It was in the early 1950s, when drawing a coaster tide up in Barking creek, the captain seeing me at work, suggested that I sail with them as a supernumerary, taking the owner’s cabin.
Having often been drawing colliers (flatirons) that were delivering Newcastle coal to London power stations, this was my first chance to expand my shipping and docks drawing horizons.
Living in London’s Fulham Road this was the start of my love of and connections with an extremely busy working part of the city’s landscape and inhabitants. The atmosphere of the place was unique and wonderful, being deserted at night with the noise of mooring chains and bumping barges, with only the odd rat as a sign of life. And then in daylight, when all was noise and bustle, shouting and swearing, with cars and vans clogging the narrow streets, and now with the noise of barges and tugs on the river, often hidden behind warehouses, made up an atmosphere of docks at their busiest.
The smells of the riverside were pronounced by the movement of spice cargoes and Stockholm tar. These were such that captains of tugs could navigate along the river in thick fog by smells alone.
More of my trips followed, like when our sailors enjoyed the pleasures of food and girls in Rouen on our way up the Seine to deliver whisky and cigarettes to France’s capital. At night we would tie up, perhaps to a tree, to visit riverside cafés for food and wine.
One time, having drunk rather too much wine in Paris, I climbed the mast of our ship to fix a purloined road lamp for my stepfather, thinking that he would like it for his pleasure boat. He did not. Climbing the mast the next day to retrieve it when sober, was a frightening experience.
In another voyage to Finland, having delivered poor quality French coal to a town in central Sweden by navigating through lakes, I was befriended by a Finish family to join them in their black sauna. It was black because of there being no chimney on the shed, so smoke had blackened the interior. After sweating and the rubbing of twigs, we plunged into the cold Baltic water before returning for another sweat, drinking copious amounts of lemonade to rehydrate our bodies. In deference to me being foreign, we wore bathing suits when they would normally be unclothed.
Derelict ships lay about as over time in the northern Baltic the seabed had risen and the water was no longer navigable to many laden vessels. They were wonderful to draw.
Salmon-like fish swam in the crystal-clear water near our ship, but we were told not to catch and eat them because of their noxious mineral contents.
Top heavy with sawn timber we made our way back to Portsmouth. Though the crossing was very stormy I felt safe with so much floatable material in the hold and tied to the deck.
Once we took aboard a cargo of fertiliser in Antwerp for delivery to Cork in Ireland, where the Stuurman (First Mate) had a girlfriend (the wife of a Danish sailor) who locked her in his cabin until the bags of fertiliser had been off-loaded to farmers in their carts. She was released when we set sail ones more.
These jaunts on small coasters took place as I rebuilt a bombed-out warehouse I had bought in London, went to art school, painted scenery at Covent Garden Opera House, designed for repertory theatre, an ice show, and exhibited my landscape paintings in London galleries and elsewhere.
Having missed out on education because of the war and my service time spent in it, I created and attached a car body of my design to an old builder’s flat-back van, and set out on a Grand Tour of Europe’s art and life, meeting generous and helpful people, especially when my untrustworthy mobile accommodation needed repair.
There were few tourists in Europe at that time, so I met many friendly people who treated me as somewhat of a curiosity, especially when I parked for the night.
It is now the late 1950s and although I was working in the theatre, I realised I would never progress to the more prestigious jobs as I was not gay.
But I was restless and wanted to see the world through drawings. So I sent my favourite drawing paper to various post restantes around the world, sold my London house, and took a train to Birkenhead with a ticket in my pocket for a sea voyage to Japan.
I got as far as Penang in Malaya, skipping the Middle East, and started from where the true Far East began.
Giving drawings for guidance and accommodation, keeping an eye out for docks and shipping, I sailed from Singapore to Bangkok, moving through Thailand to Cambodia, to HongKong, to Japan, and then through the South Pacific to Australia and then back to England via the USA. It all took a year and cost a £1000.-
From that round-the-world trip came an exhibition of drawings in Cork Street, London, one in Japan and an illustrated book on my various travel experiences.
After building a studio house in Hampshire and then selling it to Francis Bacon, I was back in London’s riverside docklands again, building a two studio house, painting happily and getting on well with the native population of dockland workers.
With a Pole, who became a great friend, we worked night and day on this project, building a two studio triple-glazed house overlooking the river Thames from Limekiln Dock.
This dock would fill with flotsam and jetsam in a westerly wind and then be empty of rubbish with an easterly wind. These winds were indicated on the ceiling of the top studio with an arrow connected to a weathervane on the roof. A map of the river was painted on the ceiling.
Material for building often came when helpful dockers would tip some timber overboard ia westerly wind, where Max and I could collect it when the tide went out.
At a nearby pub, frequented by crooks and police, building materials could be arranged - like bricks that for a modest sum would appear at our doorstep in the early morning.
Having over the years since student days been interested in wines and vineyards (I had two by now), I imported red wine in casks to bottle at home.
With one barrel of wonderful Rioja I needed 350 bottles, Bordeaux-lenght corks and capsules.
The bottle suppliers wanted a shilling a bottle. But from them I learned that they had contracts with large hotels and restaurants to collect all their empty bottles at dead of night, then discard those unwanted, like spirit bottles, and then clean and sell the desired ones (English heavyweight) back to wine merchants. So I did much the same at 4 o’clock each morning from smaller businesses. And it did not take long to collect the desired claret-shaped bottles that stack so well.
The corks were hand-selected as the cork merchant liked me and my ideas of bottling my own. (In those days wine merchants bottled their own wine from imported casks.)
My bottling was a family affair and great fun. That particular wine got better over the years, but tailed off toward the 10 year mark.
With my Port of London Authority pass I was able to roam the docks at will.
Much wine then came into London Dock to be stored and distributed at the Crescent Wine Vaults, built, it was said, by Napoleonic prisoners of war. This massive facility was lit and temperature-controlled by just a few bare-flame gas lamps. Edible fungus grew from its brickwork.
I was friends with the Head Cooper whose wife was Italian and would not eat lunch and supper without wine.
His job was to care for the stored wine which meant quite a lot of extracting it from casks with a flogger and valinch, and sipping it from thick glass goblets with their broken stems set into large corks.
Should we find a wine that was “off” in any way, Mr Arjun was called for to right it. He had the extraordinary skill to do this and yet never tasted a drop - except, one day as I left the docks and passed his office I looked in to say goodnight. “Come in and have a glass”, he said. And from what I learned later he rather took to it.
It was the 1960s and I was back in my dockland element, almost part of the community, and drinking at the pub where information was exchanged and sources of almost anything divulged - and not always legitimately.
Those days are long gone. I was so lucky to have been part of a vibrant dockland life in the days before containers took over.
