During the late 1960's my Father was employed by Booker Line as a Chief Engineer,  and as it was company policy to allow wives and children onboard their ships I, along with my Mother and sisters, were able to sail with him during the school summer holidays. The ships sailed from London, Glasgow and Liverpool, outward bound with general cargo to Guyana, Surinam, Tortola, St Kitts, Antigua, St Lucia, Trinidad and Barbados, returning to the UK with a cargo of bulk sugar, a round voyage of approximately 6 weeks.  My first voyage was on the MV Booker Venture in 1967 when I was about 10 years of age, and although I had signed on articles as a 'librarian', I was soon deployed on other duties, such as polishing the engine room hand rails, chipping and painting on deck, acting as 'look out' on the 3rd mates 8-12 watch, and obtaining my 'steering ticket' (although to this day I'm convinced the helm was switched to auto-pilot). It was on one of these voyages that a Radio Officer, who must have had great patience, taught me the morse code, something which proved to be extremely useful when many years later I trained to be a Marine Radio Officer at Riversdale Technical College Liverpool. In 1981 my association with the Booker Line was renewed, and also ended, when I sailed as a relief Radio Officer on a coastal passage from Liverpool to Glasgow on the Booker Challenge, ironically I never touched the morse key as all the communications on passage were conducted via the bridge VHF radio. I have produced this site to remember Liverpool's Booker Line, and also as a tribute to the personnel who they employed over the years.  As Bookers were a relatively small company who ceased trading in the 1980's, I don't expect the site will have a wide audience and to expand any further, however if you sailed with the company and would like to contribute any further information, then please get in touch with me, all material will be returned. I would like to thank some nice folks who I met on the 'Sailors Home' and the 'Merchant Navy Forum' websites who kindly provided me with material I have used on this site. I also owe thanks to The Sea Breezes magazine for allowing me to reproduce extracts from an article they printed in one of their fine magazines. Finally I would like to thank William Evans, an ex 3rd Engineer with Booker Line and the last serving member of the sea staff who provided me with a lot of very useful, and hard to find information about the final years of the company. Also to those people who have taken the time and the trouble to send me photographs for The Gallery Pages, I'm sure they will have brought back a lot of happy memories. Ken Berry 19th December 2006