Re-presenting Wrens

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Chris Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Royal Navy ◽  
Service Experience ◽  
Women In War ◽  
Popular Writing

Chris Hopkins focuses on how wartime participation in the Wrens was represented during and immediately after the war by exploring the written forms in which Wrens were characterized and how these forms were put into the wider context of wartime popular writing about servicemen and particularly about the Royal Navy. Writing about women’s service experience has not yet been adequately studied, though a significant number of women took part. The essay deals with some of the documentary writing that forms a rich context for the only wartime novel written by a servicewoman about the Wrens, Edith Pargeter's She Goes to War (1942), a Naval fiction/documentary unexpectedly engaging with the agenda of the People's War. The essay argues that this neglected writing tells a significant story about women in war-time Britain and as such is important for understanding the experience of servicewomen, opening debates about society, gender and class.

Paper 6: Naval Service Experience with Surface-Hardened Gears

1969 ◽  
Vol 184 (15) ◽  
pp. 53-63
Author(s):  
B. J. McD. Gowans ◽  
F. E. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Surface Hardening ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Service Experience ◽  
Full Report ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Naval Service

This paper from members of the Ministry of Defence (Navy) reviews the service in the Royal Navy of main propulsion gearboxes incorporating surface-hardened gears. The introduction of surface hardening for warship gears is described and the gear designs in use in the Fleet are discussed. Comment is made on the problems of procurement of surface-hardened gears. The very few defects experienced are described, some unexplained since they are of such a minor nature that the gears have not been removed and no full report is available. The paper concludes by indicating the Royal Navy's continued reliance on surface-hardened gears at even higher loads as a result of their research work.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

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