LITMIR.BIZ

       FOREWORD BY PROFESSOR TONY LANE

      At last a book with an original slant on the men and, yes, the women, of commercial sail’s last years. For more than one hundred years, scores of books have been written by seafarers recalling and commenting on their experiences of working and living aboard square-rigged sailing ships. All were written from memory, some helpfully jogged by saved letters and ‘telegraphic’ diaries/logs. A great deal of this genre, very popular from the early twentieth century and into the 1960s, makes for fascinating and sometimes exciting reading. I’ve been collecting and reading these books for forty years and I’m persuaded of their essential authenticity by the sheer repetitiveness of accounts telling of deaths, desertions and unrelenting danger; appalling food, low wages, and long hours; brutality not always leavened by solidarities, acts of bravery and skill, and occasional kindnesses. Probably the best of these accounts is David Bone’s, The Brassbounder first published in 1910 and thereafter more often than not in print. It certainly has literary flair but like the more prosaic authors, Bone has little to say about the family circumstances of either themselves or their shipmates. Now, however, thanks to Jack Isbester, readers have a unique opportunity to see beyond the rigours of daily life in sail (without ever losing sight of them) and find in satisfying detail something of the social origins and familial life of one of the last shipmasters in sail. In this book there is a consistent interrogation of a life at sea intimately interwoven with family relationships despite lengthy separations and scattered, infrequent and unreliable means of ‘keeping in touch’.

      The story begins in, and often returns to, the Shetlands, the birthplace of Jack’s grandfather, Captain John (‘Jack’) Isbester. His family’s daily life and broader social and economic circumstances have been sieved by the author’s unremitting diligence in digging down and around in the detail of Shetland’s self-supporting agriculture and its fishing industry where Captain ‘Jack’ learned to be a seaman. All of this has been additionally informed by the author’s family’s passion for keeping letters and documents. It’s an extremely rare thing to be able to read letters passing between a shipmaster, his wife and other family members. Experienced readers of sailing ship days will find themselves in familiar territory when the story goes to sea. A broad reading will have revealed stories of shipwreck through grounding, ships consumed by fire with crews thereafter making lengthy passages in lifeboats, rescues of crews who have experienced the foregoing, a capsized ship drowning its master, its crew saved in a masterpiece of a rescue. But readers won’t have found all this in one career as they will here. There is so very much to admire in this book apart from what I see as the real prize – the letters exchanged between Captain ‘Jack’ and his wife, Susie, and her letters home when she’s at sea with her husband. Then there’s another bonus – photographs which are just plain wonderful as also are the author’s explanatory diagrams and ‘user friendly’ maps. Here is a biography written as a splendidly rounded social history of a late 19th century Shetlander.

      Tony Lane

      Professor Emeritus

      Cardiff University School of Social Science