Years of Endurance: Life Aboard the Battlecruiser Tiger, 1914-1916

By John R Muir

Originally Published by Philip Allan 1937
Reprinted: Pen & Sword, 2021

Adrian Roberts, Reviewer

Post Jutland — HMS Tiger

Pen & Sword are to be congratulated for republishing this virtually unique firsthand account of life in the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet during the first half of the Great War, including the Battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland.

John Muir was a man with a passion for the sea and a passion for medicine. He was the Senior Medical Officer aboard the battlecruiser HMS Tiger from her commissioning in December 1914 until after the Battle of Jutland. The battlecruisers on both sides bore the brunt of that encounter and suffered the heaviest losses. Muir retired as a Surgeon Rear-Admiral in 1934 and published this book a couple of years later. In 1939, at the age of 66 he volunteered for war service again. He was told that he was too old to serve as a medical officer, so he enlisted as a Sub-Lieutenant RNVR and was appointed as navigation officer on a small patrol vessel—he had his own yacht and was an expert navigator. Sadly, in June 1940 this vessel triggered a magnetic mine, and he was among those killed.

Tiger's armament as painted by William Lionel Wyllie

The chapters seem to have been written at different times; they are almost stand-alone vignettes of aspects of a naval surgeon’s life at the time, and they all give a window into a lost world. Certainly he is interested in the men as well as the ships. The first couple of chapters cover the mobilization period at the outbreak of the war, when he was serving onshore as medical officer at Chatham Dockyard. He had to prepare the Naval Hospital for expected casualties and create a new hospital from scratch by converting a hostel—a Herculean task of inter-departmental working and administration, all achieved within four weeks without emails or any of the IT support that we cannot do without today!

He was among the first of those posted aboard HMS Tiger in December 1914, and we get details that do not enter the history books: prior to the advent of Portaloos, the dockyard workers used every corner of a ship as a toilet, and whereas normally the dockyard would clean a ship thoroughly before handing it over to the navy, Tiger was needed so urgently that it was handed over in a disgusting state which took weeks to clear up!

The roof of "Q" turret after a German 28 cm (11.0 in)
 shell hit during the Battle of Jutland

In some ways Muir was a man of his time. His creed was absolute loyalty to his king and country, and a complete belief in the justice of the cause for which they were fighting. His chapter on the ordinary seamen, the “Jack Tars,” is affectionate but today could be viewed as somewhat patronizing and romanticized. But in other respects he showed progressive and humane instincts. He was skeptical about religion and showed genuine concern for all those in his care: he was appalled to hear that the families of sailors on active service were being evicted from their homes because land-based workers were better paid and could afford more rent.

The chapter that recounts the Battle of Jutland from the point of view of a gunnery direction officer is admittedly a secondhand account but is still authentic (though the account of the destruction of German destroyers by the secondary armament is over-optimistic). He did not actually witness the awful instantaneous loss of HMS Queen Mary and over 1200 men, immediately ahead of Tiger, but he spoke to men who did. The following chapter is the account of his own experience of the battle. As he says, out of a crew of nearly 1500 men, only about 50 had a view of the fighting and even fewer had any idea of what was going on: the rest did their duty in the bowels of the ship..

Muir was in charge of the First Aid Dressing Station, under the waterline in the B Turret barbette, receiving a stream of casualties, terribly wounded and often already beyond help. The isolation and claustrophobia as they worked solidly for eighteen hours in a small steel room with the guns thundering just above them is recounted. They thought they were done for when they felt a huge concussion outside the hull, and the ship heeled as though it was about to capsize—but what they were experiencing was the explosion that destroyed Queen Mary, and the sharp turn to avoid the wreckage.

A hundred years ago, warfare and society may have been different, but the people and their lives and deaths were the same.

Adrian Roberts