“A Parent” says his boy informs him that the victuals are of the most inferior description, the butter and meat being often uneatable; and alleges that some cadets who complained of the butter on one occasion were punished.
Possibly “A Parent’s” son may not have been quite ingenuous. Any complaint would be promptly investigated by the officer of the day, and, if well founded, immediate steps would be taken to remedy the matter; an unfounded complaint, on the other hand, particularly if reiterated, would be a likely occasion for a small dose of “fours,” as a reminder not to be unduly troublesome. The allegation that boys who made justifiable complaints about food were punished for it requires something more than the authority of “A Parent’s” son to make it go down. “Navilus” does not convey the impression that there is anything wrong with either the quantity or quality of the food; on the contrary, he is rather enthusiastic about it.
There are usually, in every school and college, a certain number of students who, either from perversity or from having been unduly pampered at home, make a point of finding fault with the food, however good; they imagine it is “swagger” to know how these things ought to be done.
A young commissioned officer who was a member pro tem. of a very excellent, not to say sumptuous, mess was once known to insert in the complaint book a bitter wail because only three sorts of cheese were handed round at mess. This is the kind of hardship which should not be silently endured!
Nevertheless, messmen or stewards do undoubtedly go wrong at times, if not kept very sharply under supervision, and inferior stuff is sometimes supplied without being discovered for a time by the heads.
Well, we have reached the end of the ’nineties; but there is a small slice of the twentieth century to be dealt with before concluding this chapter.
The augmentation in age, by which cadets might enter after January, 1898, as old as 15½, was certain to result, sooner or later, in some very big boys being entered; and the following remarks in the Britannia Magazine for Christmas, 1901, appear to indicate that a contingent had arrived, in September, of cadets who were considerably more prominent for length than breadth.
“Our latest brand of naval cadets is assuming a weird shape: we are assured by the doctors and the Physical Development Society that our recent plague has produced a hitherto unknown specimen of the naval officer in embryo. It scarcely seems credible; but having the authorities to back us up with statistics, we feel safe in our statement—that the various forms of torture have revealed the fact that, although there has been an enormous increase in height, chest girth and weight have been sadly on the decrease.”
The “recent plague” referred to is possibly a severe epidemic of influenza which visited the ship in the spring of 1901, and caused a good deal of talk at the time; it died hard, and there were some deaths from complications, pneumonia and so on.