It could carry 160 tons of coal, loaded at Lydney Docks, to small ports along the Bristol Channel and across to Ireland. She was fitted with a paraffin engine, "but the skipper wouldn't use it – it cost too much," Mr Morrish reminisces at his home facing Lydney's parish church.
So the vessel went out of harbour, down with the tide, and along to Milford Haven – "to wait for the weather," as Dick explains. "He wouldn't hang about, though. Being owner as well as skipper, he would laugh at the others for dawdling."
The journey across to Waterford usually took 24 hours – "Sometimes it took two days and a night," Dick adds.
"Captain Murdoch would carry anything so long as it paid. We used to take salt to Waterford, and bring back barley. We were generally away a fortnight. One thing, though, was he always had plenty of good food on board – he had a name for it.
"I did the job for three and a half years. Then after a rough passage he paid us off, saying he was giving it up. She remained laid up in Lydney for several years."
After leaving Tidenham school in 1931, Dick worked at Woolaston with Charlie Ball on his smallholding. He signed on with Garlandstone as its second deckhand.
In the Navy as a leading seaman during the war, he was wounded in the South Atlantic on the Alcantara, a Royal Mail passenger ship on the Southampton-South America run.
"I was patched up in Rio, and in 1943 joined a fast troop carrier based in Cape Town, which used to accompany convoys home."
Posted to Devonport Barracks, he was able to get married. Marion, from Stroud, was in the Women's Land Army at Parkend, working for "the Forestry".
On the Glen Mor, a converted passenger steamer, he went to the Thames estuary – "doodle bug shooting". On D-Day they escorted across Channel some of the concrete caissons used to construct the two Mulberry harbours.
At war's end he joined Watts of Lydney, retiring in 1980. The couple had five children, a grandson being in the naval cadets.
Back in service, Garlandstone was wrecked off the Irish coast. Later salvaged, she was towed into Appledore where she lay on the mud for some years.
She was purchased by the National Museum of Wales, and a booklet was written about her in 1982 by Basil Greenhill of Greenwich's National Maritime Museum. Ownership being transferred to a restoration trust, she has spent ten years rebuilding at a quay near Tavistock.
Dick went to revisit her there four years ago, and reports that they had rebuilt her "from keel and stem to topmast". He displays a model of her in a bottle, showing her classic lines, and has provided the photos.