Here are some reviews selected by one of CFS's publishers from the period 1914-1919:

From SONGS AND CHANTIES, edited by Cicely Fox Smith, published by Elkins Mathews, London, ©1919. p. 232.

Spectator

"No one, not even Mr. Mansfield, has written finer sea ballads or come closer to the heart of those who go down to the great waters. In any anthology of the sea Miss Fox Smith's 'Ballad of the Matterhorn,' 'Bill the Dreamer,' 'The Last of the Sealing Fleet' and 'Rathlin Head' must occupy a high place."

Times

"It is not likely that many lovers of sea-songs have missed the voice of Miss Fox Smith, but if they do not know her 'Songs in Sail' let them read 'Sailor Town' – the dancing colours and fresh scents of the harbour, the rush of the sea and wind, the cheery pathos of the outward-bound, the sailor's homesickness – all this is carried on the rhythm of her verses with a vividness hardly equaled by any other verse writer of the day."

Spectator

"Miss Fox Smith is one of the few people living who can write a real 'chanty' combining a mastery of sea-lingo with perfect command of sea rhythms."

Times

"These are the right stuff."

Evening Standard

"Ballads and songs of the war, reeking of spindrift and spume, breezy and direct as those who go down to the sea in ships."

Nautical Magazine

"Mr. C. Fox Smith must be congratulated on his dainty little volume of poems, 'The Naval Crown.' We remember how well we enjoyed the author's 'Sailor Town' and can say that the enjoyment and high opinion we then formed of the author have been in no way lessened by the present volume."

Navy

"The writer's vocabulary of sea phrases is striking and characteristic; the technicalities proclaim a real sea lover, and the tone and colour are only excelled by the lilt of the verses."

Times

"Miss C. Fox Smith's naval verse … shows here, as in her former collection, her exceptional métier for apt metrical celebration of the spirit, the humour of the pathos of war and of the fighting man."

Syren

"An excellent little collection of ballads referring to various phases of the war, some of which our readers have doubtless made the acquaintance of in the pages of 'Punch.' The 'Rhyme of the Inisfail' … is the gem, and an excellent one, of the collection. The author has a capital vein of humour."

Manchester City News

"The sea songs have the breath and the sound and the motion of the waters in them."

Cheerily,
Charley Noble