Sometimes at Sea has that special mixture of fascination and pleasure that every good memoir requires. There are a number of interlocking reasons for this. As his subtitle implies, Bill Pakenham’s memories are ‘glad’ ones. No trace here of the bitterness, resentment and self justification that so often disfigures the genre. Bill greatly enjoyed his life in the Royal Navy and as a result his book is an inspiring rather than a dispiriting read.
The great strength of Sometimes at Sea is its blending of the major politico-military events and shifts of the period 1940 to 1979 with the human observations of a kaleidoscope of people and institutions, and those singular communities on board ship. Bill has a keen observer’s eye for episode, detail and personality. You can smell and feel the moments captured in these pages, from the ghastly fug of a World War Two troop train to the enervating effect of service in Singapore in the days before air-conditioning.
For a professional historian like myself there are especially choice vignettes of the Royal Family’s Tour of South Africa, the Abadan Crisis, the very special naval element of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ and the extraordinary world of the ‘War Book’ planners during the Cold War. A career that spanned youthful service in HMS Vanguard, the last of the Royal Navy’s great battleships to, in his professional maturity, refining the nuclear retaliation drills for those new capital ships of the deep, the Polaris submarines, also sheds light on a period of remarkable technological, strategic and doctrinal change.
The ultimate pleasure of the book, however, is the wisdom and humanity that Bill has brought to its pages.
Peter Hennessy, FBA,
Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History,
Queen Mary,
University of London.