The slow, end-of-disco song had just begun - I’m Not in Love, probably  - and, before I knew it, Liz from one of the many other schools on board had drawn me into a close dance and was kissing me on the lips, seemingly for the duration.

I was a 16-year-old grammar school boy from a small village; nothing remotely like this had ever happened to me before. I was above average at telling wheat from barley, dancing around a maypole and bowling leg-breaks, and could effortlessly reel off the list of French verbs requiring “être” and not “avoir” in their past tense - but that was about it. 

That two-week educational school cruise aboard the SS Uganda opened my mind and heart to a deeper and different world within and beyond. Setting out from Dubrovnik and finishing in Venice, and calling at ports in Greece, Egypt, Israel and Turkey, it was by far the most outstanding and enriching experience of my schooldays. 

Life on the ocean waves

The cost of the trip was subsidised by local councils, making it widely affordable. Thousands of children were regularly taken away each year to various parts of the Mediterranean, Atlantic Isles or Baltic, from 1968 to 1982.

With background lectures before each trip inland, and project work when we got back, it was an extraordinary way to learn about those contrasting Mediterranean worlds, taking in as well the Egyptian pyramids, ancient Turkish and Greek ruins, religious shrines and a snow-covered Venice. 

Along with all that came the unique exhilaration of life at sea with friends old and new, and all the special lifelong memories it forged. 

The SS Uganda was the main ship used: one that had been converted from sleeping 300 people to sleeping 1,200, mainly by turning the cargo decks into dormitories. Teachers and other leaders slept in the original cabins on the higher decks, while we children slept down in the cargo conversions. It was basic, but bonding. We would talk (and be seasick occasionally) deep into the night.    

Gazing dreamily out to sea

The cruises sadly came to a sudden end with the Falklands War in 1982, when the Uganda was hastily converted - just as children were about to set sail from Naples - into a hospital ship, and then redirected to the South Atlantic. The top deck, where children played quoits and hockey by day and star-gazed romantically at night, became a navy helicopter pad.  

The cruises of old never returned, and the ship was eventually broken up in 1992. 

I was reminded of those times when gazing out dreamily to sea on a Dorset coastal walk the other day.

On the horizon, I could see several vast international cruise ships, all motionless a few miles out from the coast, with nowhere to stay at the moment and nowhere to go. One such cruise ship was over 350m long, and would normally be carrying 5,000 passengers.    

I idly wondered whether - if crowds and cruises ever become feasible again - some thrilling deal could be struck between government and those cruise operators, enabling educational cruises to launch a comeback? 

Lifting the mind and stirring the soul

It seems unlikely that the likes of P&O, Carnival and Royal Caribbean will ever get back all their usual customers. Not all their ships are going to be booked up - not for a long time, anyway.

Why don’t they cut their losses and arrange some cut-price deal with the government that could enable the return of those wondrous school cruises? Everyone would gain, and think how much better the pupil accommodation would be compared with our beds in the bowels of the SS Uganda.

School cruises on luxury ocean liners may sound ridiculous at the moment. But maybe there has never been a better time for us to start to look up and beyond, and to formulate a few genuinely inspiring ideas for today’s schoolchildren.  

At the moment, the most thrilling project to emerge from Covid-19 appears to be blended learning. Which is all very well, but is never going to lift and stir the mind and soul in the way a cruise would do. 

Let’s offer them a more inspiring new horizon.

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire