CLEANING SHIP

Hokitika Guardian, 23 April 1921, Page 4

CLEANING SHIP

(By T. Clifford). I recently saw in Plymouth Sound a big liner just returned from Australia, j She will not sail again for another month because, in the meantime, she has to be cleaned. Also she has to have considerable alterations made below decks, for having come back in cargo she is going out again with passengers. Incidentally I understand that, owing to a strike of ships’ joiners in an j English port, she has to go to a Frencli j port in order to get the work done. . j The average housewife has hei bh? “spring-clean” once a year, and not unnaturally considers it a pretty serious undertaking. But a big liner is “spring-cleaned” at the end of each double trip, and the cleaning is on a tremendous scale. There is nothing else, not oven a first-class club or hotel, which is kept in such spotless order as a passenger liner. The worst of work like this is that it usually must be done in a tremendous hurry. The whole thing may have to be completed within forty-eight hours.

There are between three and four hundred cabins in an average Atlantic liner. In each the paint must be washed down, the floor scrubbed, and the carpet taken up and pneumatically cleaned.

All furniture, such as tobies and chairs, must be polished. All bedding, such as mattresses and pillows, is examined, and, if oiled, properly cleaned or renewed.

In addition to the cabins and saloons, there are the bathrooms, the lifts, the gymnasium and nursery to be thoroughly turned out and cleaned, and the whole telephone and electric lighting system to be attended to. In a ship like the Mauretania there are more than five thousand electric lamps. An Atlantic liner carries in Impresses at least 3,000 dozen pieces of linen. Since there is no laundry aboard, all this has to lie got out, counted, sent ashore for washing, then counted again, mended, and put back in place. Of knives, forks, spoons, and silverware generally, there will he twenty to thirty thousand pieces. All these have to be inventoried, repaired, and losses made good. Incidentally, the losses are heavy. Some passengers have no conscience in the matter of “souvenirs.”

The worst losses, however, to the company are in respect of glass and china. The number of pieces will total up to to forty or fifty thousand, and the item of breakages is always a heavy one. Like the rest of the furnisfiings these are all inventoried at the end of the double trip, and the losses made good from the great stores kept ashore.

Added to all this, it is usual entirely to repaint the hull of the vessel and also the funnels, while the machinery, of course, comes in for the closest possible inspection and overhauling.

The fact of the matter is that the crew and stewards, busy a.s they seem while a ship is at sea, find their hardest work during the brief periods when the ship lies in the Mersey or in Southampton Water, being made ready for her next voyage.