Old Man Rhythm a-gits-a in my shoes
It ain’t no use just a-singin’ the blues
Be my guest, you got nothing to lose
Won’t you let me take you on a sea cruise!

Going on a sea cruise with Jerry Lee Lewis these days would be mildly amusing. He’s 73 years old and isn’t likely to get you into too much trouble on board. Sailing away with him in the 1950s and ’60s would probably have been outright dangerous.

But this is 1932 and Jerry Lee hasn’t been born yet, so we can safely check out the ropes, as it were. These items from Canadian Pacific are menu cards — you can tell because there are seagulls on them, and seagulls are indigenous to restaurants, especially but not necessarily floating ones.

It’s late August near the end of a fine summer in Britain, and we’re sailing from Liverpool to Quebec City and then Montreal aboard the 20,000-ton steamship Duchess of York, with calls in Belfast and Greenock to pick up potatoes and Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s promising to do his “King of the World” stunt off the bow.

Our skipper is RN Stuart, VC, DSO, RNR, but mealtime goes far beyond alphabet soup. That Mignon of Pork with Pineapple Mikado sounds quite fetching.

Commander Stuart’s telling his war stories between courses. His mum was the daughter of an Australian master mariner and his dad grew up on Prince Edward Island, and certainly knew his way around a boat too. So it was a kick in the head in 1914 when young Ronald Niel got stuck on a beat-up old destroyer, the HMS Opossum, doing harbour patrols. At one point he actually begged to get tossed to the army instead.

But adventure came along two years later in the form of a first lieutenant’s gig on the HMS Farnborough, which was a Q-ship — a navy lurker disguised as merchant vessel that, ironically enough, played possum when a German submarine attacked. Once the sub came close to survey the damage it had done, the Farnborough clobbered it.

Yes, the Farnborough would have to take an occasional hit to make this strategy work, and the hit it took from the U-83 proved fatal. The captain made sure he was the last to leave, only to discover Stuart still on board waiting for him to get clear. That’s how he got his first Victoria Cross.

He returned to the scene of the crime on the HMS Pargust, and in mid-1917 another U-boat poked a massive hole in it. Both the U-boat and the ship were wrecked, but Stuart got another VC — this time on behalf of the whole crew — and it was pinned on him by no less than King George V.

Then he got his own ship, the HMS Tamarisk, whose rescue of an American destroyer earned Stuart his US Navy Cross. And now here he is having dinner with us, grandly bemedalled, and he only just celebrated his 46th birthday on the day we left his birthplace, Liverpool.

Commander Stuart is the SS Duchess of York’s first captain, and thanks to his war heroics the ship flies the Blue Ensign to signify his presence.

What shall we have for dessert?

The Duchess would go on to ply the New York-to-Bermuda route and then, in 1940, began new life as a troopship. On July 11, 1943, Luftwaffe bombers sank her off the Spanish coast with 600 men aboard, all but 27 of whom were rescued.

Stuart was by then in the Royal Naval Reserve and serving part-time as naval aide-de-camp to King George VI. Meanwhile he had his civilian job with Canadian Pacific in Montreal and then London, where he was general manager.

He retired to Charing, Kent, in 1951 and became one of those old geezers who jeers loudly at the screen in the cinema and shouts “Mush!” during the corny bits. That too came to an end in 1954, but Jerry Lee Lewis was just starting out. That was the year he cut his first demo.

You can find Jerry Lee on Wikipedia, of course, but Captain Stuart is there too!

I’ve got to get to moving, baby
Get my hat off the rack
I got the boogie woogie
Like a knife in my back
Be my guest you got nothing to lose
Won’t you let me take you on a sea cruise!

Here’s Jerry Lee doing “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” in 1957 …