Symonds - World War II at sea: a global history

London, 1930

The murmur of conversation ceased abruptly and there was a rustle of movement as the assembled delegates stood when King George entered the Royal Gallery, followed by the lord chamberlain and the prime minister. The king walked slowly but purposefully toward the ornate throne that dominated one end of the House of Lords, and he waited there while the delegates resettled themselves. That he was here at all was noteworthy, for George V had been ill for some time (very likely with the septicemia that would later kill him) and had retired to Craigweil House, in Bognor, on the Sussex coast, to recuperate. Unhappy and frustrated by his confinement there, he had made a special effort to be present for this ceremony.

The House of Lords, with its gilded coffered ceiling and stained glass windows, offered a suitable stage for the kings public reappearance, though the windows admitted little light on this occasion because on January 20, 1930, London was blanketed by a thick fog; local authorities had been compelled to turn on the streetlights in the middle of the day. The hall was crowded, not with peers of the realm, but with more than a hundred delegates from eleven nations. Six of those nations were dominions within Britains far-flung empire, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, though the audience also boasted representatives from the military powers of three continents. From Europe there were delegates from both France and Italy (though, significantly, not from either Weimar Germany or communist Russia). In addition to Canada, a delegation from the United States represented the Western Hemisphere, and from Asia there was a substantial contingent from the Empire of Japan, though not from China. Each delegation was headed by a high-ranking civilian, and the audience included two prime ministers, two foreign secretaries, and one secretary of state. The menand they were all menwere mostly in their fifties and sixties, and they constituted a somber audience in their dark suits with stiff white collars.

Scattered among them, however, and lined up across the back of the hall, were the uniformed officers of a dozen navies, the fat and narrow gold stripes ascending their sleeves from cuff to elbow revealing their exalted rank. There was less variation in their attire than might have been expected from such a polyglot assemblage because all of them, including the Japanese, wore uniforms modeled on the Royal Navy prototype: a double-breasted dark blue (officially navy blue) coat with two vertical rows of gold buttons. Here was unmistakable evidence of the extent to which the Royal Navy was the archetype of all modern navies.

Many of the officers also wore gaudy decorationsstars and sashesearned over a lifetime of service at sea and ashore, and the bright splashes of color among the dark suits suggested songbirds among ravens. Even the junior officers, tasked with note-taking, translating, and providing technical support, stood out by sporting thick aiguillettes of gold braid draped over their shoulders and across their chests, ornamentation that identified them as belonging to the staff of one or another of the gold-striped admirals.