Grandad

My grandfather. Claud Waghorn Beauchamp. My dad’s dad.

He’d lived a life. A merchant seaman, he was an engineer on steam ships in the 1920’s and 30’s, and in 1935, in Glasgow, passed an examination to become a first-class engineer.

I have the passports he carried onboard with their handwritten details of arrivals and departures at ports around the world. The penmanship is intricate and exact, the comments just a touch stilted and cold. His behaviour is rated as much on sobriety as it is on his ability to keep the engines running. 

The passports both spell grandad’s name as Claud. There is no ‘e’ at the end of the beautiful cursive. And yet, in every electoral roll and marriage, birth or death notice he is Claude. Who knows, here, I will call him Claud.

Claud had an eye for detail and moments and I have his photos, of Sydney harbour as the bridge nears completion, of Panama Canal with German gunships idling near-by in the mid 30’s. 

The Suez Canal, Bedouin traders shadowing the banks as the shipping slowly passes through.

We never really did much more with Grandma and Grandad than ‘visit’, so Claud was just the tall, thin man standing reluctantly somewhere on the fringes of the family pic taken on the balcony of their retirement townhouse. 

When I look at photos my mum keeps in albums, of times before my brother and I came along, Claud often has a camera draped around his neck.

He and his friends had some money by the standards of the day, and I guess they looked forward to the times they could spend catching up after he had been away at sea. 

I don’t know if the other men in his black and white photos were sailors too. I have a feeling there were friends from school times.

Some of his photos are of a trip in a big open top roadster around the top end of the South Island of New Zealand. 

Claud had gone to Nelson College. The little detail hand-written on the back of the photos refers to an earthquake which had hit the region, and Google tells me this was probably 1929. 

He has some beautifully framed images of damage to the stone buildings of the College, fallen spires and the like. A couple of boys were injured. 

It seems as if Claud and his friends were surprised by the damage, I guess in those days where news travelled slowly and laboriously you could be caught unawares.

He had others of he and his friends with their trouser legs rolled to the knees as they catch a trout and cook it over twigs and pinecones, with the roadster pulled over into the long grass tumbling down from a narrow gravelly road to the little rapids of a beautiful river.

My favourites are of Claud dressed as King Neptune. 

I guess he had been across the equator many times by then, and he has such an open, limitless smile as he looks up into the camera from the pool they created on the deck of one of the steamers, and then solemnly bestows his blessing upon the others crossing for the first time. 

I never saw him smile like that, but there were trinkets spread around the shelves and walls of the lounge room we would sit in on our visits, and it was when he looked at those that you got a inkling of what he had felt, and it was still there somewhere behind his eyes. 

I think there was a tiny part of those times in my mind when I joined the navy.

I was a teenager when Claud passed away. I liked grandad, even though he had always been just a quiet figure at the far end of the lounge in his armchair, with his pipe and the tele on.

As a young boy, even into my teenage years, I cringed on his behalf every time I heard his middle name mentioned. When people started going through their memories searching out the most memorable names from school friends, workmates, celebrities I would think my grandad still topped most cringe-worthy lists.

Kids at school mocked me for my second name, Roderick, my dad’s name. My best friend was lumbered with Mansfield, and I loved him, but I was glad he existed because he took some of the heat off me. At least mine was a first name.

I wondered what could have possessed Claud’s parents. Mum and dad loved Johnny Cash, who didn’t back then. He had a song about a boy named Sue. At its climax Sue’s father told him he’d given him that name because the world was a tough place, and he’d thought carrying a name which you’d have to fight to defend might help with getting Sue tough enough to face that world. I thought maybe Claud’s dad had had some similar type of momentary madness.

Claud’s surname was Beauchamp. He had vague memories of meeting Katherine Mansfield, his cousin. I think that’s right or I could be making the whole thing up.

Turns out Waghorn was in honour of Claud’s relative, Thomas Waghorn, the man who made a mail route half way across the world. He could take mail from the furthest corners of the empire and get it back home quicker than any ship of the time. There is a statue of the man in Alexandria still.

Waghorn letters have become sort after items, very few remain in existence and change hands infrequently for larger and larger amounts of money.

Claud would have been very proud of that name I think, the sense of adventure it held.