The Admiralty’s gaze: disciplining indecency and sodomy in the Edwardian fleet

This article examines the ways that the British Admiralty treated both acts and allegations of indecency during the early twentieth century. Despite the trope of the gay sailor, remarkably little attention has been devoted to the history of homosexuality in the Victorian and Edwardian British navy. The article historicizes the role that the state has played in disciplining sexuality and the potential effect that such efforts had upon the maintenance of discipline and efficiency of the fleet. While few personal accounts have been left, courts-martial cases offer a lens to understand how sex was expressed afloat. The source base for this article includes select courts-martial cases of indecency that are contextualized with a broader statistical survey of Admiralty disciplinary records pertaining to indecency. Research from these courts-martial records suggests the limited effects of punitive disciplinary reforms in deterring acts of indecency and the difficulties that the Admiralty faced in policing men’s sexual activities aboard ship. In particular the article finds that a significant proportion of these cases involved boy ratings as both perpetrators and victims.