Fiddler's Green: The Great Squandering, 1921 - 2012 (A History of the British Merchant Navy Book 5)

“The ‘whale’ that had defeated the ‘elephants’ of Napoleonic France, Imperial and Nazi Germany was to be killed from within.”

Plunged into depression after a brief, post-war boom, the ships and men of the British Merchant Navy found themselves called upon to repeat their sacrifice to the menace of German hostility within twenty years of the end of the 'war to end all wars'.

For over three years, until the Royal Navy bettered the German U-Boat, the Merchant Navy maintained the supply of food, raw materials and the sinews of war against appalling odds until victory ushered in a new age of peace and prosperity.

It was not to last for long.

Within a generation the Merchant Navy had all but vanished, its companies wound up, its men and women cast aside, its loss to the nation yet to be appreciated in one of the quietest yet most fundamental changes to affect this country at the end of the millennium.

The final instalment in Richard Woodman's ground-breaking five-volume series is as richly illustrated as the previous four and draws to a conclusion this critically acclaimed study into the history and development of the Merchant Navy.

Praise for Richard Woodman’s History of the British Merchant Navy:

‘Richard Woodman reminds us of the importance of merchant ships and our debts to the seafarers – men and women – who manned them.’ - HRH Princess Anne

‘If Neptune’s Trident sets the standard for what is to follow - we can at least rest assured that there is a series that truly does justice to our proud merchant maritime past.’ - Nautilus UK Telegraph

‘Richard Woodman tells many a good tale in this first volume and it is fascinating to read. I highly recommend this first volume in the Neptune s Trident for anyone with an interest in the early modern period. If the rest of the series is as good as this one, they should all be on the bookshelves of those studying the history of Britain, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.’ - Open History

Captain Richard Martin Woodman LVO is an English novelist and naval historian who retired in 1997 from a 37 year nautical career, mainly working for Trinity House, to write full-time. His main work is 14 volumes about the career of Nathaniel Drinkwater, and shorter series about James Dunbar and William Kite, but he also written a range of books on the 18th century and the Second World War.