Blue Days at Sea and other essays by H.V. Morton ~ 1932. This edition: Methuen, 1932. Hardcover. 207 pages.
My rating: 7.5/10
This is a slender book of very readable essays by that British one-man phenomenon of mid-20th-century journalistic travel writing, Henry Vollam Morton.
In 1910, at the age of 16, H.V. Morton left school to work for the Birmingham Express and Gazette, where his father was employed as an editor. Young Henry took to journalism as a duckling takes to water, and his rise in the newspaper world was sure and steady.
In 1923, Morton was present at the opening of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, and his scoop of the “official” Times reporter brought him much notice, resulting in a further impetus to his upward progress in his chosen career.
In 1926, after several collections of his travel columns had been published and received with approbation by the English public, Morton set off on a motor trip of the rural areas of the UK, frequenting pubs and country gatherings, and documenting in a strongly nostalgic, rose-tinted way the vision of “our England” that he found.
In Search of England was published in 1927 to immediate acclaim, and H.V. Morton rode the crest of its success for the following five decades, wandering (in a very focussed sort of way) hither and yon, throughout the British Isles, Spain, Italy, North Africa, and into the Holy Land.
With his reporter’s pass card in hand, Morton received entry into all sorts of places, and he followed up his visits with likeable articles and essays, a collection of which make up this particular book.
The leading essay in Blue Days at Sea, in length and importance, details Morton’s time spent on one of the Royal Navy’s largest battleships. He documents his awed introduction to the “floating city” of a massive naval ship housing over 1200 people, and pens generally admiring portraits of some of its various classes of officers, focussing on the lowly midshipmen (rejoicing in the nickname “snotties” among their compatriots), and touching on the others, up to the second-in-command Commander, and the lordly Captain. The regular seamen are occasionally mentioned, mostly as being “down there somewhere” in the bowels of the ship, but Morton doesn’t seem to hobnob with them to any meaningful extent.
This being in 1932, England is officially at peace, but the Royal Navy never relaxes, so ambitious war exercises – mock battles at sea – are frequently being carried out to keep everyone up to speed on operating their deadly ships. Morton’s narration of one of these exercises is fascinating, in particular when viewed with our future hindsight, knowing that only a few short years later those mock battles would be very real, and the torpedoes fully loaded instead of being benign duds.
A moving vignette regarding a funeral at sea caps off this section.
Once this patriotic sample of “Hurray, our England!” journalism is tidied away, Morton turns his hand to a series of humorous sketches regarding various stereotypical versions of the era’s women. The Wife, The Woman Nobody Knows, The Woman of Affairs, The Bad Girl, The Head Huntress…these are just a sampling of the rather stock characters Morton dissects. Modern readers will lift an eyebrow; period humour prevails, and with that excuse we must be content.
Travel pieces cap off the collection, giving glimpses of Rome and Egypt. A particularly good essay is a description of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tomb in Rome. Well done as well are glimpses of the tourists’ experience of the Nile and the monuments of the long-dead kings, Morton standing well off to the side viewing his compatriots with a cynical eye.
Back to Victoria Station proceeds our writer, and “It’s good to be home.”
With the recent publication of several biographies of H.V. Morton (he died in 1979, still enjoying a mostly positive reputation as a true booster of All Things British, though he had been a resident of South Africa for the last three decades of his life), most notably this one, a rather critical light has been beamed into Morton’s private life, revealing the feet of clay of this one-time literary idol.
Apparently the man was a rather promiscuous womanizer, which comes as no surprise to me after reading the essays on women in this collection, the writer very obviously having a keen eye for the delights of the female form.
More damning are Morton’s pro-fascist views in the pre-War years, according to his private journals. In this he was in common company with certain other public figures of his time; one again must keep the context of the times in mind, for the horrors of the wartime atrocities were a thing of the future.
It is now rather the thing to sneer at H.V. Morton, for both his now-politically-incorrect attitudes and the consistent romanticization in his writings, but one can’t dismiss his wide appeal to his contemporary readers, and the fact that he was an excellent documentarian of places and people now lost in time.
Leaves & Pages 
“one of the Royal Navy’s largest destroyers… massive naval ship housing over 1200 people”
That sounds like a battleship, actually. Destroyers would have much smaller crews and would have a Lt-Commander or Commander as captain.
“its various classes of sailors, from the lowly midshipmen (rejoicing in the nickname “snotties” among their compatriots) to the second-in-command Commander, and the lordly Captain.”
All classes of officer of one kind or other, which – if Morton does exclude the seamen from consideration – is very revealing about his attitude..
Thank you for the terminology tips, Jamie, they are greatly appreciated. As you might guess from my errors I am not very familiar with the details of the British Naval Forces and their various ships; I am indeed a perfect example of Morton’s target audience, an “ooh, aaah, isn’t that interesting” civilian! I’m correcting my review to reflect that it was indeed a battleship Morton was writing about.
Morton seems rather fascinated with those young midshipmen – perhaps because several of them are detailed to babysit the journalist and ensure he doesn’t make too much of a pest of himself. He doesn’t really have a lot to say about most of the other rankings, just a nod here and there, all very admiring, though he does go into some detail about the difference between a Commander and a Captain.
Oh – and he mostly does mingle with the officers, though he does also give mention to stokers and such, though they are rather lumped together under “other crew” in the essay.
I have a heap of Morton books lurking somewhere and I do think it’s a shame he’s judged for being of his time!
When reading older books, I find myself continually bumping up against “offensive” (in our modern sense) terminolgy and attitudes. Context is everything; we need to allow for the times our authors were living in. But occasionally I hesitate to write about or recommend things which might be deemed to be questionable if today’s politically correct filters were applied. Because so many people get so bent out of shape…hence the censorship of Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn, the “n word” and so on) et al. Which I think is a mistake. Aren’t we smarter than that? Can’t we separate deliberate bigotry from accepted previous-era language?
Looking at the private lives of authors is another whole can of worms, and again, unless the individual was a truly rotten person, I find it fairly easy to separate the merits of the art from the personality of the artist. Who doesn’t occasionally confide to one’s diary, or one’s friends, or even one’s interviewer, thoughts which might cause qualms somewhere down the road?
Do we really expect every single writer of past (and present!) to self-censor to such a stringent degree? Can’t we allow for occasional blurtings out of things thought at the time? To hold anyone accountable to such an impossibly high standard does us all a disservice, I think. We need to allow for flaws, because without those there can be no moving forward, no personal growth, and, on a larger sense, no open dialogue, if past words are continually to be condemned and curbed in accordance with “rules” developed in the future!
Rant over.
Exactly – I couldn’t agree more and I find it insults me as a reader if a publisher thinks I can’t contextualise and understand the contents of a book!