The Sea, Ships, and Sailormen

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 548, 23 December 1949, Page 21

The Sea, Ships, and Sailormen

ROBABLY there are very few New Zealanders who have not a dash of salt sea spray in their veins-at least enough to make them prick up their years when the adventures of ships and the men who sail in them are being discussed. And there are few people better able or better qualified to tell sea stories than Lee Fore Brace (in private life Forbes Eady, of Auckland) who will be heard from 1YA at 9.30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 28, describing Hogmanay at Sea. This Scot from the Isle of Islay in Argyllshire went to sea at 14, he told The Listener, and only the threat of blindness following a sunstroke drove him to seek a shore job after 20 years in sail and steam. He came to New Zealand because he had been led to believe it was "the finest country in the world." And he still holds that belief. "Swallowing the anchor" brought no slackening of his affection for -his first loves-the sea, ships, and sailormen, and he began to write, and to broadcast about them, drawing first on personal experience, then later, on a combination of this coupled with the results of research and inquiry. His first appearance on the air in this country was in 1928, and by 1939 he had given, in Australia

and New Zealand, over 380 broadcast accounts of maritime adventure, becoming even better known across the Tasman than in his adopted homeland. He has not been heard here since then. All his broadcasts are based on fact. There is. far too much good material about the sea to be bothered with fiction, he says. There is not one overseas vessel calling at New Zealand ports these days that cannot produce at least one epic story.. Among them are ships that saw Dunkirk, Narvik, and D Day in Europe, ships that carried stores to ussia, ships that faced peril hourly hroughout the war. The men aboard them now are often the men who sailed in them then. There is no ending to the log of adventure they have compiled. It’s not always easy to dig it out of them. Sailors are not naturally talkative. But the stories are there for those with the patience and skill to seek them out.