The winds are mad, they know not whence they come, nor whither they would go,” wrote the 17th-century scholar Robert Burton, “and those men are maddest of all that go to sea.”
But Robert Burton lived in the closed world of Oxford which he never managed to leave, and Len Wilson grew up in the town of Stromness, at the northern entrance to Scapa Flow where the great ships lay in wartime, and which for more than two centuries was the Atlantic port for the Hudson’s Bay Company ships taking men and supplies to Canada; and there was a long seagoing tradition in his family and indeed in the small island of Graemsay where they came from.
At the age of six months he was being taken across there on his grandfather’s yole, and by the time he was three he was standing at the tiller of his father’s boat. He got some good advice from his uncle Charlie, a Master Mariner himself.
If you must go to sea, then go as a Radio Officer. That way you’ll easily get a shore job when you’re ready for it.”
Storytellers and craftsmen
And there is another fine tradition in Len’s family, a keen eye for the world about them and a great ability to tell a story.
They are often craftsmen, a valued skill on a small island, and Len himself in recent years has taken up his father’s interest in making ships in bottles. Len is a natural storyteller, crafting together a tale as well as he can build a boat (another part of his work experience over the years), with warmth and humour and a sheer delight in the people and places that he encounters along the way.
So off he goes at the age of sixteen to Leith Nautical College to learn about the theory and practice of radio and radar and the use of Morse code, and then comes the moment when he sits in the Marconi depot at East Ham on the Thames, until the message comes through a loudspeaker: “We’re sending you to join the Orient liner R.M.S. Orion as 4th Radio Officer. She’s a 23,000 ton passenger ship sailing for Australia, New Zealand and across the Pacific to Canada and the States.”
And then we are in a bygone world, where each officer takes the head of a table in the First Class dining saloon, and Len finds himself in cummerbund and dinner jacket, amidst pink gin and fine wine, and caviar (“a disappointment”) and anchovies that he did develop a taste for: “After all, I was brought up on salt fish.”
The news for the passengers
One of the radio officer’s duties is to gather and type up reports for an on-board daily newspaper for the passengers, with essential news priorities: “the cricket scores, football results and the stock market, in that order.”
He sees Cape Town and Table Mountain, Sydney and Perth, Fiji and Hawaii, and feels that for his next ship he would prefer something different, and is allocated to a tramp steamer, the Marsdale, carrying general cargo for Khorramshahr in Iran.
And best of all … “Well, there wasn’t a uniform in sight! The Mate wore a battered old trilby with the brim turned down and the Old Man went about in a striped shirt and grey trousers with braces.”
To Murmansk and to Calabar
The stories flow, the ships sail on – steamers with cargoes for Venezuela and West Africa, tankers with oil for the East, a Greek ship sailing under the Liberian flag, loading coal in Communist Poland for Karachi.
There is a journey to Murmansk to get timber for Leith, at a time when the Cold War was at its height, and they are welcomed at the Seaman’s Club where Robert Burns bicentenary stamps are on sale. In Calabar he sees the grave of the Orcadian nurse Margaret Graham, and finds that the local Church of Scotland missionary knew another man who worked as a missionary there – a Graemsay man, Harry Mowat.
He looks back and reflects that it was just four years, but what a wonderful array of stories and images have come from them – “from the high Arctic to the South Sea Islands and so many places in between, covering a quarter of a million miles by the time I was twenty-two and crossing the equator ten times. More important, I learned to live and work with so many different nationalities.”
Reading this book is like spending an evening in Len’s company or setting off with him on an island outing – so sit back and enjoy the opportunity!
First published in The Orcadian of 4 September 2025. Barques, Sparks and Sharks is published by Orkneyology Press at £12.99 and is available directly from the publishers or from bookshops.
