England’s shipyards are going down, and so are the men who gave them their lives. But for crusty old Jackie White, that’s no excuse for leaving the S.S. Utopia in the stocks unfinished. Go out in glory! Just get the job done! In the real world, there’s no way this happens. “Even Rome wasn’t built in a day, Jackie,” a realist protests. Jackie’s eyebrows fly up, and the corners of his mouth curl down. “I wasn’t the foreman on that job.”
Sting, who plays Jackie in the musical The Last Ship and wrote the songs, knows all about projects that can’t be rushed. Born Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner in Wallsend 74 years ago, he grew up steps from the Swan Hunter shipyard, the only place of work his dad had ever known. “I lived in that street with a ship towering over our house,” Sting says. “I would watch thousands of the men walk to work every morning as a kid thinking, Is that what I’m supposed to do? That ain’t me. I ain’t going in there. It’s frightening. It’s dangerous and dark. I’m going to do everything in my power to escape that.”
