The Painter's Stage
Another day, another learning experience.
HMS Glamorgan was alongside in La Spezia, one of the major Italian naval bases, and there were several Italian warships secured nearby. Their crews were naturally interested in the visiting British destroyer, and we were equally interested in what was happening around us.
At some point, while on the quarterdeck, the Buffer noticed an Italian frigate being worked on across the harbour. The ship was clearly receiving attention, and something about it appears to have caught his professional eye.
The Buffer was the Chief Petty Officer responsible for the upper deck. If something looked as though it needed doing, it generally came under his attention. On this occasion, the object of his attention was the Type 965 "double bedstead" radar aerial mounted on Glamorgan's mainmast.
The Buffer asked the Petty Officer on the quarterdeck if anyone was available.
Unfortunately, Geoff Dixon and I were visible.
We were not, in our own opinion, doing nothing. We were carefully stowing a three-inch hawser down through a hatch into the laundry flat. More importantly, it was not our normal Part of Ship. The mast belonged to another area, and we were quite certain that there were proper people responsible for it.
None of this altered the situation.
From the Buffer's point of view, there were two TAS ratings available, an upper-deck job requiring attention and a ship that needed maintaining. That was all the justification required.
We were sent to obtain a painter's stage, collect paint from the Buffer's Mate and get on with the job.
The Radar Plot ratings were not impressed when we arrived fully equipped and announced what we were about to do.
They looked at us as though we had somehow lost the plot.
"We did it last week," one of them told us.
Dixie and I looked at each other. This seemed like excellent news. We reported back across the distance to the quarterdeck that the job had already been completed.
The Buffer's response came back.
"Then do the bugger again, and get on with it."
The matter was closed.
We collected the equipment and made our way to the mast area. Nearby was the Artificers' workshop, their own little kaboosh, containing benches, vices, tools and all the things required for their particular work. Like most such spaces aboard ship, it was very much their own territory. You had a reason to visit, you knocked, and you entered.
The hatch giving access to the mast was open. I had never had reason to enter that part of the ship before, and looking inside produced a surprise.
The mast was hollow.
Inside was a ladder that appeared to run all the way upwards until it reached another, smaller hatch above. It looked perfectly obvious that the painter's stage should be taken up inside.
Dixie looked at me.
"What the fuck are you doing?"
I explained.
He pointed at the stage.
"We go up there. That stays down here."
It took a moment for the obvious to become obvious.
The stage was not going up inside the mast. We were.
Dixie climbed first, carrying the rope required to haul up the equipment afterwards, muttering something about idiots. When he reached the top hatch, he opened it and disappeared from view.
There was some shouting.
I could not see him clearly and could not hear everything he said, but eventually I made out:
"Outside, you dick!"
So I went outside.
I looked up.
It seemed a very long way.
There was Dixie, hanging over the edge, looking down at me.
Only then did I understand what was happening.
The painter's stage was to be hauled up the outside of the mast, the paint pots and equipment raised afterwards, and then we were to lower ourselves down from the top.
It was not that I did not know how painter's stages worked. Seamanship training had covered their use. Normally, however, the stage would be rigged at deck level and then lowered over the side or down to wherever the work was required.
This was different.
The first part involved climbing fifty feet into the air and then deliberately stepping outside the mast onto a wooden plank suspended by ropes.
Dixie appeared completely comfortable with the arrangement.
I was less convinced.
He was a hard-nosed Cumbrian from Whitehaven who did not appear to recognise that the situation might require further consideration. To him, it was another job. To me, it was the first time I had sat on a painter's stage hanging from the top of a destroyer's mainmast.
At HMS Ganges I had climbed the parade ground mast, but that had been training ashore. Even then, the rope safety net below was only useful up to a point. If it had rained, the netting could sag alarmingly close to the tarmac before anyone decided conditions were bad enough to close the mast.
This was something else entirely.
There was no safety net. There was no harness. There was simply the stage, the ropes, the paint equipment and two sailors who had a job to complete.
The Type 965 aerial above us was reassuringly stationary, and that was probably the best news available at the time.
Paint pots were attached to improvised heaving lines tied through their handles. Brushes and rollers had to be managed while the stage moved. The lower we descended, the longer the swing became, with Dixie apparently finding this far more entertaining than I did.
He sat at his end of the board, calm and confident.
I concentrated on not joining him as an unplanned visitor to the harbour.
Very little painting was actually accomplished with great speed or efficiency. Controlling the stage, the equipment and ourselves was rather more complicated than it appeared from the deck below. Nevertheless, eventually the job was done, the stage was recovered and the Buffer seemed satisfied.
Looking back, the remarkable thing was not that we had painted the mast. It was that nobody aboard considered the method particularly remarkable.
For those who had done it before, it was simply another maintenance task. Training, experience and the confidence of shipmates combined to make something that appeared alarming to a newcomer seem entirely routine to everyone else.
That was how much of naval life worked. The unusual became ordinary very quickly, especially when there was a job waiting to be finished.
La Spezia part 2 - Part of Ship
Primary source: RN-008
RN-E-141
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