“Join the Navy and feel a man!” exhorted the famous Royal Navy recruiting slogan from the early 1980s. Or at least, the famous RN recruiting slogan according to us Air Cadets when we were trying to score banter points over the Navy Cadets at my school. Even though I thought… Read More »Making Men: Navy Recruiting Ads
The finest little bar on the Seven Seas is closing. After forty years of entertaining the sailors of the Royal Navy, Charles’ Hole in t’Wall in Gibraltar is shuttering its doors, bringing an end to a very special chapter in British maritime and marytime history. This report from GBC gives… Read More »Charles’ Hole in t’Wall Closes
Gibraltar, otherwise known as ‘The Rock’, is the full stop to the sentence of Europe. It has been besieged no less than fourteen times. The Ancients thought it was a pillar holding up the end of the World. In the Middle Ages Jews fled here from the red-hot instruments of… Read More »God Save The Sea Queen: Gibraltar’s Lovely Charlie
According to the Daily Telegraph’s front page, it’s ‘Sunset’ for the Senior Service: ‘Navy to cut its fleet by half’. The Navy that once ruled the waves, the global maritime force on which the sun never set, and gave the world some of the most romantic not to mention fetishistically ingenious uniforms ever… Read More »Union Street Blues: Plymouth’s Last ‘Run Ashore’?