Ratings and Royal Marines at Clyde Naval Base have enjoyed a traditional Christmas dinner, served to them by officers, including Naval Base Commander Commodore Carolyn Stait, in a custom which harks back to the medieval Lord of Misrule.

Babcock Naval Services (BNS), who run the catering and hotel services for HMS Neptune, near Helensburgh, pulled out all the stops to make sure the festive meal was a gastronomic treat.

And it was rounded off – in every sense of the word – by a jumbo-sized Christmas pudding, enough to feed 60 hungry ratings, which had been prepared specially for the occasion.

The festive – or in many cases not so festive – season has come under the spotlight at the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, which has dipped into its archive for a virtual exhibition.

The museum has created a temporary ‘exhibition’ on its internet site – www.royalnavalmuseum.org – giving an insight into two centuries of sailors celebrating the season of good cheer, using letters, diaries, ship’s leaflets, telegrams and paintings.

Although today’s Fleet does its utmost to celebrate Christmas and New Year, even on deployment, previous generations of sailors have suffered in war and peace at sea over the yuletide, as a rummage through the RNM archives has revealed.

Sailor George Bedford spent “a most sorry Christmas Day” in cutter HMS Etna in Channel storms in 1833, “everything and everybody being wet through and the motion of the vessel very violent”.

The ship’s company of HMS Manica, a kite balloon ship, settled down to the Christmas play Everybody’s Sick of It – presumably World War I, rather than Christmas – in 1916, and more recently chefs in cruiser HMS Jamaica served up Murmansk soup on an Arctic run in December 1942 – days before the ship was in action against Admiral Hipper in the Barents Sea.

The museum has revamped its website and will change its online ‘exhibition’ regularly to give an airing to many items, such as diaries, letters, memoirs, posters, leaflets and photographs, held in Portsmouth historic dockyard, but not necessarily on public show regularly.

Traditionally, mastheads and yardarms of RN ships were decorated with bunches of greenery, a task carried out by the boatswain’s party in the dark hours of the night on December 24.

Messes and messdecks were decorated with paper streamers and foliage, and after Christmas Day church service the Captain and senior officers would carry out rounds – up until the 1920s it was usual for samples of each mess’s Christmas dinner to be offered to the Commanding Officer.

This procession was headed by a boy rating wearing the uniform of the Master-at-Arms, accompanied by a bugler boy dressed as a colour-sergeant, and other ratings dressed as officers – a reference to the Lord of Misrule and Boy Bishops, when for one day society was turned on its head and the lowest ranking members were elevated to the highest status.

That tradition eventually settled down to variations on a theme, where the Captain and most junior rating swap places, and the officers serve Christmas dinner for the rest of the ship’s company.

In the afternoon a sporting contest – usually football or cricket – was staged between officers and ratings.