Abstract
I was brought up on this book, which is essentially a primer in big ship organisation. My father, who was a Midshipman in the battlecruiser Tiger in 1929–30, gave me a copy to read in the late 1950s when I was 15, part of his determined campaign that I should follow him into the RN. In fact, I found it rather appealing and so it succeeded. O’Connor painted a picture of a confident and proud organisation, carefully regulated to achieve rigid standards (though exactly for what purpose was sometimes less clear), and that knew it was ‘here to stay’. For a public schoolboy of that era, it seemed a normal enough picture of the world and I bought it.
The Navy I joined in 1961 was not very different in its self-image from that described by O’Connor, not at least at BRNC where some of the Staff had even seen HMS Hood in her prime. But there had been a change. Most notably there were far fewer big ships, a new type of person was joining BRNC, and the sailors under their charge were from a different culture too. O’Connor’s sailors turned out to scrub the decks at 6 am, 7 days a week; 1960s sailors expected every weekend off. O’Connor’s officers were wedded to the RN and to their ships; 1960s officers were wedded to their wives and expected to see them often.
For O’Connor, the only department in the ship that seems to have mattered (and his routines and ideas on work make it plain) was the executive or seaman department, those who fought the ship, cleaned its visible exterior, ran its boats and were its public face. The engineers, logisticians and such seem merely there to serve the ‘warriors’. What mattered was the way the ship was seen and performed in public. The achievement of Hood in winning the Fleet ‘Cock’ at the Fleet Regatta is something in which he takes inordinate pride, not the performance in exercises, gunnery, mechanical reliability, etc.
Particularly noteworthy is his paternalistic view of the smaller ships of the fleet – the destroyer navy. He is concerned with their welfare, sees it as the role of a capital ship to look after them, teach them and show them how things were properly done, but he does not really see them as the Navy’s heart and soul. To him, they were certainly ‘other’.
By the 1960s the rapidly developing technology of warfare was shifting the balance of power and the system espoused by O’Connor was increasingly inappropriate. Ships and crews were smaller and getting smaller still, and individuals needed a variety of technical skills; there was no place for the salt-encrusted and horny-handed sons of Neptune. Everyone had a shared responsibility for much more and expected, in return, a more liberal, less onerous regime.
It is this change, either side of the Second World War, which is so striking. In O’Connor’s world every sailor (and every officer) knew his place and, indeed, had more or less been born to it. By and large they accepted it – it was the function of the naval leader to create a system, an atmosphere and, when necessary, a disciplinary framework which sustained this picture of the naval world, its mysteries and magic. Certainly he saw this as requiring an approach sympathetic to the men, but the gulf between Wardroom and lower deck was kept wide and deep. By 1961, the Second World War had changed all this. Fought in all three services largely by ‘Hostilities Only’ personnel, whose immediate reaction to victory was to elect, sweepingly, a Labour government, the old social certainties were in full retreat. Increasingly those joining as officers did not have the instinctive authority that public schools had always instilled, nor the sailors the habit of unquestioned obedience. Indeed there was, as time went by, increasingly less difference in background between the Wardroom and the Lower Deck (whence an increasing number of the officers came). Today this difference has almost disappeared, although this has brought new problems of its own.
The book is interesting as social history as well as a picture of the Navy of the 1930s; in a sense it describes the social structure of the nation at that time. The Navy has often been a very formalised model of the general social framework of its day, changing, if at all, only very slowly. It is by nature, and has always been, a highly conservative organisation, and resistant to change from below – it is this as much as anything else which accounts for the apotheosis of Nelson. He was in this sense something of an original and of course in the century after his death, naval conservatism revived itself with great success. Nelson’s principles were codified in a way of which he would surely have disapproved. Even after Fisher, much the same thing happened in a Fleet obsessed still with big ships and highly disciplined and centralised organisations. It is tempting to see this as the besetting sin of naval officers over a long time.
How much of this was in O’Connor’s mind as he wrote his guide? We should remember that he was given official leave to write it, so it is unlikely that he was going to be so ungrateful as to be iconoclastic or that he was expected to be; he was instead likely to codify the established system, with some insights on treating people at different levels that were the product of his own experience and character. But he broke no moulds. And was the Hood he created and bequeathed the formidable fighting machine she should have been? Thanks to the gunnery of the German battleship Bismark, we shall never really know. Was she a happy ship? Well, at least some of the evidence is mixed, although she was certainly efficient at the things O’Connor thought essential.
Should you read the book? Most assuredly, yes. It is a fascinating window on the way in which the capital ship Navy thought of itself in the 1930s and about how it thought about other elements of the Navy. But it also has much to tell us, by implication, about British society of the period, about the relationships between different social classes in Britain, and about the Navy which the crucible of World War II was about to reforge. For all who, like me, have always been a little in love with the Navy it is a fascinating, nostalgic and appealing read. Recommended.