TOPICS OF THE DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21043, 20 February 1940, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY

Britain s Navy “When you have been at sea in a convoy you realise,” writes the naval correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, “more than any amount of book reading can make you do, the extraordinary ramifications of the thing we call sea power. A quarter of a pound of butter bought in an inland village shop is affected by it. The new battery for a black-out torch is affected. The fertiliser for the wartime allotment could not be compounded but for seme distant cruiser sweltering on patrol along the equator. All the little things of life as much as all the big things depend, for us, on sea power. If Ido not instance the raw materials of big industry it is because surely that section of the community more than any other must know that nothing whatsoever could be brought into the country if it were not for the fine and fearless seamanship of the merchant navy, by which, as the House of Commons nobly phrased it in a resolution in 1919, ‘our people have been preserved from want and our cause from disaster.’ It is difficult to* convey in words the physical strain that this fine and fearles* seamanship imposes on both the Royal Navy and his Majesty’s Merchant Service, as King George V. called it, though no one had the vision to keep Lke phrase alive after he coined it.”