JACKET BLURBS

THIS BOOK is an account of the cost of the Royal Navy during the past 150 years in terms of men, their achievements, their health and their dignity. The story of battle and heroism has many times been told. This is a different story and not a pretty one.

The starting point is the period immediately following the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and the book ends with the absorption of the Board of Admiralty into the Ministry of Defence in 1966. Trafalgar and Nelson gave the Navy a definitive lustre which a century and a half of public adoration polished into a dazzling brilliance, producing a conviction that whatever might be wrong ashore, nothing was ever wrong at sea. This conviction blinded the British public to the most appalling incompetence, stupidity and sadism it has ever been any nation's lot to survive.

If the author's sympathy is obviously with the lower deck he offers no apology. To write at all is to be subjective. Many will judge this book to be critical, unfair and harmful to the reputation of the Royal Navy. To them he says only that glory can stand upright without mythology. Further, glory has its price. This book is the Price of Admiralty.

STANLEY BONNETT was born in London in 1925 and has spent his working life as a reporter, with intervals as a sailor and a university lecturer. He volunteered for the Royal Navy aged 17 and spent his 19th birthday with a Murmansk-bound convoy under U-boat attack. He was in the destroyer H.M.S. Virago when she, with other destroyers, torpedoed the German battle-cruiser Scharnhorst off North Cape. He took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy, and in the final British surface-ship action of World War II when destroyers torpedoed and sank the Japanese cruiser Haguro in a classic night action off Penang.

He served his journalistic apprenticeship on the Slough Observer, then went to Fleet Street to the Daily Mail where he specialized in African affairs—and shipping. He wrote The Price of Admiralty (after six years of research) while senior lecturer in mass communications for the International Press Institute at Lagos University, Nigeria, and University College, Nairobi, Kenya. After a further two years, spent in the Middle East as a free-lance writer and broadcaster, he is now a writer for the Daily Mirror.

My Postage and Returns Policies

If you wish to return a book please let me know as soon as possible but no later than three days after receipt. 

If you feel, and I agree after we have discussed it, that my description was misleading or inaccurate then, upon the receipt of the book in the condition you received it, I will then refund all your payment plus your return postage. 

If the book isn't what you really wanted and if we agree, then, upon my receipt of the book in the condition you received it, I will then refund your bid price.

I have found, so far, that the majority of my buyers are genuine.

For my part I try and describe the books as fairly as possible - I am not a professional - and do not like buyers to feel dissatisfied. 

My Postage and Packing charges are calculated before wrapping as best I can with a very nominal amount added for packaging costs.

I am happy to pack together multiple buys made within a seven day period and post at cost as long as total value of purchases in the packet does not exceed the Royal Mail's built in compensation, which at the moment is £39.00.

To Top

Camberpete's web site

More naval social history books