Todd war diary, 3 August 1914-29 February 1916 / Arthur Todd - Page 169
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[Page 169]
us and do some stoking in the tropics and a few days later freeze with us in Canada.
They would soon have come to appreciate the warmed slippers and newspaper at their bed side in the morning and the sense of repletion which the Navy slaved & worked to maintain for a remuneration which any labourer would scorn to take.
It used to make one tired to read the querulous complaint by distinguished nobodies in the English press against the men whom they underpaid or rather shockingly sweated to go to sea and strive with a resourceful enemy that they themselves might sleep quietly in their beds.
The Silent Navy, the pet shibboleth of the slobber press is a term that every Naval man loathes but none the less this silence and the absence of ostentation with which the Service does its work are directly responsible for the colossal ignorance of the populace concerning its sea defenders.
But I digress - this is not an article for the National review but a plain tale of the Sydney's cruise.
On the 27th September we left Halifax in a howling gale with the temperature down to 40ºF and put to sea bound for Jamaica. We had the roughest trip since we lay off