Mast-Master Owen Rees

Mast-Master of the Cambridge yards, responsible for the flight-critical parts Cambridge builds and certifies, and for a decade the loudest voice on where yard men are really killed: at the mooring, not at the chamber.

Cambridge does not build whole vessels. Its yards build and certify the parts of a vessel that can kill a man, the lift chambers, machine-stone, frames, anchor gear, mast fittings and instruments, and the Mast-Master answers for all of them. Owen Rees holds the office. His yards make flight look less romantic than procedural, which is exactly how Cambridge prefers it.

His great subject is the mooring. Of the serious injuries recorded in the yards across twenty years, four in five fell during mooring or casting off, within fifty feet of the ground, in wind, with a crowd present; the chambers that everybody fears account for almost none. Rees has said so for a decade to anyone who would listen. He has had the crowd line moved outward twice and the inspection interval for mooring rings halved once, and his Instructions to Yard Hands of 4614 A.C. reduce the matter to a painted white line and the nine men he has buried who were not behind it.

Companies meet him at the masts, as passengers, crew or hired hands. He will put them behind the line and keep them there, and he is known to halt a mooring outright rather than let a single person stand where he should not.

In person

Rees is a heavy, powerfully built man in his mid-fifties, bald, with a thick salt-and-pepper moustache, a broad, weathered face and pale blue-grey eyes. One ear is crushed and cauliflowered, a scar cuts one eyebrow, and his hands are rope-burned. He looks like a working yard master rather than a gentleman, in an oilskin or treated-wool yard coat, reinforced work clothes and gloves.