LIFE IN THE WORLD'S GREATEST WARSHIP.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XLIV, Issue 14007, 11 March 1920, Page 6

LIFE IN THE WORLD'S GREATEST WARSHIP.

■ H.M.S. Hood has completed her speed trials, and I .have taken the opportunity of inspecting at close range the world's greatest battle-cruiser, says the correspondent of n Home paper. There are 40,000 feet of voice-pipe in the vessel. That one figure is a fanindication of the amount of work involved in a ship of this size in maintaining communications. One comes to, realise, living in the ship as I have, done now for some days, how exactly like a small town a ship is. I have my cabin which corresponds to by private house ashore. When I am in'it I am entirely cut off from the general life of the 'ship. A hundred things might happen and I should know nothing of them untill strolled round to the ship's equivalent of my club, •tlie wardroom ante-room, for a yarn and a cocktail before dinner. Jt is quite a long walk "down town" in that club from my residence. I pass on the nay along well-planted streets, with other desirable villa-residences on each side, interspersed now and again by strange square detached buildings which come up from-below'and mount through the deck *,above, the skyscrapers of our city, ammunition hoists' and the like. On the way I pass a lane that leads into a quiet backwater ot the citv, rather like one of the old squares* of Finsbury, and like it, too, in that the surroundings are all offices The business quarter of the city even has its small fragment of Fleet street with a printing office. But the products of its presses are not tor | general circulation as they' are semiconfidenial document*. ' Then we come to the Carlton House-terrace ot our town, the district where suc.i g"deU aristocracv as'the'chief of the staff and ne Rag-lieutenant will live.when the ship is fullv commissioned. We approach now the more thickly populated part of the city. Our mess decks are as the model dwellings ot the city except that none of them has a kitchen; our well-planned town has its communal kitchens, great lofty palaces ot places that with nautical conservatism are still called galleys Here the. meals will have to be cooked tor nearly )0 people every day. We have, too, our own waterworks our own electrical power station, and our own hospital with a small operating theatre. The barber's shop is quite near the local Pentonville, . the cells Sweenev Todd was a barber, and that may account for the juxtaposition, the men's recreation-room in anotliei street, is the largest I have seen in a man-of-war. You could keep on walking round until you had walked ten or twelve miles.