The seven naval toasts

Naval Toasts
Willem van de Velde the Younger [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
In the officers’ room of a ship of the British Royal Navy, there are seven traditional toasts for the midday meal, one for each day of the week. These are the original versions:

Monday: Our ships at sea
Tuesday: Our men
Wednesday: Ourselves (“as no-one else is likely to concern themselves with our welfare”)
Thursday: A bloody war or a sickly season (and so a chance for promotion!)
Friday: A willing foe and sea room (i.e. room to manoeuvre)
Saturday: Our wives and sweethearts (“may they never meet”)
Sunday: Absent friends

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s