Had Middle Watch. Went to Communion at 4 o’clock. Cleaned up shop until 10 o’clock, then went to service. Had good dinner. Lady Beatty’s turkey and Daily News Xmas Puddings. Admiral Beatty and officers made a tour of Mess Deck when all seated. Had sing song in afternoon and on the whole had quite a good day considering. German submarines supported to have been sighted during afternoon, but nothing official. One seaplane made successful attack on Cuxhaven and we were supporting them.
December 25th 1914
That first Christmas at war has been recorded by 3 people now. F Youngs gives about 4 pages on it, Beatty and his officers passage through the mess decks. I notice he calls them ‘Lady Beattys turkeys’, the idea was his but she was the millionairess.
So the Daily News gave them all a pudding?
The raid was to have been on Cruxhaven by the small seaplane carriers Engadine, Riviera and Empress, don’t know much about it except it was a bit of a flop and as Frank says, the big ships were the covering force.
F Young says they went out in ideal weather for gunnery with unrestricted sight to the horizon, as he says, “the perfect day for a fight”, and they came home in a storm ‘one of the worst of the war’.
I think it’s quite an important diary.
I had no idea that so few records exist of this first Christmas. The Lady Beatty comment is priceless, now that we know the intent. I assume the Daily News gave a number of puddings per ship or regiment, something like that.
I will change the name to Cuxhaven. Now I can see the margin note, missed it before. That raid seems to be quite historic, now that I’ve read about it.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a concept on how important the diary is, at least from the historical point of view. To me, it’s much more personal since Frank is the only relative in a long line of military relatives who managed to detail his experiences.
Back to the puddings and turkeys, I have Frank’s brother Charles’ Princess Mary Christmas box as well as a greeting from Princess Patricia of Connaught to members of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. It’s difficult now looking back at those times. I can’t imagine what it was like for soldiers and sailors on both sides during the Christmas period.
Captains Rounds.
A generic image showing the scene of a Capt visiting the men on Christmas day
http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/5553/captainsrounds.jpg
“The great event was, of course, the going the round of the mess decks. After church, at which the usual Christmas hymns were sung to the dire accompaniment of a harmonium and the more piercing of the band instalments, there was a short interval filled in by the usual duties of the morning. We had all been at action stations at daybreak, but when the mockery of the bright sunshine and the negative nature of reports from the scouting squadrons had caused the guns’ crews reluctantly to abandon hope for another day the ordinary routine was resumed, and the majority of the men were free to make their preparations below decks. And at eight bells the customary procession began. It was the simplest possible ceremony. The Admiral, accompanied by all the officers of the ship who were not on duty elsewhere, made the round of the mess decks, where the men were sitting at their dinner, and personally wished them a happy Christmas. It is practically the only occasion on which the men are visited by officers in the dinner hour, otherwise sacred to the nearest approach to privacy obtainable for the ship’s company of a modern super-dreadnought. But the function^ although simple, was certainly impressive. From the familiar and businesslike order of the main deck we passed down a steel ladder into what at first looked like a kind of underground toy fair. The numbers of the messes varied, but let us say they averaged twenty men each. To these twenty men was apportioned a certain space in the long, low vista of the mess deck; and the space which was theirs was roughly that occupied by the mess table, the forms or stools on either side of it, and a little space at either end where mess gear and utensils are stowed. And, of course, one mess is just as close to another as space permits.
Now it is the custom on Christmas Day to decorate the ends of the tables facing the gangway along which the various visitors pass with trophies, consisting of all the most decorative objects on which the mess can lay hands. Naturally there was great variety in these trophies, as the resources and the artistic tastes of the messes were various. Anything was pressed into service, from real or manufactured holly to family photographs, and from pictures out of illustrated papers to puddings and cakes. Some produced elaborate structures covered with frost and snow, in which seasonable mottoes were embedded, or the words, “God bless our Admiral,” in green icing would surmount a perfectly villainous portrait done in oil paint abstracted from the paint locker. The ship herself figured ubiquitously, either in photographs, paintings, or models; and of course the picture postcard did duty in many ways.
What chiefly impressed one during the walk along the packed area was the way in which so much had been made out of so very little. That these same mess-decks which earlier in the morning had been lying all stark and orderly under the ruthless eye of inspection, every dish and fork in its place, and no extraneous scrap of colour or ornament visible, should then be transformed into the likeness of the bargain basement of a dry goods store was remarkable enough; yet that, after all, was only such a feat of transformation as was a daily commonplace in the organized life of ships. What was more remarkable, and not a little touching, was that men living such a life of unchanging routine and toil, cramped and crowded, poised insecurely between life and death, should think it worth while to add to their labours by building up for such a brief moment these childish structures of decorative rubbish. It was eloquent of the need there is in every heart to make festival at some time or other, and surely eloquent also of that enviable gift, one of the best which the bluejacket possesses, of making something out of nothing, of being happy with little, and of constructing out of the material of daily toil a bright-hued fabric of pleasure.
As the line of officers struggled past the apparently endless succession of decorated tables, exchanging the compliments of the season with their occupants, and here and there being obliged to taste some deadly dainty, words of critical appreciation of this or that effect became inevitable; and with them just a little delicate badinage, of a kind inconceivable at any other moment, but which never by a hair’s breadth went beyond what the relaxations of the hour and the “matelot’s” inner sense of the fitness of things dictated. And, as in all human displays, the element of rivalry and competition was not absent, nor the pathos inseparable from the juxtaposition of some vast structure of ice and snow enshrining various objects of high value and ingenuity, the effort of a prosperous and rather swanking mess, and the feeble little collection of Christmas cards, home photographs, pencil cases, packets of sweets and more or less decorative articles of diet momentarily diverted from their destiny on the dinner-table itself, which represented the effort of some small and poor mess whose members were often in trouble with the master-at-arms, and whose joint exchequer had been heavily depleted by “stoppages.” But on Christmas Day the ‘defaulters’ bugle did not sound; there was respite for those who had trouble hanging over them; and a joke could even be cracked with the stem Rhadamanthus who would on the morrow whack out the due doses of 10A without turning a hair.
And that day, just on that one day, there was hand-shaking accompanying the good wishes. People who work together, month in, month out, in the combined intimacy and austerity of ship routine, whose lives depend on one another and the degree of whose mutual goodwill is measured to a hair’s breadth. could on this day touch hands and give outward expression to that sense of brotherhood which is very real in the Navy but which is seldom openly expressed. And when the procession of blue and gold (inclined to tail off into rowdiness where the gun- room brought up the rear) had struggled and cloven its way through the packed masses of blue and white, the mess decks were left to themselves, and the true festival began. To describe it as an orgy of eating would be mild. The celebrants steadily ate their way through tons of the most solid viands. The rum ration, diluted into grog by Act of Parliament, was served out on each table by the cook of the mess, from the “Fanny” or basin; and what is always the best hour of the bluejacket’s day was passed with yams and songs, until the fortunate ones who had a watch below subsided into stillness or snores, extended on any area of mess stool or steel deck which happened to be free from the boots or heads of their messmates.”
Thanks! This gives a much fuller picture of the event.
Cruxhaven – Cuxhaven: sorry about that! I did say I didn’t know much about it. 🙂
Re: the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry: Was Charles Canadian? Why did one brother enter the British RN while a 2nd joined a Canadian service? Was Frank Canadian? I did try to look him up in the National Archives but drew a blank.
Did he consume the contents of the Princess Mary tin?
No, they were both from England and served for Britain in WW1. The Princess Pat mention was for my wife’s grandfather. In the Second War, Charles was with the Winnipeg Rifles, even though he didn’t become a citizen of Canada until 1973. Both men ended up in Canada as did their sister, my grandmother, Clara Read. I’ll have to look at the tin again but while I remember there being some old cigs in it, they seem to have disappeared. I’ll get some photos of it on a later or alternative entry along with some of the other things that I have from Charles and my wife’s grandfather.