HMS Shitty
The HMS Shitty is a name used by several warships in the English and later British Royal Navy. In each and every case they have been notorious for being the worst ship to sail the seas anywhere on the globe.
HMS Shitty (1690 - 1692)[edit]
In 1689 William of Orange and his wife Not-Bloody-Mary officially took control of Great Britain in a bloodless uprising against King James II. This political event goes by the name of the 'Glorious Revolution' to distinguish it from the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
Amongst those crossing the sea from the Netherlands to England included Olaf van Shitty. The new monarchs William III and Queen Mary II (later to become the furnishing suppliers William & Mary) decreed that no one would laugh at Shitty's name in court as he was a trusted advisor and knew where the bodies were buried. In honour of his patrons - and at his own expense - Shitty was granted the naming rights for a new wooden battleship. He gladly agreed.
Shitty was a fanatical Protestant and had had a vehement dislike for the previous English King, and so James II/VII provided an unflattering model for the ship's figurehead, carved in a Spitting Image style with a massive nose and womanly lips "for kissing the arse of the Pope and the King of France". William III, who loved a good laugh, proclaimed the ship "Fuyckking hilariyus, syrs!" (using his best imitation of a Dutch accent) whilst swanning around Portsmouth in his periwig and expensive frock-coat. His co-ruler, Queen Mary, also enjoyed the ship: "The tyrant Daddy does look silly", she quipped. "It is mye decision, syrs" said King William. "That so fyne a shippe be this, that I shalle propose to mye Parliament that theye do pute forwarde and passe a bille that will mean that England and her nayve muste have a shippe called the Shitty builte once everye centurie. I will aske them to mayke it so that this bille cannote be overturned. Thus will my fyne friend Olaf van Shitty be immortalised down the ages!"
Her captain was the famous William "Big Bouncing Bill" Barstard, a former pirate who had given up raiding Spanish ships illegally and decided to raid them legally instead. The HMS Shitty was soon sent into action, sailing to Jamaica to see off a couple of Privateers and coincidentally capture a Spanish treasure galleon that had "sailed within 500 miles of English territorial waters in violation of several Acts of Parliament and the opinions of their Joint Majesties".
The Shitty engaged the Privateer They See Me Rolling, firing off several broadsides. Or at least that was the theory. Instead, every single cannon exploded and their barrels were left all splayed like a cheap prank cigar. The privateer crew laughed at the rubbish English warship and, pulling down their breeches, showed their arses. Captain Barstard was furious and ordered the ship to turn, to train the remaining guns on them. Unfortunately, the ship's wheel "did break off in the pilot's hand" and the Shitty was left sailing in circles. Not long after this, the privateers got tired of displaying their daisies and simply holed the English ship until she sunk. "What a shitty ship the Shitty was" quipped the privateer's captain, only in a foreign language. There were no survivors.
HMS Shitty (1798 - 1802)[edit]
For some reason the Royal Navy didn't take the hint and another HMS Shitty was commissioned. This time she was to be a fine ship of the line, destined to see off the French revolutionary navy and to defend British possessions in North American from the yankee rebel. Mindful of the fate of her name-sake, the War Minister, Jacob Rees-Simpkins-Snuffbox ordered her to be built in "the finest shipyard in all of England" which were actually in Glasgow in Scotland. An awful lot of pride and effort went into making the Shitty the most marvellous, modern warship in the world. In the tradition of the 18th century Shitty, a satirical cartoon was painted in her state room portraying George Washington and Robespierre being felated by toothless crones whilst saying something overly long and complicated in a large ellipse. It made George III laugh so hard he farted, anyway[1].
HMSShitty was indeed a splendid sight as she sailed into the Irish Sea. MPs on both sides of the house proclaimed her to be "a Queen of the ocean" and "the greatest ship to ever set sail" and "truly proof positive of the benefits of monarchy". Rather than place an ex-pirate in charge, her captain was the splendid Sir Alfred Shine-Smile, a handsome man of 37 and naval veteran of the American Revolutionary war who had slept with his fair share of society ladies. He hand-picked a crew of the "finest men in all of England"[2]. Among them were the seamen Hugh, Pugh, Barney, Magrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, and, of course, Gruber. Shine-Smile literally kept a tight ship and was popular amongst his rhyming seamen. When the Shitty sailed triumphantly up the River Thames, the Prince Regent himself came aboard (for once without a whore on his arm) and proclaimed her "truly a ship that will mean that the word "Shitty", far from being associated with the bowel movements so popular with the comedians and satirists of this age, shall instead come to mean a fine vessel, full of fine seamen, and captained by the most splendid of English Englishmen."[3].
The early 19th century being a time of much strife in the world, on land and sea, it wasn't long before the Shitty was put to work against the navy of republican France. Parliament decided that the Shitty should be the flagship of the British fleet and carry Admiral Admirable (also known as Mister Appropriately-named) himself. It was as the fleet was sailing from Portsmouth towards the French coast to engage the enemy flotilla that problems were noticed, though. For a start, they were sure the holds of His Majesty's flagship shouldn't be filling with water like that. And that it was a bit rum if the main mast snapped in "a bit of strong wind", taking the crows nest with it and meaning that the Admiral Admirable - red faced - had to hail the fellow Ship of the Line Jolly Good Shot and board her instead, assuring Captain Shine-Smile that "Your ship, sir, will remain the pride of His Majesty's fleet once your men are put to work in fixing whatever it is that ails her."
And so Shine-Smile got the crew to work fixing the mast and plugging the leaks as best they could. Meanwhile the rest of the fleet set sail towards France and the dastardly republican navy. The tragedy is that the captain found that no matter how well his crew tried they could not quite plug the leak. Whenever they covered one up, another one would spring. In the end they started filling buckets and chucking them over the side. Then, after they'd recovered from their "prune ration" they began using the buckets to get rid of the water. It wasn't until the British fleet started returning (from a victory, of course) that the Shitty started to take on more water than she throw over the side. Admiral Admirable was shocked to see the Shitty flounder and insisted on tying her to the Jolly Good Shot and towing her back to Portsmouth.
The Shitty eventually sank within site of the Portsmouth. Shine-Smile was court-martialed and shot. Horatio Nelson later said that he was glad the Shitty wasn't able to take part in the Battle of Trafalgar, otherwise the English would have lost. Nelson died in the battle and it then became a naval tradition never to mention Shitty by name in case it brought bad luck.
HMS Shitty (1898 - 1919)[edit]
Conflicted both by the Williamite act of Parliament and the naval tradition, the next Shitty to be commissioned was known by employees of the Royal Navy as "That Ship". Determined that she should never see combat, the navy ordered that whilst the new Shitty was officially a cruiser she was unofficially merely a hospital ship who would never leave Portsmouth dock. "What can go wrong?" said her unimaginative captain, Randy Shufflebottom. Well plenty as it happened.
The new Shitty's first role was to take part in Boer War. She was sent to South Africa and anchored in Cape Town to defend the city from the Boer navy and to look after naval warfare casualties. That there was no Boer navy seems to have escaped Britain's naval chiefs was immaterial. There she languished to defend against a threat that never came. However the ship did gain a bad reputation for bad plumbing and would often stink as the ship's toilets got blocked with some imperial strength excrement.
The new naval First Sea Lord, Jackie Kennedy Fisher had the Shitty marked down to be junked when he brought in his 'big guns/no armour' vision for the Royal Navy[4]. A lot of older or obsolete battleships were scrapped or used as floating casinos. The Shitty was put down a number of times to be sent to the knacker's yard but somehow, she always slipped away. Though designed never to take action, the Shitty was instead to 'fly the dirty flag' around various British Empire outposts. In 1906 she was sent to Tangiers to scare the Moroccans and in 1908 ended up off the coast of Turkey when the Ottoman Empire appeared to be about to collapse.
Her captain during all this time was Randy Shufflebottom. He itched for some 'excitement' but each time when he thought the Shitty was about to do something useful, accidents would happen. In 1910 she ran into a cross channel ferry and in 1911 was again send to Morocco - this time to scare the Wilhelm II. He looked at the Shitty and said 'we have no need to fear the British anymore if they send us at a time in 'crisis'. The British navy agreed and sold the ship to the Turks who were looking to boost their own obsolete naval forces.
In July 1914, a crew of Turkish sailors appeared in Portsmouth to take over the Shitty, renamed Sultan Boktan. However Winston Churchill cancelled the deal and brought the Shitty back into active commission when Turkey joined Germany and Austria-Hungary as an ally in the First World War. Also brought back was as Rear Admiral Randy Shufflebottom who had thought his days on the Shitty were behind him. Anxious to get back on shore and prune his roses, Shufflebottom volunteered his ship to take part in numerous actions. The Shitty was marked down to take part in the attack on Turkey in the Dardanelles (to 'rub Johnny Turk's nose in it') but the Shitty's appalling plumbing stopped her in Cyprus when a blocked loo exploded and covered most of the deck in a thick layer of crap. In 1916, the Shitty was part of the British fleet at the Battle of Jutland but the ship got lost and chased fishing boats under the impression they were disguised German Dreadnoughts. This saw Shufflebottom permanently retired and the ship was sent to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys as punishment,
By 1919 the "Shitty" was moored in the British naval base and was there when the Germans turned up to have their fleet interned whilst negotiations to achieve a final peace treaty to end the First World War were under way. For a few months the Shitty stayed within naked-arse-displaying-distance of the German battleships. Then in June 1919 the German crews on board their ships scuttled them [5] when they were told the British would 'get the lot'. In the confusion, the Shitty also believed it had a received a message to 'sink that bugger whilst no one would miss her'. The crew didn't flush the toilets and within hours the Shitty was sinking under the weight of its own sewage. The crew were taken off by another ship (after a thorough scrub and hose down with water from the harbour). Eventually the Shitty turned over and sank, bottom up.
Over the next 20 years, a lot of the old German fleet was retrieved for scrap metal, but the Admiralty insisted that NO ONE touch the Shitty. Not as a mark of respect but a fear of how much crap was still in her hull and the fear of pollution.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ You may well say "so what he was mad and probably laughed at most things" and you'd be WRONG and IGNORANT of the FACTS of MENTAL ILLNESS you EXPRESS-READING CUNT
- ↑ and Scotland, and Wales, and Ireland, but nobody ever mentioned that back then
- ↑ Gawd, don't you miss the days when they where honest and there wasn't all this "British" crap and pretence the Scots, Welsh and Irish were for anything other than looking miserable and taxing
- ↑ His birth name was John but he preferred to be called 'Jackie' to confuse the Germans to his gender preference.
- ↑ All German ships were built with a giant plug in their keels that could be pulled at a moment's notice. The British considered this to be 'a dirty Hun trick'.