UNIFORMS NOT FAVOURED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 October 1943, Page 4

UNIFORMS NOT FAVOURED

TRADITIONS OF THE MERCHANT SERVICE The emphatic pronouncement of the secretary of the Seamen's Union against uniforms for crews of merchant ships carries on a tradition which at one time extended to the commanders of merchant ships (says a writer in the Manchester Guardian.”) Nowadays office) s in all the well-known lines wear uniforms as a matter of course, but at no very distant period the commanders of such ships made rather a point of appearing on the bridge in shore clothes, tweeds and so on, thus marking their aloofness from anything like what Mr Jarman called “regimentation.” Whether or not that tendency was part of the ancient feud between the two Services, which was nurtured by the pressgang, considerable latitude used to be claimed even by naval officers in the matter of uniform.

There is an amusing account of the fleet in winter on the Baltic in the mid-eighteen-fifties when a post-captain is described as lurching about in a peajacket which “hitched up over his quarter galleries as he ran his hands down into the pockets of his. pilot cloth trousers.” Indeed it used to be said that in foul weather it was not easy to tell a post-captain from a coal-heaver unless he was sufficiently annoyed to express himself in “language," and that even then it was not always easy to distinguish one from the other.