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Sober Men and True
Christopher McKee
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Description for Sober Men and True
Hardcover. This work allows the reader to hear from sailors who served in the Royal Navy during the first half of the 20th century. The author has scoured sailors' diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral interviews to uncover the lives and secret thoughts of British men of the lower deck. Num Pages: 300 pages, 36 halftones. BIC Classification: 1DB; 3JJC; 3JJF; 3JJG; 3JJH; HBTM; JWF. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 235 x 155 x 32. Weight in Grams: 626.
The image of the naval sailor is that of an enigmatic but compelling figure, a globe-trotting adventurer, swaggering and irresponsible in port but swift to flex the national muscle at sea and beyond. Appealing as this popular image may be, scant effort has been expended to reveal the truth behind the stereotype.
Thanks to Christopher McKee's groundbreaking work, it is now possible to hear from sailors themselves--in this case, those who served in Great Britain's Royal Navy during the first half of the twentieth century. McKee has scoured sailors' unpublished diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral interviews to uncover ... Read morethe lives and secret thoughts of British men of the lower deck. From working-class childhoods teetering on the edge of poverty to the hardships of finding civilian employment after leaving the navy; from sexual initiation in the brothels of Oran and Alexandria to the terror of battle, the former sailors speak with candor about all aspects of naval life: the harsh discipline and deep comradeship, the shipboard homoeroticism, the pleasures and temptations of world travel, and the responsibilities of marriage and family.
McKee has shaped the first authentic model of the naval enlisted experience, an account not crafted by officers or civilian reformers but deftly told in the sailors' own voices. The result is a poignant and complex portrait of lower-deck lives.
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Product Details
Publisher
Harvard University Press United States
Place of Publication
Cambridge, Mass, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
About Christopher McKee
Christopher McKee is Rosenthal Professor and Librarian of the College at Grinnell College.
Reviews for Sober Men and True
Sober Men and True recounts the lives of the enlisted men who served in Britain's Royal Navy from the dreadnought era through World War II, from Gallipoli and Jutland to Taranto and Normandy. With his characteristic diligence, keen insight and superb literary grace, Christopher McKee brings to pulsating life a maritime society of working-class men that has now disappeared. He ... Read morehonors these British naval ratings and demonstrates that the Royal Navy was truly blessed to have such steady hearts of oak beating below decks in its last days of imperial majesty. His glowing and humane achievement will be deeply appreciated.
Kenneth J. Hagan, author of This People's Navy: The Making of American Sea Power This beautifully written and engaging reconstruction of the 'inner worlds' of British naval ratings in the first half of the twentieth century will delight and entertain. A tour de force!
Peter Karsten, author of The Naval Aristocracy It is not ships but men that make a navy, observed one great British admiral. In Sober Men and True, Christopher McKee brings to life the men who made the Royal Navy such a success. Their success was built on professionalism, courage, commitment and loyalty, human qualities that can best be understood through McKee's brilliant analysis.
Andrew Lambert, author of War at Sea in the Age of Sail McKee's elegantly written history of travel and tradition, rum and religion, skylarking and sex, and combat and comradeship, provides the reader with multi-dimensional and iconoclastic portraits of British seamen during the dreadnought era.
Michael Palmer, author of Stoddert's War: Naval Operations During the Quasi-War With France, 1798-1801 A vivid recreation of lower-deck life, full of psychological insights. We have had so little real social history of the 20th-century Royal Navy, that this will open up completely new vistas.
N.A.M. Rodger, author of The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy An evocative portrait of a unique and now vanished society. McKee has brought this world to life in an insightful and fascinating manner.
Ronald Spector, author of At War at Sea: Sailors and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century McKee's cumulative portrait shows the danger, boredom (and ways of combating it), camaraderie, discipline, diet, and many other mundane details of a sailor's life that are rarely encountered in the romantic renderings of fiction. Vivid and full of personality, this portrait of life below decks during the first half of the last century is very readable and is recommended.
Michael F. Russo
Library Journal
A meticulously researched look at the lives of sailors serving in the British Royal Navy during the first half of the 20th century. McKee...here paints a portrait that contravenes commonly held stereotypes about enlisted sailors. Such stereotypes, he argues, are generally drawn from either formal military histories written by officers and academics or from the visions of novelists and filmmakers...Rather than rely on traditional military histories, he makes use of the diaries, letters, memoirs, questionnaires, and taped recollections of the former sailors themselves. These documents reveal a decidedly monotonous and often dangerous shipboard existence. Interweaving conventional history and detailed enumeration of naval regulations into the sailors' own anecdotes, McKee captures the tension endemic on ships where public routine governed every moment of the day...Particularly appealing to those concerned with naval history, but written in vivid prose that will sustain the interest of more general readers as well.
Kirkus Reviews
There is much to lure even the novice in naval history. The voices for one. They spill from diaries, letters, memoirs, questionnaires, and an archive of taped interviews in London's Imperial War Museum. Christopher McKee uses each to bring the "lower deck" alive. The seaman talk of everything, from what they ate and wore and gambled to the pleasures of shore leave, the panic of wartime, the plague of officers.
Nina C. Ayoub
Chronicle of Higher Education
A rich and valuable account of the way sailors lived and worked and the kind of people they were.
Ian Jack
London Review of Books
There is much more to this book than initially meets the eye...It is the only real attempt I have read to look into sailors' lives and to bring out their backgrounds, their true feelings, their thoughts on their officers, teamwork, war fighting, discipline, drink, the run ashore, and many other aspects that can only be fully understood if you are part of the lower deck. And it makes fascinating reading
all the more so because, as the book progresses, the theme is absolutely clear
sailors' lives, their thoughts, feelings and aspirations are very much the same now as they were then...Sober Men and True is full of gems...[It is] a thoroughly entertaining read [and] has serious lessons for us all that are always worth revisiting.
Martin Ewence
Naval Review
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