"You don't make a torpedo gunner out of a drunkard": Agnes Weston, temperance, and the British navy.

Public interest in the naval seaman grew dramatically during the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain. Images of the British bluejacket entered the popular imagination through such diverse means as advertising, entertainment, newspapers, politics and philanthropy. Yet these images were hardly consistent. While some representations portrayed naval seamen as dutiful patriotic servants of the Empire, other popular imagery presented them as irresponsible, drunken, gallivanting tars who became social dangers once ashore. The commodification of the sailor is scarcely a substantive reflection upon the real lives of British naval men during this period but rather offers access to the attitudes and anxieties that existed within British society. From the 1870s the Royal Naval Temperance Society (RNTS), under the direction of Agnes Weston, relied upon the recognizable image of the drunken sailor, as well as stories of naval teetotallers, to publicize the cause of naval temperance among subscribers and naval men. This article is an examination of the strategies of Agnes Weston to achieve a dry British navy. For Weston, temperance was an issue of salvation – of saving drunken souls. Despite her religious motives, Weston justified naval temperance by employing a variety of different arguments in order to garner the attention of both the navy and the public. In pa rticular, Weston appealed to both naval men and subscribers through strategies that evoked duty to family, God, and nation. By categorizing naval temperance as a national, social, and religious imperative, Weston expected to increase the range of its appeal. Although Weston became famous among the British public for her effo rts to reform the navy morally, she was never able to gain widespread suppo rt among naval men for her teetotalism. In fact, her Christian temperance mission often elicited scorn from naval men who, by the early twentieth century, criticized the maternalism of her naval charity. Naval men, fully aware of their responsibilities as husbands, Christians, and soldiers, disdained her benevolence because it reduced them to children who required constant guidance and protection instead of treating them as autonomous individuals. Although naval seamen had few avenues for self-representation, especially given that A rticle 12 of the Queen's Regulations forbade naval personnel to speak publicly about naval affairs, naval men did comment on Weston's stereotypic representations. Through an examination of published