QUESTION 1 How many years did you practise as a marine surveyor and what was the appeal of the profession that drew you into the industry?


I actually started learning about surveying when I was an apprentice. Often we would drydock a ship which was undergoing one of the Class surveys when it was necessary to ‘open up the lifeboats’ also for survey. They were mainly wooden clinker-built lifeboats and I knew the class surveyor quite well because I was the only lad doing the job. He would frequently ask me what I had found, have a quick look at any defects I told him about, write in his notebook and then clear off. A couple of days later we would have repaired the defects, boxed the boat up and that was it. He would also often ask me how busy we were and, if we were not too busy, he would ‘find’ non-existent defects to give us some work. When I finally gave up working as a shipwright in 1957, I worked for some eight years in the drawing office at Blackwall yard after which I started working in 1965 for a city consulting engineer. In that role I was classed as a surveyor finally setting out on my own in 1970. I officially gave up work as a surveyor when my wife died in 2005, so the answer is 43 years plus!


What was the appeal? My father died when I was aged just 10 and he had been in the ‘Andrew’ (The Royal Navy) in the first world war and the (probably wildly exaggerated) tales of those days thrilled me and, from a very early age, I wanted to go to sea like my dad. When I reached the age of 14, my mother told me that, because of her circumstances, I had to leave school and go to work. She had a good friend called Gus Forsberg who was the Company Secretary of a shipyard at Blackwall, and he offered to give me a job. I was delighted.


I


started work there on the 1st day of January 1945. The rest, as they say, is history.


A view over West India Docks from the east. Blackwall basin is the round dock in the middle fore ground. On the day I started work the shipwrights were docking a destroyer in the drydock that leads off the basin (underneath the two white sheds in the middle foreground to the left of the basin).


QUESTION 2 Given that you have been retired for a number of years what is it that drives you on to remain current in the market, even today, by which I mean writing magazine articles, publishing handy guides, attending and presenting seminars?


When I first started as an apprentice, Bert Powell, the charge hand who had the job of teaching me said, “This aint a trade, son, it’s a disease, and what you’ll need most of all is a sense of humour!” He was right on both counts. I simply caught the disease.


It is incurable.


The sense of humour grew over the years. The profession has given me a very interesting life. I have travelled to over seventy different countries, visited every continent and sailed on a number of seas including several trips on trawlers and the (in)famous Liberty ships,


and, I think that I am right in this when I say that I am probably the only one in the IIMS who has worked under enemy fire in the second world war.


I remember


working on a ship in what is now St. Katharine’s Yacht Harbour, London and watching the last of the flying bombs go over. Some memories I would prefer to forget.


I really enjoy writing those papers and booklets because I know that they help many people to pick up some of my own hard-won knowledge which I enjoy sharing.


I


learned very early on that the best way to learn is by making your own mistakes even though you hide them by calling them experience. It is better, if you can, to learn the lessons from someone else’s mistakes and those papers and booklets often contain knowledge gained that way.


The Report • September 2020 • Issue 93 | 105


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