Richard Woodman obituary

Richard Woodman was accepted as an apprentice with the Blue Funnel line at 16 and later joined Trinity House Photograph: none

“The end was anticlimax. We slipped home unnoticed. Britain turned no hair at our arrival, as just as she has turned no hair at our extinction.” When Richard Woodman published Voyage East in 1988, he knew that the mercantile world depicted within it, which he had joined aged 16, was gone.

The first-person novel – which never reads like fiction – describes the voyage of a cargo liner carrying goods and passengers from Liverpool to Singapore, Hong Kong, Kobe and Shanghai in the mid-1960s. There is a moment, off the coast of Borneo, when the captain sees a vessel with half a dozen grey aluminium boxes on her foredeck: “What the devil are they?” he asks the pilot. “‘They’re containers, Captain,’ the Pilot replied, and no one on the bridge heard the sentence of death pronounced upon us.”