Todd war diary, 3 August 1914-29 February 1916 / Arthur Todd - Page 18
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[Page 18]
A hurried scrape and refit, a couple of days to complete with stores and coal and the ship was ready for sea again.
A few blasts from the ferries' sirens, a few fluttering handkerchiefs on the headlands, some cheers from soldiers on South Head ports, and the long cruise of the Sydney was begun, a cruise which at the time of writing is still unfinished. But it is being finished with hardly any of the four hundred people who made up her complement on Sunday 25th October 1914. To the mere peaceful landsman, as the writer was then, a warship is at first an aweinspiring abode, for one's cabin is underneath a six inch gun and above a shell magazine and while the approaches are stacked with rifles and bayonets over which an armed sentry keeps guard.
All the rifles and other lethal weapons are stored in sacks around the flats off which the officers' cabins open, a relic of the days when the ship's company mutinied when so disposed. I had reason to curse these rifles later, for when the ship rolled they rattled, and when she lurched they fell down, & on rough nights at sea we spent much time too picking them up. But it was worth a disturbed rest to hear the fervid remarks issuing from other cabins as to the ancestry of the man who made the rifle racks, and after all one must pay for one's education.
To the new-comer the cabins in a ship like the Sydney were intolerably stuffy, for with so low a free board scuttles [portholes] can only be opened in the mildest of weather.
The confiding landsman used to the merchant service opened his scuttle unwarily, but a few green seas over one's bunk at 3 AM soon taught me to prefer a dry fug to a cold bath.
The engineers profess to pump in fresh air through a ventilator into the cabin. All I ever got thro mine was the greasy smell of the engine room and lots of coal dust.