Blue Funnel Line

  So what’s a shipping line doing on a dive Blog site? Considering I have never actually dived a Blue Funnel wreck, nor come across one on my travels you’d be forgiven for asking to be honest. I suppose this is every much a “voyage around my father”, Ian Jones, as it is anything else, his love for the sea and the love he managed, unknowingly, to foster in me for Steam-ships and diving too, although my dad never dived as far as I know? has indirectly led me to the last 29 years of global adventure, the excitement that has driven me to dive whenever I can and the unrelenting fascination for shipwrecks I have had for most of my life. I suppose there’s the melancholia too, I lost my dad when I was Sixteen, living in Ainsdale, very near to the sea, and long walks on the beach there in all kinds of weather, perhaps took me a little closer to him in my mind.   I know my Father was happiest in the merchant navy travelling the world, he spoke most often about Alfred Holt and the Blue Funnel Line, out of Liverpool Docks, though I know he sailed with the Glen Line a couple of times too, during what was a short, but obviously exciting career spanning Eight years from 1955 to 1963. I was born in 1960 which I know must have been a distraction as my mother, Doreen, would have had a handful looking after me, her First-Born, in the ’60’s without my Dad around for much of the time, perhaps there’s a little more than a feeling of guilt that dad only had such a small time doing what he loved best………

  I know that Blue Funnel was considered an “elite” amongst the British merchant navy of the time, the fleet itself had created it’s own “Holt Class” within the Lloyd’s register categories for design excellence, and the ships cut a dash wherever they went. I know my father was proud to serve in the “Bluey’s” as they were known (sometimes called the Welsh Navy too) and I also know that many other merchantmen were both jealous and scornful, in equal measure, of the status of the Blue Funnel Flag elite, depending on who was asked back in the day. The Line had been started by Alfred and his brother Philip Holt as The Ocean Steamship Company in 1865, announcing its formation in a circular in 1866 (which was presumably handed out around businesses and interested entrepreneurs in and around Liverpool),  following Alfred’s registering the business a whole year earlier in 1865. Every picture I have seen of Alfred and the occasional but rarer photos of his brother Philip, give the impression of Victorian gentry, rather stern, but somewhat fatherly, maybe even Grandfatherly (is that even a word?)…..perhaps that’s just me?  

 It wasn’t only my dad that was a mariner in the family, his brother (my Uncle) Keith Jones was a deck officer in the Merchant Navy too, eventually Keith got his master’s ticket but, sadly, never sailed as Captain, being grievously injured in a mugging in Liverpool around 1968, an attack he barely survived, and one that left him psychologically damaged for the rest of his life, not impaired to speak of, but sometimes deeply sullen and prone to argumentative bouts which meant he left the sea shortly after being declared “healed” by doctors.

  I include Keith here both as a matter of course, Keith being an equal in sparking my fascination with the sea and ships, both from the tales of exotic places he visited, and knew well, but also from the postcards he sent me as a child, and the myriad small coins from far away places that he gave me in a tobacco tin, with its rich and strange, exotic smell……..Keith must also have taken many of the photos I have, tiny Black and White glimpses of the past……

  This is a Blue Funnel piece primarily and I will keep it, as reasonably practical, more aligned to the Holt Line than any other, but I reserve the right to stray, occasionally, and include the wider Merchant Navy context, without which there would be fewer and lesser contributions overall. I trust that will not deeply offend anyone who actually takes the time to read these flimsy words…. 

  Some of the old Black and White photo’s are grainy, some have fared better over the years and re-produce well, as ever, it seems the more important, personal shots are the ones that have, maybe, not survived as well as I could have wished. I share them here without apology and with a certain amount of whimsy, even a little (undeserved) pride. These are the events, the people and the history that took a part of me and gave me far more than I believed possible, the trips with my Father and my brothers Mike and Barry, onto and into those ships, docked in our home town of Liverpool had an effect, one that has lasted 29 years so far and shows no sign of diminishing (or perhaps I wouldn’t be writing this) and one which has given my life something of a purpose. I have to say, my family mean far more to me than my diving, truly, however the time I have to myself, and Ellie, Lee, Lewis & Kai have been very forgiving of the hours I spend indulging my underwater adventures, is precious and was ingrained without intent by those who came before………whom I miss deeply