Tributes to heroic ex-Grimsby skipper James ‘Jim’ Gamble following his death aged 97
Tributes have been paid to a heroic ex-Grimsby trawler skipper and tugmaster following his death at the age of 97.
During his long career at sea, James “Jim” Gamble was awarded for outstanding seamanship demonstrated in the rescue of 14 trawlermen from a stricken Grimsby vessel off the coast of Iceland in 1955. Jim was the then 28-year-old skipper of another Grimsby vessel, the Viviana, when he fought a force 10 storm and mountainous seas to bring her alongside the drifting 380-ton Barry Castle so that crew members could jump aboard.
He accepted an award – on condition it was in honour of the whole of his crew – for the courage he showed. Sadly, the 80-piece canteen of silver cutlery with an inscription on the box, presented to him by the Grimsby Trawler Owners’ Association in June 1956, was later stolen during a burglary at his Holton le Clay home.
The precious set was among a haul of heirlooms, including wedding rings and other jewellery, that went missing while Jim and his wife Jean were visiting Humberston Fitties in late 2001. He told the Grimsby Telegraph at the time: “I was asked the value of it, but I haven’t got a clue. It is not the money.”
The 455-ton Viviana rescued ten crew within seven minutes. Four men who fell between the two trawlers were picked up by other vessels and four other men who were down below tragically perished as the Barry Castle sank on November 1, 1955.
Jim worked on trawlers most of his life before becoming a tugmaster on the Humber. During that time, in the mid-1960s, he took the first fireboat tug onto the Humber, the Lady Thelma, owned by J H Piggott & Son Ltd.
The Lady Thelma, the estuary’s only specialised firefighting tug, was involved in a full-scale operation to save a Danish coaster ablaze in the Humber. The Septimus sent out a Mayday from its mooring off Spurn Point when fire broke out in the engine room.
In rough seas and gale force winds, Skipper Gamble was credited with getting the tug alongside after sailing full-throttle from Immingham. Assistant Divisional Officer Ray Topps, who led the firemen, said: “The skipper of the tug did a grand job. He managed to stay alongside the coaster in bad weather which meant we could use his water jets.
“It he hadn’t done that we would have been helpless as the coaster’s own pumps were in the burning engine room.” The smoke-blackened Septimus was steered up-river to Goole and no one was hurt during the incident.
Another incident – recalled in a Bygones report in the Grimsby Telegraph in 2014 – involved the Hull freezer trawler Northella. Outward bound from Hull in a blizzard on January 15, 1966, the trawler cut straight through the Regent oil jetty at North Killingholme, causing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage.
The Northella tore a 200ft wide gap in the jetty and knocked a sizeable hole in her bows at the same time. She eventually had to be beached near Immingham and her crew taken off by Jim’s tug Lady Theresa. Two members of the Northella crew, thrown into the water in the impact, were rescued and spent a day or two in hospital recovering from the ordeal.
Cleethorpes-born Jim was living in The Elms care home, in Louth, when he died. He leaves four children, Stephen, Martyn, John and Karen, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Daughter Karen Baldock recalled her father’s “short and sweet” visits home from sea. “He always said the sea is such a powerful thing and should be treated with the utmost respect.
“As children growing up, we didn’t see him very much because he had such little time on shore - sometimes it would only be 24 hours and in that time he would be responsible for overseeing the selling of the catch and readying the ship for sailing again.
“My eldest brother says he only really remembers having one parent at home, my mum Jean. She and dad had a very long and happy marriage – they had been married over 60 years before Mum died – and he was still living independently and cutting his own grass up until a couple of years ago.”
Karen said: “Only recently I took Dad onto the seafront for ice cream and he was watching the development of the new lifeboat station for Cleethorpes. He would always look out for the lighthouse at Spurn Point.
“He told his tales of the sea, his travels to Norway, Canada and Iceland for fishing. He would talk about how difficult and dangerous it was, chipping ice off the ships.”
Karen recalled family trips to the Fitties with her father’s warnings about checking tide times and beach safety “ingrained” in them all. “He would lecture us about the dangers of crossing the creek; I can still hear his voice now.” She also recalled Jim walking her out to Haile Sand Fort, with those strict tidal timings in mind, and collecting cockles, as well him taking her out on a tug at night when she was about eight or nine and finding it “very exciting”.
Eldest son Stephen said: “I believe Dad was the only skipper out of Grimsby who took over a ship [the Viviana] his own dad had skippered, when he was working for the same fishing company. I didn’t really know Dad until he was on the tugs at Immingham - I was a teenager by that time.
“His career was quite remarkable and he had an incredibly tough life. There were all the stories he used to tell about the bad weather and the cold. And there was the one about the first ship he was on having a toilet that was literally a seat hanging over the stern rail.”
Jim’s second-born son Martyn said: “There was an inevitability that Dad would become a Grimsby skipper, as his own father James Gamble (born 1899), and his grandfather James Gamble (born 1864 and first recorded in the crew of the sailing trawler Ben Ledi in the 1881 census) were also skippers. Over many years of service he was involved in several marine salvage operations, ship fires at sea, collection and delivery of new vessels, and the design of the anchorage system for the new Mono buoy.
“For my part, I remember racing down Ravendale hill on the Norwegian sledge he brought home for us, and walking along Cleethorpes beach as the sea had frozen in midwinter 1963.”
A funeral for Jim will be held on Friday, September 20, at Grimsby Crematorium, at 11.15am. It is family flowers only but donations are welcome in aid of Cleethorpes RNLI.