Every year our new home the Selco Phillips SS had to sail to a designated port to undergo a coastguard inspection and carry out any repairs needed. One such journey saw us sailing out of the North Sea up the river Elbe to Hamburg. Our berth in the shipyard of Bluhm and Voss was a tight turn and as we entered our captains voice came over the tannoy. ”Starboard side out of bounds”. To a man we rushed to the starboard side and to our horror we saw a very large world war two allied bomb clasped in the jaws of a dredger that had been deepening the berth next to ours. Our German dock mooring crew were scurrying away as fast as their legs would carry them. From our vantage point 100 feet above the dock, we quickly realised our only way off the vessel would be straight up!

It did not need much imagination to see the press headlines in the following days papers. “American flag vessel, built in Hiroshima Japan, British crew, blown up in Hamburg shipyard by allied bomb.“ It took the German bomb squad six very tense hours to defuse and make safe before we could be released to go on our complementary shipyard bus trip around the famous red-light district of Hamburg, The Reeperbahn. We boarded our bus and our young lady guide took us on the grand tour of its entertainments. She took us to a dance hall where the young ladies were waiting eagerly to dance and tell us that for 40 marks “extras” could be had upstairs, I heard one Yorkshire lad near me tell his dancing partner “Ee lass I can’t do that I'm on bus trip”. Having survived the Allied bomb and the brothels we went on to to have 12 very enjoyable weeks working in Hamburg. As we were getting ready to leave our German dockmaster went missing, we put our divers in the dock in order to check if he had come to harm and to our surprise, recovered him and two other bodies. Our sense of security about Hamburg was very badly dented.