A welcome return to the old ways to train sailors

There is much to be said for the old ways, and in the third decade of the 21st century many people are beginning to reap their benefit by gleefully turning back the clock. Just look at the resurgence in popularity of vinyl records. Who on earth could have predicted that?

Then there are cameras with rolls of film wound around spools inside them just waiting to be exposed and given various chemical baths before seeing the light of day. Archaic certainly, but an art form nonetheless and one which is making a surprising comeback.

Recycling? The war years and those immediately after focussed everybody’s mind with the Waste Not Want Not slogan.

But after decades of rampant consumerism we have finally seen the error of our ways and those wartime mindsets of frugality and ‘make do and mend’ are once again all the rage.

But perhaps one old way we thought we would never see again is the sight of Royal Navy sailors crewing a tall ship, in this case the magnificent threemasted barque TS Tenacious.

She is a throwback, albeit a modern one. Tenacious is a wooden sail training ship designed in the 1990s. Completed in 2000, she was the largest wooden ship to be built in the UK for more than a century.

Learning to sail her, plus the discipline and teamwork required to get her from A to B, has been recognised by the Royal Navy as exactly what it needs to replace its Covid-hit command and leadership school in the Brecon Beacons.

The navy seems delighted with this experiment. And who knows, sending new recruits and young officers to sea in a tall ship might be the way ahead. It could even mark a return for other Royal Navy training traditions – mast-manning, the window ladder and rope climbing display, and the field gun run...