In Bombay some silly bugger suggested we get a couple of grass monkeys as pets for the ship. Only two blokes were game; a silly Irish AB and me! Mine I named Sam, his he named Molly - I don’t know if it was named after the cockle and mussel Sheila they sing about when they get pi**d or if he just liked the name. What a nuisance they turned out to be! If they got loose in the rigging they could not be caught until they were hungry. The lifeboats were a favourite place if they absconded. You don’t know frustration until you have tried to extract a monkey from a lifeboat that still has its cover on. About the only saving grace of owning a grass monkey was the entertainment value.

Grass monkey are promiscuous, just like seamen, and No5 hatch in the evening was nothing short of a monkey shagging stadium. I won’t tell you about the staying power old Sam had or some of the facial expressions he came up with when he was in action. It might upset fellas of your age! It wasn’t long before we woke up to the possible economic value of taking them ashore with us. Sam and Molly shagged many a drink out of ships crews in the bars we used to frequent. In fact going ashore broke and coming back to the ship pi**d was easy for a grass monkey owner and there were times when a shore going seaman would offer to rent the monkeys for a night. We wouldn’t trust anyone to take them ashore other than us. They would probably have sold them. They were not drinkers like the yarns I’ve heard about the white cockatoos but that could be because they were living in a more temperate environment!

In the end I couldn’t get Sam ashore when I paid off so I sold him to one of the shore gang. I didn’t drink as much on the next trip. I really missed old Sam.

I was on vessel chartered to ESSO and we went to place called Plajo (Phonetic spelling) in Sumatra which had just broken ties with the Dutch, lovely wide, tree lined streets with Orang Utan's up in the trees. It so happened that our cook had a very tame, so he thought, Grass Monkey and he treated it like son, it was a male. Anyway he would come out on the poop with his monkey, give it a piece of fruit and while he, the cook, sat there yarning the monkey would play around the awnings but this particular day it jumped onto one of the mooring lines and in a flash he was go, the poor old cook was broken hearted until the drama began. A senior official from the oil company came aboard to see the old man complaining this rampant monkey was chasing the Orang Utan's through the trees up and down the main street and if the owner didn't recover it they would have to kill it.
Poor Cookie was beside himself calling for volunteers to go ashore with to recover his best pal, I went along but from the word go it clear this would be an impossible task... We were only at Plajo for about twelve hours and just before we sailed word came back that the monkey had been shot, hearing this the Cook was ready to go ashore and shoot the bugger who'd shot his pal … I must admit there was a few more ready to go with the Cook, it was a very sad incident.

Well the best I can do to locate Sam and plenty of his mates might be to go to Canberra in the ACT of Oz as we have all sorts of monkeys there. Failing that could try our state parliaments but I think that the primates would be more wise than to be associated with them. Les

Well Les have to agree with you on that score, trouble is we do not have enough peanuts in the country to pay them all. Recall on the Windsor Castle one trip as officers steward. We had a junior second engineer, a Rodesian guy, who brought a 'Bush Baby' on board. Thye look a bit like a monkey and are native to Africa. Nocturnal animals with huge eyes. He kept it in his cabin which was O.K. until it required a crap! By the end of the first four days, we were homeward bound, you could ride a bike up the smell. Then we had a captains inspection, carried out by the cheif officer, and all hell broke loose. The animal was then confined to one of the holds until we docked in Southampton. Not sure what happened to it then but we never saw the engineer again.