The Buzz on the Lower Deck
Every organisation has its unofficial communications network. In the Royal Navy it was known simply as "the buzz". It required no noticeboard, no signal and certainly no official approval. News travelled by word of mouth with astonishing speed, passing through messdecks, workshops, passageways and upper decks until, within remarkably little time, almost everyone aboard knew the story. Where it began was often impossible to discover. By the time it reached the other end of the ship it had usually acquired a little extra polish, a little more certainty and occasionally a better ending.
What mattered was not whether every detail proved correct. The lower deck had already decided what it believed.
One missile firing in the Irish Sea demonstrated the process perfectly.
HMS Glamorgan had been ordered to carry out a live firing of her Seaslug missile system on the Aberporth range. As one of the Royal Navy's principal long-range anti-aircraft weapons of the period, Seaslug was an impressive piece of engineering. Mounted on its large launcher abaft the flight deck, it possessed a physical presence that ensured nobody ignored it when it was preparing to fire.
The launch itself was certainly memorable. Smoke billowed across the quarterdeck as the booster motors ignited, the missile accelerated away from the ship with considerable noise, and for a few moments it looked every inch the sophisticated weapon system that official photographs always suggested.
After that, most of the ship's company saw very little.
Only those directly involved in tracking the exercise knew precisely what had happened next. The remainder watched until the missile disappeared into the distance before returning to their normal duties. Like countless exercises before it, the firing appeared to have concluded.
Then the buzz began.
Somewhere aboard ship came the story that the missile had failed to behave as intended. Details varied, as they invariably did, but the central theme remained remarkably consistent. The weapon, it was said, had wandered away from its planned course before eventually finding an altogether more agricultural target somewhere in County Down. Before very long, the unfortunate victim had acquired four legs and a tail.
According to the lower deck, the Royal Navy had just destroyed an Irish cow.
Whether the story possessed any foundation in fact mattered surprisingly little to its survival. By the time it had circulated through the ship it had already become accepted lower-deck history. No official announcement appeared to contradict it and no authoritative explanation arrived to replace it. In the absence of information, sailors did what sailors have always done. They filled the silence themselves.
The fascinating part was not the alleged fate of the missile, but the speed with which the story travelled. Within hours it seemed impossible to find anyone who had not heard it. Like all good naval rumours, every retelling came from somebody who knew somebody else who had spoken to somebody directly involved. The chain of authority was always just convincing enough to discourage further questions.
The Royal Navy, like any disciplined organisation, relied upon formal channels of communication. Alongside them existed another system altogether. It had no official status, yet it functioned with extraordinary efficiency. Sailors called it "the buzz", and ignoring it was rarely wise. It carried everything from harmless gossip to surprisingly accurate operational news, mixed together in proportions that varied from one day to the next.
The story of the wandering Seaslug quickly joined that tradition. Whether entirely true, partly true or improved by repeated telling scarcely altered its importance aboard ship. It became one of those stories that belonged to the lower deck rather than to official records, repeated because it was memorable, amusing and entirely believable to those who had been there.
Long after the details of the exercise itself had faded, the buzz remained. In many ways that was entirely appropriate. Guided missiles were designed to travel long distances, but few ever travelled as far through a ship's company as the story that followed one particular firing in the Irish Sea.
Rn-E-130: After the Missile Had Gone
Primary source: RN-006
RN-E-129
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