REVENGE GOES WEST

Southland Times, Issue 19278, 24 June 1924, Page 2

REVENGE GOES WEST

last of wooden walls. SALUTE FROM DEVON CLIFF. The little Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the foe, With her hundred fighters on deck, .and her ninety sick below. I fed thL; afternoon, wrote R.C.R. to the Daily Chronicle recently, as if I had been present at the funeral of an old friend, for the Revenge (Her Majesty's flagship of the Channel Squadron 70 years ago, ana the last of the old “wooden walls ) hto just been towed into Appledore Pool, to her grave in North Devon. Yet it is no grave. Her oaken bones will not be suffered to rest in peace and rot away to an honourable end. They will b. dissected by toe hammers and saws of tbe shipbreaker. At any rate, it wdl eventually be piece meal cremation; her wooden walls of oak and decks of pitch pine will furnish fuel for many a West Country hearth. I wonder if those who gather round her crackling bones heat winter will ever see visions in the firelight—the days when her sides bristled with ninety odd guns, her vanished crews, tbe dances on her decks in the moonlit Mediterranean J , Now an ignominous end to all these glories. , , They have moored her just m front or my bungalow, and the two grimy tugs that escorted her from Gareloch have scurried away, as if they were ashamed of their

It is an evening of sea mist, through which the sun has tried to struggle all day. and I have just put toe flag m our little cliff garden at half-mast, a little tribute of respect to this veteran warship of the past.