THE MERCHANT NAVY
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—I fully expected that my condemnation of the appalling conditions at sea would provoke the hostility of those who would prefer that the public be kept ignorant of them. I am, therefore, not surprised to read the ingenious and I believe futile effort of Mr. Livingstone Holmes to vitiate my case by what purports to be a categorical denial of the ten points I made last week.
Briefly reviewing his points of " denial " : I repeat that manning has in many cases been reduced to the barest legal minimum. That allowances and crew stores can be and are being cut down both in quality and quantity to the absolute legal minimum. That foreign and coloured labour is being in- creasingly used. I never said the British flag could be trans- ferred to any vessel. During 1931 alone, Britain sold at cut crisis prices 127 ships, 400,187 gross tons—the largest quantity sold by any country in the world, many of the sales being to foreigners. I withdraw nothing about the financial misdemeanours of British shipowners. Lord Runciman, the shipowner, has himself denounced them. Their orgies of overcapitalization are a byword. It is still pertinent to ask what they did with the many hundreds of millions of War- made profits. The general conditions of service, the long hours, bad food and often fetid, foul and overcrowded crew's living quarters in our Merchant Navy are facts which more than one medical officer of health has denounced. I repeat my condemnation of these conditions, which the Board of Trade stands indicted for countenancing.
In his final paragraph Mr. Livingstone Holmes says I am not writing what I know, and am the tool of other interests who will not come out into the open. I am doing this purely on my own bat, quite independently, in connexion or on behalf of no political or other society. I stand to gain nothing and lose everything by this correspondence, which I ent&ed only because life in a seaport town (where 13 per cent. of alt seamen are living below the poverty line) and actual experience in ship- ping, both ashore and afloat, have filled me with intense anger at the shameful conditions at sea and the policy of shipowners responsible for them.—I am, Sir, &c.,
[This correspondence is closed.—Ed. The Spectator.]
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