A closer look at ... Fred Walton

Fred Walton at his Creek home 

Mr Walton and the luxury yacht the Dangin in 1966

By Nicky Watson

Friday,  November 11, 2005

A series in which Cayman Net News talks to Caymanians who were raised on the Sister Islands and went on to achieve success in their field.

Success is measured in many different ways. For some, it comes in the form of rank, others money or fame.

For Fred Walton, the success of his story is in living a life at sea that he loved, getting along with the many hundreds of people from all corners of the world that he worked with, living a good honest life, and returning to the Island he will always call home.

Ellis Arnold Walton, always known as Fred on Cayman Brac, went to sea in 1947 at the age of eighteen and spent most of his adult life away from home, as many Caymanian men did in those days.

However he said he doesn’t look back at those years. He was at sea for forty-three years, but since he retired in 1984, he put it to the back of his mind. Life at sea is much better than being on land, he said.

His first ship was the Radar, built and owned by Captain Keith Tibbetts. It was a motor boat about 250 feet long. Although this was his first time on a long voyage, he had grown up used to the feel of waves underneath him, having spent most of his life sailing the little Catboats around the Island.

In 1952, he started to work on big ships of 30,000 tonnes or more for National Bulk Carrier.

“The bigger ships are better. It’s not easier - you do the same things - but it’s more comfortable; you’ve got space to do things,” he said.  With NBC, he worked with many different nationalities, including Germans, people from the Windward Islands, Italians, and Greeks, as well as Caymanians.

They went to many different parts of the world, such as Venezuela, Portland, Maine, Sumatra, Dubai and  Kuwait. The crews he worked with were all good hardworking men, and he said he didn’t have a problem with them.

“I was on one of the NBC ships, the Universe Defiance, as Third Mate, running between Kuwait and Brazil, when the captain had a telegram from the owner of the company, Daniel Ludwig, asking if I was interested in going on his private yacht as Chief Mate.”

He had worked previously with the captain of the yacht when Captain Bush was Chief Mate and Mr Walton was Third Mate.

“When he took over as Captain of the yacht, he asked if he could find out if I could come as Chief Mate,” said Mr Walton.

When I got to Brazil, the captain made provision for me to leave for Nassau where the yacht was stationed at that time.

The yacht, a luxurious steam ship, was the Dangin, and she had a crew of thirty-two men. She was 250 feet long and 39 feet wide with a 19 foot draft. It had two diesel, 36,000 horsepower engines.

Mr Walton was the only Caymanian on board, and he mixed with Japanese, German, and Chinese crew, all of whom spoke English, he said.

In Mrs Ludwig’s personal suite, the carpet, hand-made in Hong Kong, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and everything, down to the gold taps, was the height of luxury. Mrs Ludwig only came on board once while Mr Walton was on board.

“I had to take care of everything on the ship. In her suite, the dressing room was huge,” he said. He remembers a golden fish ornament sitting on top of the dining room table.

Mr Ludwig was, at that time, owner of the fifth largest shipping company in the world, and one that employed many Caymanian men.

The yacht had seven state rooms and could carry as many as fourteen passengers, but Mr Ludwig and his wife rarely came on trips. Mr Walton estimates that he was on board maybe thirty days of the year.

Instead he lent his yacht to his friends and business acquaintances. Among the guest lists were the Presidents of the Bank of America and the Bank of Manhattan, the President of the Southern Railroad Company, the President of Union Oil Company, as well as the country presidents of Mexico, Panama and Nicaragua.

Passengers had the boat at their disposal, said Mr Walton. Sometimes Mr Ludwig would make a rare appearance for a business meeting on the yacht.

“People that is rich is twice as nice as the man who thinks he’s rich, those with twenty or thirty million dollars.” Mr Walton explained that the people who came aboard the Dangin were billionaires, and were all very polite to the crew. They didn’t dress beautifully either.

“If you saw Mr Ludwig, you’d think he was a barman or something.” The ladies refrained form ostentatious dresses or expensive jewelry on board ship, too.

“None of the wives dressed up. They’d come dressed as though going on a picnic,” he said.

He didn’t want any pictures taken of him or the ship. He didn’t want the publicity, said Mr Walton.

During the end of his twenty-seven months on board, he said he got a call from the USA to get a green card, so he flew to Great Britain and then on to Jamaica to obtain this document.

Shortly after this, the Dangin was sold to Revlon cosmetics. The boat was going to Europe and Mr Walton opted to leave this position, though he remembers it as the highlight of his life.

Meanwhile, in 1948, he had married his wife Abby and, like all the women of the day, she had stayed behind on Cayman Brac while her husband was gone for at least a year and sometimes eighteen months.

“It was hard on the women. They don’t have those kinds of women any more,” he said.

Mrs Walton had a house built in the Creek area, where the couple live today, but in 1972, she joined her husband in the US.

They bought a house and lived there until 1984 when they sold it and returned to Cayman Brac.

Working in the US was very different, said Mr Walton. For one thing, you couldn’t work as a seaman unless you joined the National Maritime Union (NMU).

One of the main differences was that the people he had contact with were mostly Americans. The other and more significant difference was in the pay, which was ten times as much as he had earned with NBC, and he got vacation pay as well.

After working for the Union for a while, Mr Walton decided to go to school. He attended for a year the New Orleans Navigational School, where he obtained his Second Mates license.

Now he was an officer, he was able to get better jobs and more money. He also did not have to clean his rooms on board as this was done by the “mess men”.

But on retirement there was no doubt where he wanted to be, and Abby also wanted to come home, too.

“I came home to the Brac because I love it. I want to die here. Even though I didn’t spend much time here, this will always be my home,” he said. Cayman Brac hasn’t changed all that much, he feels.

“I still eat the same food as when I was a boy.”

Growing up in Spot Bay, the fourth of nine children of Albert and Celeste Walton, he said he used to play with different friends, playing ball, playing gig, swimming and diving,

“I never got into any trouble. It’s amazing! Nine of us, and I can’t remember any of us getting into any trouble. Our parents brought us up differently from today,” he said, pointing out that there was no TV and no cell phones.

“We came up going to church on Sunday and then staying home and reading a book or going to sleep. I never had a fight with anybody in my life.

“We’ll never see those days again. The worse is yet to come,” he said, but added that he didn’t get into politics.

“I’m just more than happy to be home,” said Mr Walton, who claims he’s been a Christian all his life.

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