674 words
Commander John Irving, Royal Navy
Royal Navalese: A Glossary of Fo’csle Language
London: Focal Point Publications, 2020 (originally published 1946)
Somebody recently gifted me with this trim, entertaining little book. Perhaps because of the season, I immediately identified it as one of that peculiar species of “Christmas books”: small volumes, usually elegantly designed, illustrated with line drawings, and often found stacked near the bookseller’s cash register in December.
As the subtitle tells you, this is a glossary of nautical jargon. Some of the expressions evidently originated in the Royal Navy, others are simply slang picked up from other services or the World Beyond. Many are extremely funny, a few are risqué, the best are brain-scaldingly obscure:
Marry the Gunner’s Daughter, To. To get a whipping — an old-Navy expression but one that is still sometimes heard. In days gone by, when a ‘boy’ was ordered a dozen of the best with the cane for some offence, he was secured face down across the breech of a gun to ensure that official retribution should fall across a suitably tightened part of his anatomy.
Foo-Foo Egg. An egg of more than doubtful age and edibility. The term hails from Chinaside where John Chinaman buries an egg in especially unsanitary surroundings and keeps it there maybe for fifty years before he eats it as an especial delicacy.
You can buy Francis Parker Yockey’s The Enemy of Europe here.
Then you have something like “Low-Down, The,” which is herein cited as an Americanism: “The inside information about something.” For me the phrase conjures up Runyonesque characters and mid-century tabloid journalism (e.g., Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s New York Confidential: The Lowdown on the Big Town, 1948). As the book at hand, Royal Navalese, was first published in 1946, it tells us the phrase had made its way into the RN lexicon by the Second World War. Good to know.
John Irving, we read on the dust jacket, was a naval gunnery expert who served in the Royal Navy from 1941 to 1945, and had earlier seen action at the Battle of Jutland (1916). But the book is very much a joint effort between Commander Irving and his wife Beryl, who was a noted children’s book writer and illustrator. Here Beryl Irving decorates the alphabetical headings with delicate, wry line drawings that have a distinctive nineteenth-century feel, very close to W. S. Gilbert’s cartoons for his Bab Ballads. In fact there’s a whiff of Gilbert & Sullivan throughout this book, in text and in pictures:
I gather the book was out of print for many years, though I see copies of the old edition at places like AbeBooks and Amazon for around $80. But the co-creators’ son David Irving, the celebrated historian, had the whole thing newly typeset and published recently (2020). It doesn’t have his mother’s illuminated, if nearly illegible, cover design (see below), but it’s currently priced at $15.00 at Focal Point Publications/David Irving Books.
It’s a book to be thumbed through at random, with raised eyebrows. Some expressions are so obvious, or long-embedded in common parlance, I wondered whether they really had a nautical origin at all. E.g., “Looney Bin. The sailor’s name for a lunatic asylum, ‘the observation ward’ at a naval hospital, or a psychopathic centre.”
Also still popular and current:
Bumph. A vulgarism, but one in very frequent use for it refers to the never-ending spate of printed and written forms, orders, hand-outs and instructions, amendments and cancellations whose volume rolls daily onward. [N.B. Originally meant toilet roll, I believe, but mainly the very cheap, old-fashioned pulpy sort.]
Chop-Chop! In a hurry; Hurry up! Pidgin English from the Chinese coast.
And finally, the odd-but-intriguing:
‘Breadcrumbs!’ In a Gun-room Mess, should the conversation verge upon subjects too advanced or too indelicate for the hearing of the younger midshipmen, the Senior Sub-Lieutenant will order ‘Breadcrumbs!’ The ‘young gentlemen’ are then required immediately to stuff their fingers in their ears and continue to block all sound until the order is rescinded.
Off White. Half caste.
Trick Cyclists. Psychiatrists.
Eyetie. Italian. [Which is funny because there’s elsewhere a cross-reference: “Macaroni. Italian: see Eyetie.” And we also have, “Ice creams. Italian.”]
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “Paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
- Third, Paywall members have the ability to edit their comments.
- Fourth, Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Paywall Gift Subscriptions
If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:
- your payment
- the recipient’s name
- the recipient’s email address
- your name
- your email address
To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.
5 comments
What a low-down coincidence; not only is Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s Washington Confidential(1951) one of my all time favorite hopelessly politically incorrect old books (picked up an old paperback for $0.10 at a thrift store), but I’m reading James Kirchick’s Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (2022) which has a whole section on it. The followup to New York Confidential was the #3 bestseller of 1952!
A DC trivia website says this:
“Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer were a couple of New York City newspapermen who had the chutzpah in 1951 to publish a book, Washington Confidential that promised the “low-down on the big town.” The writers had earlier published Chicago Confidential, which, according to the dust jacket for WC, “was viciously attacked and vilified by public officials, notables and literary critics all over the country.” The fact that Lait and Mortimer’s publisher, Crown, thought such information might help sell the new book said a lot about everyone involved.””
A sample: DC is
“A cesspool of drunkenness, debauchery, whoring, homosexuality, municipal corruption and public apathy, protected crime under criminal protection, hoodlumism, racketeering, pandering, and plundering, among anomalous situations found nowhere else on earth….”
One reason for its high sales is that though presented as an “expose”, it actually provides useful information about where to find your choice of vice; especially the whole chapter on “pansies,” which your can read here:
http://jimburroway.com/history/tiptoe-through-the-garden-of-pansies/
Some samples:
“With more than 6,000 fairies in government offices, you may be concerned about the security of the country. Fairies are no more disloyal than the normal. But homosexuals are vulnerable, they can be blackmailed or influenced by sex more deeply than conventional citizens; they are far more intense about their love-life.”
“Many [pansies] dress in drag on Thanksgiving day and mingle in the holiday crowds with the costumed young folk….”
Did this happen in the 40s-50s? If so, drag queen story hour is nothing new.
“Until the recent purges in the State Department, there was a gag around Washington that you had to speak with a British accent, wear a Homburg hat, or have a queer quirk if you wanted to get by the guards at the door.”
Interestingly, Kirchick notes that “In 1991, the Department of Defense published a study analyzing the cases of 117 American citizens who had either committed or attempted to commit espionage since 1945. Only 6 were gay, and none of them had done so under the threat of blackmail.”
Thanks so much. I think Washington Confidential was one of the first, but not THE first of their series.
A good treatment of the Lait/Mortimer books is well deserved. I have very little faith in their investigative accuracy, but that itself doesn’t really matter. What matters is the Zeitgeist and expectations of the time. When I moved to San Diego I had a column called “San Diego Confidental,” and the tone was largely Lait/Mortimer, after book of same name. Forty years later.
Besides Lait/Mortimer books, I had a somewhat similar compilation called The Lawless Decade (1957), also basically a tabloid collection, though of the 1920s. Fascinated me when I was little. Ill-researched and inaccurate, but that’s like saying Some Like It Hot isn’t the real Saint Valentine’s Day’s Massacre.
Print the legend!
nul et non avenu
Bumph is rather a contraction of ‘Bum Fodder’ and was fairly common throughout the empire and its former self.
I recommend to all and sundry the Patrick O’Brien series if you want to see a few of the older, wonderful expressions in action.
Think I knew that once. In the London business world it tended to refer to unwanted promotional material and handouts. Except when some columnist would once again report that the Queen Mother, age 92, eschews Quilted Northern toilet rolls and insists on traditional old Bumf [sic].
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.