David Littlejohn Beveridge - Water Under the Keel: An autobiography of forty one years at sea

Dedication

This book is for Patsy,
the Love of my Life

WATER UNDER THE KEEL

An autobiography of forty-one years at sea

Captain David Littlejohn Beveridge

Master Mariner

Glasgow

MMXII

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WATER UNDER THE KEEL

Copyright David Littlejohn Beveridge MMXII

First published in Great Britain in 2012

The right of David Littlejohn Beveridge to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

ePub ISBN: 9781780359748

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the author in writing.

David Littlejohn Beveridge

59, West Coats Road

Cambuslang

Glasgow

Scotland

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would not have had much of a life without my parents.

I am deeply indebted, both to them, and to the benign Providence which, in the most unlikely circumstances brought them together, gave them a love for one another which lasted their entire lives, and ensured that my upbringing was firm, trustworthy, and enjoyable, grounded in hope, love and faith. They each contributed hugely to my understanding of these virtues in their own ways and laid the foundations for my life that was to be, but it was my mother who first taught me the meaning of unconditional love.

I must record my thanks to my first employers T&J Brocklebanks of Liverpool. They gave me a profession and by virtue of the nature of their business, took me to places both exotic and exciting. Above all I thank them for training me to be a seaman, for without that training I could never have been involved in protecting the fisheries of Scotland.

When I left deep sea sailing I was a Master Mariner and fully equipped to take on the demands of my next and last employer, the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland. I am profoundly grateful to the Department and later the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency for the opportunities which were offered to me and the trust which was placed in me by the leaders of these organisations. The work I was given enriched and informed much of my life.

I must record my indebtedness to the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of shipmates with whom it has been my privilege to serve, for all, in ways both large and small have also moulded me. As I review the years I can recall very few who were less than kindly disposed to me. I have related some names from the period when I was sailing with Brocklebanks, but I am not permitted to name any personnel from my time with the Fisheries. So I will just thank them all most sincerely for their camaraderie, support and friendship.

I will however specifically mention Captain Scott Horsburgh, Marine Superintendent of what is now Marine Scotland Compliance, who kindly read and checked the memoir as it pertained to the Scottish Fisheries. He shared with me in many adventures, both as my First Officer, and my partner captain. I will also name Allison Duncan of HR, who took the trouble to read the memoir and gave permission for its publication.

I have spoken about Michael Leek MA MPhil (RCA) FRSA who accompanied me on one of my last patrols. He has not only designed the cover of my book and provided the cover photograph (showing the Jura approaching St Kilda in 2007), but has helped and guided me in innumerable ways most generously. I now regard him as my friend indeed.

I must thank my son-in-law, Dominic Brown BA PGCE MEd, who proof read my memoir. He painstakingly repaired my flawed grammar, corrected my appalling spelling and generally kept me from running aground on the shoals of literary incompetence. He has also written me a synopsis for showing the book to a wider cadre of publishers for I found myself incapable of achieving an acceptable degree of detachment from the subject - namely me!

I salute my family who from ancient times, through the present and into the future, provide the beacons whereby I am able to plot my position in time and space.

My penultimate thanks go to Patsy my wife. She is the Pole Star of my life, the living hearth of my love. She holds the warm life of my hopes and aspirations in her care, and nourishes them with her love.

Lastly I bless Almighty God without whom none of this would have been possible.

FOREWORD

I am writing this account for my descendants, because children have lousy memories. I dont mean they remember bad things, which they do, I mean they remember badly.

You tell them things and they listen with half an ear. The information gets processed and then in time, regurgitated in a form which is barely recognisable. Somehow it gets altered in the family hard drive, and what comes out is not what went in. I suppose all parents experience this in some form or another. For example, I recall my wife had revealed she worked briefly as a post code checker in Tennants Brewery in Glasgow, to make some spending money, during the summer holidays from university. After due process in the corporate cerebellum of our children, she had become a whiskey taster who consumed prodigious amounts of the product as she attempted to blend the perfect libation. We have an old tape, I think, of the children playing at news broadcasters, (this was a favourite game of theirs many years ago), in which she was reported in their news flash as a famous connoisseur of blended Scotch whisky. My wife has never taken any alcohol except communion wine, having sworn an oath of abstinence as a Pioneer through the good offices of the Catholic Church.

On another occasion she foolishly recalled that she had had a summer job working as a waitress in a highland hotel in Pitlochry. Whilst there, she and some of the staff (she tells me it was the female staff) had gone for a swim in the loch near the hotel, one night after work. I expect it was very exciting, swimming in the loch, in the dark, on a warm summers evening, luxuriating in the cold water after a hard day running after tourists from the north of England. I am sure, knowing her, it was delightful, innocent fun, a happy prelude to what would become a life of unselfish and unremitting toil for her family. Our intrepid newscasters, however, on the same tape, had turned it into a night of whisky-induced, skinny dipping, and orgiastic Highland, debauchery. Am I being nave here? Maybe the youngsters have a point.

Anyway Ive made a start on this account to set the record straight as I see it, and so I begin

CHAPTER ONE

1949 1954

I was born on Saint Patricks Day, the seventeenth of March, 1949 in the fishing village of Rosehearty on the Moray Firth, in 23 Bruckley Street, in the front bedroom of my grandmothers house.

In those days children were, more often than not, born at home, especially in rural areas, and my mother told me that she was in labour for about 24 hours. My father, who was a marine engineer to trade, was at the fishing, on my Uncle George Ritchies boat the Maracaibo, named after the lake of that name in South America. I believe they had adopted the name when they visited the place, serving together as engineers, during the war, on a tanker called the Regent Panther.

Thats the Second World War.

I dont know why, but I have always been intensely proud of my birth certificate. It says I was born in Rosehearty in the district of Pitsligo, in the county of Aberdeen. To me it says you come from a sea place where people are intimately connected to the sea. A place of great antiquity where your roots go back to the Picts, where somehow you have in your genetic makeup an innate understanding of the land and the sea and that this, out of all the places you could have been born, is where you belong. The only other place I encountered a remotely similar feeling was Jutland, but I think I was just being fanciful.