Captain
Lawrance Wilfrid Gibbins (1908-87), Master Mariner
David Gibbins
Much
of my interest in ships and the sea stems from my grandfather, who was a
captain in the British Merchant Navy. He wrote and published many stories
about the sea and his travels, and influenced my early interests in
literature. When I returned from my first diving expedition to south-east
Sicily, I visited him and was fascinated to learn that he had been within
sight of Penisola della Maddalena, the location of our Roman wreck at Plemmirio
- in 1943, when he was in an assault convoy offloading troops and supplies
for Operation Husky, the Allied
invasion of Sicily. He had been at sea in the heyday of the British
Empire, before containerization changed the face of shipping – at a time
when officers still trained on sailing ships little different from
Nelson’s day, and when the nature of trade was still recognizable from
the early years of the ‘Enterprise of the Indies’. I became even more
interested in my grandfather’s career after I began researching the Periplus
Maris Erythraei, one of the most
extraordinary documents to survive from antiquity, a Roman merchant’s
guide that shows how ancient traders on the Indian ocean were going to the
same destinations and seeking the same goods as my grandfather more than
two thousand years later.
Lawrance Wilfrid Gibbins was born in 1908 in Sussex,
England, and educated at King’s School, Taunton and HMS Conway. His father, Arthur Everett Gibbins, was an architect who
left his family to become a U.S. citizen, living most of his life in
California and dying there in 1956. My grandfather was brought up in
Herefordshire by his mother Helen and his grandfather, Colonel Walter
Andrew Gale. There was no immediate family tradition of going to sea,
but he knew that a relative on his father’s side, Commander James Young,
Royal Navy, had commanded a ship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805; as
the pictures below suggest, my grandfather must have felt he was stepping
back into the glory days of naval history when he arrived as a cadet on
HMS Conway in 1923.
HMS
Conway, my grandfather's first ship, where he was a cadet from
1923-5. The photos at top and left are from that period, when she was
moored in the River Mersey opposite Liverpool. Cadets can be seen on the
deck and the ratlines. The picture on the right was taken after she had
been moved in 1941 to the Menai Straits off north Wales, where she
remained until running aground in 1953 and burning to the waterline in
1956. If you visit the site today you can still see the last remnants of
the hull at low tide.
HMS Conway
As HMS Nile,
HMS Conway was laid down in
1826, launched in 1839 and commissioned in 1852 as a wooden-hulled,
two-decked, ‘second-rate’ ship of the line with 92 guns and a crew of
850. The design and technology were substantially unchanged from the time
of HMS Victory, but in 1852-4 she was refitted as a steam ship with engine,
screw and funnel, with her masts and rigging still remaining. During the
Crimean War of 1855-6 she led the British ‘Inshore Squadron’ in the
Baltic Sea, destroying and capturing many Russian vessels. She then sailed
the Atlantic and the Caribbean as flagship of the British North American
Squadron, where she was poised to prevent any interference with British
merchant shipping by either side during the American Civil War. In
September 1863 she visited New York City, where she was met with much
acclaim - there was a formal visit of New Yorkers on board, and her crew
were fêted throughout the city. There is some hint that the visit had a
covert dimension, allowing the Fleet commander, Rear-Admiral Milne, to
convey the Admiralty's concerns and to discuss the possibility of British
intervention on the Union side. In the event Nile
saw no action off America and was placed in reserve in 1864, her engines,
boilers and funnel being removed 11 years later.
She was then fitted out to house 265 cadets, moved to
the river Mersey off Liverpool and renamed HM Schoolship Conway in 1876, becoming the third and last ship of that name to
accommodate the school since its inception in 1859. She was moored off
Rock Ferry near Birkenhead until the Second World War, when she was moved
to the Menai Straits off Anglesey to avoid German bombing. She went
aground there in 1953 and burnt to the waterline in 1956. Only fragments
survive, including the wheel, bell and binnacle in the Royal Naval Museum,
Portsmouth, and an anchor on display outside the Maritime Museum in
Liverpool. The school itself continued ashore on Anglesey until it was
finally closed in 1974.
My grandfather was enrolled along with the other boys
as an officer cadet in the Royal Naval Reserve, though many were destined
for the merchant service – called the Merchant Navy by royal
proclamation after the First World War. The school had been founded by the
Mercantile Marine Service Association at a time when the training of naval
officers was first becoming formalized. Previously, tutelage was the
responsibility of individual captains, who trained midshipmen (in the
Royal Navy) or apprentices (in the merchant service), some as young as 12,
as seen for example in the film Master
and Commander. Most boys came to Conway
after two or three years at one of the ‘public’ schools – the
private boarding schools of England – and the emphasis was on
navigation, seamanship and leadership, with much focus on sport and
physical prowess (the motto was ‘Quit
Ye Like Men Be Strong’, from 1 Corinthians
16.13, King James Version). The regime was tough and disciplined, and
the living conditions on board - including sleeping in hammocks -
deliberately evoked those of a 19th century warship. The
intention was that cadets on leaving should be able to manage a fully
rigged sailing ship, with experience of modern steamships coming from
their subsequent three years as apprentices at sea.
From its inception more than 11,000 boys passed through Conway, accounting for many of the officers of the British merchant fleet during the years when it dominated the oceans. Famous 'Old Conways' include James Moody, 6th officer of the Titanic, and Commodore Sir Arthur Ronstron, Master of Carpathia, who rescued the Titanic survivors. Others went into different walks of life – one was the Poet Laureate John Masefield (cadet from 1891-4) – and many went into the Royal Navy, including at least 19 Admirals. Classmates of my grandfather included Commodore Geoffrey Marr, Master of both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, and Commander ‘Buster’ Crabb, the diver and spy who disappeared mysteriously in Portsmouth Harbour in 1956. Many of my grandfather’s contemporaries on Conway did not survive the Second World War.
Clan
Murdoch. My grandfather was
Second Officer on this ship from 1937 until March 1941, and gunnery
officer after completing a naval gunnery course at the outbreak of war in
1939. In June 1940 he sailed with her on convoy SL-36, homeward bound from
Freetown, which lost two ships to U-boat attack off Land's End in
Cornwall; and in August on convoy OB-193 bound for Cape Town, which also
suffered loss. Clan Murdoch was
attacked by a German surface raider off north-east England in January 1941
and a few weeks later strafed and bombed by a German aircraft, when my
grandfather and his gun crew was able to fire one round - to no effect -
in return, from their obsolete 4" gun. Clan
Murdoch was built in 1919, with a deadweight (cargo) tonnage of 5,930,
and was scrapped in 1952.
The Clan Line
In 1925, after two years on Conway, my grandfather was apprenticed as a deck officer in the Clan
Line, and spent most of the next 38 years at sea employed by the company -
apart from a year and a half during the Great Depression when many
officers were laid off, and two years employed by the Ministry of War
Transport during the Second World War. The Clan Line was one of the last
of the great East Indies shipping companies, part of a tradition that
stretched back to the founding of the Honourable East India Company in
1600, and continuing a seaborne trade that originated more than two
thousand years earlier during the Graeco-Roman period – involving much
the same range of goods and ports of call.
By 1939 the Clan Line was the largest company in the
world devoted exclusively to cargo, and the largest engaged in the South
African and Indian trades. The company had been founded in 1877 by Charles
William Cayzer, a former Bombay clerk of the British India Steam
Navigation Company. The original India service was complemented by a South
Africa service in 1881. In my grandfather’s time, a typical peacetime
voyage would begin in the Clyde or the Mersey and go via the Suez Canal to
ports on the west and east coast of India as far as Burma, or go via South
Africa; some voyages included South America and Australia. Clan Line
vessels were general-purpose cargo ships designed to carry everything
except liquids. Most of the tea consumed in Britain during this period was
brought from India and Ceylon by Clan Line ships. Other consignments
included manganese ore, coconut oil and fibre, zinc, pig iron, chrome ore,
copper, cotton, jute, linseed and sugar. Much cargo was laden at large
ports such as Bombay, but smaller batches could be picked up locally, with
goods paddled out to ships in canoes as they had been from the earliest
days of the Indies trade.
Clan Lines ships typically had provision for up to
twelve passengers, and often carried district commissioners and other
officials on leave to and from Africa or India. My grandfather’s logbook
shows that he passed through the Suez Canal 79 times and rounded the Cape
of Good Hope 57 times. His longest single voyage was 41,920 miles, and
altogether he sailed 1,384, 746 miles – the equivalent of 55
circumnavigations of the globe!
A
photograph taken by my grandfather in 1948 in Bombay, showing Lascar
seamen and Indian troops with Clan
Macnair docked behind, fully laden. He was Second Officer on Clan
MacNair from June 1941 for a year, when she survived convoy HX-162
(see below), and was again on board in 1948, as Chief Officer. She is seen
here in peacetime livery with the rear gun platform dismantled. She was
laid down in 1921, with a deadweight (cargo) tonnage of 6,094, and was
scrapped in 1952.
Officers and
Lascars
The officers on Clan Line ships were British and the
ratings were Lascars, from India. Crews during this period would typically
number from 80 to 130, far larger than merchant ships of today, reflecting
a time when engine maintenance was more labour-intensive and much cargo
lading was still carried out by hand. The captain – the master – would
typically have four deck officers, all of whom would stand watch and thus
have periods of responsibility for the ship. The Chief Officer was in
charge of the day-to-day running of the ship, including the Lascar crew;
the 2nd Officer was in charge of navigation. The other
Europeans included up to eight engineer officers, the apprentice deck
officers, two radio officers, a doctor, an electrician and sometimes a
carpenter and a steward, though more often these were Lascars.
The term Lascar, originally from the Persian for
‘soldier’, broadly meant Asiatic seaman. The Lascar crews were
generally either ‘Bombay’ or ‘Calcutta’, the former coming from
fishing communities north and south of Bombay and in the Gulf of Kutch.
Others came from the Laccadive and Maldive Islands and from Goa, Roman
Catholics of mixed Portuguese ancestry who often spoke good English and
were employed as officers’ servants and cooks.
The tradition of employing native seamen on
merchantmen went back to the early days of the East India Company, though
they only came to dominate crews after the arrival of steam, when skilled
seamanship among ratings became less important. The Lascars were often
favorably compared to British seamen for their endurance in the stokeroom,
their perseverance with monotonous tasks and their sobriety. By the period
between the two World Wars up to one third of all merchant seamen in
British employ were Lascars, amounting to some 52,000 men in 1929. Their
conditions of employment were regulated by British legislation, the Indian
Merchant Shipping Act, with, for example, strict prohibition of their use
in far northerly or southerly routes without special heating and food
provision, a particular issue during the Second World War when
Lascar-crewed ships such as my grandfather’s were requisitioned for
North Atlantic convoys.
Unlike the Indian Army, where native commissioned
officers were promoted from the ranks, the officer ranks of the British
merchant service were never ‘Indianized’, because the extensive
navigation and engineering training required was undertaken in Britain and
there was always a plentiful supply of British officers. But the Lascar
ratings had the traditional rank structure of a British crew, and could
progress through petty officer rates to serang
(bosun), who answered directly to the Chief Officer. The serang
was often a headman who had recruited the crews from the villages in
his area and had total control over them. To manage these crews the
British officers needed a working knowledge of Hindustani, though much
command was mediated through the serang
and his equivalent in the Engine Room. The Lascars often wore colourful
sashes and turbans and were allowed to maintain their diet, customs and
rituals while on board, including caste observance for Hindus and
religious holidays for Muslims.
This
painting, entitled 'Convoy', appears as the frontispiece in the official
history of the Clan Line during the Second World War, In
Danger's Hour by Gordon Holman (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1948,
217 pages). The view is from the stern of a naval escort, and shows the
wartime grey of a Clan Line ship. The artist is unknown.
The Second
World War
My grandfather was at sea for a total of 46 months from 1939 to 1945, including a continuous period of 18 months when his ship Empire Elaine was requisitioned by the Ministry of War Transport. He was his ship’s gunnery officer, and with his 4” gun crew was in action early in the war against German aircraft. His log shows that he sailed almost 200,000 miles in convoys, in the north and south Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. He saw ships sunk in convoy alongside his ship on more than thirty occasions during the war, and was in several convoys which lost numerous ships. Among his worst experiences was convoy HX-162 in Clan Macnair, outward-bound from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in December 1941, in atrocious weather and under U-boat attack – the only north Atlantic convoy ever to be completely dispersed and turned back. In Empire Elaine he was at Chittagong under Japanese air attack in April 1944, delivering landing craft for the Burma front. He was in the assault convoys for Operation Husky, the Sicily landings in July 1943, and Operation Dragoon, the south of France landings in August 1944, and was close inshore under fire on both occasions.
The Clan Line lost 27 of its 45 ships during the war, as well as ten other ships managed by the company, along with 641 officers and ratings. Overall the British Merchant Navy lost more than 3,000 ships and 33,000 men, suffering a higher casualty rate than any of the armed services as a whole. The UK Official History of the War (Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1955) notes that this figure does not take account of premature deaths, illness and breakdown after the war – sometimes many years later - arising from mental duress. This was a particular problem among merchant seamen, because of the relentless stress and fear over very long periods, the feeling of helplessness without any useful means of fighting back, and the fact that many were older men with family responsibilities. They were unable to put the war behind them as they carried on doing the same job in the same environment, without any break or readjustment. ‘A quarter of the men who were in the Merchant Navy at the outbreak of war, and perhaps an even higher proportion, did not survive until the end or, of they survived, lived permanently damaged lives, still in the shadows of death’ (ibid., p. 172).
Clan
Macbeth. He was Chief Officer of
this ship from 1946-7, and Master from 1953-4. Following the Second World
War, the Clan Line was able to rebuild its fleet by purchasing ships
constructed originally for the Ministry of War Transport. These included
the famous ‘Liberty’ ships, mass-produced, prefabricated vessels with
all-welded hulls produced in U.S. shipyards between 1941 and 1945 in huge
numbers, amounting to some 2,710 by war’s end. They had a deadweight
(cargo) tonnage of 10,500 – larger than most Clan ships at the time
– and a maximum speed of 11 knots. Their design, originally British, was
starkly functional, and led the U.S. Maritime Commission to christen them
‘Liberty Ships’ to give them added lustre. The prototype was the
smaller Ocean series built in
California and Maine for the British Government from 1941-3. Of sixty of
these ships built, a third were lost during the war, but nine of the
survivors were bought by the Clan Line. Clan
Macbeth was one, having been launched in Portland, Maine as Ocean
Glory in 1942. She had a deadweight (cargo) tonnage of 7,130, and was
scrapped in 1964.
Postwar
Despite their wartime losses the Clan Line recovered,
and continued as a mainstay of the British India trade during the 1950s
and early 1960s. My grandfather was promoted to captain in 1953, and was
master of a succession of Clan Line ships – from Clan
Macbeth, a former wartime prototype of the ‘Liberty Ship’, to Clan Cumming and Clan
Maclachlan, two of the line’s largest and most modern ships built
after the war. By the time he retired in 1964, the heyday of the British
merchant fleet was over, with containerization just round the corner and
many of the old companies such as the Clan Line destined to wind down and
cease trading within a few years. My grandfather’s retirement also
marked the end of his family’s involvement with India – his final
departure from Calcutta in Clan
Maclachlan came 160 years after his great great grandfather John
Littledale Gale had first arrived there in 1804, as a cadet in the army of
the Honourable East India Company.
Clan
Cumming. He was Master of this
ship from 1959-62. Built in 1946, she had a deadweight (cargo) tonnage of
7,812 and was scrapped in 1962.
Copyright © 2006 D J L Gibbins
Illustrations
L.W. Gibbins, about
1937, as a Second Officer in the Clan Line. After the First World War
officers in the Clan Line were allowed to wear Royal Navy braid, including
the loop over the rank bands seen here.
L.W. Gibbins in South
Africa in 1940, carrying a money bag from the port agent on the way to his
ship Clan Murdoch, with a
revolver in his pocket.
My grandfather's 'Master's Ticket', the coveted certificate allowing an officer to 'fulfil the duties of Master of a Foreign-going Steamship in the Merchant Service', awarded to him after examination by the British Board of Trade in 1937.