The Other Side of the Night by Daniel Allen Butler Page B

of clinkers and slag as they went through an elaborate and exacting ballet of muscle and sweat. A stoker’s first task was to break up the large lumps of coal brought by the trimmers into something more manageable. Using his shovel and slice bar, he would reduce the larger pieces into fragments roughly the size of a man’s fist. Next, timing his movements to the roll and pitch of the ship, the stoker would swing open the door to a firebox and quickly thrust home his slice bar along the fire-grate, working it back and forth four times, once for each track of the grate, to improve the draft across the burning coals by breaking ashes and clinkers loose. These were quickly raked into a pit below the firebox and the fire-door swung closed again. On double-ended boilers the stokers worked in tandem so that doors at the opposite ends were never open at the same time, preventing back-drafts that could blow the fire out into the stokers’ faces.
    The fire-door would be opened again, and the stoker would shovel a layer of coal across the grate—a skilled stoker would usually feed in no more than four shovelfuls of coal, spreading them over the grate at a uniform depth of four inches. At the same time, other crewmen known as water tenders would keep a close eye on the water gauges, careful to keep a level of two inches in the boiler, a combination that maximized the amount of steam each fire-grate could produce.
    The whole routine moved to the inexorable ringing of Kilroy’s Patent Stoking Indicator, a mechanical timer that could be set for intervals between eight and thirty minutes. The higher the speed of the ship, the lower the interval between rings on the Indicator; the amount of time for which the Indicator was set was the total allotted to performing the entire cycle of breaking coal, slicing, clinkering, and stoking. The usual settings would be between eight and ten minutes for a complete cycle. At the end of each four-hour watch the stokers would finish by raking the ashes and clinkers out of the pits, hosing them down to cool them, then shoveling them into hoppers that mixed them with seawater and then ejected them out scuttles near the ship’s waterline.
    It’s little wonder that, given the endless monotony and the sheer mindlessness of the work, along with the knowledge that they had little if any prospect of advancement from their station in society or aboard the ship, the “black gang” were often a surly, barely subordinate lot. More than one senior engineer had to be as adept at cracking heads as he was at repairing machinery. That such men rarely felt more than the most elementary loyalty to their officers and employers was inevitable. Over the years chilling tales, some of them confirmed to be true, would accumulate in waterfront bars of particularly despised officers who would be knocked senseless with the flat of a coal-shovel, then fed into the maw of a boiler, their ashes and bones emptied into the sea with the clinkers at the end of the watch.
    Nor was it surprising that merchant marine officers usually held their crewmen in very low regard. A good captain, careful of how he exercised his authority, might dull the worst edges of the chasm between the wardroom and the fo’c’s’le, but it could never be truly bridged. Even as generally decent a man as Arthur Rostron was not above the prejudice that the wardroom felt for the fo’c’s’le. It was Rostron who said before a Board of Trade Inquiry that “…naturally an Officer is more on the qui vive ; he is keener on his work than a man would be, and he knows what to look for. He is more intelligent than a sailor.”
    These, then, were the men who made up the crews of the British Merchant Marine. They were almost universally invisible men, for ashore they would congregate along the waterfronts, with their gambling dens, taverns, and brothels, while at sea they would rarely if ever be seen by the passengers of the transatlantic liners, their portions of