40 Years After the Royal Navy’s Last Call, Its Rum Is for Sale
By ROBERT SIMONSON
Starting this week, diners at Greenwich Village’s Minetta Tavern can drink like a sailor. But they’ll have to spend like a sailor to do so.
Minetta Tavern recently acquired four bottles of what is being billed as Black Tot Rum. Black Tot Day was the name attached by Royal Navy men to the dark date of July 31, 1970, when British sailors were accorded their final daily “tot,” or ration, of rum. The tradition went back centuries, but was discontinued as it fell out of favor with a more censorious public, as well as the crewmen themselves. Sailors wore black armbands when the sun rose on that last day of on-deck drinking. On the H.M.S. Fife, docked in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, there was a 21-gun salute, according to Wayne Curtis’s history, “And a Bottle of Rum.”
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