Excerpt from Sam Noble, Tween Decks in the Seventies: An Autobiography IT gives me much pleasure to write a foreword to Mr. Sam Noble's engrossing book. In it the Author skilfully depicts life in the Navy of that period in its lights and shadows, though he in his love and loyalty of the Sea Service is a healthy optimist. Above all he shows the great brotherhood of the Seaman and rank and file 'tween decks which can hardly be rivalled by the modern comradeship of the Great War. The greatest maritime power of the world has not yet realised how much it owes to the loyalty, cheerfulness and endurance of the rank and file of the lower deck, not only in recent wars, including the Great War 1914 - 18, but in times of piping peace. Think of 1s. 7d. A day for an able seaman, until 1919 - 20, and as Mr. Noble describes in his book, the four long years of separation, since reduced to two years as a general rule, the coarse fare, the weevilly biscuit in default of bread, and frequently the warfare against wind and weather when sail power was constantly used, the seaman literally at times had to hold on with the agility of a monkey, as everybody who has experienced handling sails on a swaying yard in a rough sea knows to his cost. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.