A few days after setting up camp in Sydney Cove, Captain Phillip was duly installed as Governor of the colony, an event marked with due ceremony by Drum Major Benjamin ...
History - general
England’s First Naval Victory-The Battle Of Sluys (AD 1340)
Mateship
There has been a lot spoken and written recently on this subject. Perhaps it can he best described in the following terms: There’s a sort of bonding that develops out ...
Garden Island – The Barracks Building
Letters: Royal Naval College, Greenwich.
Most of our readers will have been aware that the Queen unveiled the huge re-gilded statue of both her and her husband’s great-great-grandfather, Prince Albert, in London in October 1998. ...
Book Review: Our Shetland Heritage and Emigration to Australia
“Our Shetland Heritage and Emigration to Australia” by Janet Halcrow Basically, this is a family history of the fifth, sixth and seventh generations of the Halcrows, probing their Shetland background ...
Letters – Location of Sensuikan 1-124
Concerning the Japanese submarine I-124 (Sensuikan I-124 by Tom Lewis and reviewed by T.R. Duchesne – NHR Vol. 19 No.2), its wreck is shown on the approaches to Darwin chart ...
Napoleon’s Fleet – Found Buried in Seabed off Egypt
CAIRO – Two centuries after a historic battle destroyed Napoleon’s hopes of crushing the British Empire, the French Emperor’s fleet has been discovered entombed in the depths of an artifact-rich ...
A Brief History of the Royal Marines Buglers
Captain Harvey Newcomb RN – Newcomb Building, HMAS Watson
On October 28, 1997 the Royal Australian Navy’s Surface Warfare School Building was formally renamed the “Newcomb Building”, commemorating the service of Captain Harvey Mansfield Newcomb. At the end of ...
Nelson’s coffin – Yet another version
Here is another version of the story of Nelson’s Coffin: Captain Hallowell sent a party to salvage wood from L’Orient. Months later, when he was afraid that the adulation being ...
The Nelson Touch – a Trafalgar Day address
[Trafalgar Day Address 1997 to the Naval Officers’ Association, Western Australia, by Captain John Lancaster AM RAN (Ret’d)] Trafalgar Day provides the embodiment of what in our waning years, we may ...
Book Review: Shipmates
Many of our readers will be familiar with Vic Cassells as the author of “For Those in Peril“, which chronicled the loss of RAN ships and men in past conflicts. ...
Letters – The Senior Service
Which Service Came First? “Snow” Mackrell, a member, has forwarded some correspondence concerning his contention that the Navy is the “Senior Service” as, “after Federation, it was the Navy which ...
Navy Square – Port Melbourne
The concept of a naval memorial in Port Melbourne arose in May 1997 when it was observed that following the 1994 decommissioning of HMAS Lonsdale, there was no feature in ...
HMAS Canberra’s Crest – Return from P&O Liner Canberra
On the 24th April, 1964 a small group of survivors from HMAS Canberra met on board the P&O Liner Canberra to present to the captain a replica of HMAS Canberra’s crest, i.e., the ...
The Hammock
The issue hammock, the beloved pusser sack – one of man’s most endearing inventions – has vanished, alas, from Navy messdecks and establishments. It has been replaced by the impersonal ...
In Remorse Mode about the Morse Code!
Extracts from The Sydney Morning Herald (Kendall Hill) and The Sun-Herald (Peter Robinson) It revolutionised the way humans communicated long before the likes of the telephone, the radio and e-mail. ...
Letters: Astern Refuelling: HMAS Brisbane (1)
Re Naval Historical Review December 1997: HMAS BRISBANE The photograph of HMAS BRISBANE shows the ship under way and fuelling by the astern method. The tanker in this case is almost certainly ...
The Epaulettes of the Father of the RAN – Vice Admiral Sir William Creswell KCMG KBE
Sir William was born at Gibraltar in 1852. At age 13, he entered the Royal Navy, joining the “Britannia” as a Cadet. As a Midshipman in H.M.S. “Phoebe” he enjoyed ...
HMS Calliope in the Great Hurricane at Samoa – 1889
The Origins of the General Service Medal
The Battle of Trafalgar – A Midshipman’s Memoirs, 1805
Tresco – History of the First Sydney Naval Residence of the RAN
Letters: Harmony at sea
The article in the last issue of N.H.R. Vol. 17, No. 4, (Harmony at Sea) (December 1996) about the employment of women sailors at sea (R.A.N.) was not only revealing ...