Pacific clipper: UK flagship’s barber Finn reaches mane milestone

The young sailor is making a name for himself – perhaps even a second career – as the person to go to aboard the Portsmouth-based warship should their hair need a trim.

In the past Royal Navy capital ships had a dedicated barber’s shop – a compartment fitted out with a barber’s chair and all the cutting implements of the day – run by a couple of ship’s company when they were not on duty (the price in the mid-1920s was a mere 4 pence).

These days there’s no dedicated barber shop – it’s much more ad hoc. Some sailors will cut their own, others will go to stylists ashore.

With hundreds of sailors, aviators and Royal Marines aboard HMS Prince of Wales for months on end during this year’s Operation Highmast deployment, Engineering Technician Finn Davison spied an opportunity.

Finn is one of the communications experts on the UK flagship responsible for maintaining the many IT systems on board.

The 19-year-old from Portsmouth taught himself barber skills while undergoing training at HMS Raleigh and continued when he joined the aircraft carrier, hoping to make a bit of cash on the side and ensure his shipmates’ hair (he specialises in male cuts, but is happy to give female hairstyling a go) was properly coiffed.

Since the carrier deployed in April business has really boomed. By the beginning of September, Finn had styled the heads of 400 shipmates – roughly one quarter of all those aboard the 65,000-tonne warship.

Ahead of the carrier’s visit to Australia there was a rush of sailors asking for mullets (evidently the ‘classic’ 80s hairstyle remains en vogue in the Northern Territories) which, thanks to new regulations, are now permitted in the Royal Navy.

His reputation as a top stylist reached all the way to the carrier’s bridge.

Carrier Strike Group Commander Commodore James Blackmore – who with HMS Prince of Wales’ Commanding Officer Captain Will Blackett is the public face of the deployment, hosting world leaders, senior military officers, politicians, diplomats, plus appearing on TV interviews frequently – entrusted his locks to Finn’s clippers.

“Cutting every ranks hair was not something I set out to do – it just happened that way, naturally up to the captain – that’s when the aspiration to do every rank began,” Finn said.

“After cutting the commodore’s hair, it would be interesting to cut a vice admiral’s hair, or anyone above a commodore for that matter.”

Which sounds like a challenge some of the Royal Navy’s new leaders might like to take on.

Away from these highlights, the other stand-out of the deployment for Finn – and many of his shipmates – has been the carrier’s visit to Japan, which concluded at the beginning of this month.

He joined many of them seizing adventurous training opportunities while in the Land of the Rising Sun to scale Mount Fuji.