This is a wonderful little book crammed with information, diagrams, photographs and colour plates. The endpapers are the same but the message does really need repeating - 'The Life Blood of an Empire' includes a black-and-white map of the British Empire, each one of the small black dots on the map representing one British ocean-going merchant vessel at sea on any given day - an estimated 1,850 ships (and, in addition, there are 1,650 smaller ships and coastal vessels). This sets the scene - why Britain needs the Royal Navy to protect its trade worldwide and protect the ships that bring oil, not much of it coming from within the British Empire. What we today would call a certain sea-blindness, this map tries to counter with its showing "the incessant procession [of ships] passing upon its lawful occasion".

Chapter IX is 'Parts of a Warship' and it includes a fold-out drawing of the battleship HMS Barham, showing the armament and the outstanding features of the upper deck, as seen from the starboard side. This includes some 19 features of the 'forebridge and foremast' as well as 44 other features and this is not something I have seem elsewhere. The text includes a detailed explanation of these many features and fittings.

There is so much information herein that one could spend hours just browsing, let alone reading every word. In the chapter about Naval Barracks, I did rather enjoy this note "German propaganda overstepped itself when, during the early days of the present war it announced that HMS Kestrel had been sunk." HMS Kestrel was the commissioned name of the RN Air Station at Worthy Down, near Winchester! ( )