He took a deep breath and braced himself, his legs spread to counter the steady roll of the ship. Averting his eyes, he grasped the handle of the heavy iron poleaxe and brought its pointed blade down with all his strength on top of the pig’s head. The squeals ended abruptly as it slumped to the deck but, as the handbook instructed, he worked the end of the poleaxe around inside the hole, destroying the brain.
He opened up the gullet with his knife and severed the arteries on either side of the neck, catching the blood in a bucket as it poured from the dying beast. Clouds of steam filled the cold air, carrying the hot, sweet, sickly smell of blood.
Tom gagged and had to retreat for a few lungfuls of the fresher air at the foot of the companionway before he could return to complete the task. He turned the pig on to its back and cut off its head and trotters. Forcing himself to concentrate only on the next cut to be made, he sawed through the breastbone, then slit the pig from stomach to tail. A slippery tide of entrails spilled on to the stained wooden deck. Gritting his teeth, he pushed his hands inside the carcass and pulled out the remainder of them, separated out the kidneys and liver and removed the gall bladder. Next came the heart and lungs. Then he washed out the carcass with buckets of sea-water, and began to joint it, turning it from a still-recognizable body into meat.
He was never to find slaughtering and butchering animals easy, but it was his job, and he taught himself to do it as skilfully as he passed a reef earing or furled a sail.
While the captain feasted on fresh pork that night, Tom and the rest of the crew ate ‘salt-horse’ — rank, unidentifiable meat pickled in brine. Like many other cheapskate captains and ship-owners, Cowling had bought it from contractors who sold on barrels of salt beef bought from the naval victualling yards and condemned as unfit for Royal Navy use.
The unpleasantness of some of his work was only one of Tom’s problems on board the Lady Rodney. She was the worst ship he had ever sailed on, undermanned, underprovisioned and with a drunken tyrant for a captain, who used his fists and floggings with a knotted rope to reinforce his orders. Tom vowed that if ever he was master of his own ship, he would not treat his men the way Captain Cowling had treated them.
Tom and another hand, Frank Williams, jumped ship in St Michael’s in the Azores and found passage home on a schooner bound for Hull. After that he served under better captains and on better schooners, but he never forgot the misery of the voyage on the Lady Rodney, or the vow he made to himself.
He sailed with merchant ships — the Jane Ann, the Annie Grant and the Bohemian Girl — to Spain, Portugal, Genoa and Newfoundland, but his heart was in yacht-racing. At the start of every season he returned to England and found a berth on a yacht, first with his father and then on his own account. For fourteen years it was his life and he built a reputation as a solid, dependable, brave character. One captain under whom he served described him as ‘a sober, steady, respectable, God-fearing man and a smarter or pluckier one never sailed a boat’.
In 1873 he was able seaman on Prince Albert of Monaco’s yacht, Pleiad, sailing out of Torquay. The following year he was promoted to boatswain on a forty-ton cutter, the Mosquito, out of Greenock, and by the next season he had become mate on the Fiona, a cutter owned by Mr Boutcher. His crew did well for him, winning over £500 in prize money that season, but he was a generous man, and more than once divided the prize between the crew.
In 1876 Tom was given his first command as a sailing master, the Camelia, after Captain Mackie of the Condor spoke to the owner on his behalf. She was a small boat out of Greenock, rated at just five tons against the Fiona’s eighty, but he had a good season with her that year and a better one the next, when he was first across the line fifteen times, earning over £200 in prizes, though the owner lost half of that in a private match with the owner of a rival yacht.
Tom was master of Tom Kirk’s ten-tonner, the Volga, over the next two years, winning eight races. He moved to the Reindeer, a 100-tonner owned by Iain MacNab for two years after that, and then captained the Nexie for Mr Addie until the owner’s death in 1883.
By this time Tom was well known amongst the yachting fraternity from Southampton to the Clyde, and was considered ‘one of the smartest men who ever sailed a small yacht’.
He had met Philippa Julian, the mistress of Plymstock Board School, while he was sailing at the Plymouth Regatta in 1877. She was taller than Tom’s five foot three and was seven years older than him. She was the daughter of a tin miner, William Julian, but he had died when she was young and she had been raised by her uncle, Richard, a schoolteacher. She named him as her father on the marriage certificate.
Tom and Philippa married at St Saviour’s the day after Boxing Day 1877, and lived at the school house in Oreston until she became mistress of Newtown Board School in Sutton, Surrey, in 1880. They had three children, Philippa, born just before they moved to Surrey, Winifred, born in 1881, and Julian in 1883.
Although there was no shortage of demand for Tom’s services as a sailing master during the season, winter work was harder to find and often entailed long absences from home on overseas voyages. His lack of formal qualifications was no obstacle to employment on racing yachts, where experience, seamanship and, above all, the ability to get across the line ahead of your rivals were the only qualifications necessary.
When Tom first went to sea, merchant ships had taken a similarly relaxed view of qualifications. Custom and practice, not the law, ruled almost every aspect of life on board ship. The way to acquire a skill was to learn it at sea, and promotion was by merit, default or sheer necessity. You became an able seaman, a boatswain or a mate because you had shown yourself a steady, reliable hand, and you learned the trade as you went along.
Ship-owners and captains still remained free to maintain a near-feudal rule over their wooden estates, but from the middle of the nineteenth century, government regulation had begun to intrude on other aspects of shipboard life. The law now required senior officers responsible for the navigation of a British ship to hold certificates of efficiency. Having secured a second mate’s certificate, an officer had to serve at least a year at sea before his first mate’s examination, and then a further two years before taking his master’s certificate.
With Philippa’s encouragement, Tom passed his mate’s certificate. His qualification of ‘only mate’ allowed him to skipper small yachts but he needed more service on large ships and additional qualifications if he was to secure further promotion.
He was already turning away from the sea, however, anxious to find secure work on land that would both enable him to spend more time with his growing family and allow Philippa to give up her own employment. In partnership with another man, he set up a greengrocery business in Sutton. He hoped to retire from the sea altogether, as soon as it was established, but while he was away at sea, his partner took every penny from the business and disappeared. Tom could find no trace of him or his money; it was said that he had emigrated to the colonies.
Philippa’s aunt, Mrs Pettigrew, was in business in a small way as a tent-maker in Sydney, and when she heard of their misfortunes, she wrote offering to take in Tom as a partner, with a view to expanding the business to include sailmaking and yacht chandlery.