An Irishman’s Diary on Marconi’s tempting offer

A t every recruitment fair, people are being sought for jobs that are difficult to fill. It may be that there is a scarcity of artificial insemination experts in northern Queensland or a paucity of honest croupiers in some casino on the south of France.

There are always instances where the supply of suitably qualified or experienced candidates isn’t enough to fill the needs of the time and the place. That’s when the recruiting personnel begin to wax lyrical about the generous levels of pay and conditions.

This kind of situation occurred some 60 or so years ago. The Marconi International Marine Communications company made exceptional efforts to encourage young Irishmen to study for the radio officer’s certificate and to then join the company. It supplied radio and electronic safety equipment to a wide range of shipping companies, mostly British. It also supplied the men to operate and maintain it.

In the years after the end of the second World War there was a severe shortage of radio officers and other seafaring men.

There were frantic efforts by British shipping companies to replace the hundreds of ships that had been sunk or damaged during the war and to re-establish trade routes to the British Empire.

The Marconi company responded by placing advertisements in Irish newspapers. Under the heading “Well Paid to See the World”, they showed a spruce young man in neat uniform sitting in the ship’s radio room, tuning a marine receiver, with the Morse key near at hand.

For many Irish fellows it was seen as a great avenue of escape from the suffocating dullness, imposed piety and poverty of the country at that time.

The Marconi company sent its own recruiting officer to visit those colleges that provided courses for the radio officer’s certificate. One of these was the College of Science and Technology at Kevin Street in Dublin.

One day this very impressive tall man in tweeds entered the classroom. We sat there, pale-faced, pimpled and penniless, gazing in some awe at this well-dressed eminence with his shock of white hair and bronzed face.

His approach was somewhat different to that of other recruiting staff.

“Well, chaps, as someone who spent 20 years at sea I can tell you there’s no better life.” He looked out the window where a grey pall of rain was falling on the wet slates of the rooftops. “If you pass the exam and join the Marconi company you’ll find yourself in places where the sun shines out of a blue sky a good deal of the time – Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Colombo.”

He continued with a roguish gleam in his eye.“In those warm places, people don’t need to wear many clothes. And that includes many of the lovely young women you’re bound to meet there.”

When he smiled, he showed large gleaming teeth.

“Don’t forget you’ll be able to save your wages so that when the ship gets into port you’ll be walking down the street with money in your pocket, eyeing up the girls.”

This man asked us if we smoked. Most of us did. We had become adept at making a single cigarette last a long time, lighting up, taking a few deep pulls then extinguishing it between thumb and forefinger.

Holding up a right hand to display tobacco-browned fingers, he gave us the good news. “At sea, tobacco is duty free. A tin of 50 cigarettes is only two shillings – the same as you’d pay to get a good seat in the cinema.”

He told us that alcohol was also duty free. The cost of a bottle of Gordon’s gin was only four shillings and sixpence.

As he went on, some of us began to have visions of the radio officer in tropical uniform sipping coconut wine as he lounged on a veranda, watching the sun go down on the Bay of Bengal. His cheroot would be endearingly lit by a lissom girl clad in a silk sari.

“Going to sea as a radio officer is a great life,” he said. Then he held up the index finger of his right hand. “But first of all you have to pass your exam and then join the Marconi company.”

With these words he bowed to the class and backed away towards the door.

For a few moments we sat there speechless. Then a fellow from Dublin who had been an indifferent student spoke up earnestly. “From now on I’m going to study like a hoor.”

It’s hard to know how effective such recruiting methods might have been. There were many other factors. But in the following years almost a third of the seagoing staff of the Marconi company were Irish.