My Dad served in the RN from 1939 to 1946. He remembered that only one "sailor song" seemed to have survived to his time in the oral tradition, and it was not a chantey but the forebitter "Magge May".

Before the advent of the portable gramophone, even in the RN men who had instruments (especially fiddles, concertinas and harmonicas) were encouraged to play them during "makers" (make-and-mend periods) and in the dog watches when most if not all of the ship's company was awake and anticipating dinner.

By the time my Dad went to sea, the gramophone (played through the ship's Tannoy system) had supplanted all that. (He developed a hearty dislike for Vera Lynn during patrol operations in the Indian Ocean.) But the boatswain's call survived, possibly because it, too, could be played through the Tannoy. Orders would begin with that piercing shriek and the phrase "Do you hear there? Do you hear there?"