Transcript

Stag Line was a Geordie shipping company that had been going for over 100 years when I joined it. Unfortunately sometime after I left it did cease trading as did many companies in the British merchant navy, but it had always run tramp ships, which are ships, which are ships which do not go on set routes called lines – the shipping lines were shipping routes and the shipping liners that went on specific routes like bus routes, only across the oceans calling at set places. Tramp ships would go anywhere that there was a cargo that they could take to anywhere else, so you would often set off from a port not knowing where you were going to and sometimes had orders just head – I remember leaving Sfax in Tunisia with orders just to sail west in the Mediterranean, so I went to bed in my cabin one evening as we had the sun streaming in, as we headed west and woke up to the sun steaming in my cabin, so we’d obviously spun 360 degrees and were heading back to another destination in the Eastern Mediterranean, so the whole point was that they had to be constantly finding cargos to keep the ships occupied, but you could be taking allsorts of interesting stuff and on my first voyage we took gravel – special gravel from Alborg in Denmark all the way to Chicago for the airport and y’know you wouldn’t imagine that it was necessary to get a bit of gravel from Denmark just for an airport in the middle of the American North Continent and we took one hold full of that and another manganese ore And this is the nature of the sort of trade that on many occasions took metal ores, like manganese over to the States and Canada and brought back scrap metal to Europe, who would then recycle it.