Midge Ure – Why I joined the Navy

My dad bought me a boat, a little lobster pot boat shall we call it? It was an 18-foot clinker-built boat that had many issues with but I was probably one of two children in the village that had a boat, so we sort of teamed up. We would go out, we would catch lobsters, crabs and sell them and do a bit of fishing, so that sort of ingrained me into getting up every morning before school, going out. It wasn’t the safest thing in the world to do.

I now realise I had no lifejacket, no flares, no oars, in case my engine packed in, but every morning I would get up at 4 o’clock, go out, do my lobster pots, come back in, get my breakfast, then go to school.

I wanted to be at sea, I wanted to do that, and it was ingrained from about four or five all the way through. I wanted, I think quite naturally as a young boy, I wanted to follow my dad to the Deep-Sea Fishing, which he was against ‘cos he knew how hard it was.

Ultimately I think I knew how hard it was. We’d gone from living in probably a reasonably affluent area in Glasgow, to a fishing village. We did have a large house but your income was based on what you could pull out of the sea, and that wasn’t always, certainly in the winter months, that wasn’t always good.

It didn’t deter me, I still wanted to be a Deep-Sea Fisherman, I still wanted to do what my dad did, but he did his best to deter me and he did. He wouldn’t let me go with him on trips. A lot of my friends would go out with their fathers on the boats for days and weeks at a time during the summer holidays to get a flavour for it. He wouldn’t allow me to do it.

He said, “If you’re going to go to sea, you really need to do it properly” and what he meant by that was, you join either the Navy, you do it properly or the cruise ships or something like that.

So, it boiled down to two options really. The Royal Navy, which I knew how to get in to. Remember, we’re talking of the days pre-internet, so I had to go to my sort of guidance teacher and they offered me options on how to join the Navy and it was a local Recruitment Area, or the Royal Fleet Auxiliary effectively or the Marine Navy, and I didn’t really have anyone guiding me towards that so I think the Royal Navy became the option, so I enquired, I found out what I needed to get in and I reached those academic qualifications no problem so it was mainly my dad.

He deterred me in every single way he could from trying to get me not to become a Deep-Sea Fisherman. I’m eternally grateful for him for doing that.