Question: Tell me about the job as a fireman.
Well, talk about the black hole of Calcutta. It's a job that
I think you've got to be born without a brain to do. You're
in the lowest part of the tug and the blackest part and the
dirtiest part and God forbid if anything ever happened there, you
had no chance. It is very unpleasant conditions.
There's thick black dust flying around, you had a massive big
boiler burners in front of them. If you had an early call,
four, five six o'clock in the morning, they always had to get on
board two to three hours before. They had to get it stoked up
ready to get the steam for the boilers to get your power because
you couldn't run the engines without steam because they were steam
engines. And the capstans were steam, the steering gear was
steam, everything. So they were responsible when the Skipper
and most of the crew got on board, it was all lit up and basically
ready to go, because if we were called out at four in the morning
we had to be prepared to leave the quay at 4 o'clock in the morning
so the poor firemen were there two to three hours before we
were.
Question: So did that mean that they worked longer
hours?
Oh, much longer. And when we finished they used to what we
call slack the fires, they used to put all the coal ash on the
fires so they wouldn't burn too fiercely to keep them burning just
steady over the next few hours so when they got there the
next...possibly the next morning, there was still some fire left in
the stoke holes so all they had to do was shovel the coal on, rake
them through and they're ready firing again. But they had a
horrible job because they spent a bit of time slacking the fires
down after we were shut down and they must have spent a good half
an hour to an hour cleaning theirself up because you can imagine
how dirty they got. They had a terrible job.
Question: Did they have any special uniform to
wear?
No. The only uniform they possibly wore was a sweatband
around their neck. That was to wipe the sweat off and that's
literally...they had no facemask or nothing. Every single
inch of their body was covered in coal ash, it was that bad.
But you know I suppose people wonder why when they used to come
back of an evening they'd have had a felt to…better for the … for
the wear of drink because I think the only way to get rid of the …
the cobwebs was to wash it down with a few pints of beer. And
I don't think you have to tell a fireman how to drink.
Question: How many firemen were there on the
Calshot?
I think there was three to four. There was two engineers,
there was … there was greasers, there was firemen, there was ABs,
there was mates, skippers, and there was stewards too for the
lounge because we had a lounge. When we used to do the tenders, the
stewards and the assistant stewards from the Isle of Wight ferries
at the time, and they were responsible for looking after the
passengers that we bring aboard.
