John Burn
John belongs to: The Coble and Keelboat Society
John grew up in Tynemouth. He spent his spare time as a child sailing. John followed his father into piloting ships on the Tyne.
John was interviewed by Kylea Little on 3 March 2006. The interview took place at Discovery Museum History Office and lasted 1 hour, 0 minute and 12 seconds.
24 hour service
"The thing is, you see, we were all self-employed"
The thing is, you see, we were all self-employed- more or less all pilots in Britain were self-employed, there were very few occasions where they weren’t. And the thing is, obviously, you, you gave a 24 hour service and you didn’t say, “oh, well, the ship’s going to wait,” or something like that- ships never waited for pilots. They might wait for other things, but they never waited for pilots, and this why the ship owners were, looked upon us particularly favorably because we gave them no delays and they got enough delays with dock workers, and things, you know, waiting for things to finish and what have you, but the pilot was already there, even if the ship was waiting to get into port, the pilot was off there, waiting for the ship to arrive. And that was the way of life, it’s, you know, you didn’t say, “oh, it’s coming to the end of the watch,” or anything like that, there was no end of a watch, you really just got aboard.
If it was in later days where we were on sort of watches, you ensured that if the ship came, just because you weren’t on watch for another hour, you were out and you did the job and you a took pride in it, I suppose really because it was what you had been brought up to. You never worked any other way.
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