Townend, William The Ship's Company

Another excellent read from one of Britain's preeminent maritime authors. In his Ship's Company Townend documents a series of postwar voyages undertaken by the English tramp freighter M/V IKOMA, an "unhappy" ship if ever there was one. The vessel's master is arrogant, brutal (indeed, sadistic) Captain Hawksweed, a man of many hatreds, not all reserved for his officers and crew. Indeed, the novel's many narrative strands, which come together during the final section of the book with the IKOMA homeward bound across a stormy North Atlantic, focus on Hawksweed's abominable treatment of his much younger wife, his anti-Semitic hatred for the ship's 2nd Steward, his contempt for 1st Mate Millsden (a decorated World War 2 hero), his inability to sympathize with the ship's elderly, clearly dying, Storekeeper ... the list is virtually endless. What is most amazing here, however, is Townend's ability to paint the shipmaster as a brute, pure and simple, while at the same time rendering him in pathetic, very human terms. And though Hawksweed is the author's primary focus, the IKOMA's entire ship's company is so well presented as to make this an ensemble novel of the first rate.

Though the work is set circa 1947/1948, it is so thoroughly suffused with both images and deeds from World War 2 as to make it a war-related novel. In particular, Townend uses a series of war back stories to fill in the narrative histories of the IKOMA's officers and crew. Such as of how the 1st Officer, having been torpedoed, navigated a lifeboat full of survivors hundreds of miles across the open sea to eventual rescue. Or how a gruff A.B. arrived home from a Murmansk Run convoy to find that his wife had just been killed with a hundred other working class women when a V2 hit the Woolworth's where they'd been shopping. Or how another crew member had been trapped and nearly drowned when the Navy ship in which was serving as a matlow sank after action with the enemy. These are but a few of the tales Townend relates, and with each telling, the reasons for the IKOMA's unhappy state of affairs become more clear.

Also of great interest is rge author's portrayal of postwar Britain's financial and cultural austerity, and of how the nation's international reputation had taken a decided downturn - particularly as the Jewish/Palestinian conflict heated upon after 1946. Indeed, it is ironic that Captain Hawksweed's eventual downfall is tied to the Palestinian conflict for in one of the plots turning points a member of the IKOMA's crew convinces the vessel's very gullible (and Jewish) 2nd Steward Abie Loman that the captain had, in cold blood, shot and killed Jews in Palestine when the ship was recently in port at Haifa. The novel reaches a chilling conclusion with Captain Hawksweed's mid-Atlantic suicide (he jumps overboard), and even promise of salvage money for all (the IKOMA tows a disabled American freighter to the safety of Britain) fails to turn the surviving ship's company into a happy one.