Rum Ration
the Navy Network

Originally Posted by neil6814

HMS Barfleur 1954

How cute! Did AB's have iPods in those days?

Anyone have any details of the ZOO that used to be on Whale Island, you can still find the gravestones just down from the Armoury today. Believe most were killed at the begining of WW2 due to fear of bombing?

Dunno but there was a pig rescued form a sinking German Cruiser in 1915 that became a mascot untill it was raffled off as Pork raising over £1200 for the War effort.

HMS Repulse, Port Crew 1st patrol of the 1st commission had a number of passengers on board - fertilised chicken eggs, one of which hatched to produce a chick called Fang.

Probably the most famous ships cat was Simon off the Amethyst.Just google for his story.

Is this Kent's pig? While hunting up and down the coast of Chile for SMS Dresden, in February 1915 HMS Kent was presented from shore with a live pig by a local Englishman. The pig was very popular and seemed to enjoy life but disliked being washed and always protested vigorously. In the end the Ship’s Company refused to let it be killed so it was transferred (or bartered) to another ship, probably one which showed it less affection.

In 1916 the light cruiser Intrepid came back to Chatham from Archangel, where her ship's company, to save the animal from a Russian cooking-pot, had bought a baby bear. Fortified by condensed milk, tinned jam and rum, the beast grew until by the time she arrived in Blighty she was a fine specimen of bear-hood, spherical, but agile as a cat up the rigging.

Ignoring the fact that she was in quarantine, one December dusk she decided to go sightseeing. Hurtling between the legs of the Royal Marine gangway-sentry and so sending him flying, she loped off to explore the dockyard. Quite soon she came upon some dockyard mateys, celebrating their exclusion from trench warfare with a tin of purloined navy jam, with which they were making sandwiches in a hitherto unobserved skive-hole.

Miss Bruin decided to join the party but the mateys, their courage well indicated by their choice of war-work, took flight, one clutching the jam tin which left a trail all down his overalls and onto the roadway. As the ditty goes: "I've seen a Dockyard matey run; yes, by God, I've seen it done.." Pausing only to lick up the droppings, Bruin chased along, pushing after him into the ground floor office of Medway House. Temporarily ignoring the screams of a Wren clerk who had taken ineffectual refuge on top of a table, the bear laid the matey carefully out on the floor and commenced to lick him clean, first one side, roll him over and then the other. The office then being jam-free, Bruin pottered off in search of other excitements. Intrepid's search party, which had been searching a dark dockyard for a dark bear on a dark night, by now caught up and led her back on board.

Authority took offence at Bruin's run ashore. The bear was smuggled out of Chatham in a piano-case and consigned by train to the home of one of the quartermasters who had hitherto been honorary bear-keeper. What Mrs Quartermaster made of the delivery is not recorded. After wrecking their little cottage the bear was eventually found asylum in a zoo and so passed out of naval history.

(Dit lifted from Captain Gwatkin Williams' "Under the Black Ensign" (Hutchinson))

Bismarck, the German battleship, was sunk on 27 May 1941. Of more than 2200 men on board, only 116 survived — together with Oscar, the ship's cat (left). He was picked up by the British destroyer HMS Cossack, but that too was torpedoed a few months later, on 24 October, with the loss of 159 lives. Attempts to rescue the ship failed, and it was abandoned and sank two days later. Oscar survived again, was taken to Gibraltar, and then was taken on by HMS Ark Royal. His stay there was even shorter, as the aircraft carrier was torpedoed by U-81 on 13 November, eventually capsizing and sinking only 30 miles (50 km) from Gibraltar. Yet again Oscar was lucky — but there were no more ships for him, as it was decided that his presence was certainly not lucky! By now known as 'Unsinkable Sam', this great survivor among cats stayed as mouse-catcher in the Governor General of Gibraltar's office buildings until he was taken by a brave ship to Belfast, in Northern Ireland (although some reports say Plymouth). There he lived until his death in 1955, at the 'Home for Sailors'. A portrait of him has a place of honour in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, on the River Thames near London.