I am delighted to see that my fellow World Maritime University board member and crewing agency head, Doris Ho is making good progress with her campaign to get seafarers access to wifi while they are stuck aboard their vessels in ports.
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The week before I joined my first ship, there was an encouraging headline in the local paper.
“Seafarers the scum of the earth, says judge”. He was, if I recall, dealing with the aftermath of what appeared to me a low-level riot in Southampton, with a Cunarder’s crew celebrating in an unrestrained fashion, in the course of which part of the city was wrecked.
Well, that was more than a half century ago, but it often seems that in a world even more dependent upon shipping for its food, fuel and fashionable consumer goods, the seafarers does not appear to have greatly advanced up the social scale.
Nobody knows any seafarers, so ships might be manned by Martians for all they believe. If they did, or if they had some inkling…
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There was once a famously mean British shipowner, who, when shown the plans of his new vessel, seized a pen from his naval architect and with a few strokes, inserted six of the officers’ cabins into the space denoted on the plan as “officers’ recreation room”.
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Sir Robert Coleman, who once ran the transport directorate in Brussels and now monitors the EU for BIMCO, is to head up a taskforce to find solutions to the regional crisis facing maritime recruitment. It is one of those problems which sounds a lot easier to solve than it really is, once the full scale of the problem is revealed.
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