Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Sunday 23 September 2018

Flotsam and Jetsam (and Sesame)

At the end of 2016 I spent a remarkable month clearing out my mother's house - in a big hurry - prior to selling it, since she was going into a care home. I did this more or less single-handed - just a bit of help to shift big items. I used my van to take things to the dump. Long days, late nights. Looking back, I have difficulty believing that I managed to be so vigorous and single-minded about it - I guess I was focused on how badly we needed to sell it.

I spent a while with mountains and boxes of junk in our garage. A lot of things went to the charity shops, we gave stuff away by the cubic yard; I did manage to sell a few things, locally and on eBay, but mostly this whole period was just a monster chucking-out session. In amongst all the other debris, I hung on to a few items which had some personal sentimental value to me - not very much, in fact - my granddad's pocket watch, a couple of bits and pieces that meant something in my childhood.

I left home when I was 17, to go to university, and never went back apart from short visits. Over the years, my parents lives and my life rolled along independently. That does make it easier when ditching a lifetime's agglomeration of someone else's junk.

Just a doo-dad. Old junk - £1 coin for scale
One thing I rescued was the little item in the photo. From my earliest memory, it sat on the dressing table in my bedroom. I knew it had been in the family for years, but knew nothing else about it. Originally I didn't know what teak was (I assumed it was a part of a ship), though I did know that HMS Sesame was a ship (or had been a ship). I remember being painfully embarrassed at the age of about 5, when my Auntie Monica spotted it and asked me about it. Not only did I know nothing about it, but she explained to me that it was not pronounced Sessaym - two fails in one effort. Amazing how these things stick in the memory.

Since I rescued it from the back of a cupboard at Mum's house, it's been sitting on top of my painting bureau, collecting solitary cufflinks, buttons, paper-clips, rubber bands, pins - pretty much the same stuff that went in it in the old days. Typecasting? Anyway, it occurred to me that I still know nothing about it, though it and I are old friends. So I had a poke about online.

First off, there are masses of these on eBay and elsewhere. Also barometers, inkstands and similar, all with the same plaques. There must have been a lot of teak in the old Sesame. Shades of fragments of the Original Cross. Or the Berlin Wall. The other thing I found out is that there were two HMS Sesames.

One was a destroyer built in 1917, which was broken up in 1935. The other was a rescue tug which was sunk by an E-Boat a few days after the D-Day landings. Since the ship sunk in 1944 is in fairly deep water off Le Havre (it is a well-known wreck site for divers), and since the public appetite for souvenirs from sunken ships would have been pretty feeble in 1944, I guess that my little barrel must be from the 1935 breaking-up of the destroyer.

No big deal, obviously, but I'm quietly pleased to have finally got around to checking up. You may well have one of these sitting on a shelf somewhere yourself - there are certainly a lot of them about. Mine, as you see, is rather battered. If anyone knows of any interesting stories concerning HMS Sesame, I'd be very interested to hear them.

6 comments:

  1. Its known as "Treen" I have one made from wood from the deck of HMS Iron Juke using wood removed after Jutland.

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    1. Yours sounds more interesting than mine. There does seem to have been a market for this stuff. When I see other Sesame examples on eBay I realise that mine must have been varnished or polished when I first knew it!

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  2. It is an odd thing, to want to memorialize a fairly obscure ship that way. Perhaps these teak doodads were made for retired sailors / family members with a connection to the ship? Why else would one want one?

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    1. Hi Michael - it is odd - as you say, Sesame is at best obscure. The vessel wasn't completed until 1919 (it was an "S"-class destroyer, apparently), it had two 3-year spells of duty one starting 1923 when it was stationed in Irish waters, one starting 1929 in the North Atlantic. It did nothing particularly significant until it ws decommissioned in 1932, and it was broken up in 1935. Unless some entrepreneurial soul simply spotted a good way to get rid of a load of scrap teak, I can't see why anyone would bother to manufacture these.

      Mine comes from my childhood in Liverpool, which is, of course a seaport with very strong maritime traditions, though mostly merchant stuff. The citizens of Liverpool, though generally held to be disruptive, disloyal and despicable, have laid down their lives in hundreds of thousands over the years, in freight convoys, in the trenches, in the blitz etc etc, and were always prepared to turn out to wave their little flags and cheer when the King or Queen showed face. [Digression: one ancestor of mine was sacked from his job as a Mersey river pilot when he fell off the boat, drunk, during inspection by the Prince of Wales - we are talking circa 1900 here...]

      Every house in Liverpool had souvenirs brought back by relatives in the merchant marine - sawfishes' noses, conch shells, models of sailing ships, brass spyglasses, bits of binnacles, all sorts. My dad's Cousin Harold had an oar from one of the lifeboats of the "Olympic" (well, that's what it had painted on it) - it used to hang over the fireplace. Maybe seaports would be just the place to sell naval doo-dads - maybe buying a bit of the permanently underemployed Sesame felt patriotic in 1935 - I can't remember what the official line on expanding the fleet was at the time.

      One thing that was slightly unusual about Sesame is that she seems to have had a Swedish commander for a while - was she loaned out?

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    2. Fascinating stuff (as usual!)... they seem to have been turned out in the hundreds, and in all shapes and uses... posts seem to indicate profits went to seaman's charities, so maybe an earlier (more handsome) version of those "Help for Heroes" rubber bracelets?

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    3. Hi Steve - I was trying to do a little more poking about before I responded. The charities angle is interesting. Looking at the range of nautical treen on sale, some of the souvenirs are for ships which were broken up as early as 1905 (as far as I've found in a very quick scratch around), so maybe there was a steady flow of these things - maybe people collected them (did people do that sort of thing in those days?).

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