LAST SAILORMAN
skippers, most of whom weren’t there, but who suffered
from a touch of East Coast chauvinism. Bob, a native of
Poole, Dorset was an outsider.
The fact that he was educated, articulate, and middle
class, grated, too. Not that anyone said anything to his
face as he was tough and had boxed in the old
Blackfriars Ring in the City of London.
So when he wrote about the gale in his first barging
book Coasting Bargemaster, it was snidely re-dubbed
‘Boasting Bargemaster’.
The ‘great Yarmouth gale’ was still being discussed in
sailorman’s pubs 30 years later. Phil ‘Ginger’ Latham,
who was mate with Bob for four years on Cambria in
the late 1960s told me: “I reported to Bob on one
occasion how an old skipper, who brought the subject
up, said: ‘You know it was all his fault don’t you?’ Bob
told me: ‘He wasn’t even there so what does he know?’”
Which, indeed, was my own experience, when I
joined Cambria for her last 14 months in trade. As long
as Bob wasn’t aboard I could guarantee some quayside
enthusiast would sidle up claiming he knew Bob, had
sailed with him and that he was an old blowhard. When
Bob returned he could never place the informer.
But not all skippers joined in the bad-mouthing.
Dick King, master of Cetus, who, with his mate was
taken off by lifeboat before the barge was blown ashore
in Germany, remained a lifelong friend of Bob’s and after
becoming master of a motor-barge, the Peter Robin,
often gave his old pal a tow.
I should know, as I took the tow-rope.
After the notorious Yarmouth gale Bob Roberts came
to the attention of FT Everard, owners of Europe’s
greatest coasting fleet, both of sailing barges and
motor-ships. ‘Mr Will’ Everard gave him the Martinet,
the last boomie barge to trade under sail alone, a vessel
stigmatised with an ‘evil’ reputation, having crushed a
shipwright to death when she shifted on her blocks
during construction at Rye, in 1912.
Sailors are a superstitious breed and nobody wanted
to take the old ketch, especially after a former skipper,
George Carter, was killed while Martinet was
discharging railway lines at Newhaven, when a wire
lifting bond parted and whose patent anchor windlass
had crippled several other crew, including another
skipper Captain Burridge who had one arm dislocated
C/O BBCBorn in 1907 in Dorset and grew up on small boats sailing from Poole.
He ran away to sea aboard the barquentine Waterwitch, the last
square-rigged vessel to trade under the red ensign: history was
already chasing him! He made two transatlantic passages in yachts,
the first aboard Thelma, an engineless 27ft, gaff-rigged Looe smack
which was wrecked on Cocos Island in the Pacific after transitting the
Panama Canal. The second was aboard the last Ramsgate sailing
trawler, the ketch-rigged Quartette. He also had spells ashore
working as a sports sub-editor on, firstly the Daily Mail and latterly
the East Anglian Daily Times. When he started barging, it was firstly
as mate aboard the sailing barges, Audrey, Oceanic, and Oxygen and
then as master in the Hambrook, Northdown, Martinet – the last
boomie barge – and the tinpot Greenhithe. He had a short period
trying to earn a living fishing with the Whitstable smack Stormy
Petrel before taking the Cambria as master, in 1954, then finally as
owner from 1966 until her last freight in 1970.
He died in 1982 and is buried at Ryde on the Isle of Wight.All of Bob Roberts’ books are available from Seafarer
Books. Tel: 01394 420789.BOB ROBERTS
and ‘almost torn from its socket’ according to Fishing
News. Burridge also died, albeit later, from his injuries.
Bob scoffed at the stories and vowed as he stepped
aboard: “Don’t forget, I’ll kill you before you kill me.”
He did, too, when she eventually sank off Aldeburgh,
deep loaded with 200 tons of cement for Norwich and
he and her crew were taken off by the local lifeboat.
Her mate at the time, Jerry Thomason, told me: “We
would often spend all night at the pumps and still wet
the cargo. She was bloody unseaworthy really.”
For the next few months as other bargemen sailed up
and down the coast they could see Martinet’s masts
sticking out above the sea: a stark testimony to a
‘wicked’ old ship and the skipper who beat her curse.
The pages of her surviving freight book are salt-stained
and the last entry is blurred and incomplete.
Bob’s next barge was the steel Greenhithe and he was
sunk in her, too, when a steamship rammed them in the
Lower Hope. He had his wife, Tony and daughter Anne
aboard as he felt it was safer for them there than at home
in Bexley, Kent where they had been sheltering under a
steel table every time a German flying bomb attack took
place. The mate managed to get Tony, Anne, and the
third hand into the barge’s skiff, while Bob endeavouredBelow: the
“wicked” old
Martinet