We had a weekly ship’s quiz on board, in many ways like a University Challenge-type quiz night. The competition would take place most weeks of the patrol, culminating in a grand final, and most departments would send out one or two teams and we’d have a full-blown tournament – yet another thing to break up the monotony of the day-to-day grind. Buzzers were rigged up by the WEMs to get the proper TV vibe when answering, and the doctor hosted, pretending to be Bamber Gascoigne, the only resemblance being that they both spoke the English language. These quizzes were serious stuff, with full-on revision the day before, sitting in front of an encyclopaedia trying to memorise capital cities, world affairs and all the rest.
I got the nod to be in one of the teams on my first patrol, mainly due to the fact that I’d been able to name every British PM in the correct order from the beginning of the 20th century when they were picking the teams.
Even the captain put in an appearance at the quarter-final, where my warfare and sonar team had been battling back and forth with a bunch of sweaty engineers. The tiebreak question came up: ‘What was the major change in voting law that happened in the Representation of the People Act 1969?’ Quick as a flash I buzzed in and answered, ‘It meant that all people between 18 and 20 now got the vote, as well as the existing voters over 21, though you couldn’t stand for parliament unless you were 21.’ The skipper looked visibly excited and probably couldn’t believe a junior rating like myself would be capable of such an answer. ‘Well done, well done!’ he kept saying.
On a subsequent patrol my team made it through to the final but were pipped at the post by a team of engineering officers. There seemed to be an inordinate number of questions on physics and chemistry, so us non-mechanical types from the front end stood no chance. The fix was in.
Usually at around half to three-quarters of the way into the patrol we had the horse-racing night, when departments would enter their very own self-made horse, usually made out of papier-mâché. Some looked great, with real care having gone into their construction, while others were reminiscent of my youngest son’s craft classes at nursery. I was the bookie’s mate on a number of these occasions, and one of our senior leading hands in the tactical systems department was the son of a fairly successful Edinburgh bookie, so he was very adept at ‘dealing’ with the large amounts of money that swam around on these booze-fuelled nights. A percentage of the profits always went to charity, but even so it could end with a few quid made here and there. Six horses would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Why six? It was all dice related, so there were six horses in six separate lanes, fences also included. The dice were thrown, the first one to see which horse moved, the second one to see how many spaces it moved, which led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth if you lost money, but smiles and a few beers all round if your horse romped in. Those with hangovers often woke up the next day thinking about how much their gambling would cost them when they got back alongside to settle their bar bills.