The Kybo was a “bumboat”. A bumboat (the word comes from the Dutch, “boomschuit”) is a vessel that delivers essential items to larger ships moored offshore.
The Kybo was operated by the Bottom Line, originally a marine chandlery, which built up a thriving business delivering purgatives and toiletries to those at sea. The Kybo was essentially a floating convenience store; no ship wanted to get caught short of the essentials that the bumboat carried. The captain’s log recorded the dropping off of such prodigious quantities of the famed Seidlitz Powders laxative that the Bottom Line’s directors decided to emblazon the ship with the aperient’s name.
A popular TV advertisement of the early 1920s showed a sailor crouched in a crow’s nest, scanning the horizon and, upon spotting the steaming Kybo, shouting out, “She’s working her way through! Relief’s a-coming, lads!” Consequently, seafarers fondly referred to the Kybo as “The Seidlitzer”.
The ‘epoxy resin’ of the purgative world
From the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth, Seidlitz Powders were the immensely popular “epoxy resin” of the purgative world, coming in two parts that had to be mixed together. The resulting liberation was legendary. It was, however, important not to confuse the two products; the two parts of epoxy resin, when combined, worked to form a powerful adhesive and this led to some two-part packaging carrying an essential health warning: “Not for use as a laxative.”
The Kybo was launched in 1911 as The Sea Pickle but two years later, as online Seidlitz Powders sales began to surge, the Bottom Line’s managing director renamed the bumboat in memory of his mother’s abhorrence of constipation.
When he was at boarding school, she always signed off her weekly letter to him: “K.Y.B.O. Mother x.” This commitment to regular bowel habits led him to use the ship to promote the pressing maternal message that he had internalised: “Keep Your Bowels Open.”
Tragically, the Kybo dropped her anchor for the last time in 1941, when she was torpedoed in the Dolmades by an Italian submarine, Il Spurioso.
KYBO aided troop movements during evacuation
The bumboat had been pressed into war service and was supplying government-issue laxatives to a British destroyer engaged in assisting the evacuation of troops from the rear of the crumbling Allied front line in mainland Greece.
When the Kybo belatedly steamed in, the numerical superiority of the Axis invaders meant large tracts of Greece were already knee-deep in German and Italian troop movements, leaving British troops as the number twos in this campaign.
When the bumboat, holed below the waterline, sank to its inevitable resting place at the bottom, her final going was marked by a signal from the destroyer to the Admiralty: “Kybo now has been”.
(Note: The story of the Kybo is included in Flatulistings because the ship’s cook was known as “Dutch Ovens”. This may have been the cook’s name or it could have been a constructed reference to his nationality and job. However, it is most likely that it was a nickname referring to his predilection for the unsavoury by trapping his farts under his bed covers and then allowing the smell to slowly waft out.)
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