Commander ALAN JOHN VILLIERS nsc, FRGS, D.LITT. by Oswald L. Brett The mild spring morning was gray and overcast when I visited the Stanfords in Westchester in late March 1982. I inquired about news of my old friend Alan Villiers since I knew that he was in poor health . They regretfully informed me that Alan had died only weeks earlier on March 3 at the age of 78, in his beloved Oxford . He is survived by his wife, the former Nancie Wills ofCamberwell , Victoria , and three children . In every sense he was a big man ; amiable , generous, helpful , and giving the impression of quiet competence in all that he undertook. I had known and enjoyed Alan's work for the last half century (his energy and output was prodigious, and what a gift he had with words!) and it had been a privilege to have known him personally for forty-eight of those years. Alan Villiers was not only one of the most colorful and adventurous deep-water sailors of his generation, but the graphic manner in which he recorded his diverse experiences afloat made him unique. He was an electrifying speaker, and invariably addressed a packed and overflowing house when showing his films. He had the happy knack of making his subject universally popular, on which he was almost without peer as an authority. "The Villiers Phenomenon" is how my publisher friend in England , Alex Hurst, aptly describes him . Alan was born in North Melbourne on September 23, 1903, one of six children-four boys and two girls. His father, Leon Joseph Villiers, was a "gripman" on cable cars, and was also a poet of the Australian bush country, and a writer of some note on political subjects. Unfortunately he died prematurely of cancer in 1918 at the age of 45 when on the threshold of a promising political career, leaving his family in straitened circumstances. A man of outstanding character and precept, he was to exercise a great influence on Alan's life, even though adamantly opposed to Alan's enthusiasm for sailing ships and a seafaring career. While Alan was still very young, the family moved to a two story house with a balcony on Spencer Street from where Alan could clearly see the Yarra River wharves and Spencer Street docks. Sailing ships were commonplace in Australian and New Zealand ports during this period. The ports themselves were relatively small, compact , clean and accessible. They were not in some distant " Siberian" reach of the port and shut off behind miles of slums and industrial jungle. Fascinated by the spectacle of sailing ships during his boyhood , Alan was easily able to visit them and befriend many of their crews. He meticulously drew and kept records of each vessel in a secret notebook. After his father's death Alan pointed out that his absence at sea would be one less mouth to feed, and his mother finally acquiesced to the logic of this assertion. Captain Charles Suffern of the Melbourne Ancient Mariners Club had a small nautical school for seaminded youth who wished to go to sea in square sail . Here the boys became acquainted with handling a boat under sail or oars, and the rudiments of seamanship. On Albert Park lake in Melbourne the captain had a brigantine-rigged lifeboat to make the boys familiar with the principles of handling such a vessel under sai l, and to understand the old words of command . The year was 1919 and Alan was 15 when Captain Suffern found a place for him in the half deck of the old bark Rothesay Bay, then lying at Port Adelaide loading gy psum for the cement works at Whangarei in New Zealand . The Rothesay Bay was one of a considerable fleet of small , aging square-rigged vessels employed in the intercolonial trade of the often stormy Tasman Sea between Australian and New Zealand ports. In a few short years they'd be all gone. They were hard-working little vessels, providing excellent training and experience for a boy going to sea. Alan would later reflect , as have so many others on the shock of first going to sea: " I remember, the first few days at sea, being struck by the viv id differences between the actual thing and all that I had imagined about it previously! Why hadn't someone written about the real sea? I thought ; for
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then I should not have gone! The broken sleep, the cold, the wet , the poor food and wet bunks, the misery of the soulless and endless pitch against unchanging head winds, the unutterable horror of days of seasickness unrelieved by anything save work and an hour or two, now and then , in a sodden bunk- why had I never read about these? They were the sea-not romance, and not adventure!"
You had read about them, Alan! Remember? But such remarks only whet the enthusiam of the greenhorn for the sea. Experience and reality are the only teachers. Ultimately the young sailor enthusiastically entered into the life of the bark , working on deck and aloft. The Rothesay Bay, belonging to a timber merchant in Sydney, discharged her gypsum, and then loaded timber at Auckland for Sydney. The timber was badly stowed and the vessel was crank . The wind was a dead muzzler for the entire passage across the Tasman, as the unstable Rothesay Bay staggered along under lower tops'ls. One hundred miles south of Sydney they were fortunate to encounter a tugboat ranging well south looking for tows, which took them into Sydney after a 40-day passage. The average cargo steamer in head winds could cover the distance in less than a week! In Sydney Alan joined the handsome bark James Craig which cleared for Hobart to load timber. Off Gabo, on the south coast of New South Wales, the Craig was almost lost in a blow. She ran back up the coast to Sydney in distress where she lay for six weeks while repairs were effected. She finally arrived at Hobart where she loaded heavy timber at Port Huon for Port Pirie, South Australia . She then loaded superphosphates at Port Adelaide for Auckland, and thence timber for Melbourne where Alan left her. She was a happy ship and Alan always spoke of her with great affection. The skipper had his wife and two children on board, and everyone got along well together. The food was good, the ship dry on deck and handled easily. While on board he made some lasting friendships. With the laying-up of the Craig in the post war shipping slump of 1920, Alan was forced to look elsewhere for another sailing vessel in which to finish his four years sea time to qualify him to sit for his second mate's ticket. Prospects for a career in sail were becoming remote, and his ambition of a command in square rig was fast becoming a virtual impossibility. Alan , together with some forn'ier shipmates, next joined the British four-masted bark Bellands as ordinary seaman . Built as the Foreteviot in 1891 , she was well found , with labor-saving brace winches and a Liverpool house, which provided roomy and dry accommodation for her people, and made her maindeck less vulnerable to seas breaking on board . She was bound from Melbourne towards St. Nazaire with grain. The food was atrocious, and to almost everyone's dismay her store of tobacco was soon exhausted which very nearly provoked a mutiny on board ; all in the best hungry limejuice tradition! To Alan's disappointment-but not to the older seamen-the vessel did not head eastward towards the Horn , but made an easy flying-fish passage by way of the Indian Ocean and Good Hope. She was not well sailed and , incredibly, ignored the desperate plight of a burning bark she came upon in the Atlantic. Alan was glad to leave her after a weary 151-day passage in St. Nazaire, where she paid off and the crew sent home to England. Alan was entranced by his first sight of the " lovely English fie lds," in that summerof 1921 , but appalled by the slums of London's dockland. His own prospects were bleak. There were 120 Cape Hom square-riggers either outward , or homeward bound from Australia, but any sailing ships in London were not in need of people. Eventually Alan found a job working-by the four-masted bark Omega. This was on a casual basis and did not count towards his sea time. It was hoped that she would shortly sign articles and go to sea with a cargo of Welsh coal , but there was a coal strike, and Alan left when he heard that there were jobs in France. He slipped across the Channel once more-illegally-and ended up living in a drain pipe at
SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1984