There was a sort of tradition of leaving graffiti on jetty’s, usually the ships name and date and names of the crew sometimes. It is less common these days because terminals have put their foot down and started fining ships, and it was easy to do with the name of the ship painted on the jetty!
Below is from British crews from the 70´s.
The “Britannia House” referred to in the above graffiti was the old headquarters of the then mighty British Petroleum Company in London, the sailors that wrote this on the jetty in Antwerp obviously thought this very funny showing their disdain for the leadership, I can hear their laughs echoing down the decades.
Above the crew of the “British Maple” leave their calling card on the concrete jetty back in 1977.
The crew of the “British Tenacity” had an interesting philosophy “only here for the beer” great advertising for BP there!
Above from the crew of the “British Trent” back in 1976, she came to a tragic end in 1993 when she caught fire after a collision with a container ship in thick fog off the coast of the Netherlands. 9 died including 2 Irish, one of whom was in the same college as me and the other was from my home town, it brought back the memories seeing the graffiti.
Accident report from the MAIB
we saw some interesting naval graffiti while cruising in Alaska. When the ship’s captain made his last cruise, the crew would paint the ship’s crest and the skipper’s name and date on a big rock. here’s a couple of links to those pictures.
here and here