My father, William Blacklock, who has died aged 101, worked for Lloyd’s Register of Shipping as a marine engineer and surveyor in the UK, Germany and Brazil.
Bill was born in Wallsend in North Tyneside to William, a tram driver, and his wife, Jessie (nee Tomlinson). He attended Wallsend grammar school, leaving with his school certificate at 16 to start an apprenticeship with the local engineering company Clarke Chapman. While working, he studied engineering at night school, later giving classes to supplement his income.
As his job qualified as a reserved occupation during the second world war, Bill was excused the call-up until 1943, after which he served five years in the merchant navy with, variously, the Blue Funnel Line, Bowring Steamship Company, Federal Steam Navigation Company, Furness Houlder Argentine Line and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.
He survived a torpedo attack in 1945, and once his five years were up, in 1948, he opted to study as a chief engineer at South Shields Marine School before joining Lloyd’s Register in 1949 at their head office in London.
Lloyd’s posted him to Hamburg in 1955, and there he met Glyn Courtney, who was running Church Army bookshops in the British occupation zone of Germany. They married in 1958 after they had returned to the UK, where Bill worked in the Lloyd’s investigation department, with extensive foreign travel at short notice the norm.
Seeking less disruption to his family life (I was born in 1959 and my brother Simon in 1962), and having discovered the Cumberland coast and North Lancashire on work trips to the Windscale nuclear plant, he was transferred by Lloyd’s to Barrow-in-Furness in 1962. Although there was a subsequent posting to Rio de Janeiro in 1966, he was back in the UK in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1969 and was finally posted to Middlesbrough as senior principal surveyor, all the while retaining a house in the village of Great Urswick in what became Cumbria.
Bill retired in 1986, after which he honed his skills as a keen handyman and gardener, also serving on the Urswick Tarn Association, a body charged with looking after a small lake in his home village.
Glyn died in 2009. He is survived by Simon and me, his grandchildren Mikael and Elizabeth, and great-grandchildren Oscar and Sofia.
