Item 02: John Duncan McRae diary, 11 December 1916-9 February 1917 - Page 37

[Page 37]

To their dismay De-Winter sat up quite unpurturbed; he knew more than they & had tied the other end of his hammock to the leg of the deck table & of course the boys couldn't shift him, no matter how much they pulled.

A little more daring experiment was tried on a chap who was swinging from the ceiling. A rope was tied to a corner of the blanket with he had under him. The rope was a long one & stretched down under a couple of mess tables, and so the fellows could start pulling at it without being seen. Luckily for the sleeper the rope slipped off before much of the blanket had come out. Needless to say, these onslaughts always call forth a stream of flowery language calculated to terrify all comers, but, somehow no-one seems to take any notice of it.

Another attack of a similar kind was cleverly frustrated by a cute joker. A number of boys took a rope up on the forecastle and detailed one