 At age 15, Lowry won the junior golf championship at the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, Hoylake.His father expected him to go to Cambridge and enter the family business, but Malcolm wanted to experience the world and convinced his father to let him work as a deckhand on a tramp steamer to the Far East.In May 1927, his parents drove him to the Liverpool waterfront and, while the local press watched, waved goodbye as he set sail on the freighter S.S. "Pyrrhus".