Marconi Veterans President 2012

Our President for 2012 is Ron Stringer, a Marconi trained Marine Wireless Officer who had many years at sea as part of the crew on various commercial ships.  He later joined The Marconi International Marine Company in a civilian capacity in Chelmsford.

The toast to the President was proposed by our chairman veteran Peter Turrall.  In his response Ron Stringer spoke about the early days of wireless at sea before outlinig his career first at sea and then in the various posts he had held after leaving the sea.

Ron’s speech can be heard by clicking on the link below.  A transcription of the speech is included below.

 

Ron Stringer speech

 

Ron Stringer’s Response to the toast

The people who were on the Titanic, the radio officers who stayed at their posts until the vessel eventually sank, they were Marconi employees, they were Radio Officers, they were employed by Marconi and put on board, with the equipment, to operate it and to maintain it but mainly they were there to send telegrams and make money for the company.

The Radio Officer was introduced when the company started in 1899 and the take up of the service was very very slow for the next few years mainly because ship owners were notoriously conservative people they looked on such expensive frills as radio as being “OK it’s alright for the big passenger ships but not for us and so the business grew very very slowly until 1912 and it 1912 there was this fatal collision of the Titanic with an iceberg and as a result of the massive loss of life that occurred then there was obviously an enquiry and the outcome of that was legislation, legislation that said that all ships must carry a radio telegraph station so that they can send telegrams ashore and alert people to distress and they should also carry a man who would operate the equipment.  Well, that was a massive boon for the equipment, for the company in that they had legislation that said you will carry our equipment and you will employ our men to operate it – fantastic!  So, the company then grew from 1912 and the role of the radio officer apart from just sending telegrams for the passengers and the master of the ship maintained the equipment their role grew to maintain other equipment because, of course, as developments went on things like depth sounders and eventually radar, direction finders all sorts of equipment was added, electronic equipment and the man on board who looked after it was the Marconi Man.

And that went on for many many years until around the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies about when I joined the company things started to go sour.  The current climate, economic climate, then started to put pressure on shipping companies to reduce costs, and they looked for ways to reduce costs and largely what happened is that they flagged their ships or registered their ships in other countries which had lower regulatory requirements than countries like the UK.  So their costs went down and they employed third world crews, crews from third world countries who had very low wages so of course it was a very negative impact on Marconi Marine’s business.  But, as part of the organisation they had set up service depots to support the ships around the world.  So we were left with a situation with a contracting market and lots and lots of expenses (and) people around the place, on ships and elsewhere so pressures on ship owners to reduce costs resulted in pressures on Marconi to reduce costs.  At the same time developments in electronics introduced all sorts of new types of communication and these new types of communication did not require a man with special skills to operate them.  And the Radio Officer and his special skills of being able to send and receive Morse suddenly became less important and eventually became redundant.  So by the time that in the nineteen eighties the satellite relay equipment was introduced whereby ships could have access to all the communication facilities in an office ashore at that time the days of the radio officer were numbered.  So, although the Radio Officer began his job, the job was created in the nineteen hundreds and expanded throughout the twentieth century, by the end of that century it had gone.  They no longer needed skilled people to work the equipment, the equipment was operable by anybody so the job disappeared; so within a hundred years the job was created, expanded and disappeared completely, sort of hero to zero in a nutshell.

But when I joined the company in 1960 I trained and qualified as a Radio Officer and was appointed to the company in Liverpool and immediately sent to a ship in Avonmouth and I thought that my life had changed drastically.  It had because within the course of a day or two I had gone from being a student to being the third Radio Officer, out of three, on a passenger liner ship and we used to take a hundred passengers from the UK to the West Indies, spend a few days there visiting various ports loading cargo and then return to the UK with passengers and several thousand tonnes of bananas.  That doesn’t seem impressive but the important bit from my personal point of view was we were treated as were the first class passengers so we ate excellent food, I had a steward who looked after me, I had pleasant company and we spent a lot of time in wonderful weather and every five weeks or so I got a week at home on leave in the UK, so life was wonderful.  Now that went on for about nine months or so.  At the end of that nine months I was deemed responsible enough to be sent away and inflicted on the world’s merchant fleet as a Radio Officer.  And suddenly things changed but still I had a steward and I was fed whatever food was fed on the ship.  I did that for about five years on various ships from a passenger cargo ship of under 1700 tonnes to a tanker of over 60,000 tonnes.  After about five or six years of that I was offered a job working ashore for Marconi Marine in their service base at South Shields on the Tyne.  That was something of a culture shock because firstly I had to find a place to live, I had to make my own bed, I had to feed myself, I had to learn the local language and generally it was something surprising plus, of course, I then got married.  That solved some of the earlier problems but caused others.

About a year or so after I left the sea I got offered a job in Chelmsford and came down here to work in the technical department of Marconi Marine.  I was part of a small team that looked after, generally its main purpose was helping with the roll-out of new products into service, but it also dealt with oddities that didn’t fit into the normal pattern and sorting out problems ships overseas or wherever they occurred.  So I got involved in a number of different things like installations on oil rigs and ports and harbours, Dover Harbour Radio, things like this where we installed what was basically marine equipment but on non-marine applications.  So we did that for a while and I got involved with special things like yachts, I was involved with the fitting of the radio on Sir Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth IV, the one in which he sailed round the world.  I also got involved in the 1968 Golden Globe round the world yacht race which was won by Robin Knox Johnston, now Sir Robin Knox Johnston and his yacht Suhaili, I fitted the radio on there.  I also fitted the radio on a less successful competitor Donald Crowhurst’s Teignmouth Electron, he was a gentleman who disappeared at sea while he was on the race.  So we did that and then I eventually got made Technical Manager, eventually became Operations Manager and that’s why I retired in 2002 so I have a fairly wide range of things mainly doing sort of problem solving tasks but one of the things I learnt at sea was it was very easy to overcomplicate things, people would look for problems where they didn’t exist and that certainly occurred when I came ashore and tried top overcomplicate things.  One thing I learnt at sea was it wasn’t necessary to do that.

On one ship I was on with an Indian crew I was friendly with the electrician, he had an Indian crewman as his mate, electrician’s mate, and this guy came from a remote village in the foothills of the Himalayas and chatting one evening to him I said to him

“Well what do you do when you are not at sea, how do you earn your living then?” Because the arrangement was that people had to compete to get to sea, they had to wait; there was a waiting list and so on

So I said “How do you earn your living?”

“Oh” he said “it’s not a problem” he said “I have a herd of goats.”

So I said “Yes, what do you do with the goats?”

“Well” he said “every day I take them into the jungle and they browse on the vegetation there.”

So I said “Oh yes, is that not a little bit risky in India, are there not any big predators and things like that around that would attack your goats?”

“Oh, that’s not a problem” he said “there are lots of leopards and some tigers but that’s not a problem.”

So I said “How come?”

So he said “I have three very good dogs.”

So I sat and I had a vision of these dogs defending the sheep and him and holding the tigers at bay and so on.

So I said “What happens then?”

So he said “When the dogs smell the tigers they bark very loud.”

So I said “Yes, and then what?”

“Then I run away very fast”

So it doesn’t mean that you have to have very complex solutions, simple ones sometimes work.

Thank you very much.