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IN THE NEWS
Notes and Comment
Only a few weeks ago we happened to see the gold
Glencoe leaving port and looked on her well- remembered lines with
nostalgic recollection. Now we hear she is coming off the coastal
service about 55 years of faithful duty, destined presumably for the
scrap heap. It seems a harsh fate for a good ship. Yes as we think back
on the years when the Glencoe was often our home, may be it wasn’t the
ship at all but the men who sailed her. Not that we wish to belittle the
Glencoe. Far from it. We know almost every inch of her and she was home
to us long enough to form a real attachment. But we have even more
affectionate memories of the officers who made her a companionable ship.
Captain Arch Blandford was her master when we boarded
her for the first time. His mate was his son, Max, long since a captain
in his own right. Captain Arch was a fine figure of a man with a fierce
exterior that concealed a heart of gold. We got to know him very well on
that first voyage because it was the slowest trip either of us had ever
made. It happened in the spring of 1923.
We had been waiting to go up the south coast but that
year the ice came in for the first time in about thirty-five years. The
coast was blocked. Placentia Bay was jammed. The Glencoe had been holed
up for weeks in Argentia. Then one day about noon a telephone call came
from Herb Russell of the Railway. If you want to make the Glencoe, he
said, you will have to get out on the express at one o’clock. We rushed
home, packed, had a hasty lunch and made the train. At Argentia, the
Glencoe was ready to sail. We moved out into the bay and a little off
course to bring much-needed supplies to the people of Red Island. They
had run out of tobacco weeks ago and we distributed most of our store of
cigarettes to eager lads who came aboard. Then we left for Marystown and
got there more than a week later.
There were two other passengers, just three of us
with the captain and crew. We played forty-fives twice a day with the
captain, after the midday and evening meals- four hours of forty-fives a
day. We wandered down below to the mess room at night where Jim Pike,
the chief engineer, who was later to die in the engine room of the
Caribou on her last voyage, halted every now and then in the buttering
of toast to splay a cockroach navigating a nearby pipe. We played
cribbage. We listened to yarns of the sea. We forgot we were marooned in
Placentia Bay. Each day, relieve the monotony, Captain Archie [sic]
would start up the engines and do a little butting at the thick ice
which had rafted up to the rails. The ship would make a foot or two, no
more. And then came a northwest blow that pushed the ice seawards and
carried our helpless ship with it. Not until Burin was in sight did the
ice open and let us through and quite a spectacle the Glencoe must have
been as. With water pouring out of myriad small holes in her bows, she
tied up at the wharf.
That trip began an intimate acquaintance. Later, on a
bright sunny morning in May, we sailed on the Glencoe up the narrow
passage beyond Zois [sic] Island to St. Alban’s in Bay d’Espoir, a
lovely trip on a grand ship. From the bridge of the Glencoe we caught
our first glimpse of famous south coast harbours and coves. Rencontre
West, Harbour Brenton, Gaultois and Hermitage, Cape la Hune and
Francois, Burgeo, Ramea and Rose Blance. We have clung to the rails as
she pitched and tossed in boiling seas and straddled a rail as she
sailed steady as a rock, through calm seas. We were on her when only two
other passengers were with us. We have traveled on her [when] she
carried 150 passengers in excess of her accommodation [sic] and were
glad to move from our berth in a stuffy four-berth cabin to sleep on the
settee that was set in the wall in the chief engineer’s little cabin.
Her officers were grant [sic] fellows and the people
who traveled on her in those times were fine companies. They have a
vitality to the ship that endowed her with a personality and they
created a vast store of memories that range from sardines and toast in
the messroom to wonderful Newfoundland stories told to the passing of a
bottle of St. Pierre red-eye in somebody’s cabin. They include the
insistent cockroaches, the captain’s dog, the cook’s efforts to alter a
monotonous diet during the long drift across Placentia Bay and a host of
lobster broils in Fortune Bay. She was one of a number of good ships
that we recall from pleasant traveling experiences in the early
twenties, the good old Portia, the Home, and the Argyle among them. But
we remember the Glencoe best and so will may others who traveled the
south coast in those happy times. Those of us who remain will feel a
pang of real regret when she comes to the end of her long tout of duty.
The Daily News
January 31, 1956
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