A little bit of Morse Code from my Dad

During my late father's retirement we cobbled up a morse key from a switch and battery, hooked it up to my early paving-slab sized laptop and I set him the task of sending the alphabet and then an SOS signal. Bear in mind that the SOS signal would have been repeated as long as the equipment stayed above the icy water - last men to leave the ship are Captain and Radio Operator (no mobile sets in the lifeboats in those days). Both are played at the start of the slideshow/video here - and the trawlers shown are all of the deep-sea trawlers that he spent eighteen years working on as the new-fangled "Radio Operator".

Given the shocking nastiness of the news about the Costa Corncordia cruise liner (sunk, methinks by sheer complacency and modern contempt for the sea) I was reminded of his job and working conditions. We all imagine that liners today are virtually unsinkable (hah!), I know that I have never given it a thought when I've been on the beasties. How extreme must it have been to live and work on relatively small trawlers in all weathers in the worst seas with very few of the current safety gizmos - often with borderline lunatics for Skippers?

The Hutson family is (was) a fishing family, traces of us are (were) strung up and down the English east coast.

Dad left school at fourteen, as most did but, unlike most, he had a plan... to make everyone else ignore the disability that he always ignored himself (little to no use of his left arm) - and to get to sea. He held down various jobs from being a stock-broker's runner to working for a dealer supplying radiograms and equipment - including servicing and repairs. While fiddling with radio valves during the day he took evening classes at night in Hull (commuting from Grimsby to Hull, long before the Humber Bridge was built). These jobs were deliberately near Grimsby Docks where deep-sea trawlers were gradually fitting the expensive new-fangled radio equipment - now down to the size of a small cabin full of electronics - and paying for the new-fangled radio operators. The equipment and technology had been around for ages but trawler owners are notoriously tight-fisted and radio doesn't directly catch fish! A few years at night school got Dad qualified as an operator, working his way around the docks got him his chances and his ticket - and he spent the next eighteen years sailing on what turned out to be the top Grimsby trawlers, mainly the "Football" class (all named after football teams).

Harry C Hutson on Wolverhampton Wanderers, pictured in 1957

Being Radio Operator had advantages - the equipment of the day was so large that it needed a cabin of its own, which doubled up as the operator's cabin too - luxury solo accommodation! It had its disadvantages - the aerials and gubbins were usually on top of the wheelhouse - the last place you wanted to go in a rolling trawler in high Arctic seas to de-ice or fix, one of the Operator's tasks. There were unexpected responsibilities aside from passing messages to and from the Trawler Owners and the Skipper and crew - the cut-throat nature of fishing in those days meant that everything had to be done secretly.

If the vessel found good fishing it had to alert sister ships from the same company so that they could join it - while confusing and confounding competitor's vessels. Prices for the catch depended on arriving in dock at just the right time to unload just before an auction, preferably without very many other trawlers also unloading and saturating the market. Positions and directions had to be kept secret and false trails laid - something of a problem if there was an emergency and the Radio Operator suddenly had to SOS or call for help from somewhere hundreds of miles from where everyone listening thought they were. Add to this the technicalities of hiding signals from simple signal-strength direction-finding - while also trying to track down your competitors and decode their information, just in case they'd found fish or were heading to market early... The Radio Operators were on duty 24/7 and a regular day at sea was a minimum of an "official" 18-hour shift.

Dad was so good at the whole of the job (not just the electronics but also the secrecy element) that Skippers approached and signed him on directly and he chose which vessels he worked on rather than being dictated to by the agents. No doubt this was part of the attraction - like all Hutsons he was a stubborn old git, quite prepared (as are we all) to cut off our own noses to spite anyone else's face if it so suits us. More of that in future posts! (Readers should take note that my sister of Pear Tree Log is not only of Hutson stock but also Taurean and a worryingly good match for the implied character description thereof - which is why when she breaks an ankle she drives home first and only then sees to it...).

This information exchange and trail laying (and any SOS or assistance calls) was all done using Morse Code - no fancy modern voice communication in those days. This skill with signals and secrecy led to my father's second career; working for the Ministry of Defence during the late Cold War and post-Cold War era, intercepting and listening in on the pesky communist Russians and Chinese - and blocking their signals as need be. What better preparation for covert radio operations than being someone who already did all of that while also in Arctic and Atlantic waters, bouncing around in a fishing vessel?

My dad loved his time on the trawlers and was lucky enough to leave before the government sold the industry out. He had many fantastic tales - which I will dig out and relate - and many, many horror stories, the worst of which I'm sure he kept to himself. Grimsby Docks are now a wasteland, deserted except for the occasional factory ship or car transporter. Dad shook his "double-six" in 2002 and i am incredibly glad that I got to record a little bit of him in his old role!

Bear in mind that he hadn't used a morse key for about forty years when we made the recording so E.O.E.! The second "SOS" message has a slightly more urgent tone - each operator had a style just like handwriting but that goes out of the window when your shoes start to get salty and wet...