Now Press Officer for the Oban Lifeboat, Patrick Maclean (‘Pat’ to his long-time lifeboating colleagues)  is something of a walking Tardis – a cultural time traveller with a foot in many places and with several lives behind him and before him.

A man born to the sea, he has spanned the world on it, professionally and for fun – a man for all seas indeed.

There is, though, a place amid home waters that has shaped him into who he is, highly competent, self-reliant, quietly confident, authoritative and rooted in a culture many envy and few know.

That place, with its culture, is the Isle of Raasay.

Raasay and the sea

Both Patrick’s  parents were of Raasay stock. His mother was a Nicolson, whose father was a Gaelic speaker from Raasay and whose mother was from Dorset.

His father was one of a remarkable family of seven, born at Oscaig on the west coast of the island. Four became teachers – his father John, Sorley, Ishbel and Mary. One, Calum, was a well known collector of folklore. Two, Alasdair and Norman, were doctors.

One of the teachers also became a Gaelic poet counted as the finest writer in the language in the 20th century. Who hasn’t heard of Sorley Maclean? This is the man who had the signal honour of being present on Raasay at the opening of a cairn at Hallaig (a clearance village and the place immortalised in Hallaig, his most famous poem) to celebrate his work. As they stood listening to his fellow poet, the Irishman, Seamus Heaney, give the address, Sorley said to someone that it felt strange being alive and present at the completion of his own memorial.

Patrick’s father John (Patrick’s name is John Patrick but he was called Patrick to simplify communications in the family), was a teacher in Inverness when Pat was born and the family moved to Glasgow in 1945 when he became an Inspector of Schools. Long family summers were spent on Raasay where Patrick was afloat as often as he could manage. He would go fishing with his grandfather, boy and man together harvesting seas with astonishing riches in marine life – much of it long gone.

Growing up hearing the Gaelic spoken naturally around him, Patrick studied it to Higher level at school and, when he speaks, you can hear the pleasure he takes in saying some of the Gaelic names that are a part of his story.

Sorley once took him to see Calum MacLeod – yes, the Calum of Calum’s Road. This is the now legendary story – international too, for, as we reported, a Calum’s Road is now being built in Gambia.

Calum MacLeod had spent fruitless years trying to compel his local Council to build a road to the little township of Arnish in the north of the island, where he lived. So he did what islanders do (although rarely in such a daunting project) – he did it himself.

He spent half a crown on a copy of Thomas Aitken’s manual, Road Making & Maintenance: A Practical Treatise for Engineers, Surveyors and Others , published in 1900. He set about building his road with the basic tools of pick, shovel and wheelbarrow – and before he was done he’d seen off many generations of wheelbarrows.

Working when he could,  it took him ten years, a bit at a time – from 1964 to 1974, creating culverts and bridges as he went, to build the one and three quarter miles of road from Brochel Castle to Arnish. He got help with blasting (some to create passing places)  and with the £1,900 cost of it from the Department of Agriculture’s Engineering Department. They supplied a compressor, explosives, driller, blaster and men.

Eventually, many years after the road was done, the Council were shamed into adopting and surfacing it. Ironically, by then Calum and Lexie, his wife, were the only people left living in Arnish.

This is Patrick’s culture – a people marrying the practical, the creative, the individualist and the self reliant to produce the distinguishing mark of the islander and the rural Highlander.

It is probably this inheritance that has made him a man who wants to work, to be busy, to contribute. As Tennyson said in his moving poem, Ulysses (another man of the sea), Parick too could not bear: ‘to rust unburnished, not to shine in use’.

His experience and his many talents give him much to contribute. He takes tuition sessions on radar for the current crew of the Oban Lifeboat and is known across Scotland and Ireland, which he travels annually as Supervisor of the RNLI’s Sea Safety Summer Roadshow.

When his father was appointed Headmaster – or Rector – of Oban High School in 1950, the idyllic summers on Raasay became a thing of the past. The demands of the job meant that his father spent much of the summer preparing the timetable for the coming year.

The loss of Raasay, though, was softened by his parents’ purchase of a cottage on Easdale island as a holiday home.

Patrick loved Easdale and still does. A tiny one of Argyll’s Slate Islands, lying just off the mainland at Ellenabeich, you have to know and use the water all the time if you stay there.

Patrick was in his element there. He remembers a ‘messing around with boats’ that included sailing; having a Summer job in charge of a small fleet of hire boats (three launches and two dinghies); running trips out to the Holy Isles, the Black Isles; and doing relief duty on the Easdale ferry.

The sea as workplace

This was inevitable, really. Patrick left school in 1960 to go to the training ship, Dolphin, at Leith Nautical College before going on to join the Ellerman Lines as an apprentice deck officer.

During his time with Ellerman, Patrick’s favourite ship was the MV City of Guildford on which he did a seven month run from the USA to India. She was the smallest Ellerman Lines ship he sailed on and, with only four hatches, was the easiest for cargo work.

She was named after an earlier Ellerman Lines City of Guildford, torpedoed and sunk on 27th March 1942 by U-593 under the command of Kapitanleutnant Gerd Kelbling. She was on passage in a convoy from Alexandria to Tripoli with a general cargo, fuel and ammunition.

A curious fact is that in recent times, in the disaster that befell the Russian Navy’s submarine, Kursk, Gerd Kelbling came back to public attention. 85 years old at the time of the Kursk incident, he had insights into the condition of the men trapped in the submarine at depth. He had been in a similar situation when U-593 sank to a depth of 240 metres beneath the Mediterranean after coming under attack from two Allied destroyers in December 1943.

With Ellerman, after he got his Second Mate’s ticket, Patrick did one more trip and decided to return to landlubberdom. He never stopped liking the job but the periods away from home – which could run to ten months, had started to get him down.

At the time when he was with Ellerman Lines, he was at sea towards the end of the period when ships carried general cargo and, usually, sailed right into the centre of ports.

Because loading and discharging general cargo is much slower than dealing with today’s containers, crews spent much longer in port than is the case now where, as well as faster handling, the sheer cost of berthing fees alone requires a quick turn around. The current cost of an hour in Felixstowe is £4,000.

What is also very different these days is the whole business of loading – now done by computer. When Patrick was at sea, the First Mate was, and still is,  responsible for loading and for drawing up the loading schedule. As well as his brain and know-how,  the Mate used an instrument unknown to today’s mariners – a Ralston.

It is Patrick’s dream somewhere to find a Ralston and to convert it, with a glass top, into a Coffee Table, daily reminding him of one of his other lives and of skills now lost to mariners.

A Ralston is a device contained in a shallow rectangular box. Its surface is a polished steel, scaled section of the ship in question, made by its designer when it was being built. Around the edges of it are little compartments with lids, each of which contains a little weight, each scaled proportionate to the ship.

When the mate had worked out his loading plan, he tested it on the Ralston, placing relevant weights on the appropriate parts of the scaled section of the ship. The Ralston was calibrated to respond by calculating the metacentric height, essentially the point of the ship’s optimum stability. Too great a figure results in a rapid, vicious roll; and too small a figure gives a very slow roll and possible lack of stability.

The mate also had to allow for the different types of cargo, some of it loose. Some cargoes could not, by their nature, be co-located. Some were inherently unstable. Some would absorb water. Some, of course, were physically dangerous to carry. Some cargo would be loaded at the start of the voyage and more would be taken on at ports on passage, some unloaded at interim destinations. Imagine the software today’s mariner’s need to replace what a good First Mate could do then, through mental arithmetic, knowledge and seagoing experience.

When a ship came into port, it was – still is – the most junior crew member’s duty to dip the water to check salinity levels. This affects buoyancy and is another critical factor in loading. In-harbour salinity also cannot be assumed to be the same as salinity at sea in different parts of a long voyage – and it may not be the same as salinity encountered shortly after leaving port.

The difference between the draft in salt water and that in fresh water is known as the ‘Fresh Water Allowance’ or FWA.  A ship is permitted to load to a greater depth by whatever proportion of the FWA is dictated by the salinity, or lack of it.   Loading is no straightforward business.

Patrick loved and understood the discipline and the rituals of life aboard ship. Standards matter to him because he knows that the retention of standards of professionalism in all walks of life is the best barrier to irrecoverable decline. The rise of hospital-acquired infection is testimony to this.

The daily routine was up for a shower, work; shower, breakfast, work; shower, lunch, work; shower and dress for dinner.

Dinner was a dress uniform affair. Patrick recognised the spiritual value in sitting down together at the end of a hard day, to a good and convivial meal, with everyone in full fig. He feels that in some of today’s shipping lines, where full uniform for dinner is no longer de rigueur, that some operational standards too are not a prerequisite now.

While being in port meant that the crew had to work harder than they did at sea when they did ‘ just’ eight hours on watch and a little paperwork, there was much more opportunity to go ashore than seamen have today.

Patrick particularly liked Hong Kong and Japan and also the east African ports of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam was  his personal favourite. He describes it as ‘having one of the most beautiful harbours I have ever seen’.

Ports were also places where the crews of ships there at the same time met up and swopped books. Patrick remembers Norwegian sailors who spoke excellent English because the only books they could get on swops were English.

At sea as an uncertificated Fourth Mate, the watch he liked best and which he worked to make his own was the four-to-eight watch. He says it’s the best and the most interesting. ‘I would be watch keeping from four to eight, morning and afternoon, with star sights to take at dawn and dusk; and most of the remainder of the day off apart from meal reliefs and some paperwork.   Normally this would be the mate’s watch but most of the time he left me to it and got on with other work’.

The pattern of a voyage, if not sailing from the UK, was to fly out to meet the ship, sometimes in Gibraltar, sometimes further afield. Occasionally there might be a trip to deliver an Ellerman ship being sold on. The most memorable of these for Patrick was delivering the City of Rochester, a still-working Liberty ship.

They left it, re-named Fotini Xilas, in drydock in Bombay, now Mumbai, awaiting its new Greek owner. Being on the ship itself was a memorable experience for Patrick and the other highlight was coming home on his first jet flight – a Boeing 707.  (The City of Rochester wasn’t the last working Liberty ship at that time.  In fact, according to Patrick, there are still two in working order, the SS Jeremiah O’Brien is in San Francisco and the SS John W Brown is in Baltimore. In fact, Patrick visited the Jeremiah O’Brien when he was recently in San Francisco and ‘stepping into the apprentices’ cabin, which was identical to the one I had shared some forty years ago, was a surreal experience’.)

Back ashore

When Patrick took the decision to come back ashore for the sake of his family, his life became s fabric woven from connections with some major Argyll projects and with businesses that are part of Oban’s history.

• He worked first as a fitter at Cruachan Power Station on Loch Awe, noting that a promotion there was the result of the company misreading his application form and thinking he was a marine engineer.
• He spent a summer driving buses for Walter Alexander and then went on a retraining course as a motor mechanic.
• Then, in 1967, he joined William Gillespie & Son, the Morris dealership in Oban, becoming Manager in 1972. Three years on, its parent company got into financial trouble and sold up the Oban business.

At this stage, Patrick and Maurice Carnie, who had been Gillespie’s Service Manager, went into business together as Carnie & Maclean, in Breadalbane Street. They bought out equipment from their former employer and brought business with them which was glad to have the support of a local service.

For two short years. this operation was successful. Then, sadly, Maurice Carnie developed an inoperable brain tumour to which he lost his life nine months later. Losing a friend and colleague in this way was a profound shock which Patrick still feels. He had little interest thereafter in Carnie & Maclean and sold it four years later.

Lifeboating

Pat (we change his name here because ‘Pat’ is how he is known in lifeboating circles) had joined the crew of the newly formed Oban Lifeboat in 1972, when it operated with an 18′ inshore McLachlan lifeboat. He became a volunteer mechanic in 1975 and by 1978, when it had become obvious that the Oban station needed a lifeboat with year-round capability, the 42′ Watson-class, all-weather lifeboat, the Watkin Williams, arrived, coinciding with Pat becoming coxswain / mechanic.

All of this was, of course, part time voluntary work and Pat was still carrying on the Carnie & Maclean business on his own, after Maurice’s death. In 1982 the post of Coxswain / Mechanic was made a full time post and Patrick was happy to sell the business and take the job.

Reason to the fore as usual, he points out that lifeboating today comes with a very different level of risk to the crew than it used to do.  He’s thinking of the days, not so very long ago, when the boats were open and rowed in heavy seas or sailed, with the possibility of being unable to claw off a lee shore.

Today’s RNLI boats are superbly constructed without regard to cost. If they are to function reliably as a critical rescue tool they must afford all possible protection to their crews. So they are self-righting and equipped with the best possible navigational aids.

The other big change is leave, which at least exists these days. When Pat was Coxswain / Mechanic, a post he retired from eleven years ago – as well as looking after the boat, the station, crew training and all the rest, he had to stay within five minutes of the lifeboat station at all times. Oh, and he was on call 24 /7 with one weekend off a month and 25 days leave per annum. He says that back then the stresses on a family of the lack of time off were much greater than worries about his lifeboating.

Of his time as Coxswain of the Oban Lifeboat, he stresses the enduring friendships that emerge from the closeness of a team working together in challenging circumstances. For a Cox, Pat sees the greatest stress as the possibility of making a wrong decision that might cost someone their life. He says: ‘… the incident – and therefore the satisfactory result for the casualty, depends on your decisions alone and that applies whether it is a split second matter of boat-handling, decisions regarding a search for a missing person or any other scenario’.

Rescue missions that could be counted as failures, he describes as ‘those without any satisfactory outcome. While it could be deemed to be a successful outcome, the recovery of a body always feels like a failure, even if the person was dead before the lifeboat launched. It’s the same with searches for a diver or any other missing person – these can go on for days in a forlorn hope and tend, as time goes on, become more and more depressing’.

Pat talks of the great wealth of experience and expertise he had to draw on during his time as Coxswain. ‘There were two doctors on the crew and that took a tremendous load away from other crew members, particularly on medical evacuations. We had a lot of shouts for diving accidents and having crew members who dived was of great assistance to me in making decisions. We had – and still have, merchant seamen; we have experienced sailors who can be put aboard a yacht to sort things out and assist; and we have engineers and boatbuilders’.

More seafaring

In the late 1980s, the authorities concerned decided that sea-going certificates would no longer be issued for life and that if they were not being used, the holder would have to apply for re-validation.

Loath to lose his ticket, Patrick managed to fit in some more sea-time by working for J&A Gardner and by sailing as Mate on the Paddle steamer, PS Waverley (well known to Argyll), for a time.

Asked about the Waverley‘s buccaneering career around the piers and jetties of the south coast of England last summer and about her giving the Dunoon Pier a run for its money this year, he laughs at the description but is quick to defend the ship he clearly loves. He points out that paddlers are difficult to handle because the wash from the paddles does not flow over the rudder, or rudders, as it does in a screw driven ship.

On the other hand, he says that the paddles do give tremendous stopping power because they can be thrown into immediate reverse. This means that if spectators see the Waverley approaching a pier at speed it doesn’t mean that the Captain has taken leave of his senses or has a grudge to settle with mankind. It is that the only way to manage the ship in close quarter manoevres is to bring her in fast to maintain steerage and then use the paddles to stop swiftly and get the ropes ashore.

Patrick says: ‘The Waverley was a joy to be aboard as she has a wonderful atmosphere and is a classic vessel.   I had no problems as mate but I would not have liked the problems of the Captain as she is an incredibly difficult ship to handle.   Most people, seeing the speed with which she approaches and leaves a pier, would expect the exact opposite.   A paddle steamer, having no prop wash over the rudder, has to be handled fast and with great panache, otherwise everything goes wrong’. And sometimes things go wrong anyway.

The Waverley in fact provide a curious connection between different elements of Patrick’s seagoing lives. Her triple expansion steam reciprocating engine  – although lying on its side athwartships – is the same as that used both in the Liberty ships, one of which (City of Rochester) Patrick had helped deliver to Bombay when he sailed with Ellerman Lines; and the same as the engine on the SS City of Guildford, the predecessor of his favourite ship with Ellermans, the MV City of Guildford.

on the “Waverley”, the design having been chosen as it was simple to produce, the main difference being that in the “Waverley” the engine lies on its side, athwartships.

His stint with J&A Gardner – whose slogan is ‘No task too tough, no sea too rough’ – gave him his most demanding situation. He says that: ‘… coming through the Straits of Dover on the Midnight to 6.00am watch, the demands of navigation, collision avoidance, monitoring radio traffic etc, with no assistance whatsoever, was seriously stressful.

‘Most will not realize that there are not enough staff on these small coasting craft to have the luxury of a lookout when carrying out other tasks. This low level of manning has nothing whatsoever to do with safety and it is a miracle that, particularly in areas of high traffic density, there are not more collisions’.

In the end, the RNLI managed to get automatic re-validation for serving coxswains and so Patrick did not have to do more sea time until after he retired in 1998 as Coxswain – then a requirement at the age of 55.

In 1997, the year before he retired as Cox, Patrick was awarded the MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, in recognition of more than 20 years of dedicated service to the RNLI. With typical Highlander’s modesty, Patrick made no mention of this when we talked. The information came from his friend and colleague in lifeboating and in yachting, Willie Meville, whose book The Story of Oban Lifeboat, records the award.

Challenged on his economy, Patrick says that he’d just answered the questions we’d asked but then opened up to say: ‘ I always felt that there were many more deserving people than me but didn’t refuse it. Firstly, I didn’t wish to upset whoever who had nominated me and, secondly, and probably more importantly, I realized that the honour was being bestowed on Oban Lifeboat Station and the RNLI. I was merely the chest it was being hung on. But, I must say, Buck House was a wonderful experience, all the more so as the two guys ahead of me in the queue were chatting away in Gaelic’.

And afterwards?

Well, for Pat, retiring as Coxswain has been more of a change of role than a departure. He has been the Oban Lifeboat’s Press Officer since he retired. He says: ‘When the pager, which I now carry only as Press Officer, goes off in the middle of a filthy night, it is a wonderful feeling just to be able to turn over and say “I’ll do the press job in the morning”.’

If you believe that this is what he actually does, you have to be very naive. You can’t turn off the necessary instant reaction that quickly, maybe ever.

When, with Pat, we visited the Lifeboat Station – the wonderful old Pier Master’s House on Oban’s South Pier, there had just been a shout (a diver in the Sound of Mull who had come up too fast) and the lifeboat had launched and was away. We noticed that Pat was hawk-eared as far as the radio was concerned -  listening to where the boat was, what was happening and instinctively second guessing what it would do and where it would bring the casualty (to the hyperbaric chamber at Dunstaffnage).

Pat’s son Alasdair is now one of the deputy coxswains to Coxswain Ronnie MacKillop and joined the lifeboat twenty years ago while Pat himself was Cox. Pat has no worries about Alasdair. He respects his skills, knows the crew as ‘extremely competent, practiced and well trained’ and the lifeboat, the Mora Edith Macdonald, as ‘a superb craft’. (His heart though, may well belong to the Watkin Williams, the boat that arrived as he became the volunteer coxswain.)

Nowadays, Patrick and his wife Liz travel the world at frequent intervals, much of it by sea. He is well versed in the usefulness of Trip Adviser and other Internet-based travel sites. And he shares a yacht with three friends. Two of these are former colleagues in the service – Willie Melville, who has written the history of the Oban Lifeboat, and Mike Robertson, now branch chairman; and the fourth is Malcolm Young, a retired consultant dermatologist who lives near Bridge of Weir.

When they sail off, Patrick is never out of touch. We’ve had press information on Oban Lifeboat launches emailed in from all sorts of enviable anchorages.

Having had the privilege of talking to Patrick for part of a day, we came away awed by his depth of knowledge and by the precision of the information he has harvested from the many things he has done and challenges he has faced.

This story is no more than the begining of an archaeological dig. We hope he’ll talk to us again – and again.

The photographs of Patrick Maclean, accompanying this article are by copyright holder Rebecca Martin and may not be reproduced without permission. All were taken on the day of the interview with Patrick Maclean, and they include the shot of the Oban Lifeboat, Mora Edith Macdonald, showing her returning to her berth at the station after the shout she had just answered to a diver in the Sound of Mull with ‘a bend’ – the professionals version of what ‘civilians’ call ‘the bends’.

Interestingly, Pat Maclean was Cox on the newly arrived (1997) Mora Edith Macdonald for the last part of his service before retiring as Coxswain in 1998. This means that, with the exception only of the Oban station’s first two inshore boats, Pat has been Coxswain of every boat this service has had, first as volunteer and then in a full time role, starting with the Watkin Williams in 1978.

Other photographs shown above are, in order from the top:

• The Inner Sound of Raasay, by copyright holder Imamon and reproduced here under the GNU Free Documentation licence. (Crop)
• Brochel Castle on Raasay, the start of Calum’s Road to Arnish – an aquatint by William Daniel. This image is now in the public domain)
• PS Waverley coming onto Blairmore Quay, b Lucas the Scot. This image is in the public domain.

Note 1: Willie Melville’s book, The Story of Oban Lifeboat, published earlier this year (2009), details, as part of its history, the series of lifeboats the Oban Station has had, the personnel involved and, interestingly, discusses new challenges like working alongside Search and Rescue (SAR) helicopters. The book has been the best seller of the year at Oban’s branch of Waterstone’s – a tribute to the book and to the town’s identification with its lifeboat service.

Note 2: For those interested in Liberty ships, the City of Rochester, mentioned by Patrick Maclean above, was completed in December 1943, named Willis J Abbott and sent on lease lend to Britain in the war effort.

• In 1944 she was operated by Ellerman & Papayanni Lines, Liverpool, renamed Samboston.
  
• In 1947, she became the property of Ellerman Lines Ltd  and was operated under a British flag by Ellerman & Bucknall SS Co, London, with another change of name to City of Rochester.
  
• In 1951 she was operated by Hall Line of London.
• In 1962, as Pat Maclean records, she was sold to Sirikari Cia.Navigation in Panama, operated by Fred Hunter, London under a Greek flag and renamed Fotini Xilas.
• In 1964 she was sold to Cardinal Shipping Corporation, operated under a Liberian flag by Maritime Associates New York and yet again renamed, this time as Resolute II.
• In 1967 she was scrapped in Taiwan.

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