SO, an important guest comes round your house. You open the door and let them in. As they walk across the doormat, in their ear you blast a whistle so loud it deafens them and one so shrill it clears the neighbourhood of cats and dogs.

The 200th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Trafalgar were a splendid sight, but the Queen got her traditional ear-bashing as she was piped aboard ice patrol ship Endurance. The British have many peculiar traditions - most of which involve grown men prancing around in tights - but few are, to the landlubber's untutored ear, as strange as welcoming your guest on board with a drum-busting barrage.

The noise, it turns out, is made by "the bosun's call" - or the pipe belonging to the boatswain. Any 'swain' is a servant, and the boat's servant was the chap in charge of the sails and the rigging.

But a ship is a noisy place to be in charge of anything. There's the noise of the storm, the roar of the gale in the sail, the crash of the water over the deck and the boom of the cannon in the heat of the battle. How do you make yourself heard?

In Greek and Roman galleys, many millennia ago, the slaves were kept in stroke by a fellow on a flute. Not so fancy, the British opted for a pipe - but the idea was the same: a high-pitched command that rose above the din of the sea.

The first recorded use of a pipe is 1248 during the Crusades to the Holy Land when bowmen were summoned up on deck by a blast.

A bosun's pipe doesn't have notes as such. Instead it has three tones: a straight whistle, a warble and a trill. There are enough combinations of these three tones for the bosun to be able to whistle out 50 orders. His men, trained like sheepdogs, obey by pricking up their ears.

Setting sails, heaving lines, lowering boats, hoisting visitors aboard - all had different, distinctive tones.

The order to begin hoisting a visitor aboard was a rapid low, high, low piping. Although sail has gone and radio has come, low-high-low piping survives as a greeting for a distinguished visitor when they come aboard a naval ship.

But more, much more than that, it would seem that this practice gives rise to an everyday expression. Most dictionaries maintain - not especially satisfactorily - that we say "piping hot" because when a dish comes out of the oven it whistles and hisses like a pipe.

Nautical minds, though, might argue that a dish is at its hottest when the bosun pipes out to his men that it has just been served.

EVER wonder why children don't understand history? It's because we hold the 200th anniversary celebrations of Trafalgar - fought on October 21 - on June 28, and celebrate the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War on July 9 and 10 when VE Day is May 8 and VJ Day is August 15.

A FINAL piece of nautical nonsense. A fathom is six feet of water, but it derives from the distance from fingertip to fingertip of a man with his arms outstretched to hug his loved one. It may be fathom to us, but to our Anglo-Saxon ancestors it was 'faetm' which meant "embracing arms". How lovely.

Published: 02/07/2005