THE CRUISE YEARS (but only the interesting or funny bits…) Travel memoirs of a Cruise Ship Choir Leader...

David Machell

 

FOREWORD: A CHANGING WORLD

My late wife Val and I spent most of our working lives teaching music in Schools, Val leaving in the 1990s, and me in the early 2000s. Children having long since flown the coop, when the opportunity came along, through an agency, to undertake occasional two- and three-week cruises, on a “lecturer” (free board-and-lodging) basis, we could seize it with alacrity. We dovetailed our time at sea with our community choir commitments back home, and from 2003 to 2013 we worked on eight cruises, round the Pacific, the Baltic, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the South Atlantic.

  

   These are stories from a past time and a lost world. Even before the pandemic, which brought the cruise industry to a juddering halt in 2020, the small, independent niche cruise lines were being swallowed, one by one, by global players. The line we worked for the most, Voyages of Discovery, was just such a victim. The day of ships carrying six hundred passengers was giving way to the day of ships carrying six thousand. Small ships like ours (that actually looked like ships) were being replaced by enormous floating bricks. Over the span of our cruising years, we saw at first hand the proliferation of these vast seagoing hotels. We never actually sailed up the Yangtse River in China, but we kept hearing how shipyard after shipyard after shipyard was churning out enormous cruise ships on a production line. Such hubris was a defiance of the Gods! Their punishment could surely not be long delayed. And so it transpired.

 

   Things were changing even during our cruise times: the very idea of engaging professional choir directors eventually fell to desperate cost-cutting measures. By 2019, choir-leading was almost universally farmed out to general entertainment staff, and, good as they might be, the professional edge of expert singing tuition and choral training was lost. In the case of Voyages of Discovery, sad to relate, the economies were not enough, and this gem of the Cruise World, holders of the Industry Award for Best Lecture Programme, went out of business.

 

   Political forces were also gathering to bring about much more wide-ranging change: outside the rehearsal room, the world was becoming an ever more dangerous place. It was around 2010 that we were due to visit Sana’a in the Yemen, but even then the Foreign Office said the risk level was unacceptable. We managed to visit Gaddafi’s Libya, failing to foresee that, after his downfall in 2011, no further cultural visits could take place. A whole new generation has thus been unable to visit Leptis Magna, the breath-takingly vast excavated Roman city, in Khoms, near Tripoli.

 

   Libya has had a torrid decade since Gaddafi’s overthrow. It has provided yet another iteration of the pattern of chaos which seems to kick in when a hated strongman is toppled. A wave of unrest had swept through the Arab world in the latter part of the first decade of the 21st Century, sweeping aside long-standing dictatorships in Bahrain, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. Syria was, and still is, an exception, with the battles still raging at time of writing.  Libya, however, succumbed eventually to the forces of change, the only grisly variation being that Gaddafi wreaked a particularly nasty response on his own nationals.

 

   This prompted NATO to become involved, and their air support was crucial in ensuring the triumph of the anti-Gaddafi movement. It does seem, however, in our complex world, that while it is relatively easy to win a war, it is nigh-on impossible to win the peace. So it proved, as a plethora of armed militias fought it out on the ground to gain supremacy. The Central Government never found a way to make its writ run. At one stage there were even two governments, two parliaments. Great powers picked sides, with the UAE and Turkey supporting opposite camps. At time of writing a “permanent ceasefire” between warring factions seems to be holding, so there is a glimmer of optimism.

 

   One of the less welcome spin-offs is that Libya is now a prime setting-off point for desperate people to reach Europe. All things considered, it may still be some time before we can visit Leptis Magna again.

 

   Even Egypt, a favoured destination for so long despite troubling incidents, has taken a more worrying turn of late. The Arab Spring brought down Mubarak, installed a hard-line religion-based regime, overthrown in turn by a Military coup. It may be some time before it is a good idea to go Pyramid-watching.

 

   As if to add insult to injury, I was sitting at my desk editing this passage when news came in of a military coup in Myanmar. Another prize destination in the cruising world was cancelled. (I suspect that when, in the future, analyses of word-use in our era are made, the word “cancelled” will feature strongly!)  The places round Yangon that we had visited were now crawling with armed soldiers in riot gear.

 

   Equally, areas of the ocean have become fraught with danger: there were two occasions when we sailed the Indian Ocean, just at the time when kidnapping and ransom demands from Somali pirates started to fill the headlines, and we had our own brush with them. Piracy gets a whole segment of its own in this book!

 

   In common with many, I think the first time I was aware of Cruise Ships as a distinct item was the hi-jacking of the Italian MS Achille Lauro in 1985 by members of the Palestine Liberation Force. It is a sadness that the conflict that gave rise to it is no nearer peaceful resolution today. Less dramatically, the vulnerability of the cruise industry was laid bare.

 

   Right to the end of our cruise times, the past exerted a dubious legacy: in 2013 we were due to dock at Ushaia, a port in the far south of Argentina. However, still-painful memories of the 1982 sinking of the ARA General Belgrano, based at Ushaia, by British Forces, during the Falklands Conflict, meant that a visit there would have been diplomatically difficult, so we sailed past without ceremony.

 

    In 2009, the heyday of our sea-going, it is estimated that 17.8 million people took a cruise. By 2019 that had risen to 29.7 million, and was set to rise further. 50 lines operated 270 ships. The pandemic, however, has struck the Cruise Industry like no other, reducing the profitability of leading lines by 70% plus.

 

   A series of blows to the industry started with the reputational damage from the 2012 Costa Concordia disaster. This ship was 951 feet in length (The Titanic was 882.5 feet) and accommodated 3,780 passengers (Titanic could carry 2,435). The Ship’s Captain, now serving sixteen years for manslaughter, decided to show off to his girlfriend by taking his prize cruise ship too close to Giglio, a Tuscan island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, ripping its hull open on a rock. The ship capsized, people drowned. The captain left his post to go on shore. There is a recording of the port authorities asking him to please return to the ship and supervise evacuations. I dare not print an exact translation of what he said, but it was most unsympathetic, and quite nautical.

 

   The report on the confusion below decks does not make for pleasant reading, but in the absence of proper management, lives were saved by entertainment staff acting on their own initiative to help people evacuate. The death toll could have been much higher. It makes me go hot and cold to think that could easily have been me and Val.

 

   Further blows include the slowness of the industry to demonstrate environmental sustainability in an era of climate change, the crass over-tourism that has forced Venice, Dubrovnik and Barcelona to re-evaluate their relations with the Cruise Industry, (that’s a euphemism) and the inability to run “proper” cruises until the whole world has been double-jabbed for covid.

 

  So far, so gloomy. I know I promised a light-hearted book, but really, what can you do? If you are of an apocalyptic turn of mind, there is much to feast on. Financial backers do however seem to be keeping faith - the prospect of the mouth-watering profitability of the industry (when it returns) appears to be holding their attention. When this slim little volume goes into its fourteenth reprint in fifty years’ time, (ahem) I hope my dutiful executors may be able to report an improvement. It would, however, be unwise to hold your breath till then…

 

   So let us not be down-hearted, but return to happier times. I have chosen to limit myself to anecdotes that I still find funny or interesting after all these years, writing as I do in the gloomy second year of the covid pandemic, in the hope that some may share my warped perspectives and raise a modest titter.

 

   I start with a look at why we were cruising in the first place – we had a job to do, which was to get people singing! I then offer a field guide to various intriguing life forms observable in our little cruising biome, with all their idiosyncracies. A chapter follows where I recall certain colourful individuals that made our cruise years so enjoyable. I’ve tried to remember names, but some I’ve just plain forgotten – my record-keeping being, as always, lamentable.

 

  By the way, I reserve the right, at any time, without prior warning, to go off on a flight of digression, or an unreasonable rant, whenever the whim seizes me. This reflects accurately the natural disorder of my mind. Please bear with me, if only on the grounds of diversity.

 

   There is a chapter on the ups and downs of being a cruise ship lecturer, of belonging, if only for a passing moment, to that exclusive, rarified cadre of inspired eccentrics. The theme that unites the book, however, is our love of singing and our passion to help people discover their singing voice, sometimes for the very first time.

 

   I include some “travellers’ tales” – a kaleidoscope of random memories, grouped as geographically as I can, some from a single cruise, some from an amalgam of separate cruises. I also include a series of chapters entitled “songs to soothe the soul”, personal responses to some of the songs that have meant the most to our lovely choirs over the years. The book ends, as all music books should, with a triumphant concert – again, it is of necessity an amalgam of the memories of several concerts. As a reflective Coda, I offer a tribute to the charismatic choir-leader who made it all happen, my amazing late wife, Val Machell, lost too soon to Lymphoma. This book started as a few memories that demanded to be jotted down, to tell our grandkids who their grannie was.