The Amazing Story Behind 40 Years of the Maritime Engineering Journal

The long-running success of the Maritime Engineering Journal — the Royal Canadian Navy’s flagship technical forum established in 1982 — proves that it is possible to “make soup from a stone.”

In the old European folk tale, a hungry traveller invites villagers to add their own ingredients to his “stone soup,” a simmering pot of water that contains nothing more than a smooth stone. Curiosity aroused, they eagerly contribute vegetables and a bit of salted meat, and are astounded by the tasty result. As they enjoy the soup together, one villager remarks, “and to think it was made just from a stone!”

It is a wonderful story of how inspired creativity can lead to greater community good, which in many ways describes the remarkable story of the Maritime Engineering Journal. Just as the magic of the soup lay in the cooperative nature of the enterprise rather than in the stone itself, what began as one person’s idea for a semi-professional journal 40 years ago, crystallized and caught the imagination of the community to become the longest-serving branch periodical, in its class, still in continuous publication in the Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF).

Apart from the specially funded Forces-wide information and safety publications that continue to serve the wider need, many other DND/CAF newsletters and magazines have come and gone over the years. From the very start, however, the leadership of the naval technical branch insisted that the Journal should set its sights on being in it for the long haul, and took the necessary steps to ensure this would happen. Everything is relative, of course, but it’s probably safe to say that this 100th issue marks a significant achievement in that respect.

Having the extraordinary good fortune to have been part of this project since before it was even approved, I can say without hesitation that the Journal owes its longevity first to the steadfastness of its publisher — the Director General Maritime Equipment Program Management (DGMEPM) — and to the more than 1,300 members of community who have supported us with their articles, commentaries, news items and photographs over four decades. Their reward, I believe, goes well beyond simply seeing their work in print. In addition to reaching its primary audience of serving or retired RCN and DND naval engineers, technicians and support personnel, the Maritime Engineering Journal is enjoyed free of charge by an extended community of industry partners, foreign navies, and educational institutions worldwide.

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Beginnings

The spark that ignited the flame was Cmdre (Ret’d) Dennis Reilley. He retired in the 1990s, but when he was a commander and section head in the Maritime Engineering and Maintenance division (DGMEM) at National Defence Headquarters in 1978, he was already thinking about the benefits of having a Maritime Engineering (MARE) branch journal (see MEJ 28). The Navy was suffering serious attrition of qualified engineers and technicians to government civilian positions in the ship construction projects and to industry, and DGMEM was looking for incentives under a MARE Get Well Project to stem the outflow. Launching a semi-professional journal would certainly be timely.

As Cmdre Reilley wrote me in 2012, “Once promoted Captain (Navy) and appointed as the Director of Marine and Electrical Engineering (DMEE) in 1979, I started working on creating a journal in earnest. It was easy for Cmdre Ernie Ball (DGMEM) to commit to it, as precedents existed throughout the CAF for other classification professional journals, and I was able to line up funding. Getting the Journal started remains one of the fondest memories of my four years in DMEE, and I am very pleased that subsequent generations have continued to support it. We could never have gotten the Journal published without your interest and enthusiasm early on.”

In fact, it was Lt(N) Robbie Robertson who Capt(N) Reilley tasked to conduct a feasibility study into the possibility of publishing an in-house journal. I was on Class C Reserve service as the DGMEM divisional Training Officer, at the time, and although I was a navigation officer, not an engineer, Robbie knew that I was a writer, and had experience as the managing editor of the newsletter for the local Naval Reserve unit. Minutes after receiving his tasking, a somewhat perplexed Robbie swung by my desk to ask for advice on how to go about “making a journal.” We sat down together and mapped out a rough plan, after which I wrote some initial print specifications so that he could get cost estimates for his study. I was 28 years old at the time, and had no inkling that I was actually charting what would become the focus of my life’s work for the next 40 years.

On May 28, 1981, Capt(N) Reilley briefed the monthly Directors meeting on the positive findings of the study, and seven weeks later, on July 15, 1981, Cmdre EC Ball directed that a “MARE Newsletter” should be stood up as a forum to promote professionalism among marine engineers and technicians. An early run of the first issue featuring the newly designed MARE crest on the front cover (a story for later), was prepared in time for the June 1982 MARE Conference, and there was no looking back.

How much the Journal actually benefitted the MARE Get Well Project was difficult to quantify, but the increasing number of article submissions and subscription requests were pretty good early indicators of its value throughout the naval technical support community. In 1985, Cmdre John Gruber (Cmdre Ball’s successor as DGMEM) emphasized this notion of the Journal’s importance by taking the bold decision to commit to employing a full-time production editor. As he put it to me, he wanted to “ensure the Journal had legs to last a very long time.” In the years that followed, his successors (14 of them, so far) would do their part to both guide the Journal, and protect it against some very difficult rounds of DND budget cuts.

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Leading the Way

Establishing a full-time editor immediately set the Journal apart from the many other branch periodicals, which often struggled to get their next issue out. Relieving the naval engineers of a burdensome secondary duty outside their normal area of expertise not only freed them up for the more technical work they were trained for, it allowed the Journal to begin taking on a leadership role within DG Information’s oversight Periodical Review Committee, chaired by the amazing Lise Bailey. The professional editorial standards we set for ourselves soon became the model that other publications were encouraged to emulate, especially after we took the lead on committing to a fully bilingual format, starting with MEJ 16 in April 1998. This was actually before it was official policy to do so, and there’s a story both behind how this transpired, and the effect it had across the board for DND/CAF periodicals.

At the time, the translation policy for periodicals simply stated that we should publish articles in whichever official language they were submitted. Even if we wanted to do more, a translation word-limit imposed on us made this impossible, but we were determined to see this through and pushed back. In what became known as the 1988 Editors Revolt, the Journal challenged the restrictive one-size-fits-all funding model for DND periodicals, and brought the other periodical editors on board with us to demand more flexible funding arrangements to accommodate our different types of publications. We also insisted on having unlimited access to DND Translation Services to allow full translation of our magazines and newsletters. Needless to say, this woke a few people up, and the translation requirement policies were soon rewritten to better reflect the Government of Canada’s stance on official bilingualism. Things just needed a little push in the right direction.

Over the years, the Journal would get involved in a number of other initiatives, such as joining forces with Sentinel magazine to make the case for bringing desktop publishing into DND, redeveloping the syllabus for the annual DND Periodical Editors Course, and entering into a synergistic publishing partnership with the Canadian Naval Technical History Association (CNTHA). These were all worthwhile endeavours that not only upped our own game, but helped others along as well.

On several occasions we were proud to be recognized with Achievement Awards for Editing and Design from the Eastern Ontario Chapter of the International Society for Technical Communication, and with Commander RCN Commendations for the outstanding success of our editorial teamwork. Such acknowledgments affirmed we were headed in the right direction, but from our standpoint the real tip of the hat was always reserved for the people who penned the articles we had the privilege of working with.

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The Stories

When it comes to the variety of material that we publish, Blaine Duffley (a retired Combat Systems Engineer, and current PM for the Joint Support Ship) perhaps described it best. During his briefing to the 2022 Central Region Naval Technical Seminar in March, he mentioned how lucky the community was to be working in an environment that offers so many different employment opportunities. How right he was, and it is the stories of the activities associated with these opportunities that we continue to share through the pages of the Journal.

On that note, our policy has always been to freely share what we publish, asking only that people acknowledge the source, as a NATO logistics magazine did when they reprinted CPO1 Bob Steeb’s timeless Forum article, Truth versus Loyalty (MEJ 39). Another defence publication was so inspired by Bob’s message that they took some licence and created a “free abridgement” of it for their readers to clip and hang in their cubicles at work. No harm, no foul, I guess.

In a fun bit of convergence, the most-requested article to date is the “HMCS St. John’s Maintenance Capability Study” (MEJ 50), a piece co-authored by the Journal’s current publisher, Cmdre Lou Carosielli (DGMEPM), and Joel Parent (currently the Weir Canada civilian site manager for the Naval Engineering Test Establishment). During their Head of Department tours more than 20 years ago, the eight-month study they conducted aboard their Halifax-class frigate validated what many people in the technical support community already knew to be true — that our seagoing technicians don’t have enough time for maintenance.

Still other articles have been reprinted as part of student preparatory packages for high-level defence and peacekeeping courses, and it was always nice seeing the authors’ work valued in this way. Two of these were reprinted from our special coverage on “Cambodia – The Forgotten Mission” (MEJ 34), written by LCdr Ted Dochau and LCdr Rob Mack...which leads me to mention a sad epilogue.

Four years after we ran the Cambodia articles, Rob Mack buttonholed me at the spring 1999 Naval Technical Seminar in Halifax. He had recently returned from a six-month reconstruction deployment to war-scarred Bosnia, and I suspected the envelope he was carrying likely held his next travelogue. If there was one thing this intrepid CSE could be counted on for, it was his willingness to use the Journal to document his overseas experiences for the rest of the naval technical community.

As he pressed the envelope into my hands, he simply thanked me for doing a great job, and said, “Would you please see this gets published in the Journal.” I gave him my assurances, and with that he abruptly turned and left. Our meeting had lasted all of 15 seconds. I opened the package to find photographs of shell-torn buildings, and an article to go with them. It had clearly been a tough deployment, and I was saddened to learn of his accidental death at age 42 just a few months later. The editorial committee honoured his request, and that fall we published his final article, “Bosnia: Greetings from the Front!” (MEJ 48.)

Many stories have moved me deeply, but none more so than one we ran on the 50th anniversary of the RCN’s worst peacetime disaster — the 1969 HMCS Kootenay gearbox explosion (MEJ 91). Listening to Kootenay survivor Allan “Dinger” Bell (an AB Stoker at the time) describe his horrifying escape from the burning engine room, and learning the extent of the physical and mental injuries that dog him to this day, made this the most difficult story I have ever worked on for the Journal.

Thankfully, there have been some really fun stories as well, such as the Nine-Minute Writing Challenges (MEJ 63/64). There was also the one about RCN veteran Bill Bovey’s Korean War medical discharge certificate signed by “Surg.-Lt. Joseph Cyr” — in reality, Ferdinand Waldo Demara, the Great Impostor (MEJ 55). On a related note, some of you will be familiar with retired CSE Cdr Roger Cyr, whose many articles have appeared in the Journal. Despite having the same last name as the one Demara was masquerading behind, Roger’s only connection to the Great Impostor was that they served aboard the same ship — HMCS Cayuga — about a decade apart. Roger wrote about the ribbing he took over this in MEJ 38.

We have also run countless great technical articles, including an Engineering Incident story (MEJ 25) that you can read in our new feature on page 26 that takes a second look at stories from our archives. Our former associate editor Tom Douglas suggested we call the feature Déja vu!

One of the other initiatives we are promoting is for more NTO-NCM author teams, much like the duo from HMCS Shawinigan whose story made the front cover of our last issue (MEJ 99). Thirty years earlier, I collaborated with CPO1 Jim Dean on a short Looking Back piece on HMCS Fundy(I) (MEJ 24), which gave us a chance to talk about many things beyond what we were doing for the article. It was a wonderful experience, and I encourage everyone to look for opportunities like this because, in the end, the story of the Maritime Engineering Journal is one about people working together.

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Looking Forward

The Maritime Engineering Journal remains the only publication in existence designed to meet the specific needs of Canada's military/civilian naval technical support community. As such, it is a valuable and authoritative source of reference on Canadian naval engineering activities and perspectives as presented by the engineers, technicians and support personnel themselves. By reflecting the goals, ideals and traditions of the profession, it strengthens the ties that hold the membership together, fostering a more effective work force.

A publication like the Maritime Engineering Journal obviously doesn’t simply appear every few months for 40 years without a lot of people doing their bit to keep the machinery running. I do my part to manage and produce the editorial content as best I can, of course, but I’m talking about the long list of people who work in less visible capacities to ensure that each new issue of “Canada’s naval technical forum” is one we can be proud to call our own: They are the editorial advisers and subject matter experts, the project and financial managers, the translation specialists, the graphic artists and photographers, the print services partners and web support teams...all of whom deserve recognition.

Thanks also go to our current d2k Graphic Design & Web production team consisting of manager Daniel Dagenais, and graphic artists Marie-Josée Lemaire and Annie Guindon. These are the people who double down to produce the effective layouts for each issue, bringing their creative solutions to the page, and manage the final print and web production. We regrettably didn’t get an opportunity to bid a proper farewell to Tom Douglas, who left the Journal team late last summer to focus on another DND branch periodical. We thank him for his time with us, and wish him well. I miss our interesting and often complicated discussions on editorial points of order.

As the MEJ enters its 41st year of uninterrupted publication, I feel certain that the people who envisioned and gave life to this extraordinary magazine would be heartened by the steady stream of new feature articles and Forum perspectives that continue to arrive from all quarters. Together, these give the Maritime Engineering Journal its powerful voice, a reflection of the high sense of mission and purpose held by the community it serves.

Forty years ago, a torch was lit that continues to burn brightly thanks to the unfailing stewardship of the office of the Director General Maritime Equipment Program Management. The future can never be certain, but it isn’t too difficult to believe that there is someone out there now who will be cracking open the bottle of Champagne on behalf of the entire naval technical support community when the Maritime Engineering Journal marks its half-century of publication in 2032.

For myself, I will be forever thankful to have been part of this bold and wonderful experiment.

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Acknowledgments

My thanks to Erin Cruse, Ashley Evans and Wendy Wagner for their valuable assistance in tabulating a wealth of data relating to the archived editorial content of the Maritime EngineeringJournal (est. 1982), and CNTHA News (est. 1997). The important baseline information they have gathered will prove useful for historical research, and for supporting decisions taken by the Editorial Board in the years ahead. Bravo Zulu on a job well done!