Battling the Oceans in a Rowboat

EARLY ON

CHALLENGES, particularly difficult ones, have been an essential requirement in my life from an early age. Arguably the toughest of them all came just a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday.

That was when I chose to swap the playing fields and classrooms of my hometown secondary school in Boston, nestling in the sleepy, flat county of Lincolnshire, for the assault courses and speed marches of Royal Marine commando training in the lung-busting hills of Devon.

As far back as I can remember, my only dream was to go to sea. That dream naturally evolved into an ambition to join the Royal Navy, before fate stepped in almost at the last minute and I chose a slightly different path, joining the Royal Marines, the navy’s elite commando fighting force. Looking back on my childhood growing up in Boston, it’s easy now to see how that ambition took root and how my future was shaped.

My parents, Derek and Joyce Dawson, both Boston-born and -bred, were ambitious and hardworking publicans, the youngest in the town at only twenty-three and twenty, respectively, when they took possession of their first pub, the Magnet Tavern. Remarkably and very proudly, five decades later they would also go on to become the town’s oldest publicans.

Over the years they ran a total of three pubs in Boston before finally buying a country pub, the Cowbridge House Inn, on the outskirts of town. It was the only pub in England with that name, as my dad would proudly inform everyone, given the opportunity.

The second of the pubs we lived in was called the Woad Man, as in the blue battle paint made famous by Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart. The Woad Man was a thriving business, a traditional local pub at a time when pubs were both numerous and the social hubs of their communities. It was an incredibly demanding and full-time occupation for both of my parents, and making it a success while at the same time raising a young family totally consumed them. They loved it, though, and in very different ways both were born publicans.

When we moved into the Woad Man, I was five and about to begin my first year at school. The relocation to the other side of town meant I would have to attend a different school from that of my older and only sibling, Steve.

Rather than have us attend different schools however, my grandmother on my mother’s side, Nan, as we called her, offered a solution: she would collect us both each morning and take the pair of us to her and my grandfather’s house, which was just around the corner from the school that Steve already attended, enabling both of us to go to the same one.

It also meant lots of early-morning four-mile-long walks through Boston that remain some of my most vivid and in many ways fondest childhood memories. They’re certainly among the most significant.

Boston is a small port town on the east coast of England. About eighty miles north of London as the crow flies, it was founded on the banks of a tidal river called the Haven. The river gave the town access to the sea and provided a route for the commerce and trade that would provide the town’s initial prosperity.

A busy if small commercial dock thrived during my childhood, along with a healthy inshore fishing fleet. Indications of Boston’s original wealth, created largely from exports of wool in the 1300s and 1400s, when it was second only to London in the nation as a port, were evident in several of the grander constructions along the riverbanks, none more so than the spectacular and imposing form of its most famous landmark, St. Botolph’s Church. It is a parish church as striking as many cathedrals, possessing a single tower some 272 feet high, the tallest church tower in England without a spire, which gives the church its ungodly nickname, “Boston Stump.”

We would often walk directly by the Stump along the cobbled and atmospheric old roads that surrounded it, but whichever route we took we would find ourselves in its shadow, as the church dominates not only the riverbank and town center where it stands but also much of the surrounding countryside.

Decades later, my brother Steve and I, having successfully rowed across the Atlantic together, were invited to climb to the top of the Stump and stand at the very pinnacle of its famous tower. The public are allowed up to the second balcony, about two-thirds of the way up, but to stand on the top level was a rare privilege and a genuine honor. It was certainly something we could never in our wildest dreams have imagined doing as we wandered by as children on those early-morning outings.

Depending on the route we took across town, we’d cross the Haven, which neatly bisected the town, on one of two bridges. At the modern Haven Bridge we’d pass the river at its widest point, where the fishing fleet would be rafted up three deep when in port. The boats and the men who worked there were a tantalizing glimpse to a five-year-old of the exciting and dangerous life that existed just out of sight, where the sea and all its adventures beckoned. That river, particularly the broad stretch where the fishing boats tied up, was like an ocean to me, the widest and scariest stretch of water I’d ever seen.

The Haven carved its way through the center of town. Sometimes at low water it was little more than a meandering stream running between two huge glistening mud banks, while at high tide it became a seemingly unstoppable conveyor belt of heaving water threatening and sometimes breaching the flood walls placed at the top of the banks to contain it. It was always a mesmerizing sight to me.

The Grand Sluice Bridge, known locally as the Sluice, was our alternative and more regular route across the Haven. Built, as the name suggests, to house sluice gates and locks to control the flow of water, it marked the end of the saltwater Haven’s progress inland and the start of the freshwater River Witham. There was a narrow single lane of traffic each way and a pedestrian footpath on either side of the old and ornate bridge. Old-fashioned ironwork formed the railings along the footpath on either side. The bridge sat upon huge stone pillars that supported it and formed the locks beneath. A railway box and gates sat at one end of the bridge, with huge iron arched supports heading off at an angle forming a separate but equally imposing railway bridge. At five years of age it seemed to me like an engineering marvel.

The Sluice Bridge also held the wonderful promise that if we were lucky the lock gates might be open as we crossed and we could look down on vast torrents of roaring white water disgorging from the Witham into the Haven just beneath our feet. That was wonderfully exciting and gave a thrilling demonstration of the enormous power of the river.

Both bridges provided a feast for the ravenous imagination of an impressionable young boy, and whichever one we crossed it was the highlight of those long dawn walks across town.

In reality they were nothing more than two unremarkable bridges crossing an unremarkable river in a quiet and unremarkable Lincolnshire town. To my young and developing imagination, however, they were so much more than that; they were my first introduction to the excitement of the sea and its magnetic and hypnotic appeal. Even at such a young age I recognized that appeal, and I welcomed it, but I had no idea how that appeal would come to dominate and define my life.

If the seeds of my future maritime life were sown on those dawn walks across town, they were most definitely watered and fed at my grandparents’ house.

My great-grandmother, who lived with my grandparents, was approaching her nineties when I was beginning school. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants, gypsies who’d gone to London in the late 1800s. She’d grown up in Whitechapel when Jack the Ripper was carving his dark legend on the same streets where she played as a girl. I remember her scaring Steve and me with stories of “Jack.” She called him that almost as if she knew him, which only added to the thrill, and how she’d known the Flower Girls, as she called his victims, and the places where they were murdered. She was a formidable lady even in old age, and those Gothic stories only served to enhance that impression.

Gran’s sister would eventually emigrate to Canada, and her two brothers both joined the Royal Navy as young men. That was the beginning of my family’s connection with that great institution, sadly one that began on a desperately tragic note. In the early stages of World War I, my gran received a telegram from the king. Both of her brothers, whom she’d brought up as sons, had been killed in action on the same day. Gran had long white hair always tied neatly in a bun when I knew her as an old lady decades later. Apparently it had turned white overnight when she received that news.

My family could probably have been forgiven for having little if any time for the Royal Navy after that dreadful event. However, anyone walking into my grandparents’ home, as Steve and I did each school day morning, would have seen immediately that that was far from the case.

As you walked through the front door, to the right was the front room, or parlor. The largest room in the house, it was always immaculate and contained pretty much everything of value my grandparents possessed. A piano that nobody ever played stood next to a settee and chairs that nobody ever sat on in front of a fireplace that nobody ever lit.

At the heart of the room, on the center of the dark polished wooden sideboard next to the silent piano, was a large black-and-white framed picture of a young man with matinee-idol good looks smiling broadly, resplendent in his Royal Navy Warrant Officer’s No. 1 uniform and cap.

That was a picture of my mum’s brother, my uncle Peter. He’d joined the Royal Navy right out of school and in doing so had banished the legacy of grief and loss that connected my family to the Royal Navy and replaced it with an enormous sense of pride. He was on display at the center of the room because he was the center of my grandparents’ world. Not only had he gone on to bigger and better things outside of Boston, he’d also laid the ghosts of those two lost brothers to rest. The story of the Royal Navy and my family no longer ended with their tragic loss; my uncle had now effectively continued that story and in doing so had given meaning to that loss.

Once inside my grandparents’ home, seeing that picture as the focal point of their most cherished room, the message was clear: if you wanted to be admired and respected in my family, you joined the Royal Navy.

As long as I can remember, my ambition, fueled by all the time I spent at my grandparents’, had been to join the Royal Navy and go to sea. Although the marines are very much part of the Royal Navy, joining them was a considerable departure from that goal. My brother, Steve, gets the credit for that change of direction.

As I entered my last year at school, Steve decided to join the marines and was going through the long and highly selective application process required for acceptance for training. Everything about that process—as it’s designed to be—was exciting and increasingly enticing to an impressionable fifteen-year-old such as myself. So much so that ultimately I decided to follow in my brother’s footsteps and enlist.

Within weeks of blowing out the sixteen candles on that year’s birthday cake, I found myself embarking on what is regarded as the hardest basic military training in the world. It would certainly feel that way to me.

Although tougher challenges would follow, Royal Marine commando training remains to me the most difficult challenge I have ever undertaken. After that training I would never again, no matter how daunting the task, be as unprepared for what I had to face. I would also never again encounter such a steep and unforgiving learning curve. Training was a nine-month trial that would ultimately turn me from a snot-nosed schoolboy into a Royal Marine commando.

Be it brainwashing or conditioning—depending on whether you consider the process a bad or good thing—Royal Marine training works. It has to work because it needs to produce young men who when required can deal with the most unimaginable and terrifying situations and deal with them instinctively and with a calm professionalism. In the 1980s, Royal Marine training was a meat grinder, a highly effective one, that produced the required product at the end.

On August 3, 1980, sixty-three strangers and I stepped off a train together at Commando Training Centre Royal Marines Lympstone (better known as Lympstone Commando). A sixty-fifth guy didn’t even get off the train. We had departed from every point in Great Britain, and the only thing we had in common as we stood on that arrival platform was our shared apprehension at what was to come.

Together we would form 268 Troop. None of us was older than seventeen. We were the latest batch of meat to be fed into the grinder. Nine tough months later, fewer than a third of us would emerge as fully fledged Royal Marines.

Initially I adapted well to training. With the advantage of a brother who’d recently finished the course, I knew to a large extent what to expect. Many of my colleagues had no idea; they tended to be the ones who left first. I was fit and reasonably capable, and despite the hardships, I mostly enjoyed the experience.

As training progressed and intensified, the mental and physical pressures increased for all of us. Commando training is meant to be many things, but one thing it’s not meant to be is easy. Alarmingly for me, and adding to that pressure, I began to develop increasingly painful knee problems. After any kind of major physical exercise, of which there’s a lot in Royal Marine training, both my knees would swell and hurt like hell.

I took copious amounts of painkillers and hoped for the best, but the condition continued to plague me as the weeks passed and the workload increased. The last thing I wanted to do was go to sick bay but eventually I had to, if only to get some more effective painkillers. The doctor took one look at my knees, wrote me a prescription for anti-inflammatory pills, and painkillers and said, ‘No phiz for two weeks and no boots.’

To my mind it was a death sentence for my ambitions to become a Royal Marine. It’s probably a good indication of my age and emotional maturity (or lack there of), that I remember almost bursting into tears as he said that.

“No phiz” is Royal Marine shorthand for “no physical training.” The troop had major tests to complete in just a few days. If I didn’t pass those, tests I wouldn’t progress any further with 268 Troop. There were no exceptions; you made the grade, or you were out. In the ruthless and unforgiving process, I would be “back-trooped.”

Being back-trooped meant being taken out of the troop you had joined with and, after a rehab period to recover from your injury, being placed in a troop coming through behind, joining the new troop at pretty much the same point where you had left your old one. Everybody was terrified of the prospect of being back-trooped, and I was no exception. At best, you end up being an outsider in the new troop you join; at worst, you’re hated and seen as a weak link.