Biography | Colin Marshall — Cadet Purser on the Orient Line out of Tilbury

People treat Marshall's first job as a footnote to Hertz and Avis.

The first job was a ship.

In his mid-teens he signed with the Orient Line as a cadet purser, the junior officer who kept passenger accounts and cabin lists on the long run from the Thames to Australia.

The Times obituary places those emigrant sailings at Tilbury.

The Port of Tilbury had opened in 1886 as London's downriver docks; by the 1950s it was still a passenger and cargo gate on the Essex bank.

A later purpose-built passenger terminal here was not Marshall's world.

He learned the work on the older berths, on ships that still carried people who expected a steward more than a brand.

On the liner Orsova in 1956 he met Janet Cracknell, a fellow officer.

They married in 1958.

Ten days later the couple sailed for New York with an immigrant visa and a family introduction to a Hertz vice-president.

The pin is the dock, not a vanished cabin.

What stands here now is a working container and bulk port under Forth Ports, not an Orient Line quay.

The useful fact is the sequence: this river, then Chicago and Mexico for Hertz, then Avis in Europe, then Sears in London, then the state airline.

The purser's ledger was the first customer-service job he ever held.

Photo: Stephen Williams, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Geograph