WHEN 'PAPER AND RAGS' were found burning in three different
places—in a bathroom, in an air- conditioning room, and beside a turbo-generator room—in the aircraft carrier Eagle last Saturday, it seemed reasonable to suppose that they were the work of some dissatisfied rating. This was the Admiralty's own view—at first : it announced that the fires 'were lit' (implying they were not acciden- tal) and later insisted that 'the fires were the work of one man.' Why, then, did the Admiralty after- wards contradict itself and put out the grotesquely implausible story that the fires 'were completely accidental'? Was it because the Eagle had been booked for a 'relatives and sweethearts' cruise the next day, designed, according to Vice-Admiral Evans, as 'an incentive to men to join the Navy"? If the accounts of the cruise in the popular press were not exaggerated, the relatives and sweet- hearts on board may have been too sea-sick to worry overmuch about the state of discipline on the Eagle; but does the Admiralty seriously sup- pose that anybody will have any incentive to join a ship in which ratings accidentally leave piles of paper and rags (in bathrooms, in air-condition- ing rooms, and beside turbo-generator rooms) into which other ratings accidentally toss lighted matches or cigarette ends?
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