Jordan, Humphrey Landfall then Departure

“The firm of Simon Hoy, British coaster tramp owners, is one of the earliest and best considered in the eldest of British sea services. It not only holds to and cherishes the many individual and independent ways of its kind but has a tradition of its own. Late in the nineteenth century the then reigning Simon Hoy turns his business into a limited company, a private and family affair, but still a company. It is change. Yet he hopes that it will not, nor ever will be, the road to break with the Hoy tradition”–book jacket blurb. For once a book jacket blurb is actually rather accurate, for in Landfall then Departure Jordan has crafted a highly-readable novel describing just how the financial and political changes of the 20th Century affected the Hoy Line, and how those changes move it from being a paternalistic company in which its owner knows each of his employees – and their individual families – into the beginnings of a combine which joins together other coasters (small steam vessels engaged in the British Island trade as well as trade across the Channel to continental ports), shipbuilders and chandleries better attuned to mid-20th Century concepts of commercial “progress.”

The final third of the novel presents a rousing look at Simon Hoy operations (in financial and management as well as in human terms) during the Second World War, including impressive descriptions of the fictitious firm’s participation in the evacuation at Dunkirk and other French ports, in coastal convoy service, in strategic maritime planning and, in quite interesting detail, during the D-Day 1944 invasion of German-occupied France. Landfall then Departure is both a moving elegy to a now-vanished way of British seafaring life as well as a rousing look at British coaster fleet service during the Second World War.