This article explores the interrelationship of masculine identity and corporate domesticity through the example of Royal Naval officers and the quarters they occupied on board ship during the 1920s and 1930s. Through a case study of a surviving warship, it establishes the linkages of this environment to a wider upper‐middle‐class world of public school common rooms, gentlemen's clubs and family homes. It analyses the role of this shipboard domesticity in defining the idealised and class‐specific persona of the naval officer: constructed through foregrounding approved qualities (such as dutifulness, restraint and self‐discipline), and suppressing characteristics considered problematic (for instance, introspection, individualism and intellectualism). The article also evaluates the tensions generated by these impersonal and unreachable standards, and the simultaneous ability of the naval home to support corporate and individual behaviours at odds with the officer ideal. The final section explores the gendered nature of these spaces. It argues that while the shipboard home was essentially a male one, the dynamic it engineered between rival ‘male’ and ‘female’ domesticities was invariably relational. Officers’ communal quarters were routinely used to support and intensify oppositional understandings of masculinity and femininity. Nonetheless, attempts to dispute these boundaries and to internalise feminised qualities of sentiment, attachment and dependency can be detected in the privatised domesticity of the cabin.

. Rather than examining the navy as a professional fighting organisation, this essay approaches the institution as one in which a range of masculine identities and lifestyles were constructed. From this perspective, its focus is on the material culture of naval uniform, and the function of uniform in defining and communicating particular understandings of class and masculinity. It demonstrates that the respective uniforms of various ranks associated their wearers with specific clusters of stereotyped socio-cultural qualities and characteristics, and indeed with substantially different incarnations of masculinity. The essay also relates the design of naval uniform to much wider class-and gender-related debates within British society during the period.The overriding concern of most of the existing academic literature on the Royal Navy in the twentieth century has been to assess the organisation's performance of its stated duties: the protection of British interests and sovereignty in peace and war.  The doctoral research from which this essay is drawn insists, however, that the navy can also be approached as an institution within which a range of predominantly masculine identities and lifestyles were assembled, promoted and * I would like to record my gratitude to my supervisors, John Styles and Professor Penny Sparke; to the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the Institute of Historical Research for funding my doctoral research; and to the many retired servicemen from the HMS Ganges Association whose generous assistance made this work possible.

This article explores the interrelationship of masculine identity and corporate domesticity through the example of Royal Naval officers and the quarters they occupied on board ship during the 1920s and 1930s. Through a case study of a surviving warship, it establishes the linkages of this environment to a wider upper‐middle‐class world of public school common rooms, gentlemen's clubs and family homes. It analyses the role of this shipboard domesticity in defining the idealised and class‐specific persona of the naval officer: constructed through foregrounding approved qualities (such as dutifulness, restraint and self‐discipline), and suppressing characteristics considered problematic (for instance, introspection, individualism and intellectualism). The article also evaluates the tensions generated by these impersonal and unreachable standards, and the simultaneous ability of the naval home to support corporate and individual behaviours at odds with the officer ideal. The final section explores the gendered nature of these spaces. It argues that while the shipboard home was essentially a male one, the dynamic it engineered between rival ‘male’ and ‘female’ domesticities was invariably relational. Officers’ communal quarters were routinely used to support and intensify oppositional understandings of masculinity and femininity. Nonetheless, attempts to dispute these boundaries and to internalise feminised qualities of sentiment, attachment and dependency can be detected in the privatised domesticity of the cabin.

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