Cocoa, sir?

Ian Jack: The Royal Navy, 2 January 2003

Sober Men and True: Sailor Lives in the Royal Navy 1900-45 
by Christopher McKee.
Harvard, 285 pp., £19.95, May 2002, 0 674 00736 0
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Rule Britannia: The Victorian and Edwardian Navy 
by Peter Padfield.
Pimlico, 246 pp., £12.50, August 2002, 0 7126 6834 9
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... the sailors of the Royal Navy were very plentiful in this part of Scotland. They poured from the gates of Rosyth’s Naval base whenever a cruiser or an aircraft-carrier came in, to supplement the sailors who were more or less permanently there on frigates, destroyers, tugs, boom defence boats, and on a whole flotilla of minesweepers (though they were kept ...