ABSTRACT
Whether or not it will cause naval historians to amend their records, the fact is that many years before the idea occurred to anyone at the Admiralty, what was to become known as the Fleet Air Arm had already been envisaged in song by a humble, anonymous matelot. He was serving on board HMS Prince of Wales when she arrived for the first time at Dover in 1909, and it was on 25 July, whilst the ship was lying alongside the landing pier renamed ‘Prince of Wales Pier’ in her honour, that Louis Blériot flew overhead on his historic channel crossing. Reflecting on the event our unnamed bluejacket, with a vision almost Wellsian in its reach, foresaw the advent of a Royal Navy whose principal strike weapon would be ship-borne aircraft, ‘the Aeroplane Navy’ as he called it. His only mistake lay in believing that this would bring to an end the life of daily drudgery endured by the plebeian Jack Tar. As he saw it, in this new Utopian Navy the seaman and the stoker would be redundant, and he expressed his yearning for the anticipated day of deliverance in one of the Navy's most poignant songs:
