Captain Ken #9 -  The China Boats

CAPTAIN KEN 

I served most of my sea-going life on the Blue Funnel Line whose ships were referred to in Liverpool as the China Boats because at that time, that was where they sailed to and from for trading purposes. When the Communist Red Army took over the Nationalist Party in China in 1949, we were temporarily excluded from Shanghai, but Mao Tse-tung was anxious to re-establish trade, and in the early 1960s allowed our ships to continue to dock in China on strict terms. At that time I was a Midshipman on the Liberty ship Glen Beg, which was the first British ship allowed back in to Shanghai. It was an incredible experience as Shanghai, a city which had been one of the world’s most lively ports, was now in total blackout and seemed empty of people. It was the time of the Korean War and the Blue Funnel Line ships were therefore put in the very odd trading situation of carrying ammunition to our army which was fighting Chinese soldiers in Korea, and then proceeding to what amounted to an enemy port in China, to load their exports onto our ship to carry them home. As this was the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, you will appreciate that visiting China in a British ship was, to say the least, very worrisome and by the time I was promoted to Chief Officer, I got to know the full seriousness of the situation when a colleague of mine on a sister ship was arrested on suspicion of spying and imprisoned for two and a half years - mostly in solitary confinement. 

Whenever we docked at a Chinese port, we were all issued with copies of Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book (LRB) and were expected to read it. Revolutionary Red Guards were posted all over the ship to check our reactions and behaviour. One ship on which I served arrived in a Chinese port and as formal proceedings were being conducted, copies of the LRB were handed out to newcomers. The Red Guard asked the captain to produce the copy he had been given on a previous voyage. I happen to know that he had thrown it into the sea as soon as we had left China and I was apprehensive and concerned about his reply. However, I was relieved and impressed with his quick thinking when he told the Chinese official that he had given his previous LRB to the pilot in Liverpool who particularly wanted a copy, knowing the captain could get another LRB when he returned to China. They seemed to be very pleased with this answer and were only too eager to oblige. However, I felt the captain was pushing his luck a bit when, handed a fresh copy, he asked them if he could possibly have a copy in German for the pilot in Hamburg? They were even more impressed with this request. 

We invariably had a Liverpudlian crew so you can imagine how difficult it was for Scousers to take all this LRB stuff seriously even to ensure that we would be allowed to return home. On one occasion the Chinese Commissar asked me to assemble the crew on deck with their personal copies of the LRB so that he could address them. He opened his copy of the LRB and began reading from it. He read out, 'Mao says sunflowers face the sun,' to which a  Liverpool accent called out, 'and wallflowers face the wall.’ There was a slight incomprehensible silence before, to my relief, the Commissar continued to thankfully no more Scouser interjections. I think they had all drifted off. 

On the Shanghai waterfront at that time stood a once very exclusive club, which contained the world’s longest bar. However, the People’s Republic had very 'democratically' transformed it to the Working Seamen’s Club. On one occasion we were all invited there, and the place was filled with current Cultural Revolutionary slogans and In large letters behind this famous bar, was written ‘The chief enemy of the proletariat is the domestic reactionary.’ After studying the slogan for some time, I heard a puzzled young member of the crew ask an older member ‘What’s a domestic reactionary?’ ‘I’m not sure,’ came the reply, ’ but I think it’s a butler who won’t answer the door.’ A bit of political dialectic in a nutshell. How we got through all this and managed to return home, I’ll never know!