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When Peter Broadbent entered HMS Ganges, the toughest training establishment for young recruits to the Royal Navy, he was a naive 15-year-old Yorkshire schoolboy, entranced with the idea of seeing the world, proud of his drainpipe trousers and DA hairstyle, and eager to meet girls. In other words, he was a ‘Nozzer' - a raw and unsuspecting recruit. When he emerged 386 days later it was as a prospective ‘Dabtoe', not quite a fully trained Seaman, but well on the way. This funny and vivid memoir accurately captures what it was like to climb the mast, have your kit trashed, learn to swear, develop a taste for Kye and Stickies, double around the parade-ground at dead of night in your pyjamas, endlessly run up and down Laundry Hill ... and to do it all and much more while being continually barracked by a demanding Petty Officer Instructor. Along the way, Peter relished learning the Navy lingo and how to sail. He consumed platefuls of Cheese Ush, won a boxing certificate, discovered a secret stash of Playboy magazines, smoked thousands of cigarettes, and convinced girls back home that his shorn hair was in fact the very latest fashion ‘down south’.
In 1961 the Royal Navy came up with a brilliant idea: why not take all its rogues, thugs and malcontents and place them on board its flagship, HMS Bermuda, where hard work and continuous exercising would keep them out of trouble? Joining this colourful crew was sixteen-year-old Peter Broadbent, fresh out of his year's training at HMS Ganges, and drafted to ‘Bermadoo' to make up the ship’s quota of Junior Seamen. Initially he lived a cocooned existence in the Juniors’ mess, with a community of cockroaches as his closest companions, but his life changed dramatically the day he transferred to the notorious For’d Seamen’s Mess. There, he grew up. In the course of his 34,000 nautical miles with Bermuda, he learned how to ammunition the ship, avoid Pompey Lil, sing the Oggie song, survive a storm, throw a perfect heaving line and count himself proud to be a ‘sharp-end seaman’. On his eighteenth birthday, the entire population of Hamilton, Bermuda, along with a uniformed band and full ceremonial, enthusiastically welcomed Peter and his ship; in Newcastle-upon-Tyne he was given the job of preventing women wearing skirts from descending a long open-backed ladder; in Stockholm he had a memorable dalliance with a local girl called Gunnel, and in Amsterdam a professional businesswoman at work in Canal Street was so impressed with his performance that, as he took his leave, she shook his hand warmly and gave him some of her business cards.
Until that fateful day in 1970 when the Royal Navy abolished the rum ration, the one thing that every Royal Navy sailor could rely on was that ‘Up Spirits' would be piped at approximately 11:45 each day . ‘Tot-time' was the cue for plenty of banter and lamp-swinging, but also for baffling negotiations as to who might have sippers, wets, gulpers, halfers, sandy bottoms, or their share of ‘Queen’s’. With the same humour, affection and story-telling ability that characterised his earlier naval memoirs, including HMS Ganges Days and HMS Bermuda Days, Peter Broadbent tells the tale of his nine months as an Able Seaman on board HMS Gurkha, touring the Persian Gulf with a few detours to the Seychelles, Kenya and the Mozambique channel. Along the way he coxswains Royal Marines on a RIB to track down smugglers, pits his wits against a line-up of ultra-intelligent dolphins, persuades dozens of girls from a jam factory in Leeds to write to ‘lonely sailors’, is one of the transfer team that initiated the ‘Beira Bucket’ when used to trade its contents for desperately needed toilet paper from HMS Eskimo, and makes it to Gibraltar in time to celebrate England winning the 1966 World Cup. Ayo Gurkhali!
Taking you through the year day by day, The Ipswich Book of Days contains quirky, eccentric, amusing and important events and facts from different periods in the history of one of England’s oldest towns. Ideal for dipping into, this addictive little book will keep you entertained and informed.Featuring hundreds of snippets of information gleaned from the vaults of Ipswich’s archives and covering the social, criminal, political, religious, industrial, military and sporting history of the town, it will delight residents and visitors alike.
Band of Brothers is a history of the boy seaman rating in the Royal Navy, beginning with its evolution from the eighteenth century 'Officer's Servant' through to its abolition in 1956. It tells of an astonishing Victorian Naval tradition which continued right into the modern age. HMS Ganges, a byword on the lower deck of the Royal Navy for strict discipline, was the hardest of the boy seaman training establishments, and was widely regarded as the archetype. The Royal Navy throughout those years was a supremely conservative and traditionalist institution, and particularly in its attitude to and treatment of lower deck people, the boys in particular. Drawing on his own detailed diaries, the author vividly recreates daily life ashore and afloat, in peace and war. Recruitment, food and clothing, training, discipline and punishment are all recorded, and supported by the personal accounts of boy seamen who went on to serve in the Royal Navy as men.