A young Ivan Berg in New York

THE pictures are as clear as if they were taken yesterday, but are bathed in nostalgia: the images were captured by a teenage Merchant Navy man, the young Ivan Berg, as he traversed the globe for the famous Cunard shipping line.

Ivan, who lives in Dartmouth Park, was a keen photographer and when he signed on to join the Merchant Navy aged 16 in 1953, he took his camera with him.

Later in life, he went on to a star-studded successful career as a writer in numerous top TV shows, including Top Gear.

Then during the enforced idleness of lockdown, he went back to his archive of negatives from more than six decades ago. The result was a well-received exhibition of his work – which in turn prompted a memoir that tells the story of a young Londoner leaving a war-scarred city, with a camera round his neck, to see the world.

His first trip was on the MV Bloemfontein Castle, which was a passenger ship running to South Africa. Despite his training as a waiter and the smaller than average size of the ship, he had his hands full.

“I felt no excitement about leaving England for foreign parts, I didn’t have time. I was run off my feet,” he recalls.

Ivan was born in 1936 and grew up in Hackney.

“My father was a tailor, my mother a dressmaker,” he says.

“My father served in Iraq and was away in 1941 and 1942.

“He came home and was then stationed on Hampstead Heath, which was handy.”

Cunard liner RMS Mauretania

His youth saw him nurture an interest in cameras and images.

“I was keen on photography. Aged 13, I started up a printing and developing business. It was based in a cupboard in my bedroom and I got customers through the grocers. It went really well but then the chemist got in on the act and my business was over.”

His was also a bookish childhood.

“I remember reading a children’s encyclopaedia cover to cover.

“I was also fascinated by sea stories. I loved books like Moby-Dick, I read Jack London.

“My father was a keen reader of sea adventures. A mobile library would come round – it was a bicycle with a box of books on the front.

“My father had got himself sea adventures. There was one American writer who wrote about the sea, set in the early 1800s, and they were very bloody. I would quickly read them when he had finished, before we had to give them back.

“I was also into mechanics and technology. I wanted to know how things worked. I remember taking a mantelpiece clock to pieces and then putting it back together again – it worked, but there were some parts left over.

“I also dismantled a wind-up gramophone with the idea of taking out the motor and putting it into a model boat I made in woodwork. It was not a success.”

There was an unhappiness that lingered over his early years. It partly was responsible for his lack of application at school.

“I left early. I did not have any qualifications and bunked off an awful lot,” he says.

“I had a difficult childhood. My mother was unwell and my father was away.”

His extended family was called on to look after him. It didn’t happen.

“My uncle took me to a home for Kindertransport children when I was seven years old,” he says.

“It was very formative for me, and it changed my attitude to religious orthodoxy enormously. I refused to have a bar mitzvah. I wanted to get away from it all – my background, my family, London.

“I joined the Navy on impulse. It was an opportunity to get away from the family. And because of my experience as a child, I did not trust anyone at all – I could only trust myself.”

Aged 16, he was working in a camera shop in the City and at lunch break noted the numerous shipping companies. He saw an advert that offered boys aged between 15 and 17 free training to join the Merchant Navy, with the added bonus that you could avoid National Service by signing on.

After trips to South Africa, Ivan managed to land a job on what insiders said were plum routes – the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth ships running from Portsmouth to New York with the Cunard line. Sailors were known as Cunard Yanks, and there were opportunities to make good money

“The contrast was astonishing,” recalls Ivan of his first voyage. “Going into New York was like stepping into Aladdin’s cave.

“I was overwhelmed when I first saw New York. I had seen America in the cinema but the reality was absolutely amazing. I went from the down-at-heel London to the vibrant New York.”

It was on a voyage to the Caribbean that a Cockney shipmate called Tommy Hicks introduced himself. The pair would become good friends, with Tommy buying a guitar in Cuba and serenading the passengers. When they got back to London, Ivan introduced Tommy to songwriter Lionel Bart. Bart liked what he saw, and Britain’s answer to Elvis, Tommy Steele, was created.

It was another friend he made through the Merchant Navy who also helped him on his way as a writer.

While training in Gloucestershire, he caught a train home with a fellow recruit, Nick Brittan. Nick took him to meet his mother, Renee. Ivan became a firm friend of the family.

“Renee changed my life,” he says. “Meeting her set me on a different path. Up to then, I was a working-class East End Jewish boy. My attitude changed when I met her. I had told her I wanted to be a writer and she gave me a portable typewriter and suddenly it became real.”

Writing about his experience of more than 60 years ago, and developing negatives of the shots he took has brought back a rush of memories.

“I can still smell the diesel in the engine rooms, I can hear the sound of the sea, and the taste, I can feel the vibration of the ship. I remember being aware of the engines slowing and coming to a stop as we entered a harbour and I can hear the chain of the anchor rattling as it tumbles down. It feels incredibly vivid.”

Charting his journeys across the world’s oceans was helped by the fact he saved records of his trips.

“I kept documents because I thought I would write about it one day,” he says. I had dates and knew the ships I was on, and the chronology of each voyage.

“During lockdown, I had the time to look back and then scan all my negatives.”

This led to an exhibition – which in turn prompted his memoir.

After leaving the Merchant Navy, Ivan joined the RAF to complete his National Service.

It proved to be another step towards his ambition of writing for a living.

“I joined to become a medic,” he says. “I landed a cushy job. I was sent to the Central Medical Establishment in Cleveland Street. I was given my own office and a typewriter. I barely had any patients, maybe one or two a day. It gave me time to write and I created my first TV series.”

• Ocean Liner Adventures: A Teenager’s Life at Sea in the 1950s in Photographs and Stories. By Ivan Berg. Independent Publishing Network, £14.99