Arctic adventure

HOME is the sailor, home from the sea, the extraordinary Jeffrey Allison cheerfully admitting that he feels more tired sitting around the house than he did battling the chilling, truly dreadful emptiness of the Siberian ocean.

You’ll probably have read about him, or seen him on the telly, the 73- year-old mining engineer who became the first person in the world to circumnavigate the Arctic clockwise.

The voyage, Hartlepool to Hartlepool, covered 10,335 nautical miles on the 52ft Eshamy, embraced almost five months, included 40 days without setting foot on land, meant keeping an awfully sharp lookout for ice and offered few more keenly anticipated treats than a tin of peaches.

“Just like when you were a kid,” says Jeff.

What only the Echo said, and then only amid the shallows, was that he – like all the best – was a kid in Shildon, attended Timothy Hackworth infants, roamed free because back then none ever thought twice about it.

“You’d go off for the day with a bottle of water and a sugar sandwich,” he recalls. “Your mother would never worry where you were, there wasn’t anything to worry about.”

One or two others may have touched upon the impressive technical back-up – the GPS, the internet, the links with Nasa – to augment the nautical know-how of Jeff and his crewmate, Katharine Brownlie, a 28- year-old Australian.

None revealed his debt to the navigational skills learned in gaining his Queen’s Scout award as a 15-year-old in Spennymoor.

“I remember being taken to Ferryhill Station for my night navigation test,” he says. “You just opened the door and off you went, guided by the moon and the stars. Such things are still invaluable.”

His parents lived in Easington, moved to an aunt’s house in Shildon – Drybourne Avenue, posh end – before the birth.

He remembers adventures with the kids, hiding beneath a neighbour’s table during an air raid – “I expect they were aiming for the wagon works, missed as usual” – the day that a bomb dropped on the Store Field, in Shildon.

“The kids got there before the police did, took a belt of machine gun bullets, started a fire in a field next to the recreation ground. We were behind a fence about 30 yards away; fortunately they couldn’t get them to go off.”

He briefly attended another junior school in Butterknowle, west Durham – “they still had a cat o’ nine tails; I regularly got the cane, but made sure I didn’t get that” – before passing to attend Spennymoor Grammar Technical and going on to read mining engineering at Nottingham University.

Right back to his great grandfather, who helped found the Weardale Iron and Steel Company, his family had been involved in mining and quarrying.

“From sand and gravel to coal, there can’t be a commercial mineral that we haven’t taken out of the ground in the North of England,” he supposes.

At 24 he was under-manager of Middridge Drift. “There were some rough old Shildon lads there. I had to fine a few for bad timekeeping – there’d be hell on nowadays, the unions wouldn’t allow it” – finally moving into the family quarrying business.

Notionally still on the pay roll – “I talk to them, but they don’t take any notice” – he didn’t seriously take up sailing until eight years ago. That’s when Jeffrey Allison, father of six and grandfather of 13, really had to dig deep.

JEFF and his wife, Prue, live near Middleton Tyas, between Darlington and Richmond.

He’s quite small, quietly spoken, relaxed – not much like an Arctic adventurer at all, it’s tempting to write, but what does an Arctic adventurer look like?

The first question’s intercepted, seen coming a nautical mile away.

“Because it’s there,” he says, echoing the mountaineer George Leigh Mallory, who in 1923 supposed much the same when asked why he wanted to climb Everest.

He’s quickly in with his favourite saying, too. “We should listen to old men.”

The Arctic, Jeff reckons, wasn’t so much a dream as something that came together bit by bit. “I’ve not been on the yacht courses or anything like that, I just make it up as I go along, read the pilot books and listen to people. I’m not very good at this health and safety, the company won’t allow me into meetings.”

“Prue, originally from Newfield, near Bishop Auckland, insists not to believe a word of it. “He takes it very seriously. It was like a logistical chess game between him and the receding ice.”

“He could be a bit grumpy, but really he was very good, brought me a cup of tea every time he had to wake me up,” says Katharine.

“There was never a day when he wasn’t doing something. He was always happy to discuss things with me.

We were a little democracy, really.”

“We didn’t argue,” says Jeff. “She’d just ask me if I thought something was really wise.”

Katharine had joined at Aberdeen, before the 30-year-old yacht made its way to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Cambridge Bay, in Canada, and for 40 days across the Siberian Sea to Norway. “It was only when there were strong northerly winds, snow and ice than I sometimes wished I was somewhere else,” says Katherine.

“There are people back home who think it’s risky going out of Sydney Harbour.”

Jeff welcomed both crew and company.

“Two or three is best. When you’re by yourself, you’re breaking every rule in the book. You’re supposed to have someone on watch all the time.”

He talks, too, of the Aleutian Islands, a reminder of the infamous pun about the snow-blind wanderer in the Arctic wastes who thought he saw an approaching Inuit. Unfortunately it was just an optical Aleutian.

On one stage of the journey they’d been joined by two Alaskans who wanted to get off somewhere in the middle of the Barents Sea.

“I didn’t really know what my position was, but Nelson or Drake would have had them shot on sight,” says the skipper.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” says Katharine.

THE yacht’s under repair – “there’s quite a bit, but she did very well, really” – the skipper growing restless already. “At sea I missed the easy life at home, with no hassle, but I suppose at home I miss the adventure.

“The last week or so has been quite difficult. I don’t know where a thing is, I can’t deal with things. I keep thinking about the other blokes at sea, the fishermen from Hartlepool and Shields, the life that they had.

“They were the ones who had it really bad, not us, and they were being shot at, as well. We have an easy life compared to them.”

The next expedition, with son James, is a race around Scotland’s Western Islands that also includes mountain climbing. Jeff was an Alpine rock climber – “some pretty big crevices” – when younger.

And then? Katharine mentions Cape Horn as casually as a rambler might mention Cockfield Fell. Jeff insists he’ll be too old.

Pushed, however, the yachtsman slightly changes tack. “You don’t go around telling everyone what you’re going to do next, because then some bugger else will go and do it.”

Prue returns with more coffee, sighs and smiles. “He’s an amazing man and a very brave man,” she says.

“It’ll take more than being 73 to stop him.”