The Dido Papers

After two years at the Britannia Naval College at Dartmouth, Bryan Godfrey Faussett joined his first ship, HMS Dido in June 1879. From the day he joined her he wrote long letters home to his family and friends. The Dido went to West Africa, South and East Africa and the letters recount his experiences as a young man of 15 from when he first joined. Remarkably, he made copies of all the letters that he wrote home and these copies provide a very rare glimpse of the life of a young midshipman in the Royal Navy of the mid-Victorian era. The letters cover the period from June 1879 until April 1881. He experiences not only the life of a young midshipman, learning the ways of a naval warship, but also visiting many places in West Africa which very few, if any, of his contemporaries at home would have any knowledge of whatsoever. His letters are fluent and well-written and it is easy to forget that they are written by a 15-year-old boy. His descriptions of West Africa, his visits ashore and the remarkable experiences that occur, including the death of the Dido’s captain and his funeral only a few hours later in a west African graveyard, and a meeting of local kings and chieftains in a conference on board Dido in order to resolve disputes, are but two of the remarkable experiences that he undergoes and records. Dido also spends time on the East coast of Africa, anchored off Durban at the time of the first Boer war and his descriptions of that conflict, in which some of the crew of the Dido were sent to fight, are fascinating. In his Foreword, Rear Admiral John Lang says ‘Even a casual glance at this collection of letters is a joy. It is an extraordinary record of a cadet and midshipman in the Victorian Navy and opens a window of life in an era when the passage of time is marked by the receipt and dispatch of periodic letters to and from home’.