PROPOSALS TO GIVE THEM AN OFFICER'S STATUS.

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 52, 29 August 1925, Page 16

PROPOSALS TO GIVE THEM AN OFFICER'S STATUS.

OFFICER'S STATUS,

The mariners of England have not always been wont to treat their cooks with respect. It is "not a man whose services are valued and from much is expected, who acquires the cogomen of "Slushie." To be called a son of a sea cook was, in nautical circles even more grievous an insult than to be called a soldier. But they have changed all that. Your modern mariner has a gentleman with a certificate in the galley, and now (says the "Daily Telegraph") we hear that the cook is to rank with the after guard. The International Organisation of Merchant Marine Officers in solemn conclave assembled in Paris, lias decided that in future cooks are to have officer's status. We are not informed where they will rank in the table of precedence or what will be the limits of their authority. The first officer has been commonly called the ship's husband, or by irreverent landsmen the ship's chief housemaid. We hops that none of the difficulties which husbands sometimes make about cooks, none of those which cooks and housemaids generate between themselves will .arise in the new order. But no doubt tha officers have considered all that, and we applaud out of landlubbers' experience their intention to make things as pleasant as possible for the cook. All records of the sea bear witness that one of the greatest perils svhich the hardy mariner had to face was the food. Even when the Board of Trade began to take an interest in the quantity and quality of the rations the artist in the galley was too often chosen by a process of unnatural selection. The man who was no good for anything olse_ was the cook. Hence arose the reputation of the sea cook for lubberliness and flaccidity. Hence it is that in the old stories of the Bea it is tlje cook who make an exhibition of himself, while the others "die like Britons." Even in passenger ships the choice of artists for the galley waa often strange. When Dickens went to America in the 'forties the pastry cook re-Il ill. "A new man, sick to death," Dickens reported, "has been dragged! out of bed and propped up in a little house upon deck between two casks and ordered (the captain standing over him) to make the roll-out piecrust, which, ho protests, it is death to him in his bilious state to look at." What his pastry was like to eat, we have no information. The resolute spirit of that captain who would have his piecrust shows the English sailor at his best. But obviously if the original pastry cook had been an officer he would never have gone sick, or, even in the throes of sickness, would have , made his pastry. Noblesse Oblige.