The fully rigged ‘Old Billy’ was one of the Navy’s smartest and best-loved flagships, and while Evan-Thomas’s flimsies from sea make it impossible to assert that this plum appointment was unmerited, there is a definite sense of its having been kept open for him. It has already been mentioned that Sir Algernon was a close relation; to this it may be added that Lady Lyons’s family lived near Hugh’s birthplace in Glamorgan. But if the job was won through ‘interest’ – the naval Taffia, one might call it – little surprise would have been evinced at the time and nor should it be in retrospect; that
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