SHIPāS 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 sailorās repertoire. This was because, with a few exceptions, such as Eliza Cookās āThe Sailorās Graveā, 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 seamanās 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:
Iām on the sea, Iām on the sea!
I am where I would ever be,
With the blue above and the blue below,
And silence wheresoeāer 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-oā-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 Cornwallās lines above with the third verse of the following:
1 Thatās what itās like in the Navy
(Tune: See Appendix D)
I wish Iād never joined for a sailor, mother dear,
Iāve seen some places in my time, but nothing like this āere,
The girls wonāt let us court them and the canteenās out of beer,
And thatās what itās like in the Navy.
They covered us with honours, and praises far from faint,
They showered us with medals, āgainst which weāve no complaint,
But weād rather that our āJimmyā hadnāt covered us with paint,
And thatās what itās 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 soddinā tot,
And thatās what itās 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 werenāt tough enough to drink Maltese water in their rum,
And thatās what itās 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 islandās 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 āA Life on the Ocean Waveā in 1838 he can hardly have anticipated Jackās 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: āA Life on the Ocean Waveā)
A Life on the Ocean Wave,
The fellow that wrote that song,
Iād like to shit on his grave
A turd about nine inches long.
āCos heās never been to sea
On a Sunday afternoon,
And heās never coaled ship in his watch below
Or heād bloody soon change his tune ā¦
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 āturning toā 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 ācoaling shipā 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, ācoal shipā day was a major operation in which every officer and rating of the shipās 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. ā¦ She had just returned to Gibraltar and, in consequence, the day after it was ācoal shipā day. Her usual intake was about 2,000 tons. The whole of this coal had to be shovelled from the collier al...
