My wife, who had been counting the wrinkles around my eyes the other day, suddenly blurted out: ‘Age doesn’t matter, James. Unless you’re a cheese.’

I thought she was trying to reassure me, until she suggested that if I was as cheesy as some of the blogs I write I’d now be so over-ripe they’d throw me out of the ship’s galley porthole.

I suppose that’s why they call a wife the better half. Mine usually gets the better of her other half, i.e. me.

It runs in the family.

Her older sister gave me one of her exceptionally piercing looks over lunch and came out with, ‘The man who is not healthy at 20, wealthy at 40, or wise at 60, will never be healthy, wealthy or wise.’

You got me there. That’s the story of my life.

Maybe I should write it down, sometime. For, believe it or not from what you’re reading here, I have been a full-time freelance journalist, broadcaster and travel writer for over twenty years.

But the first article I wrote about cruise ships was in 1963, when I started work for a Fleet Street publisher at the age of fifteen.

First lines on liners

It was a short profile of Union-Castle, whose fleet of liners and cargo ships operated between Europe and Africa from 1900 to 1977.

I first visited their City of London offices when I delivered a parcel from my editor.
Among my many other duties such as making the tea, proof-reading, dealing with all the post and issuing invoices for advertisements, I was also the office messenger.

Most of the London-based shipping lines I had dealings with then have either ceased trading or changed hands.

Oddly enough, my old office on the second floor of St Bride Institute, Bride Lane, EC4, still exists. It’s now the home of the London Press Club, the original of which I am a former member.

What struck me when I started working in the City of London in the early 1960s was how Dickensian it all seemed. In those days, the buildings were still black with soot – the fallout of London smog.

My Fleet Street colleagues used to say that London is a great city, but it would be even greater if it had a roof over it.

Jack – the ripping passenger?

Not that it would have changed my first office, which looked like something Ebenezer Scrooge would have felt at home in.

Fortunately, my first boss, Mr Norman Fosbury, was, unlike Ebenezer, a decent generous employer. He also had two very attractive giggling daughters who popped in to see him from time to time, while I sat there, shy, goggle-eyed and tongue-tied.

Talking of this Dickensian city, the other day I picked up a battered copy of Baedeker’s London and its Environs, published in 1887, the year before Jack the Ripper put the fear of God into the world at large.

Some say the Ripper avoided capture by taking a passage from London’s docks to mainland Europe.

It would have been an easy getaway for ships left London several times a week for Boulogne, Calais, Ostend, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Bremerhafen, and Hamburg. The journey took between 10 and 40 hours, depending how far you wanted to run.

Steerage cost as little as ten shillings (50 pence) for the shorter voyages.

If the Whitechapel Murderer had decided to cross the Atlantic, the average duration of a ship’s passage, usually from Liverpool to New York, was from eight to ten and a half days.

Did the Ripper escape on a ship?

In 1887, the following shipping companies provided comfortable accommodation and relatively speedy transit to North America, some of them for as little as six guineas:

Inman Line, Cunard Line, White Star Line, American Steamship Company, National Steamship Company, North German Lloyd Line, Anchor Line, Allan Line, Guion Line, State Line, Dominion Line, Monarch Line, and the Great West Steamship Line.

Passports for British travellers heading to America weren’t required: “These documents are not necessary in England, though sometimes useful in procuring delivery of registered and poste restante letters. A visa is quite needless…”

The same niceties didn’t usually apply to American travellers visiting England.

But wherever you travelled from, the only articles on which Duty was charged were spirits (you could carry a flask of this, free) and tobacco (amounts above a half pound was subject to a charge of five shillings per pound).

There was also a slight fine for contravening the law that forbid the importation of cigars in chests “fewer than 10,000”.

Ah well….I hope you will excuse this nostalgic blog. It’s just a longing, I guess, to return to the good old days when I was neither good or old. Or married.

James Leavey

Posted in Humour