More stirring stories of little ships

‘I found this story by accident,’ begins Julia Jones’s Uncommon Courage, referring to documents belonging to her late father that she discovered in a far corner of her attic. True, but also false. This is not one story: it is a tsunami of stories. Sometimes it’s hard going, as you try to shelve the curiosity aroused by each tale. But the author writes with vim and vigour and with her own curiosity to the fore. It is all, appropriately, as far from dry as one could wish.

The imagination finds it difficult to yoke yachting with war – the one solitary and pacific, the other dense with people and mayhem – but the initial supposition that we shall be subjected to booms and topsails and rigging is soon scuppered. There is only a single actual sailing story, placed somewhere off the Levant, where one of Jones’s heroes, Adrian Seligman, was pretending to be a Greek fisherman. Rather, this is a book about yachtsmen who were members of the Royal Navy Supplementary Volunteer Reserve, the 2,000 or so gentlemen, and ‘temporary gentlemen’ who joined the service prior to, and at the outbreak of, the second world war.

Jones has tracked down and filleted written accounts of her yachtsmen’s war, including those by Nicholas Monsarrat, Nevil Shute and Ludovic Kennedy. My own favourite passage, which suggests the incongruities of which the book is full, is Ruari McLean’s reflection on a night in August 1944, as his submarine sailed towards Sumatra:

During the night my friend Edward Young passed close to us on his way in from patrol in his submarine Storm. If, five years previously when we were sharing a flat in Hammersmith and pursuing the peaceful profession of typography, we could have known that we would one night pass within a mile of each other in submarines in the Far East, we would have rushed down to the Black Lion with shaking hands to have a pint.