Hurrah for the wavy navy
I like a few amateurs around. It reminds you that there is an outside world
Uncommon courage: The Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II Julia Jones (Bloomsbury, £20)
AS a boy, I was enthralled by Peter Scott’s television broadcasts from the Wildlfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, which he had founded in 1946. Scott was the son of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott who, in his dying letter from near the South Pole, urged Peter’s mother to ‘make the boy interested in natural history’ if she could, adding that it was ‘better than games’.
It wasn’t only the wildfowl that he talked about so engagingly that fascinated me, or his oils and watercolours of geese in flight (even in black and white, as television then was); there was something in his voice, eternally calm, bespeaking some deep wisdom. It wasn’t until later that I learned he was an Olympic sailing medallist, when his voice must have been altogether more urgent. And it was only later still, when my father gave me a copy of his wartime exploits, The Battle of the Narrow Seas, that I learned he was in fact Lt-cdr Peter (later Sir Peter) Scott RNVR, DSC and Bar. His book’s subtitle, The History of the Light Coastal Forces in the Channel and North Sea, 1939–1945, referred principally
162 | Country Life | March 9, 2022 to the motor torpedo boats (MTB) that relied on speed and daring rather than on armour and heavy firepower, and I realised how even more peremptory his words would have been in action.
I happened to be re-reading The Battle of the Narrow Seas when asked to review the aptly titled Uncommon Courage and I was doubly pleased to say yes, because, thrilling as Scott’s book is, it begged a number of questions that couldn’t be answered at the time he wrote it, when the war was still going on. One question was why and how so many of those fighting the battle—most of them, as far as I could work out—were from the Royal Naval Volunteer
Reserve (RNVR), the ‘wavy navy’, as they were known from the rank badges of waved gold-braid rings on the officers’ cuffs, or the Supplementary Reserve (RNVSR).
As war grew increasingly likely in the late 1930s, some 2,000 amateur sailors signed up for the RNVSR for duties unspecified and under equally vague terms of service. One of these was the author’s father. Julia Jones is a yachtswoman, a writer of sailing fiction and a contributor to Yachting Monthly. Her story began with classic ‘cash in the attic’ or, rather, a wealth of documents. When searching through ‘lumber’ stowed at her house in Suffolk, she discovered her father’s accounts of his experiences. As she had met some of the people he mentioned as a child, she decided to delve into their history.
Some of the names are familiar. Besides Scott are Nicholas Monsarrat, Ludovic Kennedy, Adrian Seligman, Nevil Shute, David Howarth of The Shetland Bus and many more, some rich, some famous, some rich and
famous. August Courtauld returned all his pay to help the war effort.
I had known that volunteer officers served more widely than in the MTBS of which Scott wrote—i’d read Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea and Edward Young’s
One of Our Submarines—but
not to the extent the expanded wartime Royal Navy came to depend on and value them. The author quotes Monsarrat on his posting to HMS Guillemot,
a corvette, his new commanding officer saying that he appreciated having an ‘amateur’ as his first lieutenant (second-in-command): ‘I like a few amateurs around the place. It reminds you that there is an outside world, after all.’
Not all regular naval officers were quite so generous, of course, but coastal forces, at home and beyond (including the exotically named ‘Levant Schooner Flotilla’), came to be an almost exclusively RNVR preserve simply because the regulars were needed elsewhere, in the capital ships, cruisers and destroyers whose war was rather more complex than the reconnaissance and raiding of the MTBS and their like.
This is a magnificent portrait of men at war and a most scholarly history. I only wish it contained actual pictures of them and of their ships and boats, a few maps (charts) and an index to do justice to the text. Both the volunteers and the author deserve an illustrated second edition. I look forward to it.
Allan Mallinson