At the outbreak of WW2, The Boy Andrew, like many other drifters, was requisitioned by the Admiralty for the war effort.

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After leaving his boat tied up for the last time, Joe Mair went to the office to do the paperwork.  Clearly he was not daunted by officialdom.  He challenged the Naval man behind the desk.  “What about my crew?  What will I do with them?”  “Oh, we don’t need them.”  The practice of signing on the men to continue service, often in the boat they worked on in peacetime, which had been standard in World War 1, was not continued in the next war.  “But this is their livelihood, they have families to feed.”

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“Well,” said the official, “There’s a drifter over there.  We don’t want it.  You can have that.”  The vessel in question was the Primrose Bay. 

 

Named after a bay near Hopeman, she had by that time been registered in Peterhead.  Her pretty name belied the fact that she was in poor condition.  The reason the Royal Navy didn’t want her was that she was, in their view, a rusting wreck, only fit for the scrapyard.  Joe Mair took her on.  In fact, the Primrose Bay soldiered on until 1952, when she was finally scrapped.

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The Primrose Bay was built in 1910 on the River Tees by the Smiths Dock Company Ltd.  She was built as the Mary Thomson for Lossiemouth owner George Thomson and registered as INS100.  The name was changed in 1931, and her registration, INS120.  She acquired a Peterhead fishing number, PD181 in 1941. A new owner, Craigwood Ltd. Aberdeen, appears in the 1945 Olsen's Almanack.

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Joe Mair never owned the Primrose Bay; he must have come to some hire agreement with her owners.  Whether he ever fished in her is uncertain.  He did however manage to sail her to the Firth of Clyde, and for a year or two he operated her as a tender to the many big ships that came and went.  The story we were told was that the old tub was getting a coat of paint.  As the crewman wielded the paintbrush, he managed to push the brush clean through the steel hull!  This was the vessel that nine men were trusting with their lives.  However, as the popular saying went, “there was a war on”. 

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By this time, Joe Mair was over retirement age, but he was clearly eager to do what he could for the war effort.  His elder son William who had acted as skipper when his father was not on the Boy Andrew, was probably skippering the Primrose Bay.  Joe’s younger son Andrew, who also had a skipper’s ticket, was serving in the Arctic Convoys.

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Meanwhile, the Boy Andrew got a Naval crew, and began wartime operation as an auxiliary patrol vessel working from Rosyth.  On 9th November 1941, the boat was heading to sea in the Firth of Forth, and was involved in a collision with the Orkney mail boat, the St. Rognvald.  The bigger, faster vessel was overtaking the Boy Andrew, but it passed too close.  It was reported that the drifter “yawed”; her stern swung to the starboard side.  As a result of the collision the Boy Andrew foundered and tragically, all hands were lost.

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The House of Lords later conducted an inquiry, which found that the yawing was unexplained, and that the St Rognvald was negligent in attempting to overtake too close.  The case gained a certain fame in legal circles as the detailed finding of the inquiry set a precedent for later cases involving the rules of navigation.  Regardless of that, it was a very sad end for the Boy Andrew.  In a sense, the loss was just as well for Joe Mair.  The end of the war was also the end of the road for steam drifters as fishing vessels.  The advent of the diesel engine gave fishermen a far cheaper option.  After the war, the new boats moved to bigger harbours where modern facilities were being developed.  For the steam drifter, and for Portsoy harbours, old and new, the glory days of the herring boom were well and truly at an end.