From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Representing Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870-1918 (review)

In this interesting and well-researched book, Mary A. Conley charts the transformation of the public image of the Royal Navy common seaman during the late Victorian period, and shows how the reconstructed sailor came to signify an ideal British manliness. While naval officers, especially in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, were traditionally revered as heroic standard-bearers of British values, the working-class ratings who worked under them long had a distinctly less savory reputation. The Jolly Jack Tar of popular culture, while he might perform well in naval battles, was a figure of licentious, drunken recklessness—dangerous and disruptive ashore and controlled by savage floggings afloat. By the early twentieth century, however, the Royal Navy "bluejacket" had emerged as an emblem of respectability, restraint, and upright British masculinity. From Jack Tar to Union Jack explores how and why this sea-change occurred.

As Conley explains, political and naval leaders, social reformers, and sailors themselves contributed to the process, but their motivations and goals were far from identical. For politicians and the Admiralty, it was a matter of manning a modern fleet. In the past, a ship's captain would recruit or impress men from seaports and discharge them when the ship's commission was completed, at which point many would sign up with the merchant marine, where conditions and pay were better. But the advent of the steam ship and more complex weaponry demanded a larger, less transient, and more skilled naval workforce. For the Navy to attract and retain good-quality men, it had to thoroughly overhaul both lower-deck conditions and the sailor's public image. The Navy decreased the incidence and severity of floggings, suspending the lash altogether in 1879, and by the Great War had boosted wages and pensions and increased shore leave. It also provided a "naval nursery" by introducing the rating of Boy Seaman and providing training ships for young recruits (41). These reforms helped produce a massively expanded and far more professional below-decks workforce.

A strength of this book is its focus on the below-decks men who made up the bulk of the navy, but who have received far less attention from naval social historians than the officer class. Like other layers of the working class, naval ratings left relatively little to document their experiences and opinions, and they were restricted from commenting publicly on navy matters. But Conley draws on sources such as the Bluejacket, the lower-deck service magazine, as well as oral histories, letters, and memoirs. She describes lower-deck involvement in the push for higher pay, and sailors' vigorous attempts to influence their public image.

Conley charts how the improved reputation of the sailor both reflected the naval reforms and made them possible, and provides some telling visual images. A recruiting poster for stokers (who mostly shoveled coal) projects a glamorous, exciting, and wholesome lifestyle, with "good prospects for men desirous of getting on" (qtd. in Conley 46); an advertisement for biscuits features a sailor carrying a little girl on his shoulder; and the cover of an 1899 issue of Navy and Army Illustrated, titled "A Sailor and his Lass," depicts the sailor as a wholesome family man.

The reconstruction of the sailor as an upstanding paterfamilias rather than a libertine Jack Tar was not uncontested. Conley's most interesting chapter investigates conflicts between moral reformers and sailors over the extent to which sailors still needed to be reformed. Agnes Weston, nicknamed "Mother of the Navy" (67), devoted her considerable philanthropic zeal and organizational ability to the spiritual uplift of naval ratings. She conducted a tireless crusade against alcohol; organized respectable, cheap "sailors' rests" as an alternative to accommodation at rowdy inns (80); published a monthly magazine, Ashore and Afloat, which was distributed to ships; and campaigned for better conditions for sailors. While some of Weston...