Ray Hamilton

There's much in this book that will be known to those who served in The Andrew - the Royal Navy - but it will nonetheless surely be a happy memory jogger for many an Old Salt, as well as being a reference book for much of the modern Navy of today. But how one wishes the editor had done a better job. For a start, a book like this absolutely needs an index (and I have made a start with the tags on this page) - for example, having come across, randomly, the piece of Navy Speak 'Toe the Line' show more (on page 220), how on earth, without an index, would I ever remember how to find it again. There's a vignette for Admiral Sir Jonathon Band (born 1950), who wrote the book's foreword, but most, if not all, of the vignettes for the likes of Jellicoe, Beatty, Cunningham and Ramsay are not titled with their knighthood! Commodore Dock Twitchen, whose help the author acknowledges, should surely have made clear the importance of the Engineering Branches, the Logistics Branch and their precedence, as would be clear from any copy of the Navy List - it's is bizarre that the tiny Chaplain's branch has seven lines of text, the Pussers eight lines and the Engineers just nine lines. Extraordinarily, a description of the Warfare Branch seems to have been missed entirely and the Education Training and Meteorological Branches and Dental Officers too. While the Sea Cadet Corps is mentioned, what about the Sea Scouts, CCF, Naval Cadets and Maritime Cadets? Impossible to be sure without an Index but there is too much missing, too much not covered well or at all, for me to wholeheartedly recommend this - editors must not check what's been written for accuracy but must ask what's been missed out! The Naval Service deserves better than this (and, by the way, there's another thing - the author's description of the Naval Service (page 119) is wrong, for he omits the RFA!). show less