Royal Navy

The drink, by legend, was a gin drink invented late in the eighteenth century by sailors in the Royal Navy who received daily rations of gin and lime. The gimlet is a barrel-boring device that was sent with lime-juice casks to the British colonies. 

Holling HE, Clarke CA. 1944. Methyl bromide intoxication. J Royal Navy Med Serv 30 218-224. 

In 1746, a Scottish naval surgeon named James Lind carried out a carefully controlled study of the effect of diet on scurvy and demonstrated, beyond reasonable doubt, that oranges and lemons would cure (or prevent) scurvy. However, it was not until 1795, about three hundred years since it was known that citrus fruit would cure scurvy and about 50 years after Lind s definitive work, that the British Royal Navy insisted that sailors receive a daily dose of a citrus fruit. Opinion and prejudice outweighed scientific evidence to the detriment of many for far too long. 

Peter Cleave was a surgeon in the Royal Navy, with no scientific training. He noticed that certain diseases were more prevalent in developed conntries than in nnderdeveloped conntries. These are sometimes known as the Western Diseases . On the basis of these observations he came np with the concept of the saccharine disease (Cleave 1974). 

Dudley Sommer, Haldane of Cloan (London Allen and Unwin, 1960), pp. 165-9 Edward M. Spiers, Haldane An Army Reformer (Edinburgh University Press, 1980). Shawn T. Grimes, War planning and strategic development in the Royal Navy, 1887-1918 , Ph.D. (University of London, 2004). 

Manchester Guardian, 27 Jan. 1910, cited in Arthur Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904-1919, 5 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1961—70), vol. I, p.56. 

Peter F. Halvorsen, The Royal Navy and mine warfare, 1868-1914 , Journal of Strategic Studies, 27 (2004), no. 4, 685-707. 

Naval strategy required choices, since, even with a two-power standard, the Royal Navy could not match every other navy in all the seven seas. The distribution of the fleet in 1904 was still based on principles dating from before the invention of the electric telegraph and the introduction of steamships. These technical developments meant that fewer warships need be kept on foreign stations as reinforcements could be speedily summoned from home waters. In November 1904 the Naval Intelligence Department recommended a home fleet of twelve... 

Pre-war plans for trade defence had assumed that the German threat would come from cruisers, supplemented by armed liners. For this reason the Royal Navy had retained many old cruisers that required large crews. Cruisers had the advantage that they could remain at sea for longer than destroyers, and the twenty-six light cruisers completed during the war were useful additions to the fleet. However, large... 

Joseph A. Maiolo, The Royal Navy and Nazi Germany, 1933-39 A Study in Appeasement and the Origins of the Second World War (Basingstoke Macmillan, 1998), pp. 26-37. 

January 1934 by Hankey and Fisher about the pocket battleships, Chatfield replied that the French (who had laid down the first of two battle-cruisers in 1932) could look after them. He added that Britain s three battle-cruisers could do so too, but ultimately the Royal Navy might not possess any ships of that type as the design of their replacements would depend upon what the Japanese replaced their battlecruisers with. No attempt was made to build larger cruisers to cope with the pocket battleships. Indeed, the Admiralty proposed at the second London naval conference to reduce the maximum size of cruisers, from the 10,000 tons allowed under the Washington treaty to 8,000 tons, to make it possible to build at less cost the number believed to be required to protect British trade. ... 

The development of the Royal Navy s own submarines was restricted by the need for economy, although insofar as economy led to standardisation of design it was not without benefit. There had been five different kinds of submarine in service in 1918 patrol, fleet, minelayer, monitor and anti-submarine. The last two types were quickly discontinued and, although examples of the other types were still in service in 1939, only the patrol type was under continuing development. Increasing concentration on patrol submarines capable of laying mines as well as reconnaissance and anti-warship patrols was the best use of scarce resources. 

The war is generally seen as the twilight of the capital ship. Stephen Roskill, in his official history, concluded that the navy had not achieved a proper balance in 1939 between capital ships and aircraft carriers. However, no major navy abandoned the construction of capital ships before the war, and international comparison of capital ships and aircraft carriers launched between 1936 and 1945 (table 4.1) does not suggest that the Royal Navy was unusually conservative. The German navy s Z Plan of January 1939 aimed at having a fleet of six battleships and two battle-cruisers, but only two aircraft carriers, by 1944. In... 

David Hobbs, Naval aviation, 1930-2000 , in Richard Harding (ed.). The Royal Navy, 1930-2000 (London Frank Cass, 2005), pp. 69-88, at pp. 73. ... 

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