AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
PAYMASTER CAPTAIN G. H. A. WILLIS C.B., R.N.

THE ROYAL NAVY AS I SAW IT

by

Paymaster Captain
G. H. A. Willis
C.B., R.N.

A navy cloth bound book with gilt lettering to spine and a gilt decoration to front board. Bottom and top of spine shelf worn and lettering faded. Dedication on ffep to author's colleague - Page block has some spasmodic spotting but generally very clean and tight - VERY GOOD condition.
345 pages 150 mm. x 222 mm. x 43 mm. Published 1924 by John Murray, London.

£18.00 plus P & P

Notes

THE NAVY AS I SAW IT  1924 1st. John Murray, London
MB rates this book as ‘SCARCE’.     This copy was given to the author’s shipmate, who became  Admiral Sir Arthur Gough Calthorpe, who has penciled in annotations.
USEFUL INDEX.                     
The author received an appointment as supernumerary assistant clerk to HMS WELLINGTON, The Portsmouth guardship.
"The eventful January 15th arrived, and, in the glory of my new uniform, preceded by a man wheeling my sea chest on a truck, I went down Broad Street to Point, and embarked in a wherry. In those days all liberty men were landed there, and, as it was about 5 p.m., I met hundreds of bluejackets. Tall, thin, and very shy and self- conscious, in my brand new uniform, I was made more so by the sailors, who, on, seeing my chest on the truck, realised what a greenhorn I was. The first group called to the rest, in a terrifying voice, '' Attention! Salute! '' and this diversion was repeated by all the subsequent ones. To all I lifted my hat and bowed, as to a lady acquaintance, with as much self- possession as I could assume!
It was a cold raw foggy afternoon, nothing was visible, and all round bells were clanging and foghorns sounding to indicate where the ships were lying; the tide rushed and lapped angrily round the bow of the boat, and the two wherrymen were forced to pull their hardest. Having no overcoat (in those days overcoats were not in the authorised scale of naval uniform), I was soon shivering with cold. By way of enlivenment one of the wherrymen regaled me with blood-curdling stories of the riotous conduct of my future mess mates in the gunroom; how they fought, drank, and returned to the ship at all hours of the night, smuggling themselves through the baggage port on the orlop deck.
At last we got alongside; the wherrymen grossly over charged me, and disappeared in the gloom with my sea chest, a volley of oaths from someone in authority on the top of the accommodation ladder bidding them take that damned Noah's Arc to the baggage port.  So I reported myself to the officer of the watch, who told the quartermaster to '' take the young gentleman down to the gunroom. '' At this I felt that now I had really joined the Royal Navy.
Pages 199-206 describe the author's involvement in Queen Victoria's Jubilee Review of 1887       when he was secretary to Commodore 1st class Robert O'B. Fitzroy in HMS EDINBURGH.
The review was used as an opportunity to test arrangements for commissioning and equipping the largest possible number of ships.P164 . "………HMS EXCELLENT consisted of two wooden vessels, the EXCELLENT and the CALCUTTA, moored head and stern in a creek in the mud flats up the harbour. Whale Island was still in the making and had then only a gun-drill battery, parade ground, and a gun-proof cell, the barracks not being built."
P196 . "The summer had now gone and with it all the attraction of those early hours and the morning trip in the beef boat, which, being a pulling launch, gave time to take in the quaint old-world scenery of Portsmouth Harbour in the sunlight, pretty, when the tide is full in, with Portchester Castle showing through the morning haze, the old wooden hulks, of which many then remained, and the ships in the stream and along the basin walls. But when the tide was out, not even the fresh air and sunlight playing on the Portsdown Hills could take away the dreariness of the scene. The dirty-yellow gurgling tide, as it ebbed through the narrow creeks, made the men strain at their oars, and the dank, foul smell of the mud on which the early morning "shot pickers" splodged about like human flamingos, on their wooden plank "snow-shoes", searching for the shot expended in practice from the EXCELLENT and Whale Island, and for which they got a farthing a lb. on delivery, offended the nostrils as much as the miles of chocolate-coloured mud fringed with dirty green weeds did the sight."
P240 . Details of Queen Street, Broad Street - Blue Posts - whores etc.
P250 . Names of three-deckers in Portsmouth Harbour.