Roll on the Rodney

DESCRIPTION: Verses vary; recognized by the chorus: "Roll on the Rodney/the Nelson/the Hood/Renown, This (four-funnelled) bastard (is no god-damned good)/Is getting me down." "This is my story, this is my song, Been in commission for too long"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1989 (Philippson)
KEYWORDS: navy hardtimes derivative ship
FOUND IN: Britain
Roud #29721
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "A Bunch of Banshee Airmen" ("Roll on the [ship name]" lyric)
cf. "She's a Tiddley Ship" ("Roll on the [ship name]" lyric))
cf. "Shire, Shire, Somersetshire" ("Roll on the [ship name]" lyric)
cf. "Blessed Assurance" (tune)
NOTES [519 words]: This item poses a conundrum: It seems to exist as a standalone fragment, with the tune of "Blessed Assurance" ("This is my story, this is my song, Loving my savior all the day long"), but also as a floating chorus used in several of the songs listed in the cross-references. I'm listing it here with its own Roud number, but I don't know if it can clearly be distinguished from the songs that borrow it -- which often change the tune.
The fact that it exists on its own seems to be proved by the existence of a book based on it: David Phillipson, Roll on the Rodney: Life on the Lower Decks of Royal Navy Warships After the Second World War. It uses the song lyric in the dedication, but ironically the index never mentions the Nelson, Rodney, or Renown, all of which survived World War II but were scrapped soon after.
Most of my notes on this song were originally from "She's a Tiddley Ship," which you should still see, but I will copy the relevant portions here, mentioning the ships which seem to have entered particular versions of this chorus. Some of these include:
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.
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 to be very damage-prone;, it featured a lot of weight-saving techniques that cost them, among other things, about five knots of speed and a rational distribution of turrets).
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. - RBW
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File: XRolRodn

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