HMS Ganges Days

Author: Peter Broadbent
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1909183008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
When Peter Broadbent entered HMS Ganges, the toughest training establishment for young recruits to the Royal Navy, he was a naive 15-year-old Yorkshire schoolboy, entranced with the idea of seeing the world, proud of his drainpipe trousers and DA hairstyle, and eager to meet girls. In other words, he was a ‘Nozzer' - a raw and unsuspecting recruit. When he emerged 386 days later it was as a prospective ‘Dabtoe', not quite a fully trained Seaman, but well on the way. This funny and vivid memoir accurately captures what it was like to climb the mast, have your kit trashed, learn to swear, develop a taste for Kye and Stickies, double around the parade-ground at dead of night in your pyjamas, endlessly run up and down Laundry Hill ... and to do it all and much more while being continually barracked by a demanding Petty Officer Instructor. Along the way, Peter relished learning the Navy lingo and how to sail. He consumed platefuls of Cheese Ush, won a boxing certificate, discovered a secret stash of Playboy magazines, smoked thousands of cigarettes, and convinced girls back home that his shorn hair was in fact the very latest fashion ‘down south’.

HMS Ganges Days

Author: Peter Broadbent
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1909183016
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

HMS Bermuda Days

Author: Peter Broadbent
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1909183415
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
In 1961 the Royal Navy came up with a brilliant idea: why not take all its rogues, thugs and malcontents and place them on board its flagship, HMS Bermuda, where hard work and continuous exercising would keep them out of trouble? Joining this colourful crew was sixteen-year-old Peter Broadbent, fresh out of his year's training at HMS Ganges, and drafted to ‘Bermadoo' to make up the ship’s quota of Junior Seamen. Initially he lived a cocooned existence in the Juniors’ mess, with a community of cockroaches as his closest companions, but his life changed dramatically the day he transferred to the notorious For’d Seamen’s Mess. There, he grew up. In the course of his 34,000 nautical miles with Bermuda, he learned how to ammunition the ship, avoid Pompey Lil, sing the Oggie song, survive a storm, throw a perfect heaving line and count himself proud to be a ‘sharp-end seaman’. On his eighteenth birthday, the entire population of Hamilton, Bermuda, along with a uniformed band and full ceremonial, enthusiastically welcomed Peter and his ship; in Newcastle-upon-Tyne he was given the job of preventing women wearing skirts from descending a long open-backed ladder; in Stockholm he had a memorable dalliance with a local girl called Gunnel, and in Amsterdam a professional businesswoman at work in Canal Street was so impressed with his performance that, as he took his leave, she shook his hand warmly and gave him some of her business cards.

Ipswich Book of Days

Author: Rachel Field
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750957786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Book Description
Taking you through the year day by day, The Ipswich Book of Days contains quirky, eccentric, amusing and important events and facts from different periods in the history of one of England’s oldest towns. Ideal for dipping into, this addictive little book will keep you entertained and informed.Featuring hundreds of snippets of information gleaned from the vaults of Ipswich’s archives and covering the social, criminal, political, religious, industrial, military and sporting history of the town, it will delight residents and visitors alike.

Band of Brothers

Author: David Phillipson
Publisher: History Press (SC)
ISBN: 9780750931816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
Band of Brothers is a history of the boy seaman rating in the Royal Navy, beginning with its evolution from the eighteenth century 'Officer's Servant' through to its abolition in 1956. It tells of an astonishing Victorian Naval tradition which continued right into the modern age. HMS Ganges, a byword on the lower deck of the Royal Navy for strict discipline, was the hardest of the boy seaman training establishments, and was widely regarded as the archetype. The Royal Navy throughout those years was a supremely conservative and traditionalist institution, and particularly in its attitude to and treatment of lower deck people, the boys in particular. Drawing on his own detailed diaries, the author vividly recreates daily life ashore and afloat, in peace and war. Recruitment, food and clothing, training, discipline and punishment are all recorded, and supported by the personal accounts of boy seamen who went on to serve in the Royal Navy as men.

Parliamentary Papers

Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bills, Legislative
Languages : en
Pages : 766

Book Description

A Football Fan's Story

Author: Don Price
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1524632562
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
Like most kids back in the day, Don dreamt of being a professional footballer and scoring the winning goal at Wembley. Unfortunately for Don, he was not much good at football. He grew up in Manchester in the fifties and sixties, and even joining the Royal Navy in the late sixties did not dampen his passion or enthusiasm for the game. Don founded one of the largest football supporters branches in the country and was chairman of it for ten years. This is a gripping account and a humorous look back at his time in the Royal Navy and the supporters branch meetings including sportsmens dinners, and charity events he organised with some of the top names in British football. Celebrity guests included Kevin Keegan, Nick Leeson, and Francis Lee. He also recounts some of the hilarious away trips he organized. It is a real life supporters story that will appeal to all football fans.

Felix Wild

Author: Peter Broadbent
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 191110523X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
Gosport, 1860. Felix Wild has lived on the streets and on his wits for all his young life. He's been a mudlark at The Hard, eaten tallow when there was nothing else to be had, picked oakum in Forton Gaol, and acquired a skill for ‘tup-tup-tupping' from the women of Haslar. He has no family, no idea of how old he might be, and has never heard of Christmas. But he has one remarkable talent: he can make a perfect drawing, from memory, of anything that he has seen. Saved from a further spell in prison by the wealthy William Kettle, Felix joins the Kettle household in East London and is employed to make drawings of the building of a magnificent new iron-clad vessel, HMS Warrior. His eagerness to learn new things knows no bounds: from working out how to use a knife and fork, and reading a dictionary from cover to cover, to being given the ‘tipsy key’ for the chronometers during his first voyage on board Warrior as she conducts sea-trials. While the men he meets are in awe of his drawing skills, the young women are absorbed in rather less cerebral matters, namely the fit of his fashionably tight ‘gas-pipe’ trousers and his distinctive looks - one eye is blue, the other green. Felix Wild is a captivating novel that has all the affectionate humour and vivid sense of place that has made Peter Broadbent’s naval memoirs so popular.

A Singapore Fling

Author: Peter Broadbent
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1909183733
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
Having survived the notorious Training Establishment HMS Ganges and ‘cut his teeth' onboard HMS Bermuda, Peter Broadbent believed that he was equipped for anything the Royal Navy could throw at him. For 18 incident-filled months (1962-64) he ‘did his bit' onboard HMS Lincoln caught up in the Malaysian Crisis, on the other side of the world. For the young sailor, this meant visiting every corner of the Far East from Singapore, Hong Kong and Osaka, to Manila, Sandakan and Lankawi. The nature of the Crisis seemed to pass him by, as he was more interested in acquiring a suntan, picnicking on sandy beaches, buying his first pair of flip-flops, exploring Bugis Street, downing bottles of Tiger beer, and avoiding the clutches of ‘Suzie Right’, ‘Calamity Jayne’ and a girl with bad teeth known as ‘Piano’. Along the way, he crossed the equator, qualified as an AB, tasted his first rum ration, manned a Kumpit Boarding Party in search of enemy vessels, and spent a week tramping through the jungle with the Gurkhas. His return to the UK coincided with the appearance on the streets of that design classic … the mini-skirt. He had just celebrated his twentieth birthday and the girls of the United Kingdom voluntarily hoisted their hemlines in acknowledgment. This engaging and humorous memoir, filled with colourful characters, is every bit as gripping as Peter Broadbent’s previous books, which have garnered excellent reviews.

Up Spirits

Author: Peter Broadbent
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1911105108
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Until that fateful day in 1970 when the Royal Navy abolished the rum ration, the one thing that every Royal Navy sailor could rely on was that ‘Up Spirits' would be piped at approximately 11:45 each day . ‘Tot-time' was the cue for plenty of banter and lamp-swinging, but also for baffling negotiations as to who might have sippers, wets, gulpers, halfers, sandy bottoms, or their share of ‘Queen’s’. With the same humour, affection and story-telling ability that characterised his earlier naval memoirs, including HMS Ganges Days and HMS Bermuda Days, Peter Broadbent tells the tale of his nine months as an Able Seaman on board HMS Gurkha, touring the Persian Gulf with a few detours to the Seychelles, Kenya and the Mozambique channel. Along the way he coxswains Royal Marines on a RIB to track down smugglers, pits his wits against a line-up of ultra-intelligent dolphins, persuades dozens of girls from a jam factory in Leeds to write to ‘lonely sailors’, is one of the transfer team that initiated the ‘Beira Bucket’ when used to trade its contents for desperately needed toilet paper from HMS Eskimo, and makes it to Gibraltar in time to celebrate England winning the 1966 World Cup. Ayo Gurkhali!