know their position’s not going to change overnight or anything like that. They are what they are. They’re there and they only needed, in those days, a crew of three to man them whereas a Light Vessel had far more people on board.
7 minutes and 48 seconds
Lisa : Can you describe The Winston Churchill to me?
Graham : Yes, she was built in Cowes by J Samuel Whites, one of the last ships built there and it was the last of a series of four diesel electric tenders. That’s her predecessor there, ‘The Stella’, that was one of the ships I commanded later but the Winston Churchill was diesel electric. It meant that the diesel engines provided electricity to drive two electric motors that propelled the ship. They were all controlled easily from the bridge. She was quite a modern ship for her days. By today’s standard she’s antediluvian but when she was built, Winston Churchill was quite a well-developed, state of the art ship. She was extremely well built. She was all riveted which is unusual today. In fact, when we needed to go in for repairs occasionally, they had to bring boiler makers out of retirement to replace the rivets because they couldn’t find any … it was not a procedure you do, everything’s welded these days, but she was riveted; very sturdy ship. She had an accommodation for, not quite sure of the numbers now but there was accommodation for lights officers and lights personnel that we used to take to the Lighthouses and to the Light ships, had accommodation for them. We had a crew of about 35 and you know, she was all things to all men. She did have, eventually have a helicopter deck fitted to her. When she was built, she didn’t because helicopters were in their infancy then but when we started using helicopters to an extent, they took away the after-mast and put a helicopter decks on all there so we could use the company helicopter for mainly replenishment work and personnel transfer. She was, what, ostensibly I think 15 knots. Rarely went that fast but well maintained, super little ships. J Samuel Whites built fine ships in Cowes and she was one of them. Indeed, a number of our Engineer Officers that came to work on the ships were from J Samuel Whites who’d served an apprenticeship with J Samuel Whites and been to sea and then come back and then they joined, it was a great source of employment for Isle of Wight people. There was a lot of people on the Isle of Wight that at one time or another served on the Winston Churchill or one of the ships based there. We had a lot of people there because employment has never been very high on the Isle of Wight for seafarers in that respect and we were a regular source of jobs alongside the ferry companies. In fact, a number of people on the ferry companies used to chop and change with us.
10 minutes and 56 seconds
Lisa : Where was she kept when she wasn’t at sea?
Graham : Alongside the Depot in East Cowes, which is still there of course but it’s part of Red Funnel and a few other things there. It is the … it’s just up from the Floating Bridge, just seaward of the Floating Bridge on the East Cowes side. That was the Depot there. We were just about as big a ship as you could possibly get in there. We used to come in and swing. We didn’t always swing but normally we’d come in there and swing and when we sort of, when we were the full width of the river there was not very much to spare at either end. We had the bow driven up against one side and the stern just used to clear the other side as we swung round. The ship was … initially when we were there it used to work a five-day week. She would sail on a Monday, do what she had to do and come back on a Friday. The majority of the crew would go home for the weekend although our watch was always left aboard, which was a source of frustration to many of us. We couldn’t get home one weekend in three but that’s how it started, and the majority of the crew lived in Cowes, because we were always, even when we were at home one weekend, we were on a two-hour notice to sail in the event of emergencies. I remember certain emergencies like the ‘Pacific Glory’ which was a big ship that caught fire, a big tanker that caught fire. The ‘Pacific Glory’ was a tanker that had been in collision and was brought into Sandown Bay, but it was on fire, heavily on fire. It was, you know, a front-page story on the press of this big tanker in there and we had to go out there for various reasons. It was a bit tricky, because it was low water in Cowes and we could only get out just off high water, the ship was too big to get out at low water, so we managed to muster a crew and sail round there. By the time we got there, there was many people there, doing what we could but we kept a watching brief there. We always kept a watching brief when there were these incidents, both to keep … first of all to see if we could rescue anybody that needed rescuing but usually, we were a bit late for that. Mainly we were there to stop other people getting into danger running in there and act as an authority, if you like, because we had a certain statutory authority from the Government, the authority to take action over it and of course, if anything sank, it was our responsibility to mark the position, buoy it off so nobody ran into it. That was one of our big requirements. The ‘Pacific Glory’ didn’t, the fire was put out and it was towed away but at other times we did have quite a number of wrecks that sank, and we had to go out there. There was some pretty bad weather sometimes and try and locate them. Once we’d located them, we then had to survey them to see how the depth of water was over the top and we used to do this by the tried and tested method of chain sweeping. To do this you used to hang small link chain over the side of the ship in rows from the bow to the stern so there would be lots of lengths of chain with a weight on the bottom to keep them vertical, hung over the side of the ship and the bottom of them would all be joined up with a piece of spun yarn, a piece of line and you’d then position your ship so the tide would drift you over the wreck and you’d set all these chains to exactly the same height so you knew what height the depth, the line was at the bottom and as it swept over the wreck, if there was anything sticking up it would file and you could see the chains go out and the spun yarn would break so you kept on raising it up and up and up and you’d keep on doing this until it passed clear and then that was known as the swept depth of the wreck. That was the swept depth of the wreck so that’s, we did that. We did several … certainly down off Arne Point, off the entrance to Poole. We did one just south of the Island, the ‘Poole Fisher’. We never really found that one, it was a difficult wreck to find. The way we used to find them was … there were several ways of finding a wreck. In the early days we didn’t have a lot of technical equipment so the easiest way to find it was go out there and just see if you could see a wreckage coming up and oil coming to the surface and you sort of followed the oil trail to its start and that was usually where the wreck was. You’d then locate it with an echo sounder. We’d steam about over it, working out before we did so that there was enough water to do so. If it was just below the surface, we obviously didn’t want to wreck our own ship, so we’d go on there. The ‘Winston Churchill’ was one of the first ships that was fitted with an Aztec-type side scan sonar. It had three windows in the bottom of the ship which would send signals out, sound signals like that and we had a recorder on the bridge which we could see if it could pick up anything, so actually we could, with this, locate ships. It was a bit rudimentary and it wasn’t terribly effective, but it was Admiralty system that had been used since the War and we did find some wrecks with that. More modern ships now have very much more sophisticated sonars and radars and underwater things to find things with but in those days, it was fairly rudimentary and that’s how we found them.
17 minutes and 25 seconds
Lisa : You said that there were subsequent ships after the ‘Winston Churchill’, could you tell me a bit about those?
Graham : In respect of the ships that came to Cowes?
Lisa : Um.
Graham : Well, so when I say subsequently, there was a constant programme of renewal. When I joined Trinity House, they had 10 ships. Due to economies of such, as always goes, that eventually has reduced to at the moment they’ve got three but every few years a new class of ship, you’d come in to replace one and we used to keep them for about 30 years, they didn’t get discarded. The ‘Patricia’ that was one of ours, the old ‘Patricia’ which is still afloat in Stockholm, was built in about 1934 and when I was on her, in 1982, she was still going strong. We replaced her with the ‘Patricia’ that was built in ’84, was the ship they used to precede the Queen when she was on official business on ‘Britannia’. When ‘Britannia’ was at sea with the Queen aboard, as part of the ceremonial, ‘Patricia’ used to precede ‘Britannia’ as the principal … as the elder brethren of Trinity House with the principal pilotage authority of the United Kingdom so they went in front of ‘Britannia’ to make sure she was safe and didn’t run in to any obligations, how it started but it was a ceremonial function in my day which we always used to do. The ‘Patricia’ was never actually based in Cowes although a lot of us from Cowes did serve on her and I was on the old ‘Patricia’ and I transferred to the new ‘Patricia’ while she was being built. I spent a year standing by while she was being built, still based here in Cowes but on a different ship because eventually they didn’t base a ship at a particular port. They manned them constantly; they didn’t just do five days a week, they were under constant manning and they went where they were needed although the base, the Depot here remained, any ship of the fleet could come and replenish here, if they needed to, if they could get in but if they could get into Cowes of course because the new big ships can’t get into Cowes, they’re too big. So that’s that. That’s how the system developed. It’s a very old organisation, Trinity House, it’s been going on for years and years and years. It keeps evolving, it keeps doing a fantastic job.
20 minutes and 18 seconds
Lisa : The Depot at Trinity House, is that not there now?
Graham : No it’s been sold. It is in fact, the landing place for Osborne House. It’s the official landing place for Osborne House and in my day when I was there, there was a red carpet there that was provided by some ministry or other, that used to be rolled out in the event of anybody needing to land there and indeed, when Earl Mountbatten was the Governor of the Island he used to use the Depot as the landing place for him. He often used to come across in a barge from Portsmouth and he was very keen, when he did the ‘Churchill’ would be berthed in Cowes and he would come alongside the ‘Churchill’ to make it easier for them, then they could … he used to come and meet the crew. He was an elder brother of Trinity House and he was a very big supporter of Trinity House. He used to come and meet the crew and then walk ashore from the ship to fulfil whatever function he was going to fulfil on the Island but, you know, it was then the official landing place for Osborne House and I do believe and I have no knowledge if this is right or wrong but the rumour used to go around that it could not be used at that time for commercial purposes as it had been virtually loaned to Trinity House for the use of a thing but it was really the official landing place for Osborne. It’s still used to this day, you often see a Blade Runner lying alongside there but I’ve never seen any commercial ships use it to this day.
Lisa : Could you tell me a little bit about change during your career with Trinity House? I’m just thinking, the automation of the, um ….
Graham : Everything’s been automated since I started there. Nothing was automatic except us going out and doing it, you know, but they … first of all they started automating the Lighthouses where they were controlled by radio signals, microwave signals and it all was fed back to the Headquarters in Harwich and then eventually the Keepers were slowly taken off all the Lighthouses. First of all, we put helicopter platforms on them so they could be accessed by helicopter, which was another way of doing it because a helicopter could obviously go and land on a helicopter platform should it need to, without the assistance of people. When you went by boat you really needed somebody on the landing to take your lines and things like that. Not always but quite often but helicopters made a big difference and eventually all the Lighthouses were automated. The last Lighthouse Keeper left North Foreland 35 years ago. The buoys were all driven by acetylene in my day. We used to have acetylene bottles like big CO2 bottles, you know, great big heavy bottles in the buoys, they were accumulators and there was the acetylene was produced in these and it used to go up to a flasher unit on the thing which was a flame that was developed by the Swedes, they were very clever with these things and these flashers used to go and this was one of our main jobs was going round re-lighting these. There was a little burner in there and puffs of gas used to come out and that’s what gave the buoy it’s character. That’s what gave its light, it was magnified up with a lens and we often were sent out regularly. It was a point of honour then that if a buoy went out, we sailed immediately, whatever, to go and repair it and that was when I was a Junior Officer, my job you had to jump on the buoy and climb up this thing, bouncing around and then try and re-light the light. We used to get them re-lit in most cases. Sometimes they’d run out of gas in which case we had to put a temporary bottle on them until the buoy could be picked up by the ship and recharged but we … I can remember coming all the way from Harwich once to relight the Bridge Buoy. We’d gone up to Harwich for some reason, to pick up some stuff and the Bridge Buoy was blown out and we had to come all the way down to the Bridge Buoy, which is a big buoy off the entrance to The Channel by the Needles lighthouse there. We came down there and it was a filthy night. Had to go in there and jump on this buoy and open it up and all it had been, a little bit of charcoal had fallen in the burner and put it out, so we flicked it out and put the match to it. So, we came all that way for a match which was, you know, that’s what happened all the time, that’s how they are. Now they’re operated electrically; they have batteries and they have solar cells, photovoltaic which recharge the batteries and they are very small, light-weight lights, very effective and that’s technology. We were living with almost 19th Century technology, early 20th Century technology when we used to look after the gas buoys. They’ve all gone now, they’re all electric and I believe more reliable as well but that happened shortly after I left them. I left them some years ago. I left Trinity House in 1988. A year after I joined doing the Lifeboats. That was 1988 I left Trinity House for medical reasons. You had to have a medical to go to sea in those days and I had some problems and I couldn’t go to sea any longer, although I did cure the problems and go back to sea afterwards but … so I had to leave Trinity House then and it’s then, shortly after that I became a Harbour Master in Bembridge.
26 minutes and 28 seconds
Lisa : OK. Do you want to tell me about that time?
Graham : Yes, well, at the time, as I say I was, I’d been invited to become the Honorary Secretary it was called at that time, the Honorary Secretary of Bembridge Lifeboat which is now, it’s name changed to the Operations Manager but it’s the same thing, you know, you were responsible for certain things but the Coxswain was responsible for taking the boat to sea, you were responsible for seeing that all the administration was done and you were also the launching authority so when the Coastguard decided they needed a Lifeboat they used to phone me up or one of the deputies and say, “We’ve got a situation here”, da-de-da-de-da you know and you would then make the decision about whether you were going to send the Lifeboat or not because the Lifeboat is always kept under the direct jurisdiction of the Lifeboat Service. They have the final say. In reality this rarely caused a problem because you’d always go if you had because you were never sure what was going on there and you would never forgive yourself if you said, “Oh I’m not launching to that particular incident” and then find it was more serious than was presenting and something had gone wrong and somebody had been hurt or injured or even killed, you would never forgive yourself so 99 times out of 100 you went. The only time I refused to go, one thing I told the Coastguard, “Don’t be so silly” was when somebody reported a baby crying in a boat tied up at the Marina in the harbour. It was low water and we couldn’t have got in there very easily anyway and they said, “There’s a baby crying” and the answer was, “I’m sure there is but don’t call a Lifeboat for that sort of thing because it’s not an issue of safety and life.” I think what happened was some other, all the yachts were all rafted together and they couldn’t get any sleep because this baby was yelling and they called up the Coastguard (laughs) and I really put my foot down then, I said, “No, we’re not there for that” and that was about one of the few occasions, there were a couple of others but nine times out of ten you went because even if it was a minor case, a shout, you know, a call, it’s far better training than, in many respects, than an organised training rota because people are not expecting it, it comes, then you can see what happens, who comes, how quickly they get there, all the rest of it and how well the system works but it used to work very, very well indeed but you know, an unpredicted shout is sometimes a better test of the readiness of the boat than an arranged routine beforehand, an arranged training mission.
29 minutes and 22 seconds
Lisa : At that time, about how often was the Lifeboat called?
Graham : If you put it on a … if you average it out over the year, about once a week. You used to get about 52, 53 shouts a year some years. It varied widely. Some years you’d have hardly any, others you’d have four in a week. Three in a day we had on one occasion, you know. It just depends, you can’t predict when people are going to be in trouble and need you. It was on average about 50 a year but in the winter months you might not go out for three or four months at a time. Now as I say, in the summer we used to go out the Wednesday, the Thursday and three times on the Saturday. It was very unpredictable, but you had to be ready all the time regardless of everything else and I had great admiration for the crews who kept themselves in readiness for weeks on end sometimes and those gentlemen couldn’t leave their village, couldn’t do this, had to keep themselves ready to go. It’s a big commitment for a Lifeboat man to have to do that because they’re all volunteers, you know, except the Coxswains who get a retainer, you know, they had to keep themselves in readiness and it was one of the big unseen things that Lifeboat men did, besides going out in rotten weather and the rescuing people. Keeping themselves available to be able to go out was a big, big commitment they all made, and I was very conscious of that, I thought they did extremely well in doing that.
Lisa : So when you joined as the Hon Sec, what was the Lifeboat vessel then?
Graham : It was just started. I came … the ‘Jack Shaylor and the Lees’ which was an old Solent Class Lifeboat had just left and I joined the week later when the new Lifeboat, the ‘Max Aitken the Third’ had been donated by Sir Max Aitken who obviously was a Cowes man and his … the Beaverbrook Trust actually bought the Lifeboat but one of the stipulations they like, wanted to be as close to Cowes as possible. Well, it was a Time Class Lifeboat which is a slipway-launched Lifeboat. We were one of those boats that goes down the slipway as you know, as you can see, you know. That, he wanted it based as close to Cowes as possible and we were the obvious choice because with their super Lifeboat, I served all the way through its service here and I was here when the new Tamar Class Lifeboat came there, before I retired. We built a new Boathouse for that as you can see, built a new inshore Boathouse when all that was finished off [telephone rings]. When we got the new Lifeboat, or when we were told we were going to get one of these new Tamar class Lifeboats we had to obviously adapt our Boathouse, existing Boathouse to accommodate it because it’s a lot bigger and a lot heavier. Our old Boathouse was … the concrete was crumbling, it was built of concrete and that has a finite life, the salt in the concrete, it was crumbling and that and the decision was made to rebuild, replace it as a most effective way of providing a new Boathouse, so we then had to go through the regime of planning permission which took a long time and quite a lot of discussion shall we say, about planning and eventually we got the plans passed and it was built largely from seaward by a jack up rig that came along and lay alongside the old Boathouse and knocked all that down and it was all taken away. Most of that was taken away in barges, removed and then we built the new Boathouse on the same site, extending the site, it was a lot bigger then, a lot of concrete there. A lot of it was pumped down there and when that was built but we kept the old walkway to it for access. When that Boathouse was getting fairly well established, what they did is then built this new walkway which is the one there today, which was different. The old one was ‘A’ frames and it was quite a lot of concrete. This is just columns of steel, thick steel all full of grout inside so they should last a fair while and all the concrete works were made down in Cornwall by Cornish Concrete and they came up here on barges and were slotted into place, but it was a big, big undertaking. It took, what, over two years to build it and eventually when it was all built, we had asked for and we got the Princess Royal to come and open it for us which was a good day. It was a very proud day for Bembridge to have our new Boathouse, our new boat and it was officially opened by the Princess Royal and you know, it’s a fine boat, but imagine it, I mean Bembridge had been hiring crews for Lifeboats since 1857 and that is just a progression of it but, you know, the old boys would still recognise what goes on there. More modern, you know, more technology but the ethos is just the same. They go out there to help people that need help and there’s just as many of them now as ever there was, although there shouldn’t be.
35 minutes and 2 seconds
Lisa : So the building of the new Station didn’t disrupt the Lifeboat service in any way?
Graham : Oh no, what it did, what happened was, we discussed this at some length beforehand, whether we … because we’ve got two Lifeboat houses down there. We’ve got a small one where we keep the Inshore Lifeboat which is on the shore or the big one offshore and we decided whether, should we anchor one off there and run up? Eventually it was decided that there was no way that that’s really going to be successful so we, thinking outside the box slightly, we established a new temporary Lifeboat Station on the spit of land at the entrance to Bembridge Harbour and they brought down virtually a readymade Lifeboat station. Three porta-cabins came down on the back of a lorry and were put there. On the back of a lorry came a Mersey Class Lifeboat, which is a beach-launched Lifeboat, and a big tractor, a Talus tractor that could steam out into the water and we ran the Lifeboat there for over two years off the beach and this was, it was a magic time really. This big tractor used to push the Lifeboat into the water on its trolley and when it was ready to float it used to drop its chains and the thing used to tilt and away the Lifeboat would go. To come back it used to run itself up the sandy beach, just go straight onto the sandy beach, run up there until it was aground. The Talus tractor which was an enormous great thing that was waterproofed, it could out into the water, it used to go out there, put a bridle on it and then pull it up the beach, go and get the trailer, bring the trailer round, put it next to the Lifeboat and then you could winch, the tractor, you could winch the Lifeboat back up onto the trailer and push it straight up into the compound with the thing where we had, which was left in the open all the time there and it worked extremely well. We had a lot of fun with that, we enjoyed that time and we used to run our little boat from there too. We were given a tractor, an ordinary agricultural tractor and we used to stick the trailer on that and tow it to wherever we could launch it from, and it worked OK. It wasn’t anywhere near as efficient or effective as this, but nobody drowned because we weren’t there. We managed to work that extremely well. Everybody enjoyed it but of course they were all looking forward to the day that they could come back to … come into the big new boathouse. Subsequent to that we then built a new inshore Boathouse because the one offshore hasn’t got any crew facilities. They’ve got a changing room but there’s no meeting room or anything like that so the new inshore boat lighthouse took the new, well, took a new inshore rubber boat, you know, we have these D-class boats and it also has a meeting room upstairs and an office to keep all the administration and paperwork up to date and a proper changing room for the crew because before then they sort of virtually had to get changed in the road which wasn’t terribly satisfactory.
Lisa : Can you talk me through the process of what happens from the time that you get the call from the Coastguard to the vessel coming back in? Can you sort of talk me through that, what happens?
Graham : Yes well, take for example an offshore Lifeboat out, we’ve heard there’s a yacht in trouble mid-Channel. They will probably call the Coastguard on the radio and the radio will then telephone. We had pagers. Initially, it used to be just telephones, they used to telephone your house and say, “We’ve got this”, it was all a bit hit and miss. I could never leave the house in case we got a call. When we had pagers, they’d page you, you’d respond to the page, call up the central operating, the ops room over in Lee on Solent which has now moved to Fareham somewhere I think but it was in Lee on Solent. Say, “Yes” you know, “This is the Hon sec Bembridge, what have you got?” and they’d tell me what the situation would be, and I said, “Fine, we’ll launch a Lifeboat to that” and then I would set in train the call out system. Originally it was maroons that used to go up, big powerful maroons that used to go up and go ‘Bang’ and shake everybody’s windows. Then it was less powerful, hand-held maroons and then eventually it was all done on the pager. I just dialled a code in, and everybody’s pager used to go off. So, they would then run down to Lane End where the Lifeboat was then and most of them probably knew there was something going on because they will have heard the Coastguard paging me on the pager you see so a lot of them, and then immediately ‘phone down to speak to the Coxswain, tell him what the situation was and, you know, where you’ve got to go or what the problem was. He’d then select his crew. It was done on a system, get on the boat, launch, of it’d go. I then went down, usually went down, depending on how long they were going to be. If they were going to be out for 12 hours I didn’t go down there then but if they were going to be out for a short time I’d go down to the boathouse, listen to what, the moment the boat was in the water the Coxswain was responsible for everything that happened and he would deal with it all and then when it had finished we’d tell him if the lifetboat slip, whether it was, firstly always available because sometimes the weather was too bad to re-house the Lifeboat. The Coxswain would know, and he could either go to Portsmouth, Cowes or somewhere like that and wait for it to get better and then the boat would come back, be recovered. We sometimes brought casualties back to the Boathouse but the problem was getting the boat back and then getting anybody who was injured down the Pier so it was probably normal to take them over to Portsmouth where the ambulance could meet them at Portsmouth or sometimes on Ryde Pier. Not always, but that was usually the thinking, that it was probably better to get them off the Lifeboat in Portsmouth. The boat would come back, get tied up, do the paperwork, da de da de da, wash it down, re-fuel it, get it ready for service before we left the Boathouse and then we’d all go home and wait for the next one and that’s how it works. The inshore boat was a little bit different because it has a crew of three and it’s the rapid response boat and you know, you want to get it out quickly and to, because, sort of, to somebody, a swimmer in the water who’s going down for the third time you don’t want to hang about so that was on the inner end of the Pier and you used to get that in the water very quickly. We had a standard launch time. We used to think that in most circumstances, from a dead start we’d get the offshore Lifeboat afloat within eight minutes and usually the inshore boathouse, as long as everybody, there wasn’t a problem with the traffic or something but usually within about four minutes that used to be away, which is pretty good.
42 minutes and 26 seconds
Lisa : All the crew must live quite locally then?
Graham : Yes, when we were recruiting crew, we made a stipulation of within two miles of the Boathouse because, to be honest, if you lived further away than that you’d never make any of the shouts because the boat would be gone by the time you got there. There were a few exceptions but not too many but that’s how it happened, you know. They all lived within two, about two miles of the Boathouse. The big problem was, of course, people worked away from the village. You couldn’t expect everybody to work in the village. At one time we had most of the village businesses tied up. We had several people who used to work for Weaver Brothers, the builders, who were crew members. Hodge and Childs, the Garage here … there were cases known when cars were left on the lifts when the crew were called out and they were left there and there was a long shout and the customer would come to collect his car and it’s still stuck on a lift without any wheels on (laughs). They used to get round that but that’s where we used to recruit a lot of our people from, but it was a big … you know, that was a problem that you couldn’t always guarantee people could work in the village because in Bembridge there’s sort of three strands of people. All the lads, when they left school who lived in Bembridge and they’ve got three choices. They could either become retained Firemen, they could be Cliff Rescue Team for the Coastguard and be Coastguards or they could join the Lifeboat so there was a lot of demand on the folk round here and, you know, any lad there with anything about him usually wanted to join … in fact we’ve got people who have been in all three at one time or another but they always used to think the Lifeboat was the best one to be in but that’s me. I’m probably being a bit unreasonable there.
Lisa : How much, how closely did you work with other Lifeboat stations around the Island?
Graham : Quite closely, I mean our, we didn’t have Cowes when I started. That was formed half way through my time in the Lifeboat but Yarmouth of course we work quite closely with. To be fair, we worked more closely operationally with the ones on the Mainland because at Hayling Island and Portsmouth and that, they have Atlantic rubber boats there and we used to act as their back-up if there was bad weather or something, we used to put to sea from there so we kept in close contact with them but yes, the Lifeboats in the area do keep in quite close contact. We were often meeting up with each other. If we had courses to go to, they might choose one Lifeboat House to hold the course in and we’d all go to that Lifeboat House and then they’d come back to another one for another course and things like that, so yes, we had quite a lot of, we know all the people in Yarmouth. Have you done Yarmouth yet?
45 minutes 32 seconds
Lisa : Could we go back, and you tell me a bit about your time as Harbour Master?
Graham : Yes, well after I’d left Trinity House, I had to leave them on medical grounds, I actually managed to … I went to sea for another five years, working for the Admiralty and various things and I went up into the Arctic and a few things like that and while I was there, I heard about a vacancy in Bembridge, the Harbour Master was about to retire so I flung my hat into the ring and they were only too pleased to get me, I think they were pleased to get anybody at all at the time because they didn’t pay very money but there we go. Anyway, I came down and I started as the General Manager and Harbour Master of Bembridge in 1990, sometime about then, 1989 and it was a whole new world. Bembridge Harbour is a private harbour. It used to be owned by British Rail or Southern Railways and it used to be the contraflow for the whole of the bulk cargoes to the Isle of Wight because the railway used to come right down to the key and all the bulk cargoes used to come in on little ships and be landed onto the railway tracks there. All the ballast that was used to build the railways used to come through there. They dug it up outside, brought it in here and loaded it onto the trains at the Quay at Bembridge but this all fell into disrepair really because people started using the roll on-roll off Ferries where the lorries would come on and off and there was really no demand for bulk cargoes or anything because in the old days they used to have a train ferry running from Bembridge over to the Mainland where railway carriages were pushed onto the train and it was pulled over there but that trade had died. It had become moribund. There were some yachts here. It was mainly a yacht harbour and I came on the scene a few years after it had been purchased by a company that changed hands on a regular basis. It had been owned by a large Dutch dredging firm, Zanen Verstoep, it had been owned by individuals and eventually the present company, the Bembridge Harbour Improvement Company had been formed and they’d bought the harbour. The objective was to improve it slowly, using its own funding to produce the capital to do it. It’s quite interesting there. My job as a Harbour Master, besides a little bit of running around in boats and telling people where they could moor and things like that, mine was principally trying to gain the finance to improve the infrastructure because Bembridge needs a great deal of dredging. All the silt from Arreton Valley elsewhere comes down the Eastern Yar river and deposits itself in Bembridge Harbour and it silts up very quickly, so the vast majority of the revenue that’s made there is used to hire dredgers to dig this silt out again, so this is, you know, this is where your principal function was. It wasn’t in so-called Harbour Mastering, it was in trying to raise finance and decide how you were going to do the dredging and because of my background at sea where I’d done some hydrographic surveying, I could do all the surveying for measuring the mud myself, you know, so I know about mud but that’s about all I know and it was fascinating. During my time, we managed to develop it quite considerably. We put if on a reasonable stable financial basis, we built a new building with, down here for the yachtsmen, we put out some new pontoons for the yachtsmen. It was slowly going on but the problem with Bembridge is it keeps on changing hands. It keeps on getting sold and every new owner coming in has got fancy ideas about what he’s going to do and how much money he’s going to make, and they almost never achieve that, they never have. When the harbour was formed in the 1850s by building an embankment across Brading, because the Harbour used to go all the way up to Brading; it was a very big Harbour then, very good. They built the embankment to bring the railway to Bembridge in Victorian times. Well the chap who did that was a chap called Jabez Balfour and of course he was a bit of a rogue and there was a book about him, ‘The Victorian Rogue’ and Jabez had a savings of loan companies. Well, a Building Society and he sort of borrowed all the money from that to develop the harbour and that there but forgot to repay it, so he absconded to Argentina where there was no extradition. So his creditors sent the heavy gang over on a British ship to Argentina, knocked him on the head, put him onboard the ship and kept him under sedation, shall we say, until the ship was at sea and became part of British territory, when he was arrested and brought back to the UK, where he served six years inside. He was in fact an MP as well, so, you know, what goes around comes around. So that’s sort of where Bembridge Harbour started, and it’s been fighting to exist ever since if I might say that. We don’t make a lot of money, but we do provide a lot of employment for people. There’s a lot of yards around Bembridge and its very much a, you know, a necessary economic sort of activity here. We provide, you know, a lot of opportunities for people because we get a lot of visitors in the summer. We get three or four thousand yachts come over there. I mean if every one of those has four people on board and they spend £20.00 each that’s quite a lot of money, you know, and so we did that, and my principal difficulty was balancing all the vested interests who all wanted something different. As the Harbour Master there you’re in the middle. You’ve got no real cash behind you to be able to do things, but you have to keep everybody happy and it was getting to a situation at one time when VAT wasn’t being paid and things like that and I didn’t like anything like that. I didn’t want to get involved in that, the owner was, so I resigned. At that time, I was the General Manager, the Managing Director and the Harbour Master. In fact I was the only employee, I also cleaned the toilets in the winter, you know so that was it but I thought no, we don’t want to go down that, I’ve always been a straight-forward sort of chap, being a seafarer and I didn’t want it so I left, but I’m very fond of the harbour concept and would do anything to see it develop and it doesn’t, it’s not doing badly but Bembridge Harbour has been a topic in the County Press for the last 100 years, I daresay it will be a topic in the County Press for the next 100 years. Very informative, I learned a lot when I was down there but not particularly about seafaring, but bear in mind, Bembridge Harbour is really a port of refuge. It’s the last port on the way to France for all the Solent traffic more or less, and the first port when they’re coming across The Channel and they get a pasting, it’s virtually one of the first ports they can get into. So, we used to get quite a lot of people like that in there. We used to have regular customers that used to come across from France. There was, I remember, a very nice Police Inspector from somewhere on the Cherbourg peninsular. I never quite worked it out because I couldn’t speak much French and he could speak no English, but he used to come across for a fortnight every year and bring his boat into Bembridge and have a high old time. He was a nice chap.
54 minutes and 2 seconds
Lisa : Can you tell me a bit about the houseboats?
Graham : Yes the houseboats there have been … they started there I think, I might be wrong here, but I think they started pre-war, in between the wars as sort of places where some of the more wealthy people who sailed had a holiday home and they were looked after by various people who, you know, looked after them. They obviously fell into some disrepair and they were used for a time for placing people on the DHSS list who had no homes and they were put in them. Some of them sank, some of them were thing and then there was a fairly concentrated effort to bring them up to a decent standard and there’s been one or two new ones put in there recently actually, purpose built. They’re not to everybody’s taste but they are quite unique and some of the boats that are in there, as I say, are purpose-built boats and they’re quite attractive. They’re a unique feature if you like but there now are residential people live aboard; they’re not holiday homes. One of them is a sort of a hotel, boatel. There’s another one that caught fire that was, used to have bed and breakfast and very nice I believe, but most of them are homes and they have brought them up to a reasonable standard. I know of two down there certainly, that were designed and built specifically for Bembridge Harbour and they cost quite a lot of money. You could buy a house for the same but people like living down there, it’s fine. You get a lovely outlook from the back, maybe, over the Harbour. Smells a bit in the winter when the seaweed starts rotting but that’s you know, keeps them close to the sea doesn’t it? Not to everybody’s taste but they’re a feature of Bembridge Harbour and I think they will be for many years to come now because the freehold, not the freehold, the leasehold has been sold for several years ahead and, as I say, there’s one or two brand new boats being built purposely for mooring in Bembridge Harbour, but they sort of started there by accident. Somebody brought one in to act as a summer home while they went sailing and it grew from that. They won’t increase in size because there’s statutory limits for how many can be there. I can’t see them disappearing in a hurry.
Lisa : You mentioned about some of the businesses in the Harbour?
Graham : Yes.
Lisa : Um, are there less now than there were historically?
Graham : I don’t think there are to be honest, I think there’s always been a number of businesses. I know one boatyard, Ken Stratton’s boatyard sort of folded but Attrill’s is still there and A A Coombs and Bembridge Outboards have always been sort of three big Boatyards round there and they all seem to be flourishing. We bring in quite a lot of the sort of people that come to work on boats in the Harbour as well. There’s quite a lot of contractors that come in here that are sort of itinerant contractors who work out of the back of their vans and they’re always coming round here. One of the big things we do of course is support several of the restaurants in St Helens and Bembridge because we get a lot of visitors in the summer and they patronise those quite well and that’s it and they all spend money in the shops in there, it’s one of the biggest sources of revenue for, maybe hidden but one of the biggest sources of revenue for Bembridge.
Lisa : What about fishermen? Did you have contact with fishermen as Harbour Master?
Graham : Yeah quite a lot. A great deal actually because to be fair, most of the fishermen were on Lifeboat crew as well so I knew them from the Lifeboat as well as that. Unfortunately, because of the demise to an extent of the fishing, the number of fishermen has declined. There are still the old favourites that go out there, crab and lobster fishermen. Very, very successful crab and lobster fishermen but while there’s about four working regularly from the Harbour and there’s a netting boat that goes out there as well, fishing but that’s about it, but they’re consistent. We built the pontoon, fishermen’s pontoon for them and since the new owner took over, he’s widened it and made it so they can store their gear on board. Yes, fishermen are an important part of the village life and we do what we can to support them in the Harbour, but the only problem is, if there’s no fish there’s no fishermen, or there might be fish, whether it lets you catch it is the problem.
Lisa : Is there less fish now?
Graham : I don’t know, I can’t say that, but it would appear to be, yes. I’m not an authority on how or what the fishing is like because it is quite a complex arrangement there on the quotas you can get and the rest of it but I think it’s pretty general around the coast of the UK isn’t it, that the fishermen, fish do appear to be declining in some areas although they’re maintaining a balance in others. I believe the herring are coming back now but when I was a lad, herring was a staple protein of the masses. You could go down to the Quay and buy a bucket of herring for a few pennies. Now they’re a luxury item in a restaurant. The world changes quite quickly.
Lisa : And what about the Sailing Club? As Harbour Master, do you have connections with them?
59 minutes and 57 seconds
Graham : I had a lot to do with the sailing, yes, I had a lot. I’m a member of, I was a member of the Brading Haven long before I became Harbour Master and I’m also a member of the Bembridge Sailing Club and I used to help where I can, I used to do a lot of race officing for them and taking courses and things like that in the clubs but yeah, I mean we encouraged them as much as we possibly could; they are the future, to an extent, of the Harbour sailing because we’ve got some, we’ve had some pretty fine sailors coming out of Bembridge. We’ve got Olympians, you know, several Olympic sailors started their life in Bembridge and produced from there. It’s a grand spot for sailing you know, you talk about Cowes but there is all kinds of ships and ferries and this. Here we’ve got a superb sailing area just off Bembridge and we do what we can to encourage them. I mean we’ve got a fleet of redwings that sail from the Bembridge Sailing Club, who are highly regarded and renowned, very effective, technical boats. We’ve got, Westmacott designed 12 One designs from the sailing club that are pre-war. Still sail every week regularly. We have several fleets in from Brading Haven. They do a lot to encourage youngsters there. My grandchildren both went through their courses at the Brading Haven, they’ve done well. They’ve got a fleet of, they’re recovering, shall we say, a fleet of what they call Swans. When I first came to Bembridge there was loads of Swans they used to race; these were fairly heavy clinker-built boats and they sort of went out of fashion. Well somebody found one, refurbished it and now we’ve found others and refurbished them, and they made a glass fibre one and that class seems to be coming back very strongly and that was something we did as Harbour Master. You had quite a lot of input into what was happening there because of course on a busy summer’s Saturday the whole place was so awash with boats that there was … I wouldn’t say an accident waiting to happen, but it was quite fraught at times and you had to keep an eye and make a few rules to stop people crashing in to each other. That was quite an exciting time, I used to enjoy that. I do remember when the Harbour was quite full up with visiting yachts once; there wasn’t a spare berth anywhere to be had. I went out in the launch with my Assistant, and we positioned ourselves into the entrance to the Harbour, telling all the yachts that were coming in, “There’s no more room, I’m afraid you can’t come in, there’s nowhere to go. I’m sorry, it’s full, you’ll just have to hang around outside” and most of the totally ignored us. They then came into the Harbour, the tide went out so they couldn’t get out so there was boats aground all over the place in the entrance to the Harbour but there, you know, they had been warned. It’s something you had, that’s the sort of thing you used to sort out on a Saturday evening and when it got too bad, you’d just say, “Well that’s it” and you’d go home because the big thing about Bembridge is it’s tidal. You know, on the big tides that occur at midday and midnight and the low waters about six o’clock, everybody’d pile in about those tides, by six o’clock, because the tide had dropped so low they couldn’t get out if they wanted to because there wasn’t enough water so you had to try and balance things round the tides all the time, still do. We all, I had a boat in the Harbour, and you balance it round the tides, but you get used to it. Most of the Solent has tides of one sort or another. You think of the great vast Chichester Harbour, well that is virtually tidal, all the places there. Langstone Harbour is tidal. To an extent, you know, there’s tidal areas in Lymington. You’re alright up the Hamble of course but, you know, you live on the Island, why do you want to keep your boat up the Hamble? Foreign country to us, that was.
Lisa : Were you ever involved in any of the Bembridge community events or the Regattas for example?
Graham : Yes, yes.
Lisa : Can you tell me a bit about that?
64 minutes
Graham : Well we used to have Regattas. For about six years I was a secretary of an organisation called the East Wight Combined Clubs, which used to organise the Regattas. We used to, you know, write the sailing notices of racing, sailing directions, do all that, booklets and did that for about six years, very interesting. We used to run, we do, still do run good Regattas down here. They’re very well supported but they’re mainly local boats. We don’t, we do get a few, few Darings, sometimes some Squibs come from the Royal Victoria, but we don’t get many boats from outside. They’re mainly Regattas for ourselves, Seaview and you know, up as far as the Royal Victoria at Wootton Creek. The East Wight have their own Regattas but of course the big regatta’s at Cowes which attracts everybody anyway. But yes, we have regattas over here for all the little ones; for the dinghies for the kids. Very well supported and lots of fun, I do like them. It’s quite a vibrant place in that respect; sailing-wise it is vibrant. I got more sort of tied up in the administration which wasn’t nearly so vibrant but yes, sailing-wise the clubs are very good. Both of them run very good training sessions. They’re both, you know, approved RYA training centres, they do very well. As I say, they have produced some very fine sailors, the clubs in Bembridge, Olympics, Olympic hopefuls. Young Fergal Finlay from Brading Haven, who was a member of the Lifeboat crew grew up with us. He’s now, he’s a, one of the assistant water racing sailors, you know, goes round the world standing on his head and all that sort of thing. He’s an excellent chap, a very good sailor. I would imagine it’ll continue much as it is, I mean developers look at it and think, ‘Ah yes’ but developers would never get anywhere because it is a site of special scientific interest and all the rest of it and nothing’s going to change much, it’ll carry on in more or less the same way for years to come in my opinion. In one way it will be so because it’s a lot of fun; on a lovely summer’s day there’s nowhere better, but it’s a different sort of sea-faring to what I was used to of course, coming from ships but (coughs), excuse me, there you are.
Lisa : So in your 50 years of living and working on the Island some things have changed and others have stayed the same.
Graham : That’s very true, yes. The technology has developed out of all imagination and in the seafaring round here and the way things happen, but the basics are still the same. The sea’s still the same, the hazards are still the same, the fellows that do it are much the same and you know, I can’t see that changing dramatically until we’re run by robots which might not be too far down the road. That’s something I don’t want to think about, but yes, I mean the Island has always been a sea-faring area hasn’t it, because of, you know, we’ve got everything here, from Southampton and Portsmouth, they’ve got naval ships, they’ve got, we’ve got distant water ships, we’ve got cruise liners or we used to have trans-Atlantic passenger liners and a lot of the people, I mean the Pilots, all the English Pilots used to live on the Island and a lot of them still do and in Trinity House I think we had over 120 pensioners living on the Isle of Wight at one time. I expect they’ve all died off now mainly, but a lot of Lighthouse Keepers and Lights Men used to live over here. It changes but the fundamentals don’t change. The sea is still the sea. The size of the waves is still the same size as it was years ago, I don’t doubt. How you handle the sea hasn’t changed, it’s just you have different technology in which to do it; I mean a Lifeboat goes to sea with the up to date, all the technology and all the rest of it but at the end of the day it’s still the same thing. You’ve still got to go and rescue a chap out there, you’ve still got to, you know, people have to put themselves at some risk sometimes to do it and that hasn’t changed. The sea is still the same.
Lisa : What have you enjoyed most about your seafaring career on the Island?
Graham : Well I’ve loved the variety of it to start with, but I must say, probably my happiest time was in Trinity House, going round there with the ship, purely because of the variety. You get very, I wouldn’t say parochial but very protective of the Island and the reputation of the Island. We were Islanders, you know, we weren’t just seafarers. We were a very close crew because most ships have a crew that sign on for a voyage, sign off for a voyage and that’s it but we could be together on a ship for ten, 15 years because you always came back, you know, you lived amongst the people on the Island, you served with them and you sailed with them and that was good. It was a nice community, a good community which I enjoyed and also the technical side of the job was quite demanding at times. It stopped you getting too complacent and old before your time, so yes, that’s what I’ve enjoyed as much as anything.
Lisa : And what about challenges or things that have been more difficult?
70 minutes and 3 seconds
Graham : Well there have been technical challenges I must admit. Not so much on the Island but taking the ships into certain ports in very heavy weather conditions was quite demanding because they only have two propellers and one rudder; they’re not like modern ships with bow thrusters and side thrusters and all the rest of it and handling the ships was quite challenging at times and you could get quite stressed at those times but, I got stressed once or twice coming into Cowes because I used to drive … I was on the Cowes Express Hovercraft after I left Trinity House, for a while and coming down at 40 knots into Cowes Harbour in the middle of a Cowes Week race is quite exciting. We only did it for one year, but I didn’t want to repeat that experience too often. It was an attempt by Cowes Express to break with it. I think the monopoly of the existing ferry fares, ferry owners but unfortunately it wasn’t successful. One of the problems was that because we were deemed to be a Hovercraft we had to have, for safety reasons, five crew, whereas a Hydrofoil which Red Funnel run only needed three crew and that sort of makes a big difference to your wage bill and nobody fell over backwards to help them because Red Funnel at the time were owned by ABP, the Southampton Port people so they obviously, not directly maybe but indirectly had a little bit of bias in their favour. I remember, because of the wake the Hovercraft made, they said, “Well you shouldn’t run them, together because it makes too much disturbance of the water” so what they said was “We’ll break them up by five minutes” you know, “The Red Funnel can come in and you can’t come in until five minutes later” which meant you missed all the London trains, which didn’t help and things like but it was fun while we did it. I brought one of them down, I was on the crew that brought one of them down from North Norway to Cowes and that’s quite a trip. Came down the North Sea at 40 knots, following down. Left Haugesund in Norway about two o’clock in the afternoon their time, about one o’clock our time and we had breakfast in Cowes. That was quite exciting, that was a lot of fun going through the Fjords of Norway on one of those things at 40 knots is really exciting.
Lisa : Where were those Hovercrafts built? Do you know?
Graham : Norway. Sirus 150P was built in Floro in Norway and they were owned by Fred Olsen. I don’t know if they were owned by Fred Olsen, but they were Norwegian. They were registered in Tonsberg. It was a, you know, like so many other Island things, it was a try-on I suppose, they thought we could do it. Everybody thinks they can always do it better. People are always buying Bembridge Harbour because they think they can do it better, but funnily enough, nothing much changes. But you know, it was a fun life, I loved my time at sea in around the Island. As I say, I moved here in 1960 (noise), late 60’s. I was working for Trinity House already and I was, you know, appointed to the Winston Churchill here and I moved down in the 60’s and I’ve never felt any desire to go anywhere else ever since. So, that’s it really, what with Trinity House, going back to sea again, the Harbour, the Lifeboat, it’s all been associated with the sea.
Lisa : And now in your retirement you’re still involved in various …?
Graham : Oh yes, yes, we have a little charity and we’re growing. You know, we have an organisation called the Merchant Mariners whereby we have a monthly lunch which is rather pleasant, you know, we chew the fat and swing the lamb and all the rest of it but what we do do is we also raise funds for the charity Sea Cadets, which is a very worthwhile organisation I think, but trying to encourage lads to go to sea. When we first went to sea, I mean it was a big source of employment for youngsters, seafaring, but now of course as the British ships are not competitive any more, with third world crews and that, the numbers of ships, the numbers of jobs have declined. It’s still a fine career for a chap if he wants to go there. You can quickly sort of move up the ranks and then he can come ashore in the City of London or something or a pilot or, there’s always plenty of jobs and not enough people to fill them so, you know, I would encourage anybody to go to sea. You don’t see much of your family; that’s one of the down sides. I suppose it’s one of the downsides, you know? The first 20 years of my married life I’d seen my wife for about six years. That’s one of the reasons I joined Trinity House, you couldn’t carry on like that forever. Well, you can, a lot of people do but it wasn’t for me, so that’s why I sought out something closer to home. When I got in there I thought, “Why didn’t I find out about this years ago”, it was great fun.
Lisa : Well thank you very much.
Graham : That’s it.
Lisa : It’s been a pleasure.
Interview ends
76 minutes
Transcribed February 2019
Chris Litton