It is an interesting question whether or not the men who joined the Royal Navy in the late nineteenth century knew of or imagined the time-consuming and monotonous aspects the job entailed. Consideration of sailor diaries reveals that one of the most common, and indeed, disliked tasks aboard ship, was painting the vessel, inside and […]
Dr Rob James, from the Port Towns and Urban Cultures project team, will be delivering a paper entitled, “If there’s one man that I admire, that man’s a British tar”: The Navy, Identity and Leisure in Early-Twentieth Century Britain,” at the Greenwich Maritime Institute on Wednesday the 6th of November, 2013. The paper analyses popular […]
During the nineteenth century pageantry became an increasingly important, ritualized facet of the Royal Navy and altered its relationship with the public.[1] Fleet Reviews no longer represented a true ‘inspection’ of the ship by the monarch but were a carefully choreographed spectacle designed to be witnessed by the public.[2] Similarly ship launches moved beyond the […]
