Eight Bells and Top Masts: Diaries from a Tramp Steamer

I did not mean to read this book just yet – I am working through one of Simon Schama’s tomes – but I opened it to see if I would like the author’s “voice”. The following afternoon I finished and shelved the book.

Within just a few paragraphs I was excitedly telling my wife, “This book is my story too! I could have written it myself”. Well, perhaps, but not as well as Christopher Lee. As his story developed it drew away from my own similar experience, in the same time and on the same shores and seas. Lee had just the one trip – abruptly terminated in a Singapore hospital with acute appendicitis. He was flown home, and went to University, launching a new ‘trip’ as a career journalist and becoming the foreign affairs show more correspondent for the BBC. My own sea-going continued a further seven years, as Christopher Lee became a history professor and author.

This story is the authors description of his fist, and it was to transpire, only, trip on ”deep sea” articles aboard a ‘Tramp’ – one of that once huge fleet of wandering traders whose time was fast approaching an end, with giant ‘Container’ ships already looming above the blue horizons. It is built around his scribbled notes in school text-books, his memories and crafted with creative humour.

As a Kentish lad Lee worked the Thames barges around the estuaries and coastal towns in which we both grew up … Whitstable, Sheerness and up to the London docks. He joins the Merchant Navy to go ‘deep sea’ and in joining his first ship, he describes crossing the Thames to the docks on a ferry filled with early morning Stevedores. On reading this I recalled those dreich morning crossings with those darkly flat-capped Dockies with their wet ‘Old Holbourn’ fag ends, hacking out the smokers early-morning chorus of hawks and gasps! His words vividly brought back the weight and roughness of a kit-bag on the shoulder, and the excited but dreading anticipation of both ship and trip.
The author crafts a great tale, deeply involves the reader from the first page and leaves a void when the book is closed.

Even if you never hankered to run away to sea you should enjoy this well told tale of ocean wandering and, of course, of a young lad maturing. show less

Very charming story. Adapted from author's own diary, written as an 18-year old apprentice on one of the last tramp steamers.