Geoffrey Smethurst was born in 1924 and joined the Merchant Navy in 1944. He started working for Marconi after doing night-school training for two years to become a radio officer. Firstly, on trawlers and then down to South Georgia with whaling catchers. Radio officers played a vital role to keep in touch with between the factory ships and the whaling catchers. Smethurst spoke about the long hours that the radio officer had to work to keep in touch 24 hours a day – especially when working on the factory ships.
Although it was not his favourite job, he worked on the whaling catchers for two seasons. Here he saw the full process of whales being killed. He was astonished by the size of the first Sperm whale they caught, but this soon became the normal thing to see. Whilst on the catchers, small radio transmitters were used to flag where whales were and it was part of his job to fix these if broken.
Smethurst continued working for Christian Salvesen until 1973.