Master mariner

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33803, 27 March 1975, Page 14

Master mariner

(By

JOHN LESLIE)

A master mariner who for the last 11 years has gone about his quietly efficient business as head orderly at Coronation Hospital will retire this month. He is Captain T. H. (“Tom”) Roberts, who must be known to hundreds of patients, past and present. As he will be 65 in July, Captain Roberts has decided to retire to a home already purchased at Blackball. But how would a man who has been in command at sea end up as a head orderly in a large Christchurch hospital? The story begins in 1927, when Captain Roberts began seafaring as a cadet aboard the Pacific Steam Navigation Company’s cargo vessel Loriga. In 1931, after obtaining his second mate’s certificate," shipping was in the doldrums. Older seafarers may recall the great Pacific Steam Navigation Companyliners Orduna, Oropesa, and Orbita laid up at Liverpool. Work at sea was hard to come by, and Captain Roberts for six depressing years worked mostly ashore. He was an assistant groundsman at a cricket club. He sold vacuum cleaners. He even went back to sea briefly in the liner Orduna as a quartermaster. but his company frowned on this. But in 1937, Captain Roberts obtained a post as fourth officer aboard the company’s passenger liner Reina del Pacifice. Older seafarers may also remember this lovely white-

hulled, twin-funnelled liner in the dreary Liverpool dockland. But war was approaching, and Captain Roberts, as a serving officer, was moved round considerably. He , served with Shell tankers and . also with the EUerman Hall-I Line, in whose employ he I was torpedoed aboard the City of Manila in the North | Atlantic. He was later tor-i, pedoed aboard the Union , Castle liner Windsor Castle, , also in the North Atlantic.;, Captain Roberts served ini; salvage craft, and was ath one period a master in opera-L tions off the Normandy ‘ coast. . After the war, he was: 1 master of a salvage vessel in ' the Far East. He also com- 1 manded for a time a Glasgow ■ tramp. Captain Roberts, like ! many seafarers, had had. his 1 fill of glittering South Ameri- ’ can cities, the Far East, and other places — and in 1964 1 decided to make a complete • new life, setting off with his ; wife for New Zealand, far ’ from it ail. The member of Parliament i for Lyttelton (Mr T. M. Me- ; Guigan), who originally j appointed Captain Roberts to his present post, when the former was senior administration officer of Princess Mar- J garet Hospital, said to the writer recently: “Tom Rob- < erts has run a ‘tight’ ship.” ( Mr McGuigan, as a former < wartime, naval reserve officer himself, was paying a nautical compliment. He said that ( a hospital was like a ship, ( disciplined and operative 24 hours a day. The house mana-? ger at Coronation Hospital!