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I still vividly remember flying out to my first ship, joining in Durban, in a Comet with a refueling stop in Johannesburg. When I was issued with my flight ticket in the London head office I was astonished to see it marked "First Class". When I expressed wonder I was told "All of our officers travel first class!"
All that has changed in later years I read, as the bean counters gained ascendancy and when they would put us in with the baggage if they could.
But then there were the flights to Bombay via Lebanon and Tehran, Durban again, then New York, Boston, Baltimore. And the European flights to Hamburg, Amsterdam, Antwerp. All much less hassle in them days when security was lax and no-one was trying to blow up the aircraft in the name of some medieval religion. If one wanted a smoke on a long haul one was allocated a rear seat, and if the guy in the seat in front wanted to recline, his doing so didn't stuff one's tray into one's navel and spill one's drink over one's lap.
One memorable trip to join ship in Bombay -- two of us, the 4/E and me as J/E, with a stopover in Lebanon. The flight was half empty, and we got on famously with the Lebanese stewardesses who were drop dead gorgeous. Because of the length of the stopover they invited us to join them land side and, of course, we offered no resistance but we had to sneak out of the airport to do so. Naturally, we missed the connecting flight to Tehran and so we arrived in Bombay two days late, but, fortunately, our ship was also delayed.
We finally wandered into the lounge of the hotel in Bombay (I seem to recall it was the "Airlines Hotel", a rat infested place with rat holes in the lounge furniture) where the rest of the engineers crew change was waiting, as was the fleet commodore chief engineer.The sour look and then "You two again? Late on watch as normal. I might have bloody well known. Where the hell on this planet have you been this time!"
We were all young then, and the world was our oyster. We would fly anywhere any time to join a ship in some faraway place, and we were strictly non-PC. We could easily be diverted by an attractive pair of female legs but, by some miracle we always seemed to join ship more or less when we should. We could find ourselves in Bahrain, the Emirates, Venezuela or where ever and feel quite at home there because we were too simple to understand the local customs or even think about them, and the locals would resign themselves to more British seamen acting the maggot and paying their money into the local economy in various dubious ways.
Sadly, days gone by. I do though sometimes wonder if what is left of the UK merchant marine, with it's obsession with political correctness but once was the largest in the world, is going from here. The adventure of flying to distant places has been reduced to a chore to be resigned to endless checks by foreign immigrant security personnel.
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