BRITAIN S LATEST WARSHIP

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 160734, 21 August 1920, Page 5

BRITAIN S LATEST WARSHIP

HOME COMFORT FOR JACK TARS. SAILORS IN LUXURY ON H.M.S. HOOD. Quite apart from any considerations of her size and fighting strength—though both Are unprecedented—the entry in the Fleet of H.M.S. Hood, Britain’s 32,500,000 dollar warship, is an epochal event for sailors. To them it brings a domestic revolution; one .of- the) greatest the navy has ever experienced. As compared with the crews of other vessels, the lucky tars who are drafted to the Hood will live in luxury and eat from the table of Dives, says Answers. The culinary department of the Hood speaks the last word in up-to-date equipment. In fact, it is superior in its arrangements. to that of many of London’s great “food palaces.” From her kitchens fourteen hundred meals can ,be served in tpn minutes, all smoking hot, and without the necessity for hands touching them. No coal will be used aboard the Hood for any purpose. Even the ranges in her kitchens and the ovens in her bakeries are oil fired. In the kitchens, or “galleys,” as sailors call them, are three huge

ranges each capable of cooking for some five hundred men at the one time. Her bakeries can turn out 14001bs of bread daily, this being made not by hand, but by an elec-trically-operated dough-mixing machine.

Electricity, in fact, does most of the work in the ship’s commissariat. It runs the bacon-slicers, the sausage-making machines, the mechanical potato-peelers, and “fish and chips” makers, and the many other automatic appliances with which the “galleys” are fitted. For home-made sausages, fish amd chips, and many other delicacies of a like kind, much beloved by sailors, but hitherto unobtainable at sea, are to be included in the bill of fare. The old practice was for each mess to have whatever it fancied for dinner, the dishes being prepared by one of the men acting as “cook of the mess” for the day, and taken by him to the galley. But in the Hood’s routine the time-honoured call of “cooks to the galley” will have no place. The whole crew are to be supplied from a central restaurant, wherein a staff of fourteen trained cooks will be employed. And instead of a great variety of dishes, prepared to suit individual tastes, there will bo one general menu for the whole crew at each meal. After each meal, all plates, dishes, knives, forks, etc., will be collected and sent to a mechanical scullery, w y here electrically driven washing-up machines will cleanse them and pack them away in racks in readiness for the next time they are needed.

In addition to these ultramodern arrangements for feeding them, the crew of the Hood will have life made comfortable for them in other ways. There are recreation rooms, provision for cinema shows, and other conveniences, which, though not absolute innovations, are yet carried to greater perfection in her than in any previous ship. As the Hood is 860 feet long and displaces 45,000 tons, there is plenty of room aboard her for all these things. The introduction of them is in keeping with the modern trend for making Jack as cosy as possible whilst at sea.