A Dictionary of Naval Slang E-Book

Gerald O'Driscoll

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 90

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

For centuries the sailors of the Royal Navy have been famous for their colourful language. Trapped aboard leaky ships and creaking vessels for months, sometimes years, on end, the crews developed a peculiar language all of their own. Veteran sailor Gerald O'Driscoll celebrated the Royal Navy's heydey and preserved its unique language in this hilarious and fascinating collection. Taking the reader from 'Acting green' all the way to 'Water-rat', A Dictionary of Naval Slang is a treasury of naval argot, jargon, lingo and cant, and a window on the lost world of living on the high seas. First published in 1943, this modern gift edition comes with a foreword by author and former Royal Navy submariner Richard Humphreys. Clampy - Nickname for the owner of very large feet. Gutzkrieg - A pain in the stomach. Rum-fiend - As the term implies, a man who is a glutton for rum. Scaly-back - A veteran; one who has been too long in the navy. Tin-eye - Nickname given to anyone who sports a monocle. Wall-flower - Scathing reference to any ship which remains moored to a dockyard wall for a long period.

Leseprobe

GERALD O’DRISCOLL (1886–1947) was an Irish sailor, journalist and humourist who also wrote under the pen-name ‘Geraldus’. A veteran of the Royal Navy, he wrote several bestselling books memorialising the sailor’s world, including The Musings of a Merry Matloe (1927) and Awful Disclosures of a Bluejacket (1929). A Dictionary of Naval Slang, his last book, was published at the height of the Second World War.

RICHARD HUMPHREYS is a British writer and memoirist. Born in Wolverhampton, he spent many years in the Royal Navy as a diver and submariner, including multiple patrols on the UK’s Polaris class nuclear submarines in the 1980s. His experiences aboard Britain’s nuclear deterrent formed the basis of his bestselling memoir Under Pressure: Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine, published in 2019. He lives in London.

Contents

Foreword by Richard HumphreysA Dictionary of Naval Slang

‌Foreword

As the rest of the human race settled down to watch Live Aid, a lithe, spotty and nervous teenager gazed out from the Torpoint ferry across the sun-soaked millpond of the River Tamar, wondering what the next twelve weeks had in store. I’d been told by various people to get as fit as possible for both the physical and mental tests that lay ahead; military basic training was going to be a full-on, intensive process.

What nobody had mentioned to me, though, was the trouble I’d have understanding what all the Chief Petty Officers (mostly old salty sea dogs) with years of experience behind them were talking about! Since the days of yore, the Royal Navy has had its own language, or ‘Jackspeak’, that has, over the last four centuries, come into everyday use for the senior service.

My first introduction to this was on my first day in the RN, when a bespectacled barber and ex-Navy man had shaved my head to within half an inch of its life before shaking my hand and saying, ‘Welcome to the Andrew.’ I misunderstood him. ‘Hi Andrew, I’m Richard, nice to meet you,’ I replied. A torrent of abuse was hurled at me from my left as an enraged Chief Petty Officer with a face the colour of beetroot informed me that ‘the Andrew’ was actually the term for the Royal Navy. Pusser is another term that can be used to describe the whole of the Navy; it derives from the paymaster and supplies officer of the Navy of old, in other words the bloke who paid you. I still got paid cash in hand when I first joined—the Pusser would deliver the cash into my left hand as I saluted and failed to remember my service number, which I had to shout back at him at the same time.

There are conflicting reports as to the origin of the term ‘the Andrew’. Some say it derived from the Christian names of two notorious press-gangers from the Napoleonic and the Age of Sail eras. The most likely explanation, however (and one which O’Driscoll subscribes to), is that the first edible rations on the Royal Navy men-of-war were supplied by a company run by one Andrew Miller, who had such a monopoly on supplies that in many ways he owned the Navy. The phrase stuck.

The rest of my time in basic training I was referred to as a Nozzer, which was a term given to new sailors until they passed out. The term came from an old instructor from some years past who had been well endowed in the nose department!

At the start of my service, we were given a lecture about the perils of too much alcohol and what it can do to the brain and indeed the body. The term ‘grand slam’ was used to describe the moment the sailor arrived back from a night out on shore, lost control of his bodily functions (the three sphincters), fell asleep (usually with a lit cigarette) and—well, you can imagine the rest! Talking of cigarettes, it was here in basic training that I had my first induction into smoking a Blue Liner. This, believe it or not, was the Navy’s own brand of cigarette, strong enough to make a human throat bleed with just one inhalation—it put me off smoking for a long, long time. Phased out by 1991, it must have immediately cut emphysema cases by half. Basic training also involves a trip to the Fang Ferrier–the dentist. My trip involved a return visit and my own version of the film Marathon Man with a sadist who put in a filling without anaesthetic and berated me for having the audacity to complain about it.

With basic training behind me, I joined the completely terrifying, baffling, exciting and sometimes monotonous world of submarine warfare. Different to any other branch of the military, the submarine service is thus home to some of the most coarse and ingenious phrases in the Royal Navy. Here are some of my favourites.

angles and dangles High-speed changes of depth whilst also using large angles of trim. I was terrified when I was first subjected to this whilst on operations. The captain makes sure the foreplanes and the afterplanes are working correctly by tilting the bow up and down fifteen to twenty times, sending the boat hurtling this way and that. It’s like being in a fast elevator that moves sideways and backwards as well as up and down! Angles and dangles are used mainly to make sure everything is stowed away and won’t bang about if you have to take evasive action—in our case, we needed to be particularly alert to Soviet submarines on Cold War hunter patrol. The chefs used to dread this in case they’d failed to lash down all their pots and pans correctly, which could be a loud and bruising experience.

beer tokens Money. What else does it need to be called?

bellfin Stinking and/or sweaty; the inside of a submarine most of the time, especially when submerged for more than a week.

black lighting Term used when a submarine is at periscope depth at night-time, curtains drawn, minimal red lighting—you can’t see anything. But the skipper’s in his element on the periscope (or ‘peep stick’). Always farcical if there was a watch change in the middle of it, which did happen occasionally. I saw a young sailor trip through one of the blackout curtains and wrap it round the captain accidentally while he was still on the periscope; the effing and jeffing which followed was priceless.

bomber Polaris/Trident submarine.

bubble Best to describe it as a spirit level (clinometer) that the planesman uses to keep the boat level in the water, particularly prevalent whilst at periscope depth. The Captain doesn’t want his periscope dipping in and out of the water whilst carrying out all-round looks. Some planesmen have been on the receiving end of some almighty bollockings when this occurred.

bunch of bastards Usually a line of rope that has become entangled and is a nightmare to source either end. Can result in a seaman becoming entangled in the submarine casing and tripping overboard, which looks funny but is potentially very dangerous.

coffin dream The bunk on a submarine is about the size of a generous bookshelf; it’s tiny! About sixty centimetres in width, sixty to seventy centimetres in height and about 1.8 metres in length, it is enclosed on all three sides by a curtain which is then pulled across for total darkness. It feels like something out of a Stephen King novel. If you’re at all claustrophobic, submarines are not for you. The bunk is sometimes referred to as the coffin; I used to have two or three coffin dreams per patrol, quite scary nightmares of the sides closing in or the feeling of waking up whilst being buried alive.

crumb brusher The officers’ steward.

Deeps Nickname of any submariner whose name is not known; our version of ‘mate’.

dit A story, any story.

dogs The name given to watches between 16.00 and 20.00, split into two separate watches, the first dog and last dog. This is done so the watch roster is equalised.

fire, flood and famine Exercises that are carried out on pre-patrol work to test the readiness of the crew. A royal pain in the arse.

fish Torpedoes.

front c*** Anyone who does not keep a watch from AMS [Auxiliary Machinery Space] 2 back to the motor room.

Jimmy First Lieutenant, second in command who has passed the perisher submarine commander training course. In charge of the warfare teams.

kettle The nuclear reactor, so called as it works in a similar way, generating steam by the splitting of atoms in the nuclear reactor, which releases energy as heat. This heat is then used to create high-pressure steam. This steam then generates the power to turn the turbines and propellor, operate life systems (oxygen and fresh water production) and enough power to drive all the electrical systems on board. A nuclear reactor can generate enough output to power a town the size of Swindon!

on the step The truly majestic sight of a nuclear submarine on the surface at full tilt riding the bow wave. This was an incredible experience. Part of my job was as the Navigator’s yeoman, so I would sit up top on the bridge watching the boat below. It would be heaving effortlessly through the seas off the glorious west coast of Scotland, sometimes with dolphins bow-riding in the pressure wave created by the boat.

Part Three The term given to the lowest of the low, the oxygen thief, the unqualified submariner battling away doing eighteen-hour days to qualify and pass sea training to earn the much-sought-after Gold Dolphin badge. Everyone has to do this if they are new to submarines, no matter what their rank. Mine was a nightmare: hours in overalls crawling around dank, sweaty engineering spaces looking for valves, switches and various bits of machinery. It usually involved me clanking my head on low-hanging pipes and forgetting everything within twenty-four hours so I’d have to repeat it. It was all worth it though when you get the old dolphins from the captain and become a fully-fledged submariner—‘sun-dodgers’, as we’re referred to by the rest of the Navy.

pavement pizza The finest description of the full vomit in Christendom.

scram When the rods in the reactor are lowered quickly to shut down the reactor.

Sherwood Forest Name given to the missile compartment of first the Polaris and then the Trident submarines, each of which carried explosive power many times greater than all the bombs dropped in the Second World War. There’s a sobering thought. The missile tubes fill the submarine like an apocalyptic orchard.

Skimmers The name given to the surface fleet by submariners.

sneaky A covert intelligence trip. For us, this usually involved dropping special forces soldiers from the SBS (the Navy equivalent of the SAS) near land or hunter-killer Cold War excursions against Soviet naval bases or submarines.

snorting both diesels Snoring.

Teacher The head of the perisher course designed to find the next generation of submarine captains; the course has a 25% failure rate.