Special service sparks memories of the Merchant Navy

IT is almost 60 years since Dave Moore signed up for a life at sea.

In the event, that “life” only lasted four-and-a-half years, but it filled him with memories that have lasted a lifetime.

Now 75, Mr Moore looks back fondly on times good and bad and the adventures he had circumnavigating the globe. He was, he says, never destined for a life at sea.

“I went to Darlington Technical School and always wanted to go onto the land, but I was asthmatic,” he says.

It was chatting to another young lad who had already gone to sea that inspired him to try his luck.

“Everybody said it would be good for my chest. I went for the medical and passed it,” says Mr Moore, from Hutton Magna. He became a “Vindi Boy” who completed his ten weeks of shore training at TS Vindicatrix, at Gloucester.

“It was really tough training there. The idea of it was to knock all the homesickness out of you and for you to learn to take an order and not answer back,” he recalls.

Training over, he was only back at home for a week before he received a telegram telling him to report to Hartlepool. He was assigned the post of cabin boy and told to report to the Temple Lane at Hawthorn Leslie’s dry dock in Hebburn, on the Tyne. Aged just 16, he was part of a crew that headed to West Africa to collect a cargo of timber. It was not a happy voyage.

“I was up at 6am and had to start scrubbing floors. There was always trouble on board. A lot of the guys had run away to sea.”

He told his boss he was leaving once the ship returned to London – only to be informed the captain was getting rid of the entire crew, he was so fed up.

Next, he was assigned to the Northwood, an old coal burner and this turned out to be a much more enjoyable experience.

“She was built in the 1930s and she used to load coal in Jarrow and take it down to Battersea Power Station, in London.”

The return journey brought loose cement which was offloaded on the Gateshead quayside where the Sage arts venue now stands.

“I remember the captain brought me onto the bridge – I was only a cabin boy – and there I was, steering,” he says.

He says the best ship he served on was the Lynton, operated by Chapman and Willan out of Hartlepool.

“We loaded soya in Brazil and sailed 11,000 miles down the South Atlantic and across the Indian Ocean to Japan,” recalls Mr Moore. “We were at sea for 61 days and ended up living on porridge. The water looked like beer – but it certainly didn’t taste like it.

“Believe or not, the route we took was the shortest, and it would have been expensive to go through the Panama Canal. We unloaded in Japan and then went to Vancouver Island to pick up a cargo of timber. Then it was back to Dublin.”

Mr Moore, who is well known to Mercury readers as author of the popular Nature Notes column, ended his days at sea as a pantryman on a brand new liner called The Aragon, which was built by Harland and Wolff, in Belfast.

“It was real five star. What a difference.”

However, life on a liner

didn’t suit and after two trips, Mr Moore’s life at sea came to an end.

“I wanted to go back to something like the Lynton, but The Aragon was my last ship.”

He found it difficult to settle back into “normal” life.

“I had 23 jobs by the time I was 27 – everything from bus conductor to working in a shoe shop.

“Everyone who leaves the Merchant Navy wishes they had stayed and put with it,” he says. Finally, he became “the man from the Pru” doing the rounds of part of Teesdale and that led him to Hutton Magna, where he has lived for the past 43 years.

He said it had been a good move of Barnard Castle Town Council to commemorate Merchant Navy Day.

“It’s true, we have been completely forgotten,” he says.