The village of Pill is the home of the legendary Pill pilots, the men who guide the ships up and down the sometimes treacherous Bristol Channel and of the Hobblers, or boatmen, who take a ship’s mooring lines.

It sits on the southern bank of the River Avon, some six miles east of the centre of Bristol and about four miles from the coastal town of Portishead, where the river flows into the Severn Estuary.

Its location, close to the city and to the docks which later opened at Portishead and Avonmouth, facing each other on opposite sides of the river, and more recently the Royal Portbury Dock, has given it a strong maritime history.

For generations many of the village’s young men have gone to sea or earned a living by working in the docks or connected with shipping and Ray Buck is no exception.

The sea was in his blood and he was proud to follow his birthplace’s tradition and spent more than half a century afloat – initially sailing to exotic destinations around the world and later staying closer to home on the River Avon.

The male members of his family included sailors, westernmen and boatmen and even Ray’s father made one voyage to the West Indies on a banana boat in 1916 before deciding the sea was not for him and he chose to join the North Somerset Yeomanry instead.

Ray was the first child of the Buck family, who went on to have 3 more children.

His family had been in the Pill since the middle of the 18th century and Ray was born in a small cottage at Pond Head, close to the village green and a short distance from the river.

One of his earliest memories is of being taken down to the pill – an muddy inlet where a small creek flows into the river -  by his grandfather, William Buck, armed with a bucket which they filled with mud.

The idea was to use the mud to seal the front door of the cottage to prevent the spring tide, which regularly flooded low-lying properties close to the river and around the green, from penetrating the house. It failed.

As Ray recalled resignedly: “It never worked – ever.”

Another vivid childhood memory is his “gladiatorial” confrontation with a mouse in the kitchen as his mother stood terrified on a chair.

Ray, then aged about four, took on the rampaging rodent armed with the stick his mum used to stir the clothes she boiled up, but before he could inflict any harm, the family cat entered the arena and gobbled up the mouse for its lunch.

When Ray was five, his father obtained a job as a stoker in the boiler room at Ham Green Hospital, situated on the hill above the village.

The family was allocated a cottage in a terrace of eight homes built near the hospital by Bristol Corporation. Half were for hospital staff and the others for farm workers.

It had three bedrooms -  and a bathroom with hot and cold running water.

“It was luxury compared with the cottage in Pill,” said Ray.

For the next few years he enjoyed a “wonderful, Utopian childhood.”

Ray, who went to the village school, spent much of his time with his friends playing down in Pill, with its network of narrow streets, creeks and, of course, the river on which he and his pals went sculling.

Highlights of the year included an annual trip to Weston with the Sunday School, Pill Rag, an early form of fun day then held on November 5 but now staged in the summer, regatta day on the river and the village flower show when a fair with dodgems and musical roundabouts would set up for the duration of the event.

There were also visits by a travelling theatre company and Ray would get a free ticket for distributing handbills and offloading the large wicker baskets containing the props from the back of an old lorry.

Other forms of entertainment included a man with a barrel organ who would make the trek from Bristol to play it in the village. It came complete with a real-live monkey.

Then there was a rather refined blind woman who used to sit on a canvas stool outside the Pill pubs singing in a fine contralto voice and accompanying herself on a guitar.

Money was tight in the Buck household and when he was about 13, Ray got an evening newspaper round at the village post office for which he was paid half a crown – 12.5p in today’s money – of which he kept 9d – just under 5p – for pocket money.

His father helped to swell his modest weekly wage by running a clothing club for villagers and hospital staff which enabled the family to enjoy a few extra pleasures.

Ray used his earnings to fund Saturday afternoon trips to the fleapit cinema in Avonmouth known as the Bug House, where the owner’s wife would go round the audience with a giant spray gun and douse the young audience with antiseptic.

These cinema excursions were sometimes followed by visits to Gomer Sharp’s fish shop for twopenn’orth of chips and a penny’s worth “scrumps,” crumbs of hot batter.

Over time, young Ray had earned enough money to buy a Standard Upright bicycle from the Freeman’s Club and also acquired an air rifle which got him into a spot of hot water.

On one occasion he was brought up before magistrates at Flax Bourton for trespassing on the railway line with an air gun and his father was fined £2, almost his weekly wage.

Ray recalled being shocked when a lad from North Weston, who was appearing before the court for a second time, was sent to a reformatory for two years.

“He was forcibly separated from his parents and his crying entreaties of “no, no” rang in my ears for days,” he said.

Ray left school at 14 and after a couple of temporary jobs, secured his first job afloat.

He heard that the Commonwealth Towing Company of Avonmouth needed a boy and applied for the post. He was told to start work next day and so became a deckhand on the 129ft coal-burning steam tug Triton, towing vessels in and out of the docks.

His first chore when he arrived aboard was to make a cup of tea and scrub the cabin out.

Ray got to work by crossing the River Avon on the Pill ferry, then a two-oared scow, and was often expected to take one of the oars to help row the craft across.

In 1937, Ray had the distinction of helping to tow the four-masted barque the Viking in from Lundy Island when she was en route to Sharpness Docks on the River Severn. It was the last deep-water square-rigger to enter Sharpness.

The following year, Ray developed a hankering to broaden his horizons and see the world and so he joined Elders and Fyffe as a deck boy, or “peggy,”  on the company’s banana boats which plied between Avonmouth and the West Indies.

He made his maiden Atlantic crossing aboard the Cavina and his shipmates included Bill Staples and Moaner Perkins, men from the sailing ship era.

“It was a hard, tough life,” said Ray. “We started work at 5am and finished at 6pm. I had to scrub the fo’c’sle out and fetch the crew food. There was no heating and you did your ablutions in a bucket.

I also found to my consternation that on my first voyage I was seasick. The ship laboured against force 10 gales and I was ill for five days and five nights, retching and bringing up green bile. But I was never seasick again.”

His duties aboard also required him to scrub the messroom, the heads (toilets), the dayworkers’ room and the decks, carry dixies of steaming tea up and down ladders with the boat pitching and tossing in a rough sea, wash up the eating and cooking utensils, sweep the decks, disinfect wooden fruit bins and also build them from scratch out of numbered slats, polish the ship’s  brass fittings and wire wool paint spots off the deck.

Living conditions on the Cavina were “miserable” and “Dickensian” as far as Ray and most of the crew were concerned, with steel bunks and just a single thin grey blanket with which to keep warm, a single 25 watt bulb for lighting and negligible heating.

The food was basic with hot porridge every morning, the cheapest cuts of meat and bacon, bread and rock cakes. But there was steamed Spotted Dick pudding on Sundays and a delicious pea soup was served twice a week.

There was also a Saturday night rum ration, but for men only and, as a youngster, Ray received nothing.

Life was also made more bearable as the ship sailed further south. As the weather improved a swimming pool was erected on deck and the crew were allowed to use it at certain times, usually when the Cavina’s passengers were having dinner.

In June 1939, war was imminent and Ray volunteered to go on a gunnery course.

War was declared while Ray was returning from the West Indies three days from home and all the white enamel on his ship was painted grey to make it less visible.

It was on that return voyage that his ship passed the flotsam and jetsam from an oil tanker which had been torpedoed.

Two hours later it encountered a French cruiser which trained its guns on the ship until its identity was established.

Despite the dangers, Ray then joined another banana boat bound for what was then the German Cameroons on the West African coast.

On his return to Avonmouth, Ray switched to an oil tanker as a seaman gunner and sailed to the Dutch East Indies. Another voyage took him in convoy to the United States and the Texan port of Corpus Christi.

On Christmas morning 1940, Ray was on watch on his vessel, the Arbistan,  when it came under fire from a German cruiser. It was hit on the starboard bow by a shell and peppered with shrapnel, but miraculously no one was seriously hurt.

But Ray did suffer a slight injury which left him rather puzzled. He said: “After the action, taking off my seaboots, I found a small wound in my foot, but no corresponding hole in the boot!”

Despite the ever present dangers which faced seamen throughout the war,  and the constant risk of being attacked by enemy submarines, warships and aircraft, Ray claims that he was never scared.

The few times he was frightened while at sea was in bad weather.

During the course of the Second World War, Ray made long trips to destinations including the Persian Gulf, which necessitated sailing around Cape Horn.

He then joined a general cargo ship which was due to sail out of Avonmouth the night the German’s launched a bombing raid on the port.

“The pilot wouldn’t take the ship out and we decided to go home to Pill,” said Ray. “We were walking along the Portway and the German’s dropped a stick of bombs. The pilot put on his tin helmet and gave me his trilby to wear and two handkerchiefs to stuff inside it as extra protection.

“When we got to the ferry we had to shout for half an hour before the ferryman, Bumper Price, came to fetch us.”

Ray’s visit home was short indeed. The next day his ship sailed at 5.30am, calling at Penarth to take on a cargo of bombs and nitroglycerine.

The war also has some fond memories for Ray. He vividly recalls seeing The  Lady in White during visits to Durban in South Africa.

She was the soprano Perla Sielde Gibson, South Africa’s answer to Vera Lynn, who entertained tens of thousands of military personnel on the troopships which docked there.

Dressed in white and wearing a white hat, and often using a megaphone, she would sing them patriotic songs such as Land of Hope and Glory. During the course of the war, she became a legend and sang for more than 1,000 troopships and 350 hospital ships.

The Royal Navy paid for a memorial to be erected to her on Durban’s North Pier after she died in 1971 aged 82.

There were also compensations for braving the perils and pack ice of the North Atlantic in the form of leaves in Canadian cities like Montreal and Quebec.

Ray also has happy and lasting memories of New York. As he said: “The beauty of the merchant navy was that you could get to places that were not blacked out. I loved New York. It was a blaze of lights and you could get things that you could not find in England, like stockings and even canary seed!”

One thing that Ray did find in wartime England, and almost on his doorstep, was his wife, Rose.

He first set eyes on her in the Kings Arms pub in Easton-in-Gordano.  “She was a real stunner,” he said.

Fortunately for him, she was similarly impressed and they were married nineteen months later.

Ray and “Burls,” as he always calls her, went on to have two sons and a daughter and to date have two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

As newlyweds they naturally settled in Pill, eventually, they went to live on Ham Green Hill, which Ray’s family had moved to in the 1930's.

Ray finally gave up the sea in 1956 after a career which had taken him from Abadan to Australia and Japan to Johannesburg. But he retained his connection with shipping.

His experience as a sailor enabled him to become one of 36 licensed hobblers and boatmen working at Portishead Dock, the Royal Edward Dock at Avonmouth and at Cumberland Basin in Bristol.

Hobblers have the job of securing the mooring ropes of ships when they come in to dock and their work is totally dependent on the tides, so there is routinely a lot of night work.

“We worked a rota system with two days off a month,” said Ray, who also became a river helmsman.

As such, he was entrusted to steer vessels up and down the winding River Avon to and from Bristol Docks.

Ray had the privilege of steering the second biggest ship ever to go up and down the river.

“In summertime the river work was enchanting, towing up the boat, the sun on one’s face, dabbling your hand in the cool river and hearing the nightingales in profusion singing when coming down past Nightingale Valley,” he said.

“Pill then was a close-knit community with pretty cottages, inns, pilots – a lot still living in the village - hobblers, many of them descended from pilots, and westernmen who had crewed the famous Pill pilot cutters.”

Ray retired when he reached 65 but went on for many more years to use his hobbler’s skills to secure the mooring ropes of the historic Bristol Channel cruise ships, MV Balmoral and PS Waverley, the world’s last ocean-going paddle steamer.

He became a familiar sight perched precariously on the end of Clevedon Pier and at other ports of call along the Bristol Channel as the vessels made ready to dock.

In his retirement, Ray has also enjoyed writing poetry, for which he has won prizes, and writing nostalgic articles for nautical magazines. At 87 he remains fit and alert and tries to walk five miles every day. He also still enjoys his beer.

Looking back, he said: “I would say one of the main features of life is job satisfaction and I had job satisfaction all my life, always associated with the sea.

It was a marvellous life and it was challenging, especially pre-war.

With a simple notice on the Shipping Federation door at Avonmouth saying cabin, messroom or deck boy required, the SS so-and-so could transport a green boy to romantic places around the world, not like today when air travel puts all these places within reach of most ordinary people.

Jolly Jack was a worldly man in those days. It was a hard life for all hands with not much money but you had a pride in your job and your ship.”

Ray, who now lives with his beloved “Burls” in a bungalow in Pill has no regrets about spending all his life in the village– apart from the accumulated years he spent at sea.

“I like its maritime history and my family connections,” he said.

But he regrets the changes that have seen the village’s character and appearance change over the years and laments what he sees as “the destruction of rural England.”

Looking back on his long and eventful life, Ray said: “I, like my father and grandfather, was born with a caul – a membrane covering the head.

“It is supposed that a person born with a caul will never drown. Well, despite going into the spread three times, once in heavy weather gear, I’m still here and hope it lasts.”

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