C. R. Benstead

This is the Book of the Second Commission, covering the story of the battleship HMS Rodney from April 1930 to April 1932. There are 20 plates (black and white photographs), two track charts and lists of officers (of all ranks) and visitors who took passage, and a detailed list of the ports visited and dates, as well as information about sports teams, regattas and the ship's concert party. During the period covered HMS Rodney was commanded by Captain A B Cunningham DSO and, from December 1930, Captain Roger Bellairs CB CMG, to whom the book is dedicated.

Written as seen through the eyes of the ship's schoolmaster, with tales of a visit to Iceland, to ports around the British Isles (indeed, to all four home nations), to Trinidad, Tobago, St Vincent, Antigua and Gibraltar and the naval dockyards at Portsmouth and Plymouth (her home port). Invergordon is often visited and the author affords descriptions of exercises off Cromarty and off Weymouth and elsewhere. He covers in some detail the matter of the Invergordon Mutiny of 1931 and how it affected the ship and ship's officers.

He gives details of the ship's routine for a day but, unfortunately, there is little about mess life, food or the lower deck and life inside the ship. It is written by a ship's officer principally for the ship's officers and anyone else who might be interested.

All in all, the reader will gain a reasonable understanding of the life of a capital ship in the middle of what we now know were the inter-war years.… (más)