Can you help interpret this 1885-1920 record?

[dermotb]

'List and No' concerns pay ledgers on each of his ships. The No. would be his Ship's Book No. I may be wrong [it was a while ago ] but I am sure in the early days of my training, before compulsory banking, we ratings were 'fallen in' in Ship's Book Number order to receive our pay.

Thank you for that.

wrt the desertion mentioned earlier above, I'm wondering if they would bother trying to find someone who ran off in an overseas colony, because as far as I know, he never got into trouble about it, and actually served in the army in Kenya in WW2.

[Allan F Sparrow]

An interesting question, to which I have no answer. It seems to me an odd place to desert, anyway, though it was a British colony at the time. I would have thought he would have been relatively easy to find. However, "Run" was certainly the traditional word used for leaving the navy by desertion, the other common entries being D (discharged) and DD (discharged dead).

[dermotb]

lol, typical military to bother discharging someone who died.

Our deserter's brothers followed him to East Africa a few years later (Ireland was pretty depressing in the 1930's),and I was born there. Now I think I know how it all started!

[Allan F Sparrow]

Now that is an interesting story! Better than anything in my tree, even though one of my great-grandfathers was killed in a mine explosion...

I think even the navy was amused about DD. I suspect it began with D being used for discharged, and then someone saying, what do we write for the dead? The answer was DD, and then someone interpreted it to mean "Discharged, dead" - but I may be completely wrong about this!