A thousand years in Portsmouth

Over a thousand years of chequered history, Portsmouth has been a bastion of England, a strongpoint against the invader, a sally port from which have gone for the King’s men and ships to the uttermost parts of the Seven Seas. In all these centuries it has passed through many ordeals, has been burnt and ravaged, has waxed and waned as the Fleet grew or declined. All down the ages, also, we have given our sons to the national service. We have ‘straw’d our best to the weed’s unrest’ in a long record of silent suffering, bravely borne in peace as well as in war, by the widowed and fatherless in our midst, who know so well the tragic price of admiralty. William G Easthope, 1945