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the Navy Network

Well, here we go! The most eagerly anticipated book review for a long time: 'The official ARRSE guide to the British Army' by Major Des Astor...

My copy arrived last week and I read the 223 pages in two sittings. The book caused immediate problems - Mrs Crusty took immediate issue with the constant chuckling as she was trying to get to sleep.
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There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right!” - Rudyard Kipling

This is undoubtedly the best work of this nature that has ever been produced, in a genre stretching back to 1626 to Pocahontas’ friend Captain John Smith‘s “A Sea Grammar”, via many other works including Admiral William Henry Smyth‘s “The Sailor's Word-Book” of 1867. The author should need no introduction; if he does, read his “The Red and Green Life Machine” and reflect on the large number of lives saved because of his leadership and organisational and clinical skills in the Falklands in 1982. Meanwhile, here we have Surgeon Captain Jolly as the Navy’s Dr Johnson, the Great Lexicographer.
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The RN only took about two thousand National Servicemen per year but was oceans more popular as a choice than the Army; this meant the RN could pick and choose. We should remember that ‘Join the Navy and See the World’ was a pretty fair boast in the days before the Boeing 707, even if what some of the NS saw was Korea, through a Firefly’s gunsight.

Two of my (regular) contemporaries - one eventually a Commander, the other a Captain - started as National Servicemen. Some spent time in an MFV in the Baltic scribbling down Russian. But about 500 a year were brought in as Stokers, which was a 1950s shortage category.

In 1955 Perris had just failed his first year as an electrical engineering student. This meant two things. One, a brown envelope calling him up as his deferment had lapsed; two, his entry qualifications for further education mean that he was possibly commissionable.
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