Band of brothers - David Phillipson

A revealing history of the boy seaman rating in the Royal Navy, beginning with its evolution from the 18th-century "Officer's Servant" through to its abolition in 1956. It tells of an astonishing Victorian naval tradition which continued into modern times. HMS Ganges, a byword on the lower deck of the Royal Navy for vigorous - not to say harsh - discipline, was the hardest of the boy seaman training establishments.;The tradition for which the Ganges was widely regarded as the archetype, lasted almost to the threshold of the permissive society of the 1960s. Throughout those years the Royal Navy was a supremely traditionalist and conservative institution, never more so than in its attitude to and treatment of its lower deck people - its boys in particular. This led a future First Sea Lord to describe HMS Ganges as late as the 1950s as "the most feudal of the Navy's institutions".;This history describes in detail such aspects of service life as recruitment, feeding and clothing, training, discipline and punishment, and daily life ashore and afloat, in peace and war. The narrative is supported by a selection of personal accounts by boy seamen who later went on to serve in the Royal Navy as men. The author concludes the history with an in-depth personal account of his own life aboard HMS Ganges as a boy entrant after World War II, drawn from his personal diaries.