Black Tot Day, the Royal Navy's Last Rum Ration

The Royal Navy gave its sailors rum for more than three hundred years. Rum took over from beer after the capture of Jamaica in 1655, and in 1740 Admiral Edward Vernon, nicknamed “Old Grog” for his grogram cloak, ordered it watered down. The mixture took his nickname. By 1850 the ration had settled at an eighth of a pint a day, handed out late each morning when the boatswain blew his whistle and called “Up Spirits!” By the twentieth century, sailors under twenty got no rum ration, and those who chose not to drink were paid threepence a day instead.

In December 1969 the Admiralty Board decided that the rum issue was “no longer compatible with the high standards of efficiency required” in a modern navy, and the House of Commons argued over it on January 28, 1970, in what became known as the Great Rum Debate. The last tot was poured at 11 a.m. on July 31, 1970. Sailors wore black armbands, held mock funerals and tipped their tots over the side. In compensation, each sailor got an extra can of beer a day. The Royal Canadian Navy ended its ration in 1972, and the Royal New Zealand Navy in 1990.

Tom Lewis, a submariner who served through the change, put it in the last verse of A Sailor Ain't a Sailor: “But now we get an extra two because they stopped the tot.” Older songs take the ration for granted. The dying man-of-war’s man in Tom Deadlight asks for “my tot, Matt, before I roll over,” and Sailor's Alphabet gives the forecastle’s view: “Give a sailor his grog an’ there’s nothing goes wrong!”