TSS Camito

History

She was built in 1956 by Alexander Stephen and Sons, of Glasgow, Scotland, and scrapped at Taiwan in 1973.

Accommodation

She had three passenger decks with cabins for 96 first class passengers, public rooms and open-air deck spaces, centered between four large refrigerated cargo holds, two forward and two aft, that could handle 140,000 stems (1,750 tons) of bananas.

Trade

Her main trade was general cargo outwards (mostly British manufactured goods), returning with bananas.

Routing

She was routed on 4-5 week voyages from Southampton (rarely Avonmouth) in England to Trinidad (for bunkers); up to 5 ports on Jamaica (Kingston, Port Antonio, Montego Bay, Oracabessa and Bowden). She always started her run round the Jamaican coast by arriving at Kingston; and always finished at Port Antonio, which was an unusual loading port because she went alongside a dock. The intermediate Jamaican ports were less sophisticated then; and most of them loaded bananas through side-shell doors in the ship while she anchored in the bay (mostly at Oracabessa and Montego Bay) from lightering craft that were sculled out under one-man power. Loading took place 24 hours a day.

Camito berthed in Southampton as regularly as clockwork at 0600 every fourth Sunday: the dockers loved her because they got a regular source of full Sunday pay for getting the passenger baggage off, which could sometimes take only an hour or two but almost always in time for the pubs opening at noon: if there was a bit more baggage than usual they would stretch things out until a few minutes past 5pm (after taking a two-hour pub-break at lunchtime) so that they got a full night of pay for Sunday night plus the day off on Monday (and we wonder why the docks went broke!).

Banana discharge used to start at 0800 on Monday, using a system of continuous-belt elevators that were dropped down the hatches and she was, thus, able to discharge all decks concurrently to the shore. There were four cargo decks in the forward two hatches and three decks in the aft two hatches. Discharging generally finished by Tuesday night or Wednesday morning; then outward passenger baggage was loaded on Wednesday, the ship sailing for Trinidad/Jamaica/Bermuda on Wednesday afternoon or evening.

The biggest glitch in the system would come about if the dockers had a strike: they would always open the hatches (breaking the temperature control seal in the cargo hatches) and put the banana elevators down the hatches so they could not be re-sealed; then go on strike. This way, if the owner did not give in to the demands of the dockers, the whole cargo would go ripe in only a very few days and would have to be dumped on the way back across the Atlantic to the West Indies.

Passengers on the Fyffes' ships were fiercely loyal; and they needed to be. A round-trip suite in 1969 cost £549.19.6d (549.97 in today's money) and until the late sixties this was not even air-conditioned. She and her fellow Fyffes' ships also carried a lot of consular staff to and from the West Indies, together along with all their belongings.

Sister ship

There was a similar but much older vessel, the TSS Golfito, which was broadly of the same design. Together they provided a regular fortnightly service between Southampton Empress Dock (straight across from the Ocean Terminal, where the Queens docked regularly), to and from the West Indies.

Name prefix

When new, she was known as TSS Camito. This was an abbreviation for "Twin Screw Ship". This was always her "official" designation by her owners, Elders and Fyffes (later to be Fyffes Group Ltd), though the shorter and more generic abbreviation SS (Steam Ship) was often used throughout her life, though more often in the later years as "company orientated" manning was gradually dropped in favor of pool employees.