Boats - 4

When I was born in 1945 my parents hadn't been 'on leave' to the UK since before the war so, like almost everyone in their position, they were anxious to get 'home' to see their relatives. They finally succeeded in 1946, when I had my first experience of travelling on an ocean-going ship. We sailed 'home' aboard the Collegian and returned on the BI boat Malda, above.

Three years later we travelled to the UK again, this time on the Llanstephan Castle. But something had changed. For the first time prices had fallen enough for us to return to East Africa by air, in a BOAC Solent flying boat. The journey from London to Dar-es-Salaam took three days.

I remember little of the three ocean voyages, all via the Red Sea, but I do recall events on my fourth voyage, in 1952, when we travelled to the UK on....

....the Durban Castle - this time the 'long way' via the Cape. The itinerary was Mombasa, Dar-es-Salaam, Beira, Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, St Helena, Ascension, the Canary Islands and Southampton.

So as a small boy I was already quite accustomed to travelling in 'big ships', and this continued as soon as I left school, when in January 1963 I sailed from Tilbury to Cape Town aboard the Harrison Line's Arbitrator, on my way to a volunteer teaching job in what was then Southern Rhodesia. The difference in this trip was that I had to earn my passage, so I learned what life was really like on a cargo ship, experiencing enough - and being bored enough - to persuade me that, after all, I didn't want to go to sea as a career.

I returned from Rhodesia via Mombasa, where I joined the the BI passenger ship Uganda for a voyage to the UK via the Red Sea and Mediterranean, a journey in the company of several other young people of my age all, like me, heading for university. The ship is seen here in Barcelona, where we had time enough ashore to 'enjoy' a bullfight.

My next experience of travel in 'big ships' was when Mrs MW, our eldest daughter, then three, and I travelled out to Jamaica in 1973 aboard a Dutch ship, the Amersfoort, one of many cargo ships in those days which carried up to twelve passengers. Picture shows our ship tied up alongside in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands.

Since then, Mrs MW and I have had to content ourselves with cruise ships. We never set out to travel by cruise ship for the sake of the cruise, our first journey, from Dover to New York on the Norwegian Jewel, being a way getting across the Atlantic without having to fly. Since then we've had four more cruises, all for the sake of the cruise, and enjoyed them partly because we always find ways of doing things when everyone else isn't doing them.