RN Day by Day

The Royal Navy Day by Day. 4th edition, by Lt Cdr Lawrie Phillips.

Stroud: Spellmount, 2011.

ISBN: 978-0-7524-6177-9.

£50 (hb) 864p., with illustrations.

It poses an interesting challenge to review a standard reference work which is displayed in every HM ship and establishment and referred to daily. This is a thumping great book of 864 pages - 222 pages bigger than its 2005 predecessor - which has allowed an expanded allocation of two pages per day, albeit at the price of a much reduced bibliography. First published in 1979 this fourth edition places Lt Cdr Lawrie Phillips firmly in the tradition of Shrubb and Sainsbury with a version which is fully revised, augmented and updated. The dedication to Her Majesty is happily timed and throughout it shines with good judgement and what Admiral Lord West describes as the author’s “deep admiration for the Royal Navy and a profound understanding of its business”

“This celebrated reference book”, writes the First Sea Lord in a foreword, “is well-recognised for both its incisive historical authority and its ability to capture the enduring character and ethos of the Royal Navy”. And that it neatly does. It would be all too easy to have produced a list of battles and events, of launchings and sinkings, of births and deaths. And the dates of naval operations and events do provide that solid core of essential detail in the book, but it is also packed with fascinating information on how the Royal Navy was organised, trained, commanded and deployed across the oceans, how its ships were designed and manned, how it deterred aggressors, fought dictators, supported friends. It neatly captures the balance between dry historical fact and demonstrating that the RN is and always has been a vibrant community with its share of humour, whimsy, selflessness and even madness as well as being a polished operational machine. It records astonishing facts – pay for Able Seamen was unchanged at 24s per month from 1653 to 1797 – and whimsical facts, such as their Lordships instruction in 1910 to issue a second typewriter to Battleships or the nature of umbrellas which may be carried by WRNS. Such details fill out the picture with a rich and varied record of naval life from uniform changes to instructions for the keeping of women on board overnight. There is also classic naval humour as when a banner welcomed HMS Conventry to Shanghai, “an unintentional but accurate indicator of our blameless and celibate stay...”. This mix is then further leavened with brief but pithy articles of a few paragraphs on topics as varied as gunnery and the hydrographic service, which are interpolated throughout the text. And although it is squarely aimed at the RN it finds space to record related matters large and small from the purchase of shares in the Suez Canal by Disraeli to the establishment of the Laughton Chair of Naval History at King’s College London. Nor can one cavil at currency as it reaches to such recent events as the deployment of the RN off Libya in 2011.

Phillips tells an inspiring story but it is not an entirely uncritical account. The Royal Navy has put up some significant ‘blacks’ down the years. The long distant events present no difficulties and they can be considered dispassionately. However, some more recent incidents in which the Royal Navy did less than its best are briefly – very briefly - recorded without comment or elaboration. However while the detention of sailors and Marines from Cornwall in 2007 is, for example, simply described, it is rather cleverly cross-referenced to quite unrelated events which are explicitly recorded as naval “humiliations”, making the author’s view perfectly clear. More generally, this system of cross-referencing to other dates allows a nice way of linking apparently unrelated material which would not otherwise show up in the very full indices.

The book is illustrated with a wide variety of well chosen prints and photographs, many of them taken down the years and around the world by the author, who was the long-serving and much-travelled Fleet PR Officer from the 1960s and the first Head of Media Operations at the Permanent Joint HQ 35 years later. His skill at spinning a dit is evident throughout! Although the book is on general sale and indeed of general interest it is also in the curious position of being squarely aimed at the RN. With a copy on the shelf of every naval Captain it provides the main, if not the only, daily access the Royal Navy has to its history, which puts a particular responsibility on the author and one he discharges well.

This work is simply a joy. Not perhaps great history, nor intended to be, nor yet a book to read from cover to cover, but one that is easy to open up to check a fact or the events of a day and then find oneself drawn into a serendipitous period of browsing which is ended with great reluctance.