She's a Tiddley Ship

DESCRIPTION: "She's a tiddley ship, through the ocean she'll flip, She's sailing by night and by day. And when she's in motion, she's the pride of the ocean... And 'Jimmy' looks on her with pride," but "This four-funnelled bastard is getting me down."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1987 (Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy)
KEYWORDS: navy sailor work travel hardtimes
FOUND IN: Britain(England(South)) Canada
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy, pp. 23-24, "She's a Tiddley Ship" (1 text, with tune on p. 148)
Roud #32823
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Little Ships (I)" (mentions of HMS Nelson, Rodney, and Hood)
cf ."Roll on the Rodney" ("Roll on the [ship name]" lyric) and references there
SAME TUNE:
Prince Henry Song (File: Hopk044)
A Band of Banshee Airmen (File: Hopk060)
NOTES [679 words]: Uden/Cooper, p. 516, give this definition of "Tiddley (or tiddly): sailors' slang for smart and neat; applied to a best uniform, to a caboose, cabin, or any part of the deck made smart with extra touches of car."
"Jimmy" is presumably "Jimmy-the-one," the first lieutenant (Uden/Cooper, p. 237), who would be responsible for keeping ship and crew in good order.
Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy's version of this refers to the ship Ariadne. The Royal Navy in World War II had a ship Ariadne but she was a minelayer built in the 1940s (Worth, p. 121); I doubt she was so much into spit and polish. There was also a World War I Ariadne, a cruiser of the Diadem class, built 1898-1900 (Wragg, p. 187), which made them almost obsolete by 1914 (indeed, the Ariadne was made into a minelayer, and the rest of the class mostly into training ships). And she had four funnels, as in the song. But she was torpedoed in 1917.
Which brings us to the chorus of this and most of its derivative songs (listed in the Same Tune field), which include lines such as
Roll on the Nelson, the Rodney, Renown,
This four-funnelled bastard is getting me down.
or
Roll on the Nelson, the Rodney, the Hood,
This four-funnelled bastard is no bleeding good.
or
Roll on the Nelson, the Rodney, Renown,
You can't sink the Hood; she's already gone down.
Bradford, p. 16, has another variant,
Roll on the Nelson, the Rodney, the Hood,
This one-funneled basket is no mucking good.
There is also a book, David Phillipson, Roll on the Rodney: Life on the Lower Decks of Royal Navy Warships After the Second World War. I don't know that the title derives from this chorus, but I suspect it was.
Apart from proving that this chorus was extremely well-known, all of these are dating hints. The Hood was a heavy battlecruiser/fast battleship launched in 1918 (Humble, p. 125) and famously sunk by the Bismarck in 1941 (Bradford, pp. 184-185, and indirectly covered throughout the book; there are at least three other books specifically about the Hood, and dozens more about the Bismarck and their battle). For more on her story, see "The Sinking of HMS Hood."
The Renown was a lighter battlecruiser, launched 1916; she survived World War II (Worth, p. 91).
The Nelson and Rodney were sisters, launched in 1927, after the Washington Naval Conference had restricted battleship tonnage (Worth, pp. 92-93; Ballard, p. 85, repeats an old joke that called the two the "Cherry Tree" class because they had been "cut down by Washington"). They carried the heaviest guns ever mounted on a British battleship -- 16"; no other British ship carried anything larger than a 15" gun for more than a brief time. They were the last major British ships commissioned before World War II (which revealed their design, which featured a lot of weight-saving techniques that cost them, among other things, about five knots of speed and a rational distribution of turrets, to be damage-prone).
Thus from 1927 to 1941, the Nelson, the Rodney, and the Hood were the biggest, deadliest ships in the Royal Navy. After the Hood was sunk in 1941, the Renown became the biggest battlecruiser left in the fleet. All of them were scrapped soon after the war. So this chorus must date from after 1927, and the version in which the Hood has been sunk is from 1941-1945.
All of which leaves the identity of the Ariadne a mystery. The four funnels fit the World War I ship, and Tawney thinks the lines were written before the larger ships were commissioned (perhaps by a sailor who wanted to be on a better ship), but the Ariadne and the Nelson and Rodney cannot possibly have overlapped. So it would seem either that the chorus came later or that the name Ariadne was zippered in. Which raises the question of which ship might originally have been the subject of the song -- but I doubt there is enough data to figure that out. It has been suggested that it refers to the four-funnel destroyers that the Americans lent the British; for those, see the notes to "Reuben James." - RBW
BibliographyLast updated in version 6.6
File: Tawn007

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