Go, hew the gold spurs from your heels,
And let your steeds run free;
Then come to our unconquered decks,
And learn to reign at sea.
Allan Cunningham.
After the War broke out, a wise man declared that every British child ought to say this grace before meat:
“Thank God for my good dinner and for the British Navy.”
Perhaps you will wonder why he put the dinner and the Navy together in this way. It is because British children during the war owed their dinners, and all their other meals also, to the Navy. This may sound strange, but it is perfectly true. The Navy guarded the thousands of merchant ships which bring us food and other things from abroad.
We do not grow nearly enough corn at home to feed everybody, so we have to buy from Canada, America, and other countries. The German Navy would have liked to capture the ships which brought us this corn, but owing to the British Navy it could not do so.
But that is not all that the British Navy did.