Letter from Hector Smith, R.N. to Miss Katherine Elizabeth Buckle (née Staines Alcock).

This letter of 20 pages was written by Ordinary Seaman Hector Smith, on his first commission at sea at the age of 18, on the battleship HMS Ramillies. The letter contains no date but his service record shows he was on the Ramillies from August 1921- April 1924, some six weeks into his naval career. Smith’s place of birth is given as Greenwich. The letter is to his sweetheart, who we only know as ‘Katie’. It begins with a long apology for not having replied to her letters, his excuse being that the Mediterranean climate makes him lazy, and that ‘this can be only be cured by sport, and plenty of it’. The letter says little about naval life, relating instead his impressions of the various ports the fleet had visited, chiefly Venice, Cairo and the Ionian islands.
Smith describes admiring the carved and painted bridges of Venice by gondola and offers amusing ‘jack tar’s’ description of camel riding to see the pyramids, ‘we lopped along at a steady 3 knots… I am at home on a ship that floats on water…it would be very hard to explain what I felt like after that ride; sufficient to say that certain parts of my body were out of action, where sitting is concerned, for the remainder of the day’.