Geoff Brown on Sea Scouts

Lisa: Can you tell me about your uniform when you were young?

Shorts. Summer and winter and you wore thick jumpers and we all wore our uniform when we were afloat as well. Nowadays, they change, they don’t wear the uniforms when they’re afloat. But yes, we wore our uniforms at all times.

But as I say it was the shorts and we wore shorts till ’67 and then we went into long trousers so yes, it’s quite nice in the snow wearing your shorts.

Lisa: Did you wear hats?

Yes, we wore white hats and at that time all Scouts wore hats and then when the uniforms were…well ’67 when the whole of the scouting was changed they got rid of the hats, but Sea Scouts didn’t get rid of hats.

They still kept their sailors’ caps and the…after a few years the Headquarters were talking about getting rid of them.

But the Navy, because of the RN scheme says, “If you get rid of the Sea Scouts’ hats, like that, we will stop the Grants.”

And not all Scouts use hats. We don’t here, wear our Sea Scout hats regularly, we wear baseball caps with our RN number on, RN09, which we use all the year round and the group actually own hats so for special occasions like St George’s Day Parade or the Remembrance Day Parade, we hire them out so to speak.

Because the funny thing is if you go on a Scout Parade and it starts to rain, we’ve got hats.