Greenwich is home to the Royal Navy. The wide riverside facade of the Christopher Wren designed Royal Naval College has been greeted with fond relief by generations of homecoming sailors. It is both symbol and engine of a long seafaring tradition.
Who knows how many hundreds of books have been written about the Senior Service. Many readers will have their favorites. Maybe a biography of Admiral Lord Nelson or one of C S Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels. Mine is a wonderfully rumbustious memoir of an Able Seamen who served at the tail end of World War Two and through the early months of the peace.
George Melly never saw active service and never knowingly committed an act of bravery or self-sacrifice. But his book, 'Rum, Bum and Concertina', records that he did have a lot of fun. He spent most of his brief naval career on punishment duties or running up to London to hang out with the surrealist painters and poets among the refugees of the Parisian art world who had made their temporary home there, or having illicit sex with his comrades in the nooks and crannies of various of Her Majesty's Ships of the Line.
Not long after I read this book I was regaling some fellow dinner party guests with stories from it. When I concluded that the Navy sounded like a big gay love jamboree a rather tight lipped young man at the other end of the table said, 'Not on my watch, it isn't.'
Ooh er!
Notwithstanding George Melly's extra-curricular activities, the Royal Navy was a hugely successful organization and at one time policed the biggest land empire the world has ever known. When Queen Victoria was, as Leonard Cohen has it, 'stern governess of all those huge pink maps', Britain did indeed rule the waves.
So it made sense, when an international conference met in Washington D.C. In 1884, to agree on a Prime Meridian, a line of 0° longitude, that the British standard was chosen. And the British line goes through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Not that there weren't competitors. At various time there were meridians defined that passed through Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Warsaw, Jerusalem and Antwerp among many other cities. There was one in Kyoto. In the United States, Philadelphia had one and Washington D.C. itself had another. Mecca had one.
But in 1884 , according to Wikipedia, 'over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage used it (Greenwich) as the reference meridian on their maps'. So Greenwich got the gig. And has it for the foreseeable future.
Although, there is currently an Islamic movement for Mecca to be the Prime Meridian. To this end the world's largest clock has been built and on 11 August 2010 (1 Ramadan, AH 1431) it was started up in that city. We'll see.
Despite the maritime associations of Greenwich it won't be the venue for any sailing or boating events during the Olympic Games. However, Greenwich Park, which occupies the ground between The Royal Observatory at the top of Greenwich Hill and The Old Royal Naval College at the bottom, will host the Olympic and Paralympic Equestrian competitions and the running and shooting section of the Modern Pentathlon.
A temporary Cross Country course will be laid out in the Park and a temporary arena will built within the grounds of the National Maritime Museum there. It's not clear at the moment which of these will be in the western hemisphere and which in the eastern.
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