9 minute read
A few weeks ago, I wrote the sad story of the death of my Great Uncle Syd. (Blog: The dark heart of the harbour). He died in 1988 aged 76 but what had brought him to take his own life. What had he endured in the years prior? What did he experience throughout his lifetime? Now I return to where it all began for Syd.
Sydney Drew was born four days after the Titantic sunk. Although this tragedy occurred half a world away, Syd’s parents had an association with the sea and they would have read in the newspapers about the disaster, close to the time of his birth. Syd came into the world on the 19th April 1912 in Crookwell, in southern NSW. His father William Duck and his mother Ada Drew already had a 1-year old son Jack. Also living in the house in Crookwell with them were four other family members; William’s first wife Minnie and their three children. Hold on, I hear you say; what?! That is a long story for another day, but what you need to know now is that after one of Syd’s half siblings suggested calling him Sydney (after Sydney harbour), baby Syd’s family life would implode. As a consequence of his father’s actions, Syd never knew his father or his half siblings. He never met them, never knew much about them, only what little his mother could tell him. He never even saw a photograph of them. But he wondered about them all, eventually travelling the world in search of answers.
With his life turned upside down by the disintegration of his parent’s marriage, which occurred soon after the arrival of his baby sister Connie in 1913, Syd was taken to Newcastle where his mother Ada fled to seek solace with her friend Marion. For the next seven years, Syd and his siblings Jack and Connie would live with their mother on weekends and be boarded out with another family during the week. In 1920, Ada’s aunt Emma, who lived in Sydney, died, leaving Ada with a five-hundred-pound inheritance. Empowered with more choices, Ada returned with her children to her native London.
Now aged nine, Syd’s life in England did not get off to an easy start. He and his older brother Jack were sent to a Barnardos home in the north of England soon after they arrived. Their mother was able to secure work at a drapery shop, however she could only rent one room at the property, so kept Connie with her. The boys stayed at the home for 2-3 years. Syd would have been about 12 by the time Ada was able to have her family back together, once her brother Will was able to purchase a house for them all to live in. Uncle Will, or Nunc, as he known by the children, supported his sister, niece and two nephews for the next two decades. Syd settled back into life in East London and he was able to reconnect with his mother and sister. Connie adored her brother and the two of them became close again. Unlike Jack, both Connie and Syd liked to stay at home, enjoying card games and listening to the radio. They had different personalities though, with Connie being the talker and Syd shy and retiring. Syd left school at age 14 when his mother’s cousins were able to provide him with an apprenticeship in engineering. He worked for their company near Leytonstone in London for about two years.
But the lure of a life on the sea was a great temptation, particularly since Jack had sailed away aged 16, in 1927 and headed back to Australia. So, in 1929, when he was 17, Syd signed up to the merchant navy as well. His employment card notes he joined the Commonwealth and Dominion’s Port Line and was assigned to the T.S.S Port Napier, a twin-screw steamship that had been built in 1912, so was as old as Syd himself. The first immigration record relating to his merchant navy career shows that in August 1929, just four months into his new life at sea and only two months before the great stock market crash that heralded the start of the Great Depression, Syd sailed from London to New York. He was working as a saloon boy on this trip and he had reached 5ft 4 inches in height and weighed 130 pounds (59 kilos). The following year, in May 1930, Syd is recorded as sailing from Auckland, New Zealand to New York on the motor ship, the Port Hobart. He had been ‘at sea’ for one year and was still working as a saloon boy.
In July 1931 Syd was shifted to the Port Alma, another refrigerated cargo ship, on a journey from London to New York. This time he had moved to working as an engineer’s boy, clearly keen to try life in a different area of the ship and perhaps walk in the footsteps of his father, who had worked on the P&O liners as a refrigeration engineer twenty years earlier. The trip from London to New York took ten days sailing time. From the early 1930s, Syd changed course and began sailing further afield, back to his country of birth, Australia. Syd joined the Port Nicholson in January 1932 and it took 36 days to travel from London to Melbourne. It then travelled to Tasmania, Sydney and up the coast of Queensland and then back to Fremantle and home to the UK. A round trip meant that Syd would only be home in London once every three months or so. During his time on the sea Syd worked as an officer’s steward, a captain’s steward, an engineer’s steward and a second steward, helping with catering and provisions. His ship card shows that he worked consistently throughout the 1930s, at a time when many of his fellow countrymen were unemployed. The Port Line managed to stay profitable throughout the Great Depression, bringing food back and forth between different continents. Food was a basic necessity of life and despite the economic downturn, trade continued between the UK and Australia. During the early years of Syd’s career, the company also had a contract to ship the steel girders needed for the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Life in the merchant navy was not always easy. At the mercy of the weather, away from home for long periods of time and cramped into tiny cabins working long hours each day, it made for a lonely life. Syd’s life on the ship would have been very regimented. Days off would have been rare but welcome, especially once in port. He may have had just hours off, or a day or two, depending on what cargo was being loaded and unloaded. It meant little time to forge friendships, other than with fellow crew and certainly maintaining a relationship would have been difficult as would finding the time to meet someone. Syd took his work seriously and by 1936, he was an experienced sailor with seven years behind him. Perhaps by this time, as Syd was now 24 years old, he may have felt he had seen and done it all. He had sailed on at least twelve different ships, including some ships making their maiden voyage. In August 1936 he signed on with the Blue Star Line to work the Canadian and American West Coast areas, joining the T.S.S Tudor Star. It sailed from New Westminster in British Colombia, Canada (near Vancouver) to Seattle in America, just a short trip of a couple of hundred miles. Syd was one of sixty crew onboard and one of three assistant stewards. Whilst he was still 130 pounds, he had shot up and now measured 5ft 5 inches tall. Unlike his father who had been heavily tattooed during his time on the sea, Syd had resisted the temptation of many sailors to tattoo his body. Connie told me that whilst he was shy, Syd also had a warm personality and got along well with his passengers and fellow crew. His shipmates nicknamed him ‘Smiler’, indicating that whilst not a chatty fellow, he still made people feel comfortable through showing he was happy to be helping them.
Connie also told me that Syd spent seven years on the sea and this tallies with his last official sign on to ship number 165383, the Port Jackson on the 18th January 1937. The Port Jackson, a 495ft four-cylinder engine motor ship, commenced its maiden voyage from England in February and arrived in Brisbane on the 22nd March 1937. An article from the Courier-Mail described the new ship, impressed by its top speed of 17 knots and its grand interior. It could carry 12 passengers in comfort and had smoking rooms for the officers and the engineers on board. It could carry 557,000 cubic feet of refrigerated produce, including meat, butter, fruit and cheese. The ship returned to the UK with a cargo load of chilled beef at the end of March. Syd did not return with it. And that is where the trail of Syd’s merchant navy career ended, until this week.
After trawling through as many records as I could find and doing additional research to understand the merchant navy life of the 1930s, I remembered that there may have been more stories about Syd on the recordings I took of Connie. These recordings were done in 2000 and 2005 when Connie was in her late 80s and early 90s. She was still extremely clear with her memories and could recall conversations from 70 and 80 years past. I’m so fortunate to have these recordings because you don’t always realise the significance of what people tell you at the time and these small details can indeed turn out to be huge clues further down the track, once you have other pieces of the puzzle of someone’s life. And indeed, Connie’s recording turned up a revelation about Syd’s life that I had completely forgotten she had told me about.
Now it comes as no surprise to me that Jack, their more adventurous brother, is implicated in this part of Syd’s story. Once I was able to confirm, from the numbers listed on Syd’s record, of the names of the ships he sailed on, I checked the newspaper records. Indeed, it would appear that from about 1932, Syd was sailing up and down the coast of Queensland. Jack had arrived in Australia about 1929 and spent much of his time in Queensland. The brothers may have met up on occasion, when their schedules allowed. And Syd must have found time to have some shore leave during these years. For fate awaited Syd there in Brisbane. In 1937, Syd somehow got word to Jack that he needed his help. Syd had met a young woman in Brisbane and despite having never bothered with girls before, this one somehow won his heart and he fell hard for her. So hard in fact, that he risked everything to be with her. With his ship in port, Syd packed up his belongings and waited, whilst Jack got hold of a rowboat and silently rowed out to Syd’s ship in the dead of night. Syd got a rope and lowered his luggage, then himself over the side of the ship and into the rowboat, where he stole away to shore to be with his beloved, Winifred.
So, who was Winifred and why was she so special? Did Syd make it to Winifred without being caught by the authorities? As a deserter from the merchant navy, he faced criminal prosecution if caught. Stay tuned for the next chapter in Syd’s life and see if what he risked for Winifred, turned out for the best.
Syd’s ship sign on list (with immigration records in bold).
No. Sign on date Ship name Ship no. Company
1 14 February 1929 Port Napier 135175 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
August 1929 London to New York
May 1930 Auckland to New York
2 3 July 1930 Port Caroline 143790 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
3 16 December 1930 Port Caroline 143790 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
4 28 May 1931 Port Auckland 146606 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
5 8 July 1931 Port Alma 160615 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
July 1931 London to New York
6 23 January 1932 Port Nicholson 143058 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
7 1 January 1933 Port Hobart 148631 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
8 21 September 1933 Port Hobart 148631 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
9 20 April 1934 Port Hunter 146641 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
10 23 January 1935 Port Wyndham 163561 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
11 24 August 1935 Port Townsville 164519 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
October 1935 – Ship docked in Brisbane, as per newspaper records
12 1 August 1936 Tudor Star 143407 Blue Star Line
September 1936 New Westminster, BC, Canada to Seattle, USA
13 12 December 1936 Port Fremantle 149807 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
14 18 January 1937 Port Jackson 165383 Commonwealth & Dominion Port Line
March 1937 – Ship docked in Brisbane, as per newspaper records