Years of Endurance

This memoir is perhaps one of the most immediate and vivid recollections of life in a Royal Navy battlecruiser to come out of the First World War. John Muir, a surgeon, was the senior medical officer aboard HMS Tiger from her commissioning in October 1914 until his departure in the autumn of 1916 when she was then undergoing repairs at Rosyth to the damage incurred at the battle of Jutland in June that year. Vivid, authoritative, empathetic and beautifully written, this memoir takes the reader right to the center of the action in the first years of the War. The book begins with a stirring account of a night in the wild North Sea with Tiger, head to wind in a gale, steaming at a reduced speed of 10 knots, her purpose to intimidate the German fleet ‘by the mere terror of our presence’. The scene set, Muir’s narrative then describes his experiences from the early days of mobilization, when he was the Senior Medical Officer of the barracks at Chatham, to his arrival aboard Tiger on the Clyde, her commissioning and the drilling of fifteen hundred officers and ratings as she put out to sea for the first time. In the first months of her career she was involved in intercepting the German raid on Scarborough before fighting the battlecruisers Derfflinger, Moltke, and Seydlitz at Dogger Bank. In May 1916 she found herself in line just astern of the doomed Queen Mary at Jutland. Muir had a ringside seat at these critical and decisive clashes and brings remarkable perception and clarity in the telling of his experiences. But more than a narrative of events, his story is also one about the officers and men who were his comrades in those years; about their qualities, their anxieties and the emotional dimension of their experiences. His insights are those of a man trained to understand the human heart, and they bring vividly to life a generation of men who fought at sea more than one hundred years ago. This is a spellbinding and gripping memoir, brought to a new audience in a handsome collectors’ edition for the first time since its publication in 1936.