The Penalty Kick by Robert McCrum

Author:Robert McCrum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

SNLR

Commander McCrum had served in the Royal Navy for more than twenty years. He was known as one of ‘the cleverest officers of his generation’, with a reputation as a gifted, even charismatic, leader of men. He and his fellow officers were seasoned career professionals with years of experience in war and peace. Nevertheless, this dawn protest, on the morning of 15 September 1931, took them somewhere far beyond their training. What followed, up and down the Home Fleet, was the sensation familiar among all penalty-takers doomed to a mis-kick, a mixture of panicking and choking, followed by excruciating depths of depression. At Invergordon, Commander McCrum believed he could persuade his men to obey orders. When he failed, the situation quickly spiralled out of control. Tomkinson, his immediate superior, the Captain of HMS Hood, was so dismasted by this unprecedented situation that all he could do was … nothing. Having choked, he froze. It was now that events began to spin from a drama towards a catastrophe.

In London, the Admiralty did not freeze. Far from it. At first, some sea lords on the Board of Admiralty proposed that the Home Fleet should be bombarded by howitzers from beyond the hills round Cromarty Firth. Within two days, when it became clear that this would be inappropriate (the sailors were in no mood to aggravate their revolt with a full-blown mutiny), the Admiralty cultivated the threat of strike action to manipulate the government into concessions. The events at Invergordon became characterised as a ‘Mutiny’ through the government’s deliberate act of political spin. No one was hanged, but behind closed doors the penalties were swift.

Once the Fleet had steamed south to Portsmouth, Plymouth and Chatham, the ringleaders of the protest were weeded out, but not prosecuted, and simply discharged into civilian life without pay or pension, a ruthless procedure known as SNLR (Services No Longer Required). Next, the Admiralty wrought vengeance on the senior officers of the Home Fleet, regardless of their conduct, in the only way that the Senior Service knew: its role in the life of the nation was to guard the high seas, with severe and salutary penalties. The captains and commanders of the worst affected ships were quietly sidelined with no prospects of future promotion.

As a commander, Cecil McCrum never received any formal notice of his official disgrace, but there were winks and nudges. He soon came to understand that he’d never rise above his present rank, and fell into a profound, annihilating depression. His children remember their father at home during the Christmas holiday in the grip of this black dog, unable to speak, lost in wastes of disappointment and regret, puzzling over the injustice of his fate, and wondering why or how he had failed. Invergordon seemed to have slammed the door on his ambitions for a better life in the Royal Navy, his escape from Milford’s spiral of decline, debt and bankruptcy.

With sensations not dissimilar to grief, like any unsuccessful penalty-taker, he was forced into a grim, professional reckoning.

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