Enacted and re-enacted in life and letters: the identity of the Jack Tar, 1930 to date

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the Jack Tar persona during the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the age-related nature of this naval identity, and the complex and changeable relationship it generated between notions of hedonism and respectability. This is assessed through the accounts of trainees at HMS Ganges, one of the navy’s great training establishments. It argues that these boys exploited the idea of the Jack Tar, with its individualistic and self-gratifying connotations, to extract maximum empowerment in terms of contemporary working-class adolescence. This amounted to an idealised, class-specific and age-related vision of manliness that was, moreover, consolidated through their use of the square rig uniform. In reality, though, this identity could never be comprehensively mastered. Civilian society did not always endorse the conviction boys had in its potency and, as they entered adulthood and marriage, the need to perform a respectable selfhood gradually took precedence. In the act of autobiography, though, many retired naval ratings reconnected themselves with - and often defined themselves through - the charismatic identity that had helped to draw them into naval service. The Jack Tar persona was, therefore, the organizing category for a specific working-class youth culture, and the touchstone for lives reimagined in memoir.