SAILOR IN THE AIR – The Memories of Vice Admiral Richard Bell Davies

Outstanding as a seaman, even among those who received their Dartmouth schooling at the tail end of the period when cadets were trained in sail, the author’s successive appointments on the Mediterranean and China stations seemed to indicate exclusively a seafaring future. His lively accounts of some legendary characters with whom he served offer splendid reading; these include the notorious ‘Spuddy’ Carver, a well-known bully, Commander of the Swiftsure. 

It was in 1910 when Grahame-White flew an aircraft over the fleet that the author’s career involuntarily made a violent change, of course. Privately he learned to fly and at last joined the Naval Air Wing of the Royal Flying Corps in 1913. He gives a unique picture of the hazards and vicissitudes of flying, the happy-go-lucky spirit which attended forced landings preferably in a field near a likely looking house for a good lunch-and the primitive instruments for air navigation, bomb sights and indeed aircraft control, involving liberal use of Sandow elastic. 

He began his important work for the early carriers after a hectic period of operational flying, during which he won the D.S.O. in 1915 for one of the first air attacks on Zeebrugge.