Photo. R. Thiele & Co.
SERVING OUT JACK'S GROG (12.30).
At noon the ship's company is "piped to dinner."
Noon is the dinner hour of our navy right throughout the world, and though things have greatly changed since the introduction of steam and the torpedo, the navy still retains the "bosun's pipes" of the days of Nelson. No sooner is the shrill pipe sounded than there is an excited rush of men to the cook's "galley," whence arises a cloud of odorous steam redolent of baked meats, vegetables, and baked and boiled "duffs" (so dear to the naval heart of all ages), which are to feed the 600 or 700 odd hungry men just released from work.
Men going on watch at noon—as the Marine sentries, for example—are allowed to fetch their dinner at "seven bells" (11.30), and sometimes ludicrous mistakes will arise through this privilege. The men take turns to prepare the dinner, and the cook of the mess for the day usually fetches his mess-mates' dinner from the "galley." On one occasion which the writer recalls, the cook was at work on deck when the bell struck seven, and could not get away. Several of his mess-mates (he was a Marine Artillery man) having to go on watch at noon, proceeded to the "galley" in quest of their dinner, and "fisted" (seized) a savoury dish they imagined to be theirs, without first examining the brass mess-number on the side thereof. The dinner was divided and eaten, and the plates were being washed up, when a group of excited bluejackets, having questioned every other mess in the ship, made their way to No. 19 mess and hungrily demanded their dinner.
The Marines had taken the wrong one, but offered their own in exchange. Search at the "galley" failed to produce the missing meal, which was eventually discovered stowed away beneath a wash-tub under the Marines' mess-table, uncooked. The absent-minded cook for the day, who was much taken up with a song of his own composition, entitled "A Barrack-room Dinner," which he was to sing at a forthcoming entertainment, had, in his contemplation of the visionary meal he was to sing of, forgotten to take the actual dinner to the galley, and there it lay in the mess in all its uncooked glory.
After a somewhat heated discussion, the Marines appeased the bluejackets by paying for a dinner of corned beef and pickles from the canteen, and thought they had heard the last of the matter; but the sailors had determined to pay the "Joeys" in their own coin, and did so a few days later, when the ship's company, being at "collision quarters," the Marines' messes were emptied of all their inmates. A party of bluejackets was stationed with the diving apparatus on the main-deck near the Marines' messes, and in the party were several who had suffered the loss of their dinner. It was 4 p.m., and noticing a large "plum-duff" on the table, evidently intended as a delicacy for tea, they pounced on it to a man. When the Marines came down in hungry expectation, behold! there was but an empty dish.
Dinner time lasts an hour and a quarter, and at "one bell" (12.30) the bugle-call for grog—"Nancy Dawson," as it is nick-named—summons the cooks to the grog tub.
