Neither Officers nor Gentlemen

Abstract

Pushed, pulled and nudged by coal-burning tugs throwing out clouds of black, bitter smoke, my very first ship, loaded to her marks with Australian wool, frozen lamb and beef, lumbered into Liverpool's Canada Dock. It was a damp, chill early-morning in January, 1956, and my first trip as an apprentice merchant ship's deck officer had almost ended. This rather old memory does not surface very often but that arrival and a great deal more welled into my consciousness with the stunning discovery that lying now on shelves in the National Maritime Museum's annexe in the old Woolwich Arsenal are pieces of my own history. Excited and incredulous, I recently flicked through an album of group photographs of ship's officers deposited by the New Zealand Shipping Company and it did not take long to find myself with my old shipmates from that trip on the Durham that began in Falmouth in the summer of 1955. A full circle had been turned and I was studying myself, my own experience, as history. The New Zealand Shipping Company had been a subsidiary of the P&O group since the First World War but was operated as an independent company until the late 1960s. The NZS was one of those prideful and paternalist companies which at some time early in the 20th century decided to take 'voyage photographs' and had never subsequently thought to question the habit. Every ship, on departure for Australia or New Zealand, mustered its officers in front of a camera. That this material was kept and is now in a national museum will seem apposite to those of us brought up in the elitist traditions of those elegant and superbly