The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #166764 Message #4012792
Posted By: Bat Goddess
09-Oct-19 - 08:13 PM
Thread Name: What are 'Quarterdeck Manners'?
Subject: What are 'Quarterdeck Manners'?
I'm rereading James Norman Hall's Doctor Dogbody's Leg with my iPad on my knee to look up nautical or 18th century (and early 19th) terminology that I might be unfamiliar with.
In the story "Attica, the Twelfth", the Banyan Club, "an informal organization, social in character...and its membership comprised both wardroom and warrant officers. Captains, lieutenants, masters, gunners, naval surgeons, pursers, and, often, seamen of yet humbler rank, as well as others connected with the Admiralty on shore, sat down together... And the one bylaw of the organization was, 'No quarter-deck manners'."
I've searched but I'm flummoxed. I can find the term used in other fiction, but no explanation or definition.
I might have the meaning expressed in one of my books on nautical and British naval lingo downstairs, but I can't be arsed to leave my book, cat, and sherry and get out of my comfortable bed to try to discover it.
Anybody help me out?
Linn