With A Tot And A Toast, Antigua's Loyalists Remain True To Charles

St. John's, Antigua and Barbuda, Sept 18 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 18th Sep, 2022 ) :In the quickly fading light of a rainy Antiguan dusk, Mike Rose, chairman of the Royal Naval Tot Club, leads a circle of loyalists in raising their daily ration of rum and toasting King Charles III.

"To the King, God bless him," the dozen or so people standing in a semicircle facing Rose say as they knock back the pungent grog -- pleased that, for the first time since Queen Elizabeth II died earlier this month, they got the words right and toasted her son rather than her.

It's an easy mistake to make -- after all, they had toasted the queen in this way every night at 6:00 pm since 1991.

"We've never missed a tot," 81-year-old Rose, originally from Britain, tells AFP as rain hammers down on the roof of the waterfront Galley Bar in the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda.

They are carrying on a tradition that began in 1655, when the British Royal Navy began giving its sailors a daily half pint of rum. Yes -- half a pint of rum, every morning.

It took nearly a century for the admirals to begin reassessing the wisdom of this idea. They ordered that the ration be watered down and split into two portions.

Somehow problems with drunkenness among sailors persisted -- perhaps because, as Rose points out, three parts water to one part rum is still one part rum.

In 1850 it was recommended that the daily ration be eliminated.

That advice was ignored, but the navy did at least begin reducing the ration, eventually landing at one-eighth of an imperial pint -- a "tot," or 71 milliliters (2.4 oz) per day.