Retired seaman recalls a colourful working life
Jeff Williams with his ‘handpainted on glass’ picture of the SS Waverley, the earliest item he remembers from his parents’ household. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
Living up the Waitui Valley off the Upper Takaka-Cobb Road, 81-year-old Jeffrey (Jeff) Williams couldn’t have chosen a place much further from the sea in Golden Bay. Yet virtually his whole 46-year working life was spent upon the waves.
He was born in his parents’ house around the port in Nelson, the youngest of eight children. His father was Captain George Williams, who owned two small trading vessels called Comet and Felicity, part of the region’s so-called “mosquito fleet”.
“No wonder I went to sea; it was in my blood. Every one of my brothers served at sea at one time or another,” says Jeff.
His working career began when he left school at age 12, starting a shop boy in the haberdashery department of McKays, which later became H & J Smith. But just before his 14th birthday, he got a job as engine room boy on the Portland, a 22m coastal scow built in 1901 by George Nicol of Auckland. Unlike most of the other scows, which were painted grey and white, this one was green, which earned it the nickname of “green pea”. Her top speed under power was around five knots, so she voyaged mostly by sail.
Jeff’s very first voyage was to Puponga to pick up coal for the Nelson Powerhouse, a regular run, but the Portland worked anywhere between Westhaven (Whanganui) Inlet, Wellington, D’Urville Island and the Marlborough Sounds. After six months Jeff became a deck hand. He has strong memories of sailing into Westhaven Inlet, where they’d pick up sawn timber or coal, loading it on from the wharf that once existed by the Mangarakau River bridge, or another, below the Te Hapu hill, that was connected back along the mudflats by a tramway. Getting back over the bar at the harbour entrance was often tricky, he recalls: “Once, we hit it, tearing off the timber sheathing on the bow and immediately started taking on water. As we were motoring up past Farewell Spit, the engine room flooded and pumps stopped working, so we were forced to sail it onto the beach at Totaranui where we stayed at the homestead while we hand-pumped the boat out and patched it up so we could continue to Nelson.”
After the Portland, work on a string of small ships followed, including the Pakura and the old Arahura, the first overnight ferry of that name that sailed between Nelson and Wellington. The last year of WW2 saw Jeff sail to Canada and the States to work on Liberty cargo ships, fortunately not getting torpedoed in the process. “Ships were going down everywhere. One boy from Liverpool I met got torpedoed twice in the same day, on his 16th birthday. First he got picked up from the water after his ship went down, then his rescue ship got it. A lot of seamen who got hammered would never sleep down below again.”
Jeff helped sail the Maori up to China where it had been sold as a ferry, but got caught in Shanghai for six weeks when the Communist revolution swept through that country. Back in New Zealand there was a further succession of ships and memorable incidents, like in the 1950s when Jeff came in on the Holmburn to the Onekaka Wharf to pick up a load of dolomite to take to Onehunga.
“The weather was terrible and it was late at night, so we thought it best to anchor off until the morning. But when we woke up and looked out, a large part of the wharf had been just washed away.”
Jeff later served on tankers working the Taranaki oil rigs, pulp and paper boats that sailed between Tauranga and Australia, even the interisland ferries, and became quartermaster on the Rangitira. When the Wahine went down he was serving on the Aramoana, although it was his time off.
“The roof had blown off my house at Porirua, so once I secured a cover over that, I raced down to help out, getting on a small launch owned by Victoria University. Shocking conditions it was, but we picked up five survivors from the water that day. It seemed like there were bodies floating all around us.”
Jeff retired at age 60, his last ship being the Golden Bay, which sailed out of Tarakohe. “My first voyage was into Golden Bay and my last was out of the place. After my wife passed away I came here to live, first at Totara Avenue, then up by Barrons Flat.”
Like his parents, Jeff had eight children, the youngest being Delys Harwood, whom he has now moved to be closer to.
“After 46 years at sea, I’ve seen a lot of changes, and I would never have swapped my life for anything.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
