Good Enough For Nelson

by John Winton

  ‘Prof., does the name Highflyer mean anything to you?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘It’s the name of a frigate. She had a most unfortunate mutiny on board last year. I’ve got some accounts of it somewhere amongst my stuff, which I can lend you, from newspapers, from the CB on unrest in HM ships, one or two signals made at the time, and other bits and pieces. It was a perfect example of how not to run a ship. Everything seemed to conspire against them. The stars in their courses fought against them. They even lost the ship’s black cat on a run ashore in Yarmouth. Everything combined in the most uncanny way. Even the captain. He was the chief personality, of course. He thought he could be clever about fitting the punishment to the crime. He was always devising his own punishments which nine times out of ten turned out to be far more of a punishment than he intended, far worse than the official scale. So he ended up punishing the wrong blokes in the wrong way. Nobody on board knew what the penalty for a known offence was going to be. He let the informality of a small ship, which you need, of course, slide into familiarity and then to contempt. Discipline was always being tightened up one moment and then slackened the next. The ship’s company didn’t know where they stood with the captain half the time. The most ironic part was that the captain genuinely thought he was doing everything for the best. He was absolutely furious with the mutineers when it all blew its top. “After all I’ve done for them!” he said at the court martial. Yet all the signs of a mutiny were there for months. He was even warned by the coxswain. There was nothing new in the whole affair. He could have acted differently if he had chosen to. He knew what to do and he didn’t do it.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I think the whole affair could be made into a play, to be acted here at the College. Change some names of course. But the main thread of it will be what happened in that ship. We’re always telling them what to do and what not to do. Let’s for once show them what to do and what not to do. Actually act it out, with a proper script and rehearsals.’

  The Prof.’s imagination was fired by the idea. Here was the story of a man in authority who had hurried on his own fate. His was the story of the fallen prince, the unworthy leader, the chief who transgressed against the rules of his own tribe. The Prof.’s mind leaped, soaring, across barriers of time and text. This man’s groans would be heard, like Agamemnon’s, off stage, where they would be all the more terrible in the imagination. His own actions, his own investigations, would lead him, like Oedipus, to his own downfall. His wife, like Antigone, would have to choose between family and state, between her husband and the Navy. This man and the leader of the mutiny, his Bligh and his Christian, would grapple each other, like the twin brothers Eteocles and Polynices, whose mutual hatred had been so great they had fought together in their mother’s womb and when they died, the smoke from their adjacent funeral pyres had refused to intermingle. But hold hard, the Prof. thought, wasn’t that last bit Racine, not Sophocles?

  ‘Jings,’ said the Prof., finally, and breathlessly. ‘What a corking idea!’

  ‘Would you like to write the play for us, Prof.? In a way it’s just like Greek tragedy. If it’s good it could become part of the permanent College repertoire. We could perform it every year.’

  The Prof. gasped. A tragedy of personalities, specially commissioned from the playwright, to be played before a like-minded and understanding audience, performed at certain ritual times of the year--the comparison with the Greek city theatre was almost frighteningly close.

  ‘I would that,’ said the Prof., firmly.

  ‘Good,’ said The Bodger. ‘Will you see if you can do it for the end of term? We could even make a home movie of it, with the television unit.’

  ‘Television unit?’ said the Prof., in exactly the tone of voice in which he would have said ‘Sabre-toothed tiger?’ ‘Television unit, here, in the College?’

  ‘Here, in the College, as ever was. Coming in the next fortnight or so. We’re going to start courses on how to appear on television.’

  ‘Appear on television?’ said the Prof., in precisely the accents in which he would have said ‘Conduct a sado-masochistic orgy?’

  ‘Nobody in the Navy nowadays knows when he might be invited to appear on the box and put the Navy’s point of view. Best to be prepared.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the Prof., wonderingly. ‘Well, I’ll see what I can do about the play. Do you know, I’ve just thought of a good title. How about Oedipus RN?’

  Their laughter made Polly poke her head through the doorway.

  ‘Scratch not back yet, Polly?’

  ‘No, sir. I think he must be taking part! ‘

  ‘Well, who’s next?’

  ‘Commander (T), sir.’

  Isaiah Nine Smith had come to talk about the same two subjects as the Prof. ‘It’s really about the syllabus, sir. Or rather, some of the emphases in the syllabus as it is today.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said The Bodger.

  ‘Well, sir, it seems to me with all the blokes we’ve got here who’ve been to university and the hotted-up syllabus we’ve got, especially on the mathematics and electronics side, we seem to be getting away from the practical side of what it means, what has to be done, what has to be learned, to be a naval officer, sir. Looking at the syllabuses and some of the exam results and the questions set, this is something that hasn’t happened overnight. The College has been getting steadily more intellectual during the time of the last three or four Captains, sir. The Navy after all is very much a practical service, sir. Sooner or later, you have to get down to the nitty gritty. X-chasing, as they used to call it, is all very well. I used to do a lot of it myself, but I’m the first to admit that it’s only part of the story, and not the most important part. We need many more practical things for them to do in their vacations, instead of all this endless dragging round art galleries and pottery appreciation courses. Surely, what we are all here for is to train young gentlemen to be officers in the fleet.’

  ‘I don’t think anybody would seriously dispute that with you, Ikey, would they?’

  Isaiah Nine Smith shook his head sadly. ‘You’d be surprised, sir. Some of the ideas I get chucked at me ... You’d think we were trying to turn out a Service full of boffins, people who are past masters at chess but don’t know port from starboard. The main purpose of this place is to train young men to be leaders, and we must never allow anything to get in the way of that. But, at the same time, we must occasionally consider what sort of Navy they are going to be leaders in. For example, I sometimes wonder whether we are giving the right sort of emphases to what we teach some of the foreign officers.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, sir, we lecture them about sea power and its consequences, tell them about the awful fate that awaits everyone who doesn’t have sea power. But we are looking at it very much with our own history in mind .... We’re speaking, if you’ll forgive the word, sir, from an imperialist past...’

  ‘Of course I’ll forgive the word,’ said The Bodger.

  ‘But many of these foreign navies, particularly the third world ones, they have no imperialist past, and no future prospects of it. For many of them, sea power seems to me to be absolutely irrelevant. In fact, in some of these countries, any show of force naval or military would actually be counterproductive. God knows why they bother with all the trappings of having a navy. It’s not cheap.’

  “It’s never been cheap,’ said The Bodger. ‘In blood or money.’

  ‘Admittedly we haven’t yet produced anybody who’s immediately gone home and led a naval coup. Not yet we haven’t, anyway. But there must come a point where seamanship merges into politics. The mechanics of seamanship, how to bring a boat alongside, and how to drop an anchor and pick it up and how to navigate about the place without hitting anything, these are all very well but at some point we have to ask ourselves to what end are they learning all these new skills? We have to ask ourselves not just how and what are they going to do, but why, where and when a
nd against whom are they going to do it?’

  ‘Good point, Ike. In fact a whole lot of good points. We’ll obviously have to talk about all this later on. But in the meantime, talking of leadership and allied trades, there’s one small amendment to the syllabus I would like to start now. I was talking to Polly about it. When we get an invitation for the College, and we get dozens of them every term, that are obviously not important enough for the Captain to go to, or even a staff officer, I want you to send one of the OUTs in my stead. Take them in rotation, in alphabetical order, and allocate them strictly as they come up. Nobody is allowed to choose which event he goes to.’

  ‘But sir, honestly, there’s hardly room in the term for everything we do now. I’ve found that if you try and put something extra in, something else drops out the other side without you noticing...’

  ‘True, but hear me out. When a midshipman or any OUT of whatever rank goes to any function, no matter what it is, he must wear his best Number One uniform. He is to be given official transport, to take him there and back. He will be my representative, our representative, and he must look and act the part. Before he goes he must do some homework and find out what sort of event it’s going to be, who his hosts are and something about them, what is likely to be required of him, it might be a speech of thanks, it might even be giving away the Sunday school prizes, so that he won’t drop some fearful brick and will be able to make polite conversation with whoever he meets. For instance, Midshipman Adrianovitch had better find out who Strindberg was before he goes. And when he gets back, I want him to write an official report of proceedings, setting down what he did, what time, Who he met, what they said and did...’

  A reluctant light was dawning in Isaiah Nine Smith’s eye. ‘I’m beginning to see, sir...’

  ‘... Commenting upon anything that he thought went well, anything that didn’t, any snags encountered, any way the event could have been improved, and giving his general conclusions and recommendations. He will be acting as an ambassador for the College and for the Service and he’ll have to keep his eyes and ears open and his tongue in his cheek. I’ve a suspicion that up to now the College has been refusing or not even answering a lot of invitations unless they offered some form of free booze and food. From now on, we accept everything whether it’s the local pigshow or the Garden Party at Buck House, and we send somebody all dressed up in his best bib and tucker. Got it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry I was sceptical about it at first. I think there is the germ of something very useful in this.’

  Polly came in again. ‘Seven minutes to your lecture, sir.’

  ‘Any sign of Scratch yet?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir, there’s been a message. He’s sprained his ankle, sir and he’s gone to the sickbay.’

  ‘I told him he shouldn’t be so energetic so early in the morning. All that running about, it’s very bad for supply officers. Are you going over to my lecture, Ikey?’

  ‘Oh yes sir.’

  ‘We’ll go over together then.’

  CHAPTER V

  ‘Leadership,’ said The Bodger, ‘is the art of making other people, many of them older than you, do what you want them to do against their better judgment. And don’t be too coy about it, because there will be plenty of people in the Navy ready to make you do what they want you to do against your better judgment.

  ‘It always helps if you can bring a sense of humour to your job. I remember serving in the old Superb in the Mediterranean under Admiral Cunningham - ABC, as he was called. Arguably, the best admiral of the last fifty years. One morning, when we had to send a boat to the flagship for some reason, we got a signal saying “Your bowman’s right ear needs attention”. As soon as the boat got back we seized the bowman and examined his ear. We couldn’t find anything wrong with it. We sent him down to the sickbay to have his ears tested. Nothing wrong with them. We sent him ashore to Bighi to have the fleet ear, nose and throat specialist look at him. He couldn’t find anything wrong either. So, rather shamefacedly, we had to send a signal to the flagship asking what was wrong with our bowman’s ear. The answer came “There was a fag behind it”.’

  It was one of The Bodger’s own favourite stories, saying so much about the admiral and about the Navy, and it normally brought a storm of laughter. But now, it fell rather flat. There was polite amusement, a noticeable movement of approval across the surface of the audience, but nothing more. The Bodger was speaking in the Parker Hall, a newly constructed concrete and glass building named after some obscure nineteenth-century admiral and proconsul. Such scientifically resonant auditoria, with their acoustic baffles and their ergonomically-designed seating, had been built in new schools and universities for years but were only just appearing in service establishments. The Bodger could not complain about the size of his audience. The hall was full to overflowing, with one or two standing at the back.

  It was not the quantity, but the quality of his audience which was causing The Bodger misgivings. He was not getting the reactions he expected, and needed. With his long experience of public speaking, to all kinds of listeners and in all kinds of conditions, The Bodger was very quick to sense an audience’s mood, to realise what they were enjoying and what they were rejecting. But even The Bodger had to admit himself puzzled by his present audience. He felt that, in some unexpected way, he and a whole generation of officers whom he represented were under a reappraisal. Those faces he could see out there were expectant, but not in any way enthusiastic. It was not that they were hostile; they were simply waiting, yet to be impressed.

  ‘Leadership in any of the armed services,’ he said, ‘has an extra special dimension over leadership in other professions. You will find leaders in all walks of life, but in the Navy there is the added ingredient that the leader and his men are committed, literally to the death. Let us not be mealy-mouthed about this. The Navy is not just a nice uniform and a nice way of life. Ultimately, your job may well be to kill people.’

  The Bodger had wanted audience reaction. Now he had it. A wave, as though swiftly moving outwards over a dark water surface, spread amongst his listeners. But The Bodger, though he watched very carefully, could not decide which emotion had caused it. Was it disgust, or shock, or revulsion, or disbelief, or was it even tolerant amusement? For all his intuitive sympathy with an audience, The Bodger was baffled.

  ‘Generally the best definitions of leadership, the best speakers on leadership, are those who are themselves the best leaders. Bill Slim of Burma was a very great leader of men, with an unrivalled knowledge of what a leader could and could not do, and a very good way of expressing himself. He used to say that a leader’s most difficult task was to handle himself, to be able to come back after a defeat, not to mope, not to indulge in what Montgomery, another very great leader of men, use to call belly-aching. From my own experience, I know that many definitions of leadership are expressed in such romantically heroic terms that they are not much use to the ordinary bloke for trying to keep order on the quarterdeck with a few dozen assorted drunks coming off shore on the night before sailing. I’ve listened to a hundred wishy-washy lectures on leadership in my time, and I dare say I’ve given some, too.

  ‘So, I’ve had a rethink, and I’ve decided that one of the best ways of defining the art of leadership is by calling it the art of taking just a little more trouble than the next bloke. To be a leader you have to pay just a little more attention and take just a little more care. For instance, it’s not a coincidence, I’ve known it myself time and time again as officer of the watch and as captain of my own ship, that the captain very often sights a ship on the horizon before anybody else, before even the lookouts who are specially placed there and supposed to do nothing but look out for ships on the horizon. To be a leader, you must be prepared to last out just that little bit longer, read a little more deeply, delve into things more deeply, think that little bit further ahead, go just that little bit faster. What I’m talking about is a mixture of endurance, and knowledge, and anticipation,
and application. The difference is often not much, only a hair’s breadth, but makes all the difference in the world.

  ‘A good officer and a good leader should always know just that little bit more about the job. I remember, years and years ago, when I was First Lieutenant of a fleet aircraft carrier, a huge vessel of a type we haven’t been able to afford for many years now. One day we had a lot of trouble with the sea-boat. This was a motor-cutter, very like the ones we have here down on the river. It was kept permanently up on the davits, ready to go away if someone inadvertently fell overboard. These days, of course, we don’t have enough hands for a sea-boat’s crew, it’s done by whoever happens to be nearest. But in those days we had a sea-boat’s crew detailed off from the watch on deck. And the first thing they did on taking over a watch was to get into the boat, check all their gear and start the engine, to see if everything was OK. This occasion was our first morning at sea after a maintenance period, and they couldn’t start the sea-boat. Nobody could start it. So eventually they piped for the engineer officer in charge of the ship’s boats.

  ‘I can still see the scene clearly now. There was the boat up at the davits, with the crew in it. The starter motor was grinding round and round, uselessly. There was the ship’s boat officer, there was myself who happened to be passing, there was the boat’s stoker and the boat’s artificer, all of us standing round, baffled. It was all down to the boat’s engineer officer. He was a very young man, this was his first ship as a watch-keeper and now everybody was standing around looking at him, with expressions saying, what do we do now?