17 Feb 2009
Stuart A. Buss as a cadet, late 1918
The albums of Commander Stuart A. Buss are the latest to have been acquired by the Museum for its photographic collections. With a total of 349 images, they are an intriguing mix of personal and professional photography, covering his rise from midshipman to commander over the period 1918 to 1936. From within the pictorial narrative structure of the albums emerge some interesting themes; life aboard ships of the Royal Navy in the inter-war years, naval operations ashore (including a fair amount of leisure!) and contact with other nationalities and cultures (sometimes in awkward situations). There is a huge amount to tell, but for now I shall restrict myself to a quick discussion of the first album (catalogue reference number ALB1403).
Cleaning the upper deck near 'Y' turret with sand, HMS Royal Sovereign, late 1919
Whatever else it may have been, Buss's early career was certainly eventful. As a young midshipman, his first assignment was to the battleship HMS Royal Sovereign - then attached to the British Grand Fleet. Less than a month later he was witnessing the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet. Within another three years he had travelled around the Mediterranean, participating in bombardment operations, amphibious landings (and evacuations), leading armed shore parties on pacification and occasional combat missions, and even found time for considerable sight-seeing! The latter including a somewhat gruesome tour of the Gallipoli beaches, still strewn with the human and material debris of 1915/16. The first album concludes in about 1925, towards the end of Buss' first Mediterranean deployment.
Midshipman Buss suited up for a dive, Sea of Marmara, 29th July 1920
My particular fascination with this album - and the great enjoyment I derived from researching and cataloguing the images - is the perspective it gives of British naval activity in the aftermath of the First World War. While the end of the War heralded an immediate reduction of the fighting strength of the Royal Navy for reasons of economy, it also resulted in a corresponding increase in its deployment obligations. Through the first years of the 1920s, British warships were involved in fully-fledged military campaigns in the Baltic and Black Seas. These were primarily directed at the containment of Bolshevik (Russian communist) expansion, but in the Mediterranean the British remit also included an attempt to support the tottering Ottoman government in the face of Kemal Ataturk's nationalist uprising, and involvement in the bloody Græco-Turkish conflict. The value of this album for me lies in the 'view from the ground' that it provides of these events, a fine complement to other less personal operational histories of this fascinating period of the Navy's history.