Steaming away from the gloom and doom
FOR a moment, let's steam away from those frightful images of the Russian-inflicted devastation of Ukraine, from the plight of millions – yes millions – of hapless refugees, including children, from the thousands of Russian and Ukrainian lives lost or torn asunder by the heartlessness of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cohorts, and from the centuries-old beautiful architecture laid waste by indiscriminate shelling.
Let's bypass the local shipping malaise and government lethargy that continue to hamper the employment of thousands of South Africans in the maritime industry and that indirectly add costs to essential imported cargoes.
Let's also give a wide berth to some current past-times that produce bombardments of evil, authored by troubled minds and presented in dark television series, and let's steer clear of the frenetic world of emails, and of those impersonal electronic games where participants neither converse nor even see one another – as once happened over good old board games.
Let's rather enter a haven of more genteel pursuits related to the maritime world, like marine art, or the once-popular past-times of marine philately or collecting ships' postcards.
Let's stand before the masterpieces of Dutch artists whose painstaking work has left us with magnificent paintings of East-Indiamen returning to Amsterdam after two years away. Let's also admire the canvases of folks like Kenneth Shoesmith or Walter Thomas who, in fine detail, captured vessels of another era – Cunarders outward from Liverpool on trans-Atlantic voyages, or those magnificent P&O ships heading to India.
More recent works, such as superb portrayals of British merchant ships by Robert Lloyd, and dozens of excellent
paintings by acclaimed local artists Jeremy Day and Peter Bilas, are also to be admired. The ships depicted and the sea, in various states, are accurate and proportionate. Often, other vessels such as tugs, yachts or lighters – and even bystanders watching a ship manoeuvring in port – enhance the visual impact of the painting and lend authenticity to the scene.
Dating from my kortbroek days when philately was popular among young and old, my small collection contains several stamps depicting ships. On an envelope posted in Singapore in the late 1950s by my Sunday school teacher who was visiting her brother, then based at the Royal Navy's station there, were three stamps of ships. That wonderful lady of deep faith knew the interests of the youngsters in her care each Sunday but sadly that item has disappeared.
On the to-do lists of most visitors to islands such as St Helena or Tristan da Cunha is a visit to the post office to buy sets of stamps, many adorned with island birds or marine life, but also with a fair sprinkling of ships and local craft. South Africa also produced stamps to mark some special waypoints in our maritime history. Unusual not for its value or shape but for the vessel it depicted, a R1.15-stamp showed the small pilot tug Eland. With 63 winters astern, she held the longevity record among South African harbour craft. Leaving her Falmouth builder's yard in July 1896, the wooden-hulled Eland took three months to reach Algoa Bay where she towed lighters to and from ships working cargo overside in the anchorage. She spent most of her life, however, on Cape Town's pilot service, venturing out in all weathers, her characteristic pall of smoke from her slender funnel visible for miles.
In 1959, she was withdrawn from service and, stripped of valuable items, including her teak wheelhouse, she was beached on Woodstock Beach in 1962.
Email has culled a once thriving hobby – and even those islands whose attractive stamps remain popular across the globe have reduced their philatelic output.
The point-to-point ocean passenger services engendered another interesting hobby. To relatives and friends back home, passengers sent postcards of the ships in which they were travelling, hastily scrawling a cryptic message on the back. As a memento of more genteel times or a reminder of a loved one, many still keep a Union-Castle sepia postcard.
Once housed in a shoebox, but now numbering thousands, my postcard collection contains a postcard of Capetown Castle sent by my Sub A (Grade 1) teacher who, having endured me in her class for a year, went to Britain on a Commonwealth teacher exchange programme. Remembering a little pupil who talked about the docks or tug rides, that patient and thorough teacher sent him a postcard of the mailship carrying her to Southampton. With the demise of those wonderful passenger services and the advent of emails and the cellphone, another popular hobby disappeared, but we learnt much through those stamp and postcard collections.
Reference to these olde-worlde pasttimes betrays my age. While I did not experience the horrors of World War II, this old timer fears that the present conflict could spiral upwards, and, tragically, in its greater ferocity, could surpass anything witnessed before.
And South Africa does not censure the aggressor, now destroying an independent country!