Keeping Afloat
Snotty: The Story of the Midshipman. By Commander Geoffrey Penn, RN. (Hollis and
ON entering the Service, every matelot is told (but rarely, to my knowledge, believes) that the Mid- shipman is the lowest form of animal life in the Royal Navy. The Snotty's 600-year-old recorded career, however, has often been a specially well- stoked hell :. .particularly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And the terrible tale of training at sea and existence in the Cockpit at this time is the most absorbing section of Commander Geoffrey Penn's Snotty: an excel- lent and . comprehensive history, skilfully assembled from contemporary documents written, for the most part, by the Young Gentlemen them- selves.
We read here the comments of a child of eight, scribbling home in 1802 to the light of a tallow or Purser's dip. His home is a wooden dungeon five feet seven inches high, with no ports or ventilation, on the lowest deck of the ship. He eats off the amputation table, with a red-hot shot as heater. In what spare time he has, perhaps, he carves toys out of hard, dry beef, salted, on occasion, almost a quarter of a century before Dr. Joseph Maguire spent thirty years going down to the sea in eighteen different ships, includ- ing the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary. The Sea My Surgery is the vastly diverting, shrewd and well-written account of his experiences on the job, including wartime trooping. It is all very much above the average literary performances of medical men.
Ramsay At War, by David Woodward, is a valuable study of the fighting life of the late Sir Bertram Ramsay, who organised the evacuation from Dunkirk and played a major part in planning the landings for Operations Torch (North Africa), Husky (Italy), Overlord (Normandy), and the assault from the sea on Walcheren that led to the opening of the Scheldt. Yet this remarkable man never caught the public imagination as a wartime 'personality.' What is it that makes a naval com- mander of his superlative quality tick? I hope that Mr. Woodward may now be persuaded to write a more intimate and personal full-length biography of this brilliant sailor.
Mr. Ronald Sired's Enemy Engaged is a unique document. It is a journal from the professional lower deck (Mr. Sired joined the Royal Navy from the Training Ship Arethusa in 1937), most was
Written despite, apparently, all regulations. It tells ` of his life at sea first as an AB aged nineteen, then as a young petty officer with the Mediterranean Fleet 'during two of the most critical and desperate Nears of the last war. The simply written account has a devastating authenticity as well as pathos, and has been adroitly edited and placed against its larger historical background in a Series of notes by Captain F. ('.Flynn. CHARLES CAUSLIN
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