Roll on the Aeroplane Navy

DESCRIPTION: "I'm sick and tired of the Navy, Of being a bloody AB... My chances in the Navy are small, So roll on the Aeroplane Navy, Were they won't want no flatfoots at all." He currently serves as a stoker, but in the Aeroplane Navy, there will be no need for such
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1959 (Hamphire Telegraph, according to Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy)
KEYWORDS: worker Navy technology nonballad
FOUND IN: Britain(England)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy, pp. 98-99, "Roll On the Aeroplane Navy" (1 text)
NOTES [269 words]: Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy suggests that the tune of this might be "Botany Bay." It looks like a better fit for "Rosin the Beau" to me, but I'm just guessing.
Tawney reports this came from a sailor in the Prince of Wales "when she arrived for the first time at Dover in 1909" and witnessed airman Louis Blériot cross the channel -- a first.
If the dating is right, the airman certainly was prescient, since the first time an aircraft took off from a ship was in 1910 (Preston, pp. 8-9), and it was 1911 before one managed a landing (Preston, pp. 9-10), and while seaplane carriers and cruisers with floatplanes came to exist in World War I, it wasn't until 1917 that a plane managed to land on the first prototype aircraft carrier, HMS Furious (Preston, p. 17-18), which marked the first time a ship could really take care of planes (the earlier experiments had involved temporary platforms which made the ships less capable in combat and so unacceptable in wartime).
The Prince of Wales that the writer supposedly served on was not the famous World War II battleship that fought against the Bismarck and was sunk by the Japanese in late 1941; rather, it was a ship that was already obsolete in 1909; she was a member of the Queen class of 1904. These were "pre-dreadnought" battleships, with four 12" guns and coal-burning triple-expansion engines (Wragg, p. 177); although ships of this class were still around as late as World War I, no one dared use them for much. But their inefficient reciprocal engines meant that they would require a lot of work by stokers, which helps explain this song. - RBW
Bibliography

Preston: Antony Preston, Aircraft Carriers, Gallery, 1978
Wragg: David Wragg, Royal Navy Handbook 1914-1918, Sutton Publishing, 2006

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File: Tawn074

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