The S. S. Uganda Cruise 1 Sailing Off

Tweet

This diary was written forty years after the events described, so inevitably, details are forgotten, and some events may happen out of sequence. Even the exact dates of sailing and arriving home were lost on me, but I got some useful information from Uganda cruise correspondents online and pinned down the dates accurately. I was on Cruise 778. My adventures occurred between 14th June 1977 and the 23rd June 1977. We had just celebrated the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in England, and the Sex Pistols were all we talked about for weeks. We even sang their Friggin’ In The Riggin’ version of The Good Ship Venus on the cruise. Introduction In 1977 My School, Moston Brook High School For Boys in Manchester, England, gave me a golden once in a lifetime opportunity to participate in an educational cruise around the Baltic Sea. Initially, the party of twenty from our school had been booked for a Spanish Mediterranean Cruise on the same ship, the S. S. Uganda but that had been cancelled for some reason or other. Such cruises were heavily subsidised by education committees and school funds to make them cheaper for educational groups. My Father, as a leading activist in the School PTA had helped champion our school through the red tape required for getting one organised. It was to be my first trip abroad. I was fifteen years old. 10th June 1977 Sailing Off We travelled in the school mini bus to Sunderland, in good spirits. It was a cloudy bleak day in England. The Uganda, my home for the next fortnight, was huge and bright white with a vast black funnel. There is a picture of her below. I was disappointed that we had no individual passports. We were on special boarding cards presented by the cruise organisers. I just had a small card with my boarding details and a photo of myself on it. The other difference between this and more traditional tourist cruises was that educational students had a communal dormitory rather than private cabins. We were strictly banned from the main paying tourist areas, though like most students, I would ignore that rule throughout my time at sea. It was just a case of taking our student badges off and blending in, hoping that no teachers spotted us mingling with the wealthier tourists on board. We shared our rather dark and gloomy looking dormitory with about thirty lads from a school in Edinburgh. Girls accompanied them from their school but they understandably had a separate dormitory. Moston Brook was a School exclusively for boys, so sexual relationships seemed unlikely to me. I was mistaken. Before the cruise ended, I would be in love for the fiat time, but I was destined to mess that up badly. . In the self-service ship restaurant there was plenty of choice, but every diner was encouraged to eat grapefruits or oranges, presumably as a traditional way of warding off scurvy. After the meal, which we ate while the passengers were still boarding the ship, we were soon on deck to watch the ship casting off. I saw a broken hawser line snap sharply into the quayside, chipping concrete away and making two dock workers step back quickly for safety. The amount of tension in those cables was astonishing. For the students, there was regular evening entertainment, A disco, with soft drinks only officially allowed, ran until about ten thirty each night at sea. The DJ played virtually the same tracks every night. When Rod Stewart, sang Sailing, you knew that it was time to go to bed. Nothing more would follow that. Initial sailing was calm, but gradually as we moved out of sight of land, the decks began to sway and stomachs churned as if we were in cars going over speed bumps. At first, we thought it was amusing, but gradually, it became more and more unpleasant. We had bunk beds in the Dormitory. I was on a top bunk. It was in the night that our school bullies went on the rampage, jumping out of bed to thrash each lad in turn as we were wrapped in our blankets. I knew that my turn was coming, and the bully walked up, but the ship lurched and he punched the iron bedstead instead of me, seriously hurting his hand in the process. He gave me no more trouble after that, though he had several, often brutal fights with the main bully from the Edinburgh school group. Occasionally a member of the crew, who was assigned to keep an eye on the dormitories, looked in on us. He often shouted like an army Sergeant Major through the doors for everyone to quieten down. This often woke up those of us who had been asleep despite any remaining rowdiness in the dorm. As the night wore on the North Sea was getting increasingly choppy… I went to the toilets outside the dormitory, and out of curiosity, I decided to walk up on deck to see what the sea was like. It was pitch dark outside, and I only felt the freezing wall of water pour over me as a wave rolled up the deck. I sloshed back to my bed, cold and wet. Everyone laughed. Someone asked if I had been for a swim. I groaned and got changed into some clothes that I decided were now my dry pyjamas, and went back to bed. Arthur Chappell