"I was cutting hair on the side - and now I'm styling 400 shipmates on HMS Prince of Wales during deployment"

Engineering Technician Finn Davison, 19, has cut the hair of 400 shipmates since the aircraft carrier deployed from his home-city on April 22. While many sailors styled their own locks of hair, or visited salons ashore, ET Davison has helped roughly a quarter of the ship’s company.

This included the Commander of the UK Carrier Strike Group (UKCSG), Commodore James Blackmore, who entrusted ET Davison with the clippers ahead of meetings with senior military officials and media appearances.

“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,” he 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.”

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ET Davison taught himself barber skills while training at HMS Raleigh, and continued when he was deployed on HMS Prince of Wales. Capital ships used to have a dedicated hairdressers – a compartment fitted out with a barber’s chair and all the cutting implements of the day – which was run by a few sailors when they weren’t on duty.

In modern times, the situation is more ad hoc. Ahead of the carrier’s visit to Australia there was a rush of sailors asking for mullets, which is now permitted in the Royal Navy under new regulations. When he isn’t styling his fellow shipmates, ET Davison is one of HMS Prince of Wales’ communications experts, tasked with looking after many of the IT systems on board.

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.