Grey Funnel Lines

Traditional Song & Verse of the Royal Navy 1900-1970

Cyril Tawney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138954113
• eBook ISBN: 9781317308010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

Originally published in 1987. In this book we find songs reflecting every aspect of life in the twentieth-century Royal Navy, both upper and lower deck: war, ship's routine, aviation, submarines, the antics of dockyard personnel, not to mention the matelot's shore-going adventures, both amorous and bibulous.

The compiler was well-known as a folk-singer, though he began his career in the Royal Navy. Based on his personal collection of Navy songs, this book proves that the sailor's muse did not desert him with the passing of the sailing ship. It also dispels the notion that the modern Jack Tar, when he produces any songs at all, confines himself to the pornographic. With the songs, Cyril Tawney interweaves a commentary on the Royal Navy setting, providing a backdrop to the sailor's own words. This book is of enduring appeal to all who have served as well as to students of twentieth-century oral tradition.

THE SONGS

SHIP’S ROUTINE

Sea songs in general are songs referring to the sea. They are rarely sung by the sailors themselves.

R. DUNSTAN in Musical Appreciation Through Song, Huddersfield, 1933

How true. Much has been said about the futility of attempts by well-meaning outsiders to write songs on behalf of communities to which they do not belong, and in the past the sailor has never gone short of unsolicited offerings of this kind. But, as Dr Dunstan says, they rarely found a place in the sailor’s repertoire. This was because, with a few exceptions, such as Eliza Cook’s ‘The Sailor’s Grave’, their sentiments were utterly at variance with those of the people about whom they were written.

At the very least the landlubber writing cheery ballads in praise of the seaman’s life ought first to ensure he has good sea-legs himself if he wishes to avoid social embarrassment. Bryan Waller Proctor (Barry Cornwall), dying a thousand deaths on a Channel crossing, had also to endure the callous humour of his wife who, hale and hearty, marched up and down the deck in front of him humming the refrain of one of his own songs, the words of which assured everyone that:

I’m on the sea, I’m on the sea!

I am where I would ever be,

With the blue above and the blue below,

And silence wheresoe’er I go.

If a storm should come and awake the deep,

What matter? What matter? I shall ride and sleep.

The twentieth century has, thankfully, seen a rapid decline in such idealised nonsense, probably because far less romance is attached to steel and steam than to timber and sail. Consequently the field has been left almost entirely to the matelot himself, with the result that those wishing to know what life has really been like on board a man-o’-war in modern times are far less likely to be misled than were their Victorian counterparts. The sailor puts his songs together from firsthand experience and pulls no punches. Compare Barry Cornwall’s lines above with the third verse of the following:

1 That’s what it’s like in the Navy
(Tune: See Appendix D)

I wish I’d never joined for a sailor, mother dear,

I’ve seen some places in my time, but nothing like this ’ere,

The girls won’t let us court them and the canteen’s out of beer,

And that’s what it’s like in the Navy.

They covered us with honours, and praises far from faint,

They showered us with medals, ‘gainst which we’ve no complaint,

But we’d rather that our ‘Jimmy’ hadn’t covered us with paint,

And that’s what it’s like in the Navy.

And when we started rolling, we rolled an awful lot,

Some people lost their balance, or their dinner, on the spot,

But the whole of bloody Two Mess went and lost their soddin’ tot,

And that’s what it’s like in the Navy.

There were tough guys in the Navy when Francis banged his drum,

And chaps like Hawkins chewed up glass instead of chewing gum,

But even they weren’t tough enough to drink Maltese water in their rum,

And that’s what it’s like in the Navy.

For the sake of present-day Maltese tourism perhaps I should point out that the above song shows its age in the last verse. From personal experience I can say that today the island’s water supply is as good as anywhere else!

Lower-deck lyrics are not only straight from the shoulder, they can be admirably succinct into the bargain. When S. J. Arnold penned the words of ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ in 1838 he can hardly have anticipated Jack’s broadside of an answer a few generations later, and the point it has taken this present writer some 300 words to make is pungently summarised by the sailor himself in those eight short lines:

2 Coal Ship Song (I)
(Tune: ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’)

A Life on the Ocean Wave,

The fellow that wrote that song,

I’d like to shit on his grave

A turd about nine inches long.

’Cos he’s never been to sea

On a Sunday afternoon,

And he’s never coaled ship in his watch below

Or he’d bloody soon change his tune …

In civilian life even the humblest wage-slave could take a stand on the right to some sort of respite from their labours but, if the needs of the Service so decreed, the bluejacket was entitled to nothing. If it meant ‘turning to’ on the Sabbath, his one day of rest, then so be it, and, as was pointed out in a Hampshire Telegraph article in 1959, when it came to ‘coaling ship’ it was not just the rank-and-file lower-deck personnel who were dragooned into this squalid but vital operation:

In the days of coal-burning ships in the Royal Navy, ‘coal ship’ day was a major operation in which every officer and rating of the ship’s company, including the chaplain, but excluding the commander and surgeon, took part. In November 1908 I joined HMS Prime of Wales to serve in the newly-formed Atlantic Fleet. … She had just returned to Gibraltar and, in consequence, the day after it was ‘coal ship’ day. Her usual intake was about 2,000 tons. The whole of this coal had to be shovelled from the collier al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction
• The Songs
• Appendices
• Sources
• Glossary
• Index
• Sternpiece