I am finding the postings on ships boiler rooms most interesting, In my family we had on my fathers side four ships firemen ,of which for a spell he was one These were my three great uncles, two of whom were employed at one time by Messrs Sloan & Co, on the coastal trade Glasgow, Liverpool Cardiff, Bristol & London & return, Even in my day i can remember Sloans ships tying up at Kingston Dock in Glasgow, to unload their miscellaneous cargo, Sloans had a sign up above their dockside warehouse, As had all the other shipping firms, E.G. Anchor Line, Hendersons etc. Sloans ships in the late 1950/s through till mid sixties still were coal burners
The two old firemen were dead before i appeared on this planet, Both of these old guys lived along with the another brother, And an older sister called Tabitha (sounds like the cat!) She ruled the old boys with a rod of iron, and when the ship docked she was present, to grab the paypacket, lest the publican should get his hands on it, giving each of them, enough money for a refreshment, and the train fare to the nice seaside town of Helensburgh, where the family home was. The other brother, who was employed as a fireman, on the clyde coastal vessels (puffers) a hardy &versatile little species of ship,i can remember, a tall elderly man with piercing blue eyes, always imaculate with his blue suit and bowler hat, &small leather bound bible in his pocket, He was most particular, & fastidious type.
Fate played my father a hard life, For some time was employed, during the hungry twenties firstly as a boiler scaler at Sydney Harbour, Take the job or starve! With what he told me a terrible occupation, Hot dirty ,dusty , cramped and dangerous, One of the stories he recalled was scaling out the inside of a set of Scotch boilers on one particular ship, and the watchkeeping engineer said to him, "That boiler took the lives of two boiler scalers some years back, They were scalded to death inside it" It seems somebody had opened a valve on to them in mistake, Strange to say my maternal grandfather was also badly scalded in one of Calderbank steelworks boilers, in a similar type of accident with a blowdown being opened Somehow or other i feel that there is a lot to be said for the big Diesel engine and on land a nice big electric motor!
However back to dads boilers, he was employed both as a trimmer and fireman on a ship belonging to The New Zealand Shipping Co. or as he preferred to call them the New Zealand Starvation Co. This was a ship built by Denny Brothers of Dumbarton The biggest ever built by that companyl He got started on The Horarata, a big combined passenger and refrigerated ship of the New Zealand Co
With what he told me it was no bed of roses that life, As a trimmer, you were running with your barrow of coal, from the bunker to the firing platform, He had until his dying day burn marks on the side of his arms, where going between the side of the hot boilers coming from the bunkers, Proceeding through the turbulent seas leaving Australia, the ship was pitching &rolling he was flung against the hot sides, And to compound the miseries, they had a fair number of his fellow workers in the hospital with broken bones, being flung across the stokehold, along with their wheelbarrow.
This led to double juicers! (Two shifts rolled into one) He said another" lovely" task, was cleaning the firetubes, off with the blast, Open the big front door and brush out the tubes, Your arms all wrapped in rags, Meanwhile being met with a blast of hot air, Mention is made of the disposal of the ashes, another frightfully nice excercise, from what he told me, i think Horarata, was equiped with a Sees ash ejector, In which one breaks up the clinker, and shovels them through a grating and closes a big baffle plate, and ejects the ash by a jet of water and steam, Un like the nice little hoist engine which might from appearance be a little Alley & McLellan of Glasgow, Peter could you check please
He also said of some of the firemen being delirious, with heat coming through the hot equator region, and having to be restrained, I have once read somewhere of firemen being so overcome by this affliction as to imagine that the glowing fire was cool, and attempt to hurl themselves into it, and having again having to be restrained.
Whist i worked in Greenock, i came across the remains of parts of a ship being cut up, these perquisites, were lying in Mr John Beveridges scrapyard, Old Beveridge was a really nice old bloke The said items were one or two little Kilroy Stokehold indicators, This little device worked in conjunction with a large gong, set up on the stokehold bulkhead, and the indicator had a little quarter light with a needle The timing of this was set by the leading fireman or tindal, from a master control panel and as it bonged, the needle would tell the unfortunate fireman to throw coal on fire number two, no sooner done than bong, Fire number four etc ad infinitum!
What of poor old Horarata, years later she was the first ship to be fitted with ball mills, &fired with coal dust pulverised and blasted into the furnaces under pressure, This ship met her end during the last great war sunk in the Aegean sea, taken over for a time by the admiralty prior to this occurence.
As to my father paid off Port of London, back home to a mixture of work in little coal mines and farming Except for the war time, he was employed for a period in a machine shop, And was one day working a big radial drilling machine, when along comes an admiralty inspector of munitions, and says hello John, his ex second engineer Who promptly wrote out, and gave him a chitty for the best kit of tools one could have obtained -- Free gratis