ABOARD THE S.S. JOHN W. BROWN -- The old English seaman had planned to honor his dead World War II shipmates by tossing a wreath into "The Graveyard of the Atlantic" -- the vast East Coast area where a German U-boat had sunk their ship 56 years ago.
Instead, Thomas William Tickner joined his old friends in the depths.
Tickner, 75, a volunteer crewman from Kent, Surrey, suffered heart attack and died during this restored, Baltimore-built Liberty ship's visit to Charleston, S.C. He was buried at sea Tuesday off Cape Hatteras, N.C., entering the water along with the wreath he had bought.
During the 10 years of the Baltimore-based Brown's revived existence, sailing in the Chesapeake Bay and as far away as Nova Scotia, the old ship has welcomed thousands of visitors and buried other sailors. But the crew remembered no more emotional moment than when they bowed their heads and buried Tickner, the Brown's first death while the ship was on a cruise.
Gathered on the starboard foredeck for a traditional service were Tickner's new friends -- 40 fellow sailors, including several women of the all-volunteer Brown, most of them also veterans of the Merchant Marine and the Navy. Nineteen others were on duty.
"The Lord is my Captain, I shall not want," intoned the Rev. Ramon Reno, the ship's chaplain, in his mariners' version of the 23rd Psalm, as mourners stared stoically or wept. "He makes me sail to pleasant bays, He anchors me in quiet waters. He restores my soul."
And from the 139th Psalm, he offered, "If I settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there Your hand shall guide me and Your right hand hold me fast."
The ship's master, Paul J. Esbensen of Kent Island, had slowed the Brown to five knots. Perfect conditions prevailed for a funeral at sea: out of sight of land, under a sunny sky, in a fair wind and with a following sea.
Two years before, Tickner had joined the Brown's crew as a deckhand. He volunteered for any job except taking the helm. Never again, he had said, remembering a wartime horror: He was at the wheel of a tanker in a North Atlantic convoy when, under convoy rules, he had to steer it through live and dead Allied sailors in the water without stopping for fear of endangering his vessel.
The ship whose crew Tickner had planned to honor, the freighter S.S. Margot, was sunk May 23, 1942, away from the Brown's Baltimore-to-Charleston course. So it was not possible to lay the wreath and bury Tickner at that spot. He was laid to rest not far from Diamond Shoals, near where the British tanker Empire Gem was sunk by another German U-boat with the loss of all but three of its 57 crewmen.
A final salute
The ashes of Tickner were in a biodegradable bag on a board inside a black box especially created with four brass handles and painted battleship gray the night before the funeral. The remains were covered by the red ensign, the distinctive British merchant navy flag of scarlet with the Union Jack in one corner.
On completion of the rites, a burial detail of four crew members tipped the board and committed the remains of the old sailor to the deep.
The quartet consisted of Ralph Brown of Cambridge, representing the U.S. Navy Armed Guard, which served aboard Liberty ships; Ed Agnew of Lewes, Del., representing the U.S. merchant marine; Ray Lewis of Essex, who resuscitated Tickner after the heart attack on a Charleston street; and Craig Crawmer of Columbia, a paramedic who attended him later.
Esbensen pulled the ship's steam whistle for three blasts. It's the traditional salute of ships to each other as they pass each other and was a final salute to Tickner.
"Tommy was a good shipmate. We can't say anything better about a crew member," the captain had said days earlier when he announced Tickner's death to the crew in Charleston.
Tickner's joking manner fit in on the Brown, which is run with military strictness yet doesn't take itself seriously off duty. A sign in the Brown crew's mess reads, "Floggings will continue until morale improves."
Reno later conducted another burial service, for David Shelley Klass III, 74, of Somerdale, N.J., a retired American merchant mariner and Navy veteran who died June 3 and was covered by the Stars and Stripes before burial.
Project Liberty Ship
Klass was a member of Project Liberty Ship, the nonprofit Baltimore group that acquired and restored the Brown, but he was not a crew member.
The group, supported by 3,100 members, was given the 10,865-ton ship by the U.S. Maritime Administration in 1988, towed it to Baltimore from the James River in Virginia and, during thousands of hours of scraping rust and tuning engines, restored it to operating fitness. All rivets are being replaced in a major overhaul that is expected to last several years.
The Brown -- which landed troops during the invasion of southern France -- and the S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien, based in San Francisco, are the only working Liberty ships left from the 2,700 built to defeat the Germans and Japanese. More Liberties were built in Baltimore than anywhere else.
"Tommy came this summer because he felt this was his last chance to lay a wreath on the open Atlantic for his old buddies," said Brian H. Hope of Ellicott City, chairman of Project Liberty Ship.
"The Liberties were the bridge across the Western Ocean," Tickner recalled last year on the Brown's voyage to Philadelphia. "We were finished. We had no food. These Liberties saved England."
The owner of plumbing businesses in England, Tickner flew to Baltimore two weeks ago to join the Brown for a round-trip voyage to Charleston. The city had invited the ship to be the centerpiece of last weekend's HarborFest.
On Aug. 11, the Brown docked in Charleston. The next day, Tickner ordered the $52 grapevine wreath with red and white carnations and purple statice. That night, he had a heart attack on a downtown street and fell unconscious. Ray Lewis, one of the crew's electricians, revived him with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and Lewis' daughter, Beth, 14, a deckhand, ran for help.
At Charleston Memorial Hospital, when a doctor asked him whether he had had heart problems, the sailor responded in his Cockney accent, "When I was young and in love."
Kidding with nurses, he discussed Viagra. Mates visited.
During four days in port, the ship drew thousands of visitors, mainly veterans and families from the Southeast. As the Brown's crew of 57 welcomed them, the sailors privately worried about Tickner. On the afternoon of Aug. 14, he died.
A rosary service was held in the ship's chapel in No. 1 hold. A friend collected Tickner's wreath from the florist. Now the blossoms would also be for him.
The ship's officers notified his family in England. His wife -- "my Nan," he called her -- died several years ago. His five grown children conferred. They decided it would be fitting for the Brown's crew to bury him at sea.
Tickner's early adventure on the S.S. Margot was during the same year, 1942, when the Brown was built. He was a 17-year-old cabin boy when he sailed on the small British freighter of 4,545 tons.
"She was rotten, an old tramp, full of bugs and rats," he said last year, but he noted that it was full of good men.
The vessel was steaming alone from Boston to Norfolk to join an eastbound convoy. It carried a full cargo of wartime materials including tanks and explosives. Attacking on the surface east of New Jersey, U-588 under Capt. Kaleum Viktor Vogel fired one torpedo. Almost half of the Margot's crew was killed or wounded.
Tickner and other survivors took to the lifeboats. The German sub repeatedly fired at the empty freighter and sank it. "The poor Margot, she was my home," Tickner had said. "I can see her struggling today."
The U-boat commander offered two bottles of rum to the lifeboats. Asked for a tow to shore, Vogel said, "Have no time." He and his sub disappeared. Tickner's lifeboat was picked up by xTC an Allied ship in four days. After a few months in New York City, he returned to the war.
War stories, with humor
People liked to listen to his war stories, told with dollops of black humor. On the Brown's voyage last summer to Philadelphia, he broke into a familiar old song to emphasize that escort vessels sometimes disappeared from North Atlantic convoys, leaving their charges to the lethal Germans:
"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."
He would break into "The White Cliffs of Dover" to remember mates lost in the war.
A common feeling expressed aboard the Brown as it sailed back to Baltimore was that Tickner died doing what he wanted. "He was a sweet little man," said Beth Lewis, who had run to get help. "He joked when he was revived, and he joked when he was in the hospital."
Ending its two-week voyage, the S.S. John W. Brown docked in Baltimore Wednesday afternoon.
Keith Tickner, one of Tommy's sons, called from England the next day. Through Ray Witt, another English crew member, he thanked the Brown crew for its friendship.
The same day Tickner was buried in the Atlantic, the Tickner family in England remembered him in a service in London. They placed carnation-laden wreaths in the Thames River in his memory.
The Baltimoreans will send the Tickners the red British ensign that covered their father.
Pub Date: 8/23/98