The Ship. C.S. Forester. Toronto: S.J. Reginald Saunders, 1943.

As I write this, the publishing world is abuzz with discussion of those works that have been short-listed for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize. The literary award season is also battling for headline space with the concurrent November release of the first volume of Barack Obama’s long awaited autobiography. Even military history aficionados can claim their share of attention with the widespread praise given to historian Margaret MacMillan’s October release of War: How Conflict Shaped Us. Nevertheless, the book that has lately taken residence on my nightstand belongs to a sub-genre of literature that is unlikely to make its way onto the year-end best-of lists that broadsheets and magazines are so fond of: maritime fiction. That being said, reading the 128 pages of C.S. Forester’s long forgotten 1943 paean to the Royal Navy, The Ship, has proven a supremely enjoyable foray into a long-forgotten episode of naval history.

Forester will be familiar to many as the creator of the perennially popular Hornblower series of books documenting the Napoleonic-era adventures of the eponymous main character. More contemporaneously, Forester is also the author of The Good Shepherd (1955), the basis for Tom Hanks’ Greyhound (2020). However, my first Forester experience was through The General (1936), a thin volume—as many of his books are—that I picked up at a second-hand bookshop in Johannesburg. This book did much to perpetuate the narrative of the British serviceman in the First World War as the proverbial lion led by donkeys, generals who gained the scarlet gorgets on their uniform collars by doing little more than holding minor peerages and double-barrelled surnames. While the book may have bought too much into the then prevailing disgust with the performance of the First World War British senior officer corps, the fictional general officer in question, Herbert Curzon, captures the ethos of his time. He is daring yet unoriginal in terms of thought, blessed as much by chance and marriage as he is by professional competence.

A Novel With A Mission

Written in 1943, only seven years after the literary birth of General Curzon, The Ship is very different from The General. The physical properties of my dog-eared, wartime copy give a clue to the circumstances in which it was created. The font size is positively microscopic, and the pages are rice-paper thin. The end papers ask readers to support The Royal Naval Benevolent Trust, with the reminder, “It is upon the Navy, under the good providence of God, that the wealth, safety and strength of the Kingdom do chiefly depend.” The book’s inferior quality likely results from wartime paper and ink shortages; it was meant to be disposable entertainment for a population growing used to the shabby and ersatz.

The Ship is a work of propaganda. It was written when Britain’s existence, and that of besieged outposts like Malta, very much lay in the hands of Royal Navy seamen fighting an existential battle against the war machines of Hitler and Mussolini.

The Ship was written while Forester was employed by the British Ministry of Information. By the Second World War, he had already achieved considerable literary fame, including as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Forester’s mission in government service was no doubt to turn his skills as a master storyteller to the service of his country. This was an embattled nation that had, in the words of the Prime Minister just a few months before The Ship was released, only just begun to see “the end of the beginning” of its battle against fascism. Part of this effort was to explain something of the lives of Britain’s soldiers, sailors, and airmen to the British public and the world at large. Forester, as one of the world’s premier writers of naval fiction, was perfectly suited to turn his pen to the task of dramatizing the Royal Navy’s efforts to run the Italian and German gauntlet that was then trying to choke off supplies to long-suffering Malta.

The Ship occurs over the course of just a few hours in the life of the crew of the fictional HMS Artemis, a light cruiser protecting a lumbering merchant convoy in the final stages of its voyage to Malta. Forester based the Artemis on the real-life HMS Penelope, a ship he had sailed on as an observer earlier in the war, and the Penelope’s sterling performance in what is assumed to be the Second Battle of Sirte, where a British fleet bested an Italian battle-group that was far superior in number of ships and armament.[1]

Humanizing the Everyman Sailor

The Ship excels in the creation of a narrative rich with the detail of a classical naval battle combined with character sketches of individual Artemis crew members. The smell-of-cordite action was surely what readers expected from the creator of Hornblower, while the brief vignettes about the lives of the crew doubtlessly helped humanize a conflict that to most Britons was occurring in distant locales with which they had little familiarity. He succeeds marvellously in bringing to life a group of sailors who represent a wide swathe of Britain’s class-riven society. The men may come from very different backgrounds, yet they are united in their commitment to their fellow seaman and measuring up to the best traditions of Britain’s senior service.

The Ship excels in the creation of a narrative rich with the detail of a classical naval battle combined with character sketches of individual Artemis crew members.

Take, for example, the amusingly named Captain the Honourable Miles Ernest Troughton-Harrington-Yorke. Forester casts him in the expected role of the iron-willed master of his ship, yet he also confides in the reader that “the Captain was a man of violent passions” and given in his youth to “an insane evil temper” that had left its physical and emotional scars on his family.[2] While the Captain has learned to control his darker impulses, his thoughts during the battle turn to these compulsions and the struggle he felt, even in that moment, to check his inner demons.

Most of The Ship’s biographical vignettes are given over to the average seaman on the Artemis, capturing the essence of the working class core of the Navy and the country at large. Ordinary Seaman Harold Quimsby, for instance, is a lookout posted to the crow’s nest who relishes nothing more than being posted alone at the highest point of the ship, reflecting on the joys of a hurried lunch of “cold meat and pickles,” remembering his last leave in Alexandria, and taking pride in his ability to maintain effective watch despite the rolling sea far below him.[3]

Though Forester makes an effort to ensure his crew is representative of the Britain of 1943—from the cocksure Cockney to the one-time orphan with a penchant for crafting Keats-like verse—these sketches never venture into parody. They recognize the country’s deep divisions and the everyday concerns on the minds’ of sailors such as marital infidelity, financial woes, and straying from one’s faith.

The fact that The Ship was published long ago means that there are inevitably passages that are a bit quaint in tone or simply old-fashioned in outlook. Nevertheless, Forester vividly reminds readers that while his story’s solely male protagonists may be facing the many dangers of life at sea in wartime, these men have left behind women facing their own harrowing experience of total war. The Chief Yeoman of Signals, for example, while gazing through binoculars, begins to think of “the wife he loved, back in England” who had been “twice bombed out of her home, and all the furniture they had collected and of which he had been so modestly proud was now nothing but charred fragments and distorted springs.”[4]

80 Years On, a Masterpiece of the Genre

There is little doubt that The Ship was intended to stoke patriotic fervour among a population  standing alone against a Fortress Europe that looked impenetrable. On its publication, the Torch landings in North Africa had only just occurred and the prospect of an invasion of France surely seemed not only distant, but also foolhardy. Producing a work of fiction that reminded Britons of the bravery and skills of their seaman, particularly in time when so many capital ships had recently been lost in action, was a worthy albeit political goal.

It is a reflection on C.S. Forester’s skills as a writer that he could quickly draft a work of fiction, suited to the exceptional circumstances of 1943 Britain, which reads so well nearly 80 years later. It surely helped that the fight in question was existential and that themes of bravery and commitment to professional prowess are timeless. Nevertheless, Forester’s war-time output and his many works of fiction and non-fiction published both before and after the war all highlight his almost singular ability to place the reader on the proverbial bridge, sea-spray in their face and danger all around.

Todd Johnson is the risk and intelligence leader for a leading multinational manufacturing firm. He has previously held roles in corporate strategy, political and partnership risk management, and in the U.S. Government as a political-military intelligence analyst. The opinions and positions stated are his alone and do not represent the views or policies of any company or organization.

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Header Image: HMS Penelope (Jeremy Day)

Notes:

[1] John Roberts, “The Context of The Ship: The Second Battle of Sirte (21st – 23rd March 1942),” Reflections: The Magazine of the CS Forester Society, Number 24, 2013.

[2] CS Forester, The Ship, (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1943), 85.

[3] Forester, 12.

[4] Forester, 20.