Books: Bulldog Sea Dog

AN ADMIRAL NEVER FORGETS—Vice-Admiral Humphrey Hugh Smith, D.S.O.

—Lippincott ($5).

Admiral Humphrey Hugh Smith, D.S.O., spent 37 years in the British Navy, but never polished up the handle of any big front door. Now retired, with bluff British candor he admits: “I spend my time on meditating on my utterly misspent but thoroughly enjoyable past.” Though he served all through the War, he never mentions that he ever saw action, is mum’s self on the subject of his D.S.O.

What he cannot get out of his delighted memory are the japes,pranks,hearty horseplay and lurching humor that apparently ballasted every ship he ever served on.

How he ever got to be an admiral of anything but the horse marines is a mystery which his unrepentant-schoolboy reminiscences do not help to solve.

The Admiral’s sense of humor is more Minsky than Gilbertian: the gunrooms and wardrooms that housed him and his mates were no places for sisters, cousins or aunts. Even as a midshipman he was a hearty: sometimes the sea made him sick, but never thoughts of home. He has not forgotten the name of a single one of his ships, or where they took him—the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Bering-Sea, the South Seas—and every ship, cruise and station gave him an anecdote-souvenir to tuck away in his sea chest.

He once heard an old salt settle an argument about the extent of the Admiralty’s legal authority: ”I tells you all that the Admiralty can do what they like with us. They can hang us, they can shoot us, and they can drown us. There’s only two things they can’t do to us: they can’t boil us in the coppers and they can’t put us in the family way.” He is equally delighted to remember the disdain of one Chawbags Bayly for the microscopic difference between senior and junior mid-shipmen. Said Chawbags: “I can never see that there is any more difference between a senior midshipman and a junior midshipman than there is between a large cowpat and a small cowpat.” Occasionally the force of his anecdotes is somewhat weakened by the necessity of bowdlerizing ‘navy lingo into such terms as “simian-faced son of a spinster,” or “blood-stained Bulgarians.” Sailor Smith spent the War in “Trousers Pulling Down Contests”(“the officer whose brace buttons first touched the deck lost the contest”) with his brother officers in the wardroom. Between times he commanded armed merchant cruisers, aircraft carriers. The War over, he hitched up his trousers and went ashore to preside over the Royal Naval College at Greenwich.

Even here his affinity for anecdotes pursued him. His voluble housekeeper (whose father had worked in a gasworks and naturally died of a gastric ulcer) complained that her niece insisted on becoming a nurse, so “I always tells her that’s just the job for her, as she has got a heart like a flint, and she loves the sight of blood.”