RECORDS

Photo J. Russell and Sons.

1882. Captain of H.M.S. “Inflexible.”

v

Preamble

The main purpose of this second book is obvious from its title. It’s mostly a collection of “Records” confirming what has already been written, and relates almost exclusively to years after 1902. As Lord Rosebery has said so well, “The war period in a man’s life has its definite limits”; and that period is what interests the general reader, and for that reason all attempt at a biography has been discarded.

In our present distress wevi certainly want badly just now Nelson’s “Light from Heaven”! Nelson had what the Mystics describe as his “seasons of darkness and desertion.” His enfeebled body and his mind depressed used at times to cast a shade on his soul, such as we now feel as a Nation, but (if I remember right) it is Southey who says that the Sunshine which succeeded led Nelson to believe that it bore with it a prophetic glory, and that the light that led him on was “Light from Heaven.” We don’t see that “Light” as yet. But England never succumbs.

Napoleon at St. Helena told us what all Englishmen have ever instinctively felt—that we should remain a purely Maritime Power; instead, we became in this War a Conscript Nation, sending Armies of Millions to the Continent. If we stuck to the Sea, said Napoleon, we could dictate to the World; so we could. Napoleon again said to the Captain of the British Battleship “Bellerophon”: “Had it not been for you English, I should have been Emperor of the East, but wherever there was water to float a ship, we were sure to find you in the way.” (Yes! we had ships only drawing two feet of water with six-inch guns, that went up the Tigris and won Bagdad. Others, similar, went so many thousand miles up the Yangtsze River in China that they sighted the Mountains of Thibet. Another British Ship of War so many thousand miles up the Amazon River that she sighted the Mountains of Peru, and there not being room to turn she came back stern first. In none of these cases had any War Vessel ever before been seen till these British Vessels investigated those waters and astounded the inhabitants.)

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Again, Napoleon praised our Blockades (Les Anglais bloquent très bien); but very justly of our Diplomacy he thought but ill. Yes, alas! What a Diplomacy it has been!!! If our Blockade had been permitted by the Diplomats to have been effective, it would have finished the War at once. Our Diplomats had Bulgaria in their hands and lost her. It was “Too Late” a year after to offer her the same terms as she had asked the year before. We “kow-towed” to the French when they rebuffed our request for the English Army to be on the Sea Flank and to advance along the Belgian Coast, supported by the British Fleet; and then there would have been no German Submarine War. At the very beginning of the War we deceived the German Ambassador in London and the German Nation by our vacillating Diplomacy. We wrecked the Russian Revolution and turned it into Bolshevism.

I mention these matters to prove the effete, apathetic, indecisive, vacillating Conduct of the War—the War eventually being won by an effective Blockade.

Of all the curious fables I’ve ever come across I quite think the idea that my mother was a Cingalese Princess of exalted rank is the oddest! One can’t see the foundation of it!

“The baseless fabric of a vision!”

My godfather, Major Thurlow (of the 90th Foot), was the “best man” at my mother’s wedding, and very full of her beauty then—she was very young—possibly it was the “Beauté du diable!” She had just emerged from the City of London, where she was born and had spent her life! One grandfather had been an officer under Nelson at Trafalgar, and the other a Lord Mayor! He was Boydell, the very celebrated engraver. He left his fortune to my grandmother, but an alien speculator (a scoundrel) robbed her of it. My mother’s father had, I believe, some vineyards in Portugal, of which the wine pleased William the Fourth, who, I was told, came to his counting house at 149, New Bond Street, to taste it! Next door Emma, Lady Hamilton, used to clean the door steps! She was housemaid there.

2

I don’t think the Fishers at all enjoyed my father (who was a Captain in the 78th Highlanders) marrying into the Lambes! The “City” was abhorred in those days, and the Fishers thought of the tombs of the Fishers in Packington Church, Warwickshire, going back to the dark ages! I, myself, possess the portrait of Sir Clement Fisher, who married Jane Lane, who assisted Charles the Second to escape by disguising his Majesty as her groom and riding behind him on a pillion to Bristol.

The Fishers’ Baronetcy lapsed, as my ancestor after Sir Clement Fisher’s death wouldn’t pay £500 in the nature of fees, I believe. I don’t think he had the money—so my uncle told me. This uncle, by name John Fisher, was over 60 years a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and told me the story of an ancestor who built a wing of Balliol at Oxford, and they—the College Authorities—asked him whether they might place some inscription in his honour on the building! He replied:

“Fisher—non amplius,”

(but someone else told me it was:—

“Verbum non amplius Fisher!”)

My uncle explained that his ancestor only meant just to put his name, and that’s all.

But the College Authorities put it all on:

“Fisher! Not another blessed word is wanted.”

One of my ancestors changed his motto and took these words (I have them on a watch!):—

3

A Poacher, I suppose! or was there a “double entendre”?

I’m told in the old days you could change your motto and your crest as often as you liked, but not your coat of arms!

A succession of ancestors went and dwelt at Bodmin, in Cornwall—all clergymen down to my grandfather, who was Rector of Wavendon, in Bucks, where is a tablet to his brother, who was killed close to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, and who ordered his watch to be sent to my uncle’s relatives with the dent of the bullet that killed him, and that watch I now have.

My uncle was telling this story at a table d’hôte at Brussels a great many years afterwards, and said he had been unable to identify the spot, when an old white-haired gentleman at the table said he had helped to bury him, and next day he took him to the place.

I remember a Dean glancing at me in a Sermon on the Apostles, when he said the first four were all Fishers!

On the death of Sir Robert Fisher of Packington in 1739, a number of family portraits were transferred apparently to the Rev. John Fisher of Bodmin, born January 27th, 1708. The three principal portraits are a previous Sir Robert Fisher, his son Sir Clement Fisher, who died 1683, and Jane Lane, his wife. Another portrait is a second Sir Clement Fisher, son of the above and of Jane Lane. This Sir Clement Fisher died 1709, and was succeeded by his only brother, Sir Robert Fisher, who died A.D. 1739, one year before his niece, Mary Fisher, wife of Lord Aylesford. All these portraits were4 transmitted in direct inheritance to Sir John Fisher. The four generations of Reverend John Fishers of Bodmin, commencing with John Fisher born 1708, were none of them in a position to incur the heavy expenses involved for their assumption of the Baronetcy. They were descended from a brother of the Sir Robert Fisher who lived before the year A.D. 1600.

I was born in 1841, the same year as King Edward VII. There was never such a healthy couple as my father and mother. They never married for money—they married for love. They married very young, and I was their first child. All the physical advantages were in my favour, so I consider I was absolutely right, when I was nine months old, in refusing to be weaned.

These lines were written by Lord Byron of my godmother, Lady Wilmot Horton, of Catton Hall, Burton-on-Trent. She was still a very beautiful old lady at 73 years of age when she died.

One of her great friends was Admiral Sir William Parker (the last of Nelson’s Captains), and he, at her request, gave me his nomination for entering the Navy. He had two to give away on becoming Port Admiral at Plymouth. He gave the other to Lord Nelson’s own niece, and she also filled in my name, so I was doubly nominated by the last of Nelson’s Captains, and my first5 ship was the “Victory” and it was my last! In the “Victory” log-book it is entered, “July 12th, 1854, joined Mr. John Arbuthnot Fisher,” and it is also entered that Sir John Fisher hauled down his flag on October 21st, 1904, on becoming First Sea Lord.

A friend of mine (a yellow Admiral) was taken prisoner in the old French War when he was a Midshipman ten years old, and was locked up in the fortress of Verdun. He so amused me in my young days by telling me that he gave his parole not to escape! as if it mattered what he did when he was only four foot nothing! And he did this, he told me, in order to learn French; and when he had learned French, to talk it fluently, he then cancelled his parole and was locked up again and then he escaped; alone he did it by filing through the iron bars of his prison window (the old historic method), and wended his way to England. I consider this instance a striking testimony to the inestimable benefit of sending little boys to sea when they are young! What splendid Nelsonic qualities were developed!

But it was quite common in those days of my old yellow Admiral for boys to go to sea even as young as seven years old. My present host’s grandfather went to sea as a Midshipman at seven years old! Afterwards he was Lord Nelson’s Signal Midshipman, his name was Hamilton, and his grandson was Midshipman with me in two ships. He is now the 13th Duke of Hamilton! It is interesting as a Nelsonic legend that the wife of the 6th Duke of Hamilton (she was one of the beautiful Miss Gunnings; she was the wife of two Dukes and the6 mother of four) peculiarly befriended Emma, Lady Hamilton, and recognised her, as so few did then (and, alas! still fewer now), as one of the noblest women who ever lived—one mass of sympathy she was!

The stories of what boys went through then at sea were appalling. I have a corroboration in lovely letters from a little Midshipman who was in the great blockade of Brest by Admiral Cornwallis in 1802. This little boy was afterwards killed just after Trafalgar. He describes seeing the body of Nelson on board ship on its way to Portsmouth. This little Midshipman was only eleven years old when he was killed! This is how he describes the Midshipman’s food: “We live on beef which has been ten or eleven years in a cask, and on biscuit which makes your throat cold in eating it owing to the maggots, which are very cold when you eat them! like calves-foot jelly or blomonge—being very fat indeed!” (It makes one shudder!) He goes on again: “We drink water the colour of the bark of a pear tree with plenty of little maggots and weevils in it, and wine, which is exactly like bullock’s blood and sawdust mixed together”; and he adds in his letter to his mother: “I hope I shall not learn to swear, and by God’s assistance I hope I shall not!” He tried to save the Captain of his Top (who had been at the “Weather earing”) from falling from aloft. This is his description: “The hands were hurried up to reef topsails, and my station is in the foretop. When the men began to lay in from the yards (after reefing the topsails) one of them laid hold of a slack rope, which gave way, and he fell out of the top on deck and was dashed to pieces7 and very near carried me out of the top along with him as I was attempting to lay hold of him to save him!!!” Our little friend the Midshipman was eight years old at this time! What a picture! this little boy trying to save the sailor huge and hairy! His description to his mother of Cornwallis’s Fleet is interesting: “We have on board Admiral Graves, who came in his ten-oared barge, and as soon as he put his foot on shipboard the drums and fifes began to play, and the Marines and all presented their arms. We are all prepared for action, all our guns being loaded with double shot. We have a fine sight, which is the Grand Channel Fleet, which consists of 95 sail of the line, each from 120 down to 64 guns.”

That is the Midshipman of the olden day, and one often has misgivings that the modern system of sending boys to sea much older is a bad one, when such magnificent results were produced by the old method, more especially as in the former days the Captain had a more paternal charge of those little boys coming on board one by one, as compared with the present crowd sent in batches of big hulking giants, some of them. However, there is more to learn now than formerly, and possibly it’s impossible (all the entrance examination I had to pass was to write out the Lord’s Prayer, do a rule of three sum and drink a glass of sherry!); but one would like to give it a trial of sending boys to sea at nine years old. Our little hero tried to save the life of the Captain of his Top when he was only eight years old! Still, the Osborne system of Naval education has its great merits; but it has been a grievous blow to it, departing8 from the original conception of entry at eleven years of age.

However, the lines of the modern Midshipman are laid in pleasant places; they get good food and a good night’s rest. Late as I came to sea in 1854, I had to keep either the First or Middle Watch every night and was always hungry! Devilled Pork rind was a luxury, and a Spanish Onion with a Sardine in the Middle Watch was Paradise!

In the first ship I was in we not only carried our fresh water in casks, but we had some rare old Ship’s Biscuit supplied in what were known as “bread-bags.” These bread-bags were not preservative; they were creative. A favourite amusement was to put a bit of this biscuit on the table and see how soon all of it would walk away. In fact one midshipman could gamble away his “tot” of rum with another midshipman by pitting one bit of biscuit against another. Anyhow, whenever you took a bit of biscuit to eat it you always tapped it edgeways on the table to let the “grown-ups” get away.

The Water was nearly as bad as the Biscuit. It was turgid—it was smelly—it was animally. I remember so well, in the Russian War (1854–5), being sent with the Watering Party to the Island of Nargen to get fresh water, as we were running short of it in this old Sailing Line of Battleship I was in (there was no Distilling Apparatus in those days). My youthful astonishment was how on earth the Lieutenant in charge of the Watering Party discovered the Water. There wasn’t a lake and there wasn’t a stream, but he went and dug a hole and there was the water! However, it may be that he carried out9 the same delightful plan as my delicious old Admiral in China. This Admiral’s survey of the China Seas is one of the most celebrated on record. He told me himself that this is how he did it. He used to anchor in some convenient place every few miles right up the Coast of China. He had a Chinese Interpreter on board. He sent this man to every Fishing Village and offered a dollar for every rock and shoal. No rock or shoal has ever been discovered since my beloved Admiral finished his survey. Perhaps the Lieutenant of the Watering Party gave Roubles!

I must mention here an instance of the Simple Genius of the Chinese. A sunken ship, that had defied all European efforts to raise her, was bought by a Chinaman for a mere song. He went and hired all the Chinamen from an adjacent Sponge Fishery and bought up several Bamboo Plantations where the bamboos were growing like grass. The way they catch sponges is this—The Chinaman has no diving dress—he holds his nose—a leaden weight attached to his feet takes him down to where the sponges are—he picks the sponges—evades the weight—and rises. They pull up the weight with a bit of string afterwards. The Chinese genius I speak of sent the men down with bamboos, and they stuck them into the sunk ship, and soon “up she came”; and the Chinaman said:

It’s a pity there’s no bamboo dodge for Sunk Reputations!

10

An uncle of mine had a snuff box made out of the Salt Beef, and it was french-polished! That was his beef—and ours was nearly as hard.

There were many brutalities when I first entered the Navy—now mercifully no more. For instance, the day I joined as a little boy I saw eight men flogged—and I fainted at the sight.

Not long ago I was sitting at luncheon next to a distinguished author, who told me I was “a very interesting person!” and wanted to know what my idea of life was, I replied that what made a life was not its mature years but the early portions when the seed was sown and the blossom so often blasted by the frost of unrecognition. It was then that the fruit of after years was pruned to something near the mark of success. “Your great career was when you were young,” said a dear friend to me the other day. I entered the Navy penniless, friendless and forlorn. While my mess-mates were having jam, I had to go without. While their stomachs were full, mine was often empty. I have always had to fight like hell, and fighting like hell has made me what I am. Hunger and thirst are the way to Heaven!

When I joined the Navy, in 1854, the last of Nelson’s Captains was the Admiral at Plymouth. The chief object in those days seemed to be, not to keep your vessel efficient for fighting, but to keep the deck as white as snow and all the ropes taut. We Midshipmen were allowed only a basin of water to wash in, and the basin was inside one’s sea-chest; and if anyone spilt a drop of water on the deck he was made to holy-stone it himself.11 And that reminds me, as I once told Lord Esher, when I was a young First Lieutenant, the First Sea Lord told me that he never washed when he went to sea, and he didn’t see “why the Devil the Midshipmen should want to wash now!” I remember one Captain named Lethbridge who had a passion for spotless decks; and it used to put him in a good temper for the whole day if he could discover a “swab-tail,” or fragment of the swabs with which the deck was cleaned, left about. One day he happened to catch sight of a Midshipman carefully arranging a few swab-tails on deck in order to gratify “old Leather-breeches’” lust for discovering them! And as for taut ropes, many of my readers will remember the old story of the lady (on the North American station) who congratulated the Captain of a “family” ship (officered by a set of fools) because “the ropes hung in such beautiful festoons!”

There was a fiddler to every ship, and when the anchor was being weighed, he used to sit on the capstan and play, so as to keep the men in step and in good heart. And on Sundays, everyone being in full dress, epaulettes and all, the fiddler walked round the decks playing in front of the Captain. I must add this happened in a Brig commanded by Captain Miller.

After the “Victory,” my next ship was the “Calcutta,” and I joined it under circumstances which Mr. A. G. Gardiner has narrated thus:—

I think I must give the first place to one of the first of my Captains who was the seventh son of the last Vice-Chancellor of England, Sir Lancelot Shadwell. The Vice-Chancellor used to bathe in the Thames with his seven sons every morning. My Shadwell was about the greatest Saint on earth. The sailors called him, somewhat profanely, “Our Heavenly Father.” He was once heard to say, “Damn,” and the whole ship was upset. When, as Midshipmen, we punished one of our mess-mates for abstracting his cheese, he was extremely angry with us, and asked us all what right we had to interfere with his cheese. He always had the Midshipmen to breakfast with him, and when we were seasick he gave us champagne and ginger-bread nuts. As he went in mortal fear of his own steward, who bossed him utterly, he would say: “I think the13 aroma has rather gone out of this champagne. Give it to the young gentlemen.” The steward would reply: “Now you know very well, Sir, the aroma ain’t gone out of this ’ere champagne”; but all the same we got it. He always slept in a hammock, and I remember he kept his socks in the head clews ready to put on in case of a squall calling him suddenly on deck. I learned from him nearly all that I know. He taught me how to predict eclipses and occultations, and I suppose I took more lunar observations than any Midshipman ever did before.

Shadwell’s appearance on going into a fight I must describe. We went up a Chinese river to capture a pirate stronghold. Presently the pirates opened fire from a banana plantation on the river bank. We nipped ashore from the boats to the banana plantation. I remember I was armed to the teeth, like a Greek brigand, all swords and pistols, and was weighed down with my weapons. We took shelter in the banana plantation, but our Captain stood on the river bank. I shall never forget it. He was dressed in a pair of white trousers, yellow waistcoat and a blue tail coat with brass buttons and a tall white hat with a gold stripe up the side of it, and he was waving a white umbrella to encourage us to come out of the bananas and go for the enemy. He had no weapon of any sort. So (I think rather against our inclinations, as the gingall bullets were flying about pretty thick) we all had to come out and go for the Chinese.

Once the Chinese guns were firing at us, and as the shell whizzed over the boat we all ducked. “Lay on your oars,14 my men,” said Shadwell; and proceeded to explain very deliberately how ducking delayed the progress of the boat—apparently unaware that his lecture had stopped its progress altogether!

His sole desire for fame was to do good, and he requested for himself when he died that he should be buried under an apple tree, so that people might say: “God bless old Shadwell!” He never flogged a man in his life. When my Captain was severely wounded, I being with him as his Aide-de-Camp (we landed 1,100 strong, and 463 were killed or wounded), he asked me when being sent home what he could do for me. I asked him to give me a set of studs with his motto on them: “Loyal au mort,” and I have worn them daily for over sixty years. When this conversation took place, the Admiral (afterwards Sir James Hope, K.C.B.) came to say good-bye to him, and he asked my Captain what he could do for him. He turned his suffering body towards me and said to the Admiral: “Take care of that boy.” And so he did.

Admiral Hope was a great man, very stern and stately, the sort of man everybody was afraid of. His nickname was composed of the three ships he had commanded: “Terrible ... Firebrand ... Majestic.” He turned to me and said: “Go down in my boat”; and everyone in the Fleet saw this Midshipman going into the Admiral’s boat. He took me with him to the Flagship; and I got on very well with him because I wrote a very big hand which he could read without spectacles.

He promoted me to Lieutenant at the earliest possible15 date, and sent me on various services, which greatly helped me.

My first chance came when Admiral Hope sent me to command a vessel in Chinese waters on special service. His motto was “Favouritism is the secret of efficiency,” and though I was only nineteen he put me over the heads of many older men because he believed that I should do what I was told to do, and carry out the orders of the Admiral regardless of consequences. And so I did, although I made all sorts of mistakes and nearly lost the ship. When I came back everyone seemed to expect that I should be tried by Court-Martial; but the Admiral only cared that I had done what he wanted done; and then he gave me command of another vessel.

The Captain of the ship I came home in was another sea wonder, by name Oliver Jones. He was Satanic; yet I equally liked him, for, like Satan, he could disguise himself as an angel; and I believe I was the only officer he did not put under arrest. For some reason I got on with him, and he made me the Navigating Officer of the ship. He told me when I first came on board that he thought he had committed every crime under the sun except murder. I think he committed that crime while I was with him. He was a most fascinating man. He had such a charm, he was most accomplished, he was a splendid rider, a wonderful linguist, an expert navigator and a thorough seaman. He had the best cook, and the best wines ever afloat in the Navy, and was hospitable to an extreme. Almost daily he had a lot of us to dinner, but after dinner came hell! We dined with him in tail16 coat and epaulettes. After dinner he had sail drill, or preparing the ship for battle, and persecution then did its utmost.

Once, while I was serving with him, we were frozen in out of sight of land in the Gulf of Pechili in the North of China. And there were only Ship’s provisions, salt beef, salt pork, pea soup, flour, and raisins. Oliver Jones was our Captain, or we wouldn’t have been frozen in. The Authorities told him to get out of that Gulf and that’s why he stayed in. I never knew a man who so hated Authority. I forget how many degrees below zero the thermometer was, and it was only by an unprecedented thaw that we ever got out. And with this intense cold he would often begin at four o’clock in the morning to prepare for battle, and hand up every shot in the ship on to the Upper Deck, then he’d strike Lower Yards and Topmasts (which was rather a heavy business), and finish up with holystoning the Decks, which operation he requested all the Officers to honour with their presence. And when we went to Sea we weren’t quite sure where we would go to (I remember hearing a Marine Officer say that we’d got off the Chart altogether). Till that date I had never known what a delicacy a seagull was. We used to get inside an empty barrel on the ice to shoot them, and nothing was lost of them. The Doctor skinned them to make waistcoats of the skins—the insides were put on the ice to bait other seagulls, and a rare type of onion we had (that made your eyes water when you got within half a mile of them) made into stuffing got rid of the fishy taste.

King Edward VII. and the Czar, 1909.

17

On the way home he landed me on a desert island to make a survey. He was sparse in his praises; but he wrote of me: “As a sailor, an officer, a Navigator and a gentleman, I cannot praise him too highly.” Confronted with this uncommon expression of praise from Oliver Jones, the examiners never asked me a question. They gave me on the spot a first-class certificate.

This Captain Oliver Jones raised a regiment of cavalry for the Indian Mutiny and was its Colonel, and Sir Hope Grant, the great Cavalry General in the Indian Mutiny, said he had never met the equal of Oliver Jones as a cavalry leader. He broke his neck out hunting.

When I was sent to the Hythe School of Musketry as a young Lieutenant, I found myself in a small Squad of Officers, my right hand man was a General and my left hand man a full Colonel. The Colonel spent his time drawing pictures of the General. (The Colonel was really a wonderful Artist.) The General was splendid. He was a magnificent-looking man with a voice like a bull and his sole object was Mutiny! He hated General Hay, who was in Command of the Hythe School of Musketry. He hated him with a contemptuous disdain. In those days we commenced firing at the target only a few hundred yards off. The General never hit the target once! The Colonel made a beautiful picture of him addressing the Parade and General Hay: “Gentlemen! my unalterable conviction is that the bayonet is the true weapon of the British Soldier!” The beauty of the situation was that the General had been sent to Hythe to qualify as Inspector-General of Musketry.18 After some weeks of careful drill (without firing a shot) we had to snap caps (that was to get our nerves all right, I suppose!); the Sergeant Instructor walked along the front of the Squad and counted ten copper caps into each outstretched hand. At that critical moment General Hay appeared on the Parade. This gave the General his chance! With his bull-like voice he asked General Hay if it was believable after these weeks of incessant application that we were going (each of us) to be entrusted with ten copper caps! When we were examined vivâ voce we each had to stand up to answer a question (like the little boys at a Sunday School). The General was asked to explain the lock of the latest type of British Rifle. He got up and stated that as he was neither Maskelyne and Cooke nor the Davenport Brothers (who were the great conjurers of that time) he couldn’t do it. Certainly we had some appalling questions. One that I had was, “What do you pour the water into the barrel of the rifle with when you are cleaning it?” Both my answers were wrong. I said, “With a tin pannikin or the palm of the hand.” The right answer was “with care”! Another question in the written examination was, “What occurred about this time?” Only one paragraph in the text-book had those words in it “About this time there occurred, etc.”! All the same I had a lovely time there; the British Army was very kind to me and I loved it. The best shot in the British Army at that date was a confirmed drunkard who trembled like a leaf, but when he got his eye on the target he was a bit of marble and “bull’s eyes”19 every time! So, as the Scripture says, never judge by appearance. Keble, who wrote the “Christian Year,” was exceedingly ugly, but when he spoke Heaven shone through; so I was told by one who knew him.

It’s going rather backwards now to speak of the time when I was a Midshipman of the “Jolly Boat” in 1854, in an old Sailing Line of Battleship of eighty-four guns. I think I must have told of sailing into Harbour every morning to get the Ship’s Company’s beef (gale or no gale) from Spithead or Plymouth Sound or the Nore. We never went into harbour in those days, and it was very unpleasant work. I always felt there was a chance of being drowned. Once at the Nore in mid-winter all our cables parted in a gale and we ran into the Harbour and anchored with our hemp cable (our sole remaining joy); it seemed as big round as my small body was then, and it lay coiled like a huge gigantic serpent just before the Cockpit. Nelson must have looked at a similar hemp cable as he died in that corner of the Cockpit which was close to it. All Battleships were exactly alike. You could go ashore then for forty years and come on board again quite up to date. On our Quarter Deck were brass Cannonades that had fired at the French Fleet at Trafalgar. No one but the Master knew about Navigation. I remember when the Master was sick and the second Master was away and the Master’s Assistant had only just entered the Navy, we didn’t go to Sea till the Master got out of bed again. There was a wonderfully smart Commander in one of the other Battleships who had the utmost contempt for Science;20 he used to say that he didn’t believe in the new-fangled sighting of the guns, “Your Tangent Sights and Disparts!” What he found to be practically the best procedure was a cold veal pie and a bottle of rum to the first man that hit the target. We have these same “dears” with us now, but they are disguised in a clean white shirt and white kid gloves, but as for believing in Engineers—“Sack the Lot”!

It is very curious that we have no men now of great conceptions who stand out above their fellows in any profession, not even the Bishops, which reminds me of a super-excellent story I’ve been told in a letter. My correspondent met by appointment three Bishops for an expected attack. Before they got to the business of the meeting, he said, “Could their Lordships kindly tell him in the case of consecrated ground how deep the consecration went, as he specially wanted to know this for important business purposes.” They wrangled and he got off his “mauvais quart d’heure.” My correspondent explained to me that his old Aunt (a relation of Mr. Disraeli) said to him when he was young “Alfred, if you are going to have a row with anyone—always you begin!”

I come to another episode of comparatively early years.

Yesterday I heard from a gentleman whom I had not seen for thirty-eight years, and he reminded me of a visit to me when I was Captain of the “Inflexible.” I was regarded by the Admiral Superintendent of the Dockyard as the Incarnation of Revolution. (What upset him most was I had asked for more water-closets21 and got them.) This particular episode I’m going to relate was that I wanted the incandescent light. Lord Kelvin had taken me to dine with the President of the Royal Society, where for the first time his dining table was lighted with six incandescent lamps, provided by his friend Mr. Swan of Newcastle, the Inventor in this Country of the Incandescent light, as Mr. Edison was in America (it was precisely like the discovery of the Planet Neptune when Adams and Leverrier ran neck and neck in England and France). After this dinner I wrote to Mr. Swan to get these lamps for the “Inflexible,” and he sent down the friend who wrote me the letter I received yesterday (Mr. Henry Edmunds) and we had an exhibition to convert this old fossil of an Admiral Superintendent.

Here I’ll put in Mr. Henry Edmunds’s own words:—

Talking about water-closets, I remember so well long ago that one of the joys on board a Man-of-War on Christmas Day was having what was called a “Free Tank,” that is to say, you could go and get as much fresh water as ever you liked, all other days you were restricted, so much for drinking and so much for washing. The other Christmas Joy was “Both sides of the ‘Head’ open”! What that meant was that right in the Bows or Head of the Ship were situated all the Bluejackets’ closets, and on Christmas Day all could be used! “all were free.” Usually only half were allowed to be open at a time. It was a quaint custom, and I always thought outrageous. “Nous avons changé tout cela.”

When I was out in the West Indies a French Frigate came into the Harbour with Yellow Fever on board. My Admiral asked the Captain of the English Man-of-War23 that happened to be there what kindness he had shown the French Frigate on arrival? He said he had sent them the keys of the Cemetery. This Captain always took his own champagne with him and put it under his chair. I took a passage with him once in his Ship, he had a Chart hanging up in his cabin like one of those recording barometers, which showed exactly how his wine was getting on. When he came to call on the Admiral at his house on shore, he always brought a small bundle with him, and after his Official visit he’d go behind a bush in the garden and change into plain clothes! All the same, this is the stuff that heroes are made of. Heroes are always quaint.

King Edward paid a visit to Admiralty House, Portsmouth, 19th February to 22nd February, 1904, while I was Commander-in-Chief there; and after he had left I received the following letter from Lord Knollys:—

I can say that I never more enjoyed such a visit. The only thing was that I wasn’t Master in my own house, the King arranged who should come to dinner and25 himself arranged how everyone should sit at table; I never had a look in. Not only this, but he also had the Cook up in the morning. She was absolutely the best cook I’ve ever known. She was cheap at £100 a year. She was a remarkably lovely young woman. She died suddenly walking across a hay field. The King gave her some decoration, I can’t remember what it was. Some little time after the King had left—one night I said to the butler at dinner, “This soup was never made by Mrs. Baker; is she ill?” The butler replied, “No, Sir John, Mrs. Baker isn’t ill, she has been invited by His Majesty the King to stay at Buckingham Palace.” And that was the first I had heard of it. Mrs. Baker had two magnificent kitchenmaids of her own choosing and she thought she wouldn’t be missed. I had an interview with Mrs. Baker on her return from her Royal Visit, and she told me that the King had said to her one morning before he left Admiralty House, Portsmouth, that he thought she would enjoy seeing how a Great State Dinner was managed, and told her he would ask her to stay at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle to see one! Which is only one more exemplification of what I said of King Edward in my first book, that he had an astounding aptitude of appealing to the hearts of both High and Low.

My friends tell me I have done wrong in omitting countless other little episodes of his delightful nature.

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin!”

This is a sweet little episode that occurred at Sandringham. The King was there alone and Lord26 Redesdale and myself were his only guests. The King was very fond of Redesdale, and rightly so. He was a most delightful man. He and I were sitting in the garden near dinner time, the King came up and said it was time to dress and he went up in the lift, leaving Redesdale in the garden. Redesdale had a letter to write and rushed up to his bedroom to write the letter behind a screen there was between him and the door; the door opened and in came the King, thinking he had left Redesdale in the garden, and went to the wash-hand-stand and felt the hot water-can to see if the water was hot and went out again. Perhaps his water had been cold, but anyhow he came to see if his guest’s was all right.

On another occasion I went down to Sandringham with a great party, I think it was for one of Blessed Queen Alexandra’s birthdays (I hope Her Majesty will forgive me for telling a lovely story presently about herself). As I was zero in this grand party, I slunk off to my room to write an important letter; then I took my coat off, got out my keys, unlocked my portmanteau and began unpacking. I had a boot in each hand; I heard somebody fumbling with the door handle and thinking it was the Footman whom Hawkins had allocated to me, I said “Come in, don’t go humbugging with that door handle!” and in walked King Edward, with a cigar about a yard long in his mouth. He said (I with a boot in each hand!) “What on earth are you doing?” “Unpacking, Sir.” “Where’s your servant?” “Haven’t got one, Sir.” “Where is he?” “Never had one, Sir; couldn’t afford27 it.” “Put those boots down; sit in that arm chair.” And he went and sat in the other on the other side of the fire. I thought to myself, “This is a rum state of affairs! Here’s the King of England sitting in my bedroom on one side of the fire and I’m in my shirt sleeves sitting in an armchair on the other side!”

“Well,” His Majesty said, “why didn’t you come and say, ‘How do you do’ when you arrived?” I said, “I had a letter to write, and with so many great people you were receiving I thought I had better come to my room.” Then he went on with a long conversation, until it was only about a quarter of an hour from dinner time, and I hadn’t unpacked! So I said to the King, “Sir, you’ll be angry if I’m late for dinner, and no doubt your Majesty has two or three gentlemen to dress you, but I have no one.” And he gave me a sweet smile and went off.

All the same, he could be extremely unpleasant; and one night I had to send a telegram for a special messenger to bring down some confounded Ribbon and Stars, which His Majesty expected me to wear. I’d forgotten the beastly things (I’m exactly like a Christmas Tree when I’m dressed up). One night when I got the King’s Nurse to dress me up, she put the Ribbon of something over the wrong shoulder, and the King harangued me as if I’d robbed a church. I didn’t like to say it was his Nurse’s fault. Some of these Ribbons you put over one shoulder and some of them you have to put over the other; it’s awfully puzzling. But the King was an Angel all the same, only he wasn’t always28 one. Personally I don’t like perfect angels, one doesn’t feel quite comfortable with them. One of Cecil Rhodes’s secretaries wrote his Life, and left out all his defects; it was a most unreal picture. The Good stands out all the more strikingly if there is a deep shadow. I think it’s called the Rembrandt Effect. Besides, it’s unnatural for a man not to have a Shadow, and the thought just occurs to me how beautiful it is—“The Shadow of Death”! There couldn’t be the Shadow unless there was a bright light! The Bright Light is Immortality! Which reminds me that yesterday I read Dean Inge’s address at the Church Congress the day before on Immortality. If I had anything to do with it, I’d make him Archbishop of Canterbury. I don’t know him, but I go to hear him preach whenever I can.

The Story about Queen Alexandra is this. My beloved friend Soveral, one of King Edward’s treasured friends, asked me to lunch on Queen Alexandra’s sixtieth birthday. After lunch all the people said something nice to Queen Alexandra, and it came to my turn, I said to Her Majesty, “Have you seen that halfpenny newspaper about your Majesty’s birthday?” She said she hadn’t, what was it? I said these were the words:—

Her Majesty said “Get me a copy of it!” (Such a thing didn’t exist!) About three weeks afterwards (Her Majesty has probably forgotten all about it now, but she hadn’t then) she said, “Where’s that halfpenny newspaper?”29 I was staggered for a moment, but recovered myself and said “Sold out, Ma’am; couldn’t get a copy!” (I think my second lie was better than my first!) But the lovely part of the story yet remains. A year afterwards she sent me a lovely postcard which I much treasure now. It was a picture of a little girl bowling a hoop, and Her Majesty’s own head stuck on, and underneath she had written:—

“May she live till she looks it!”

I treasure the remembrances of all her kindnesses to me as well as that of her dear Sister, the Dowager Empress of Russia. The trees they both planted at Kilverstone are both flourishing; but strange to say the tree King Edward planted began to fade away and died in May, 1910, when he died—though it had flourished luxuriantly up till then. Its roots remain untouched—and a large mass of “Forget-me-nots” flourishes gloriously over them.

For very many consecutive years after 1886 I went to Marienbad in Bohemia (eight hundred miles from London and two thousand feet above the sea and one mass of delicious pine woods) to take the waters there. It’s an ideal spot. The whole place is owned by a Colony of Monks, settled in a Monastery (close by) called Tepl, who very wisely have resisted all efforts to cut down the pine woods so as to put up more buildings.

I had a most serious illness after the Bombardment of30 Alexandria due to bad living, bad water, and great anxiety. The Admiral (Lord Alcester) had entrusted me (although I was one of the junior Captains in the Fleet) with the Command on shore after the Bombardment. Arabi Pasha, in command of the Rebel Egyptian Army, was entrenched only a few miles off, and I had but a few hundreds to garrison Alexandria. For the first time in modern history we organised an Armoured Train. Nowadays they are as common as Aeroplanes. Then it excited as much emotion as the Tanks did. There was a very learned essay in the Pall Mall Gazette.

I was invalided home and, as I relate in my “Memories,” received unprecedented kindness from Queen Victoria (who had me to stay at Osborne) and from Lord Northbrook (First Lord of the Admiralty), who gave me the best appointment in the Navy. I always have felt great gratitude also to his Private Secretary at that time (Admiral Sir Lewis Beaumont). For three years I had recurrence of Malarial Fever, and tried many watering places and many remedies all in vain. I went to Marienbad and was absolutely cured in three weeks, and never relapsed till two years ago, when I was ill again and no one has ever discovered what was the matter with me! Thanks be to God—I believe I am now as well as I ever was in all my whole life, and I can still waltz with joy and enjoy champagne when I can get it (friends, kindly note!).

At Marienbad I met some very celebrated men, and the place being so small I became great friends with them. If you are restricted to a Promenade only a31 few hundred yards long for two hours morning and evening, while you are drinking your water, you can’t help knowing each other quite well. How I wish I could remember all the splendid stories those men told me!

Campbell-Bannerman, Russell (afterwards Chief Justice), Hawkins (afterwards Lord Brampton), the first Lord Burnham, Labouchere (of Truth), Yates (of the World), Lord Shand (a Scottish Judge), General Gallifet (famous in the Franco-German War), Rumbold (Ambassador at Vienna), those were some of the original members. Also there were two Bevans (both delightful)—to distinguish them apart, they called the “Barclay Perkins” Bevan “poor” Bevan, as he was supposed to have only two millions sterling, while the other one was supposed to have half a dozen! (That was the story.) I almost think I knew Campbell-Bannerman the best. He was very delightful to talk to. I have no Politics. But in after years I did so admire his giving Freedom to the Boers. Had he lived, he would have done the same to Ireland without any doubt whatever. Fancy now 60,000 British soldiers quelling veiled Insurrection and a Military Dictator as Lord Lieutenant and Ireland never so prosperous! I have never been more moved than in listening to John Redmond’s brother, just back from the War in his Soldier’s uniform, making the most eloquent and touching appeal for the Freedom of Ireland! It came to nothing. I expect Lord Loreburn (who was Campbell-Bannerman’s bosom friend) will agree with me that had Campbell-Bannerman only known what a literally overwhelming majority he was going to obtain32 at the forthcoming Election, he would have formed a very different Government from what he did, and I don’t believe we should have had the War. King Edward liked him very much. They had a bond in their love of all things French. I don’t believe any Prime Minister was ever so loved by his followers as was Campbell-Bannerman.

Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Chief Justice, was equally delightful. We were so amused one day (when he first came to Marienbad) by the Head Waiter whispering to us that he was a cardsharper! The Head Waiter told us he had seen him take a pack of cards out of his pocket, look at them carefully, and then put them back! Which reminds me of a lovely incident in my own career. I had asked the Roman Catholic Archbishop to dinner; he was a great Saint—we played cards after dinner. We sat down to play—(one of my guests was a wonderful conjurer). “Hullo!” I said, “Where are the cards gone to?” The conjurer said, “It doesn’t matter: the Archbishop will let us have the pack of cards he always carries about in his pocket”! The Holy Man furtively put his hand in his pocket (thinking my friend was only joking!) and dash it! there they were! I never saw such a look in a man’s face! (He thought Satan was crawling about somewhere.)

Lord Burnham was ever my great Friend, he was also a splendid man. I should like to publish his letters. I have spoken of Labouchere elsewhere. As Yates, of the World, Labouchere, and Lord Burnham (those three) walked up and down the Promenade together33 (Lord Burnham being stout), Russell called them “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.” I don’t know if it was original wit, but it was to me.

Two photographs of King Edward VII. and Sir John Fisher on board H.M.S. “Dreadnought” on her first cruise.

Old Gallifet also was splendid company; he had a silver plate over part of his stomach and wounds all over him. I heard weird stories of how he shot down the Communists.

Sir Henry Hawkins I dined with at some Legal Assemblage, and as we walked up the Hall arm in arm all the Law Students struck up a lovely song I’d never heard before: “Mrs. ’enry ’awkins,” which he greatly enjoyed. On one occasion he told me that when he was still a Barrister, he came late into Court and asked what was the name of the Barrister associated with him in the Case? The Usher or someone told him it was Mr. Swan and he had just gone out of the Court. (I suppose he ought to have waited for Sir Henry.) Anyhow Sir Henry observed that he didn’t like him “taking liberties with his Leda.” I expect the Usher, not being up in Lemprière’s Dictionary, didn’t see the joke!

Dear Shand, who was very small of stature, was known as the “Epitome of all that was good in Man.” He reeked with good stories and never told them twice. Queen Victoria fell in love with him at first sight (notwithstanding that she preferred big men) and had him made a Lord. She asked after his wife as “Lady Shand”; and, being a Scottish Law Lord, he replied that “Mrs. Shand was quite well.” There are all sorts of ways of becoming a Lord.

Rumbold knocked the man down who asked him34 for his ticket! He wasn’t going to have an Ambassador treated like that (as if he had travelled without a ticket!)

As the Czechs hate the Germans, I look forward to going back to my beloved Marienbad once more every year. The celebrated Queen of Bohemia was the daughter of an English King; her name was Elizabeth. The English Ambassador to the Doge of Venice, Sir Henry Wootton, wrote some imperishable lines in her praise and accordingly I worshipped at Wootton’s grave in Venice. The lines in his Poem that I love are:—

In dictating the Chapter on “Some Personalities,” that appears in my “Memories,” I certainly should not have overlooked my very good friend Masterton-Smith (Sir J. E. Masterton-Smith, K.C.B.). I can only say here (as he knows quite well) that never was he more appreciated by anyone in his life than by me. Numberless times he was simply invaluable, and had his advice been always taken, events would have been so different in May 1915!

I have related in “Memories” how malignancy went to the extent not only of declaring that I had sold my country to the Germans (so beautifully denied by Sir Julian Corbett), but also that I had formed “Syndicates” and “Rings” for my own financial advantage, using my official knowledge and power to further my nefarious schemes for making myself quickly rich! I have denied this by the Income Tax Returns—and I have also explained35 I am still poor—very poor—because one-third of my pension goes in income tax and the remaining two-thirds is really only one-third because of depreciation of the pound sterling and appreciation of food prices!

But let that pass. However, I’ve been told I ought to mention I had another very brilliant opportunity of becoming a millionaire in A.D. 1910, but declined. And also it has been requested of me to state the fact that never in all my life have I belonged to any company of any sort beyond possessing shares, or had any place of profit outside the Navy. That is sufficiently definite, I think, to d——n my enemies and satisfy my friends.

My finances have always been at a low ebb (even when a Commander-in-Chief), as I went on the principle of “whatever you do, do it with all your might,” and there is nothing less conducive to “the fighting efficiency of a Fleet and its instant readiness for war” than a Stingy Admiral! The applications for subscriptions which were rained upon me I countered with this inestimable memorandum in reply, invented by my sympathetic Secretary:—“The Admiral deeply regrets being unable to comply with your request, and he deplores the reason—but his Expenditure is in excess of his Receipts.” I always got sympathy in return, more especially as the Local Applicants were largely responsible for the excess of expenditure.

At an early period of my career I certainly did manage on very little, and it is wonderful what a lot you can get for your money if you think it over. I got breakfast for tenpence, lunch for a shilling and dinner for eighteen36 pence and barley water for nothing and a bed for three and sixpence (but my bedroom had not a Southern aspect). The man I hired a bedroom from was like a Father to me, and I have never had such a polish on my shoes. (I remember saying to a German Boots, pointing to my badly-cleaned shoes, “Spiegel!”—looking-glass; he took away the shoes and brought them back shining like a dollar. Hardly anyone will see the joke!) But what I am most proud of is that, financial necessity once forcing me to go to Marienbad quite alone, I did a three weeks’ cure there, including the railway fare and every expense, for twenty-five pounds. I don’t believe any Economist has ever beaten this. I preserve to this day the details of every day’s expenditure, which I kept in a little pocket-book, and read it all over only a couple of days ago, without any wish for past days.

I recall with delight first meeting my beloved old friend, Sir Henry Lucy; he had with him Sir F. C. Gould, who never did a better service to his country than when he portrayed me as an able seaman asking the Conscriptionists (in the person of Lord Roberts) whether there was no British Navy. The cartoon was reproduced in my “Memories” (p. 48). In my speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in 1907 (see Chapter VI of this volume) I had spoken of Sir Henry Lucy as “gulled by some Midshipman Easy of the Channel Fleet” (Sir Henry had been for a cruise in the Fleet), who stuffed him up that the German Army embarking in the German Fleet was going to invade England! And in the flippant manner that seems so to annoy people,37 I observed that Sir Henry might as well talk of embarking St. Paul’s Cathedral on board a penny steamer as of embarking the German Army in the German Fleet! He and Gould came up to me at a séance on board the “Dreadnought,” and had a cup of tea as if I had been a lamb!

On the occasion of that same speech, a Bishop looked very sternly at me, because in my speech, to show how if you keep on talking about war and always looking at it and thinking of it you bring it on, I instanced Eve, who kept on looking at the apple and at last she plucked it; and in the innocence of my heart I observed that had she not done so we should not have been now bothered with clothes. When I said this in my speech I was following the advice of one of the Sheriffs of the City of London, sitting next me at dinner, who told me to fix my eyes, while I was speaking, on the corner of the Ladies’ Gallery, as then everyone in the Guildhall could hear what I said. And such a lovely girl was in that corner, I never took my eyes off her, all the time, and that brought Eve into my mind!

I have just been listening to another very eloquent sermon from Dr. Hugh Black, whom I mention elsewhere in this book (see Chapter V). Nearly all these Presbyterians are eloquent, because they don’t write their sermons.

The one slip our eloquent friend made in his sermon was in saying that the A.D. 1611 edition of the Bible (the Authorised Version) was a better version of the Bible than the Great Bible of A.D. 1539, which according to the front page is stated to be as follows:—

It is true, as the preacher said, that the 1611 edition, the Authorised Version, is more the literal translation of39 the two, but those “diverse excellent learned men” translated according to the spirit and not the letter of the original; and our dear brother (the preacher) this morning in his address had to acknowledge that in the text he had chosen from the 27th Psalm and the last verse thereof, the pith and marrow which he rightly seized on—being the words “Wait on the Lord”—were more beautifully rendered in the great Bible from which (the Lord be thanked!) the English Prayer Book takes its Psalms, and which renders the original Hebrew not in the literal words, “Wait on the Lord,” but “Tarry thou the Lord’s leisure,” and goes on also in far better words than the Authorised Version with the rest of the verse: “Be strong and He shall comfort thine heart.”

When we remonstrated with the Rev. Hugh Black after his sermon, he again gainsaid, and increased his heinousness by telling us that the word “Comfort,” which doesn’t appear in the 1611 version, was in its ancient signification a synonym for “Fortitude”; and the delightful outcome of it is that that is really the one and only proper prayer—to ask for Fortitude or Endurance. You have no right to pray for rain for your turnips, when it will ruin somebody else’s wheat. You have no right to ask the Almighty—in fact, He can’t do it—to make two and two into five. The only prayer to pray is for Endurance, or Fortitude. The most saintly man I know, daily ended his prayers with the words of that wonderful hymn:

40

It must not be assumed that I am a Saint in any way in making these remarks, but only a finger-post pointing the way. The finger-post doesn’t go to Heaven itself, yet it shows the way. All I want to do is to stick up for those holy men who were not hide-bound with a dictionary, and gave us the spirit of the Holy Word and not the Dictionary meaning.

Here I feel constrained to mention a far more beautiful illustration of the value of those pious men of old.

In Brother Black’s 1611 version, the most famous of the Saviour’s words: “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” is, in the 1539 version, “I will refresh you!” There is no rest this side of Heaven. Job (iii, 17) explains Heaven as “Where the wicked cease from troubling and where the weary be at rest.” The fact is—the central point is reached by the Saviour when He exemplifies the Day of Perfection by saying: “In that day ye shall ask me nothing.”

I have been told by a great scientist that for the tide to move a pebble on the beach a millionth of an inch further would necessitate an alteration in the whole Creation. And then we go and pray for rain, or to beat our enemies!

Again, I say—The only thing to pray for is Endurance.

Some people in sore straits try to strike bargains with God, if only He will keep them safe or relieve them in the present necessity. It’s a good story of the soldier who, with all the shells exploding round him was heard to pray: “O Lord, if You’ll only get me out of this d—d mess I will be good, I will be good!”

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I am reminded of what I call the “Pith and Marrow” which the pious men put at the head of every chapter of the Bible, and which, alas! has been expunged in the literary exactitudes of the Revised Version. Regard Chapter xxvi, for instance, of Proverbs—how it is all summed up by those “diverse excellent learned men.” They wrote at the top of the chapter “Observations about Fools.” Matthew xxii: the Saviour “Poseth the Pharisees.” Isaiah xxi: “The set time.” Isaiah xxvii (so true and pithy of the Chapter!): “Chastisements differ from Judgments”; and in Mark xv: “The Clamour of the Common People”—descriptive of what’s in the chapter. All these headings, in my opinion, as regards those ancient translators, are for them a “Crown of Glory and a Diadem of Beauty”; and I have a feeling that, when they finished their wondrous studies, it was with them as Solomon said, “The desire accomplished is sweet to the Soul.”

Dr. Ginsburg

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I enclosed with this letter the front page of the first edition of the Great Bible, A.D. 1539, often known as Cranmer’s Bible, but Archbishop Cranmer had nothing whatever to do with it except writing a preface to it; it was solely due to Cromwell, Secretary of State to Henry VIII., who cut off Cromwell’s head in July, 1540. Cranmer wrote a preface for the edition after April, 1540. Cranmer was burnt at the stake in Mary’s reign. Tyndale was strangled and burnt, Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, died of hunger. Coverdale headed the company that produced the Great Bible, and Tyndale’s translation was taken as the basis. (So those who had to do with the Bible had a rough time of it!)

John Wyclif, in A.D. 1380, began the translation of the Bible into English. This was before the age of printing, so it was in manuscript. Before he died, in A.D. 1384, he had the joy of seeing the Bible in the hands of his countrymen in their own tongue.

Wyclif’s translation was quaint and homely, and so idiomatic as to have become out of date when, more than one hundred years afterwards, John Tyndale, walking over the fields in Wiltshire, determined so to translate the Bible into English “that a boy that driveth the plough should know more of the Scriptures than the Pope,” and Tyndale gloriously succeeded! But for doing so, the Papists, under orders from the Pope of Rome, half strangled him and then burnt him at the stake. Like St. Paul, he was shipwrecked! (Just as he had finished the Book of Jonah, which is curious, but44 there was no whale handy, and so he was cast ashore in Holland, nearly dead!)

Our present Bible, of A.D. 1611, is almost word for word the Bible of Tyndale, of round A.D. 1530, but in A.D. 1534, Miles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, was authorised by Archbishop Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell (who was Secretary of State to Henry VIII.) to publish his fresh translation, and he certainly beautified in many places Tyndale’s original!

In 1539, “Diverse excellent learned men expert in the ‘foresaid tongues’” (Hebrew and Greek), under Cromwell’s orders made a true translation of the whole Bible, which was issued in 1539–40 in four editions, and remained supreme till A.D. 1568, when the Bishops tried to improve it, and made a heavenly mess of it! And then the present Authorised Version, issued in A.D. 1611, became the Bible of the Land, and still holds its own against the recent pedantic Revised Version of A.D. 1884. No one likes it. It is literal, but it is not spiritual!

In the opinion of Great and Holy men, Cranmer’s Bible (as it is called), or “the Great Bible”—the Bible of 1539 to 1568—holds the field for beauty of its English and its emotional rendering of the Holy Spirit!

Alas! we don’t know their names; we only know of them as “Diverse excellent learned men!” It is said they did not wish to go down to Fame!

“It is the greatest achievement in letters! The Beauty of the translation of these unknown men excels (far excels) the real and the so-called originals! All nations45 and tongues of Christendom have come to admit reluctantly that no other version of the Book in the English or any other tongue offers so noble a setting for the Divine Message. Read the Prayer Book Psalms! They are from this noble Version—English at its zenith! The English of the Great Bible is even more stately, sublime, and pure than the English of Shakespeare and Elizabeth.”

Action

“Ye men of Galilee! Why stand ye gazing up into Heaven?” (Acts, Chapter i., verse 11.)

The moral of this one great central episode of the whole Christian faith (which, if a man don’t believe with his utmost heart he is as a beast that perisheth, so Saint Paul teaches in I. Corinthians, Chapter xv.), the moral of it is that however intense at any moment of our lives may be the immediate tension that is straining our mental fibre to the limit, yet we are to “get on!” and not stand stock still “gazing up into Heaven!” Inaction must be no part of our life, and we must “get on” with our journey as the Apostles did—“to our own City of Jerusalem!”

It is curious that Thursday (Ascension Day) was not made the Christian Sabbath. No scientific agnostic could possibly explain the Ascension by any such theories as those that try to get over the fact of the Resurrection by cataleptic happenings or an inconceivable trance! The agnostic can’t explain away that He was seen by the Apostles to be carried up into Heaven when in the46 act of lifting up His hands upon them to bless them “and a cloud received Him out of their sight!”

Vide the Collect for the Sunday after Ascension Day!

Resentment

The prophet Zechariah says in Chapter xiv., verse 7:

And I conclude that in the last stage of life, as pointed out so very decisively by Dr. Weir Mitchell (that great American), “the brain becomes its best,” and so we rearrange our hearts and minds to the great advantage of our own Heaven and the avoidance of Hell to others! “Resentment” I find to fade away, and it merges into the feeling of Commiseration! (“Poor idiots!” one says instead of “D—n ’em!”) But I can’t arrive as yet at St. Paul, who deliberately writes that he’s quite ready to go to Hell so as to let his enemy go to Heaven! You’ve got really to be a real Christian to say that! I’ve not the least doubt, however, that John Wesley, Bishop Jeremy Taylor and Robertson of Brighton felt it surely! Isn’t it odd that those three great saints (fit to be numbered “with these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job,” Ezekiel, Chapter xiv., verse 14) each of them should have a “nagging” wife!

Their Home was Hell!

And I’ve searched in vain for any one of the three saying a word to the detriment of the other sex! They might all have been Suffragettes! (St. Paul does indeed47 say that he preferred being single! But Peter was married!)

But this “Resentment” section hinges entirely on “Charity” as defined and exemplified by Mr. Robertson, of Brighton, in one of the best of his wonderful Trinity Chapel Sermons.

Dean Inge

I heard the Dean of St. Paul’s (Dr. Inge) preach in Westminster Abbey on the 17th Chapter of St. Matthew, verse 19: “Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, ‘Why could not we cast him out?’”

The sermon was really splendiferous!

The Saviour had just cast out a devil that had been too much for the disciples, and He told them their inability to do so was due to their want of Faith, and added: “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer.” The Dean explained to us that some ascetic annotator 400 years afterwards had shoved in at the end of these two additional words—“and fasting.” That, of course, was meant by the Dean as “one in the eye” for those who fast like the Pharisees and for a pretence make long prayers! Then the Dean was just too lovely as to “Prayer!” He said he was so sick of people praying for victory in the great War! And speaking generally he was utterly sick of people praying for what they wanted! (as if that was Prayer!) No! the Dean divinely said, “Prayer was the exaltation of the Spirit of a Man to dwell with God and say in the Saviour’s48 words, ‘Not my will but Thine be done.’” “Get right thus with God,” said the Dean, “and then go and make Guns and Munitions with the utmost fury. That (said the Dean) was the way to get Victory, and not by silly vain petitions as if you were asking your Mamma for a bit of barley sugar.” (I don’t mean to say the Dean used these exact words!) Then he said an interesting thing that “this event of the disciples ignominiously failing to cast out the devil” happened to these chief of His apostles just after their coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration, where they had been immensely uplifted by the Heavenly Vision of the Saviour talking with Moses and Elijah. The Dean said “that it was really a curious fact of large experience that when you were thus lifted up in a Heavenly Spirit it was a sure precursor of a fierce temptation by the Devil!” These highly-favoured disciples, after such a communion with God, thought that they themselves, by themselves, could do anything! Pride had a fall! They could not cast out that devil! They trusted in themselves and did not give God the praise! And so it was that Moses didn’t go over Jordan, for he struck the rock and said, “How now, ye rebels!” (I’ll show you who I am!)

The Dean also observed that it was the Drains that had to be put right when there was an Epidemic of Typhoid Fever! “Prayer” wasn’t the Antidote!

The holy man Saint Francis summed up all religion and the Christian life in his famous line:

“How we are in the sight of God!—That is the only thing that matters!”

Photograph, taken and sent to Sir John Fisher by the Empress Marie of Russia, of a group on board H.M.S. “Standard,” 1909.

1. Lord Hamilton of Dalzell. 2. The Chevalier de Martino. 3. Sir Arthur Nicholson. 4. M. Stolypin, Russian Prime Minister. 5. The Czarina. 6. M. Isvolsky, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs. 7. Sir John Fisher. 8. Sir Charles Hardinge. 9. Baron Fredericks. 10. The Grand Duchess Olga. 11. The Czar. 12. The Princess Victoria. 13. The Grand Duke Michael. 14. Count Benckendorff, Russian Ambassador.

Forgiveness49

It fortuned this morning that I read Joseph’s interview with his Brethren just after the death of their Father Jacob. They, having done their best to murder Joseph quite naturally thought that he would now be even with them, so they told a lie. They said that Jacob their Father had very kindly left word with them that he hoped Joseph would be very nice with his brethren after he died. Jacob said no such thing. Jacob knew his Joseph. But it gave Joseph a magnificent opportunity for reading one of Mr. Robertson’s, of Brighton, Sermons—he said to them, “Am I in the place of God?” Meaning thereby that no bread and water that he might put them on, and no torturing thumbscrews, would in any way approach the unquenchable fire and the undying worm that the Almighty so righteously reserves for the blackguards of this life. Which reminds me of the best Sermon I ever heard by the present Dean of Salisbury, Dr. Page-Roberts. He said: “There is no Bankruptcy Act in Heaven. No 10s. in the £1 there. Every moral, debt has got to be paid in full,” and consequently Page-Roberts, though an extremely broad-minded man, was the same as the extreme Calvinist of the unspeakable Hell and the Roman Catholic’s Purgatory. How curious it is how extremes do meet!

I.—Mr. Gladstone’s Final Resignation.

I was Controller of the Navy when Lord Spencer was First Lord of the Admiralty and Sir Frederck Richards was First Sea Lord. Mr. Gladstone, then Prime Minister, was at the end of his career. I have never read Morley’s “Life of Gladstone,” but I understand that the incident I am about to relate is stated to have been the cause of Mr. Gladstone resigning—and for the last time. I was the particular Superintending Lord at the Board of Admiralty, who, as Controller of the Navy, was specially responsible for the state and condition of the Navy; and it was my province, when new vessels were required, to replace those getting obsolete or worn out. Sir Frederick Richards and myself were on the very greatest terms of intimacy. He had a stubborn will, an unerring judgment, and an astounding disregard of all arguments. When anyone, seeking a compromise with him, offered him an alternative, he always took the alternative as well as the original proposal, and asked for both. Once bit, twice shy; no one ever offered him an alternative a second time.

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However, he had one great incapacity. No one could write a more admirable and concise minute; but he was as dumb as Moses. So I became his Aaron. The moment arrived when that magnificent old patriot, Lord Spencer, had to choose between fidelity to his life-long friend and leader, Mr. Gladstone, and his faithfulness to his country. Sir Frederick Richards, the First Sea Lord, had convinced him that a certain programme of shipbuilding was vitally and urgently necessary. Mr. Gladstone would not have it. Sir Frederick Richards and myself, in quite a nice way, not quite point-blank, intimated that the Sea Lords would resign. (My bread and cheese was at stake, but I did it!) Lord Spencer threw in his lot with us, and conveyed the gentle likelihood to Mr. Gladstone; whereupon Sir William Harcourt and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman were alternately turned on to the three of us (Lord Spencer, Sir F. Richards and myself) sitting round a table in Lord Spencer’s private room. I loved Sir William Harcourt; he was what might be called “a genial ruffian,” as opposed to Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, who, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a perfect beast, without a single redeeming feature that I ever found out. Sir William Harcourt always started the conversazione by insulting Lord Spencer (quite in a friendly way); then he would say to Sir Frederick Richards, “I always thought that one Englishman was equal to three Frenchmen, and according to this table of ships required, which has been presented to the Prime Minister, it takes three Englishmen to manage one Frenchman.” Old Richards52 would grow livid with anger; he wanted to say, “It’s a damned lie!” but he couldn’t get the proper words out!

He had an ungovernable temper. I heard him once say to one of the principal Officers in his ship: “Here; don’t you look sulky at me, I won’t have it!” There was a famous one-legged cabman at Portsmouth whom Sir Frederick Richards hired at Portsmouth railway station by chance to drive him to the Dockyard. He didn’t recognise the man, but he was an old ship-mate who had been with him when Sir Frederick Richards commanded a brig on the coast of Africa, suppressing the Slave Trade—he led them all a dog’s life. The fare was a shilling, and ample at that; and as old Richards got out at the Admiral’s door he gave the cabman five shillings, but the cabby refused it and said to old Richards: “You drove me for nothing on the Coast of Africa, I will drive you for nothing now,” and he rattled off, leaving old Richards speechless with anger. He used to look at Sir William Harcourt in exactly the same way. I thought he would have apoplexy sometimes.

Dear Lord Spencer was pretty nearly as bad in his want of lucid exposition; so I usually did Aaron all through with Sir William Harcourt, and one of the consequences was that we formed a lasting friendship.

When I was made a Lord, Stead came to my house that very morning and said he had just had a message from Sir William Harcourt (who had then been dead for some years), saying how glad Sir William was; and the curious thing was that five minutes afterwards I got a53 letter from his son, now Lord Harcourt, congratulating me on my Peerage, which had only been made known an hour before. I think Stead said Sir William was in Heaven. I don’t think he ever quite knew where the departed were!

Campbell-Bannerman was a more awkward customer.

But it was all no use. We got the ships and Mr. Gladstone went.

II.—The Great Lord Salisbury’s Brother-in-law.

It really is very sad that those three almost bulky volumes of my letters to Lord Esher—which he has so wonderfully kept—could not all have been published just as they are. This is one of the reasons for my extreme reluctance, which still exists, for these “Memories” and “Records” of mine being published in my lifetime. When I was dead there could be no libel action! The only alternative is to have a new sort of “Pilgrim’s Progress” published—the whole three volumes—and substitute Bunyan names. But that would be almost as bad as putting their real names in—no one could mistake them!

I think I have mentioned elsewhere that Lord Ripon, when First Lord, whom I had never met, had a design to make me a Lord of the Admiralty, but his colleagues would not have it and called me “Gambetta.” Lord Ripon said he had sent for me because someone had maligned me to him as “a Radical enthusiast.” Well, the upshot was that in 1886 I became Director of Ordnance54 of the Navy; and after a time I came to the definite conclusion that the Ordnance of the Fleet was in a very bad way, and the only remedy was to take the whole business from the War Office, who controlled the Sea Ordnance and the munitions of sea war. A very funny state of affairs!

Lord George Hamilton was then First Lord and the Great Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister. Lord Salisbury’s brother-in-law was the gentleman at the War Office who was solely responsible for the Navy deficiencies, bar the politicians. When they cut down the total of the Army Estimates, he took it off the Sea Ordnance. He had to, if he wanted to be on speaking terms with his own cloth. I don’t blame him; I expect I should have done the same, more particularly as I believe in a Citizen Army—or, as I have called it elsewhere, a Lord-Lieutenant’s Army. (The clothes were a bit different; but Lord Kitchener’s Army was uncommonly like it.) Lord George Hamilton, having patiently heard me, as he always did, went to Lord Salisbury. Lord George backed me through thick and thin. The result was a Committee—the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, Chairman; W. H. Smith, Secretary for War; Lord George Hamilton, First Lord of the Admiralty; the Director of Ordnance at the War Office, and myself. It was really a very remarkably unpleasant time. I had an awful bad cold—much worse than General Alderson, the Prime Minister’s brother-in-law—and Lord Salisbury never asked after it, while he slobbered over Alderson. I just mention that as a straw indicating which way the wind blew. The result, after55 immense flagellations administered to the Director of the Sea Ordnance, was that the whole business of the munitions of war for the Navy was turned over to the Admiralty, “lock, stock and gun barrel, bob and sinker,” and by Herculean efforts and the cordial co-operation of Engelbach, C.B., who had fought against me like a tiger, and afterwards helped like an Angel, and of Sir Ralph Knox, the Accountant-General of the Army, a big deficit, in fact a criminal deficit, of munitions for the Fleet was turned over rapidly into a million sterling of surplus.

They are nearly all dead and gone now, who worked this enormous transfer, and I hope they are all in Heaven.

This story has a lovely sequel; and I forgave Lord Salisbury afterwards for not asking after my cold when, in 1899, many years after, the Hague Peace Conference came along and he submitted my name to Queen Victoria as the Naval Delegate, with the remark that, as I had fought so well against his brother-in-law, there was no doubt I should fight at the Peace Conference. So I did, though it was not for Peace; and M. de Staal, who was a great friend of mine, and who was the President of the Conference, told me that my remarks about boiling the crews of hostile submarines in oil when caught, and so forth, were really unfit for publication. But W. T. Stead tells that story infinitely better than I can. It is in the “Review of Reviews” for February, 1910.

But there is another providential sequel to the events with which I began this statement. I made great friends at the Peace Conference with General Gross von Schwarzhoff and Admiral von Siegel, the Military and56 Naval German Delegates, and I then (in 1899) imbibed those ideas as to the North Sea being our battle ground, which led to the great things between 1902 and 1910.

III.—Ship-building and Dockyard Workers.

I have been asked to explain how I got rid of 6,000 redundant Dockyard workmen, when Mr. Childers nearly wrecked his Government by turning out but a few hundred. Well, this was how it was done. We brought home some 160 ships from abroad that could neither fight nor run away; enough men were thus provided for the fighting portion of the crews for all the new ships then lying in the Dockyards, which were not only deteriorating in their hulls and equipment for want of care, but were inefficient for war because officers and men must have practice in the ship they fight as much as the Bisley shot with his rifle, the jockey with his race-horse and the chef with his sauces. It is practice that makes perfect. The original plan for mobilising the Navy for war was that on the outbreak of war you disorganised the ships already fully manned and efficient by taking a portion of the trained crew, thus impairing the efficiency of that ship, and putting them into the un-manned ships and filling up both the old and the new—the former efficient ships and those in the dockyards—with men from the Reserve. So the whole Navy got disorganised. And that was what they called “Preparing for War!” By what Mr. Balfour called a courageous stroke of the pen, in his speech at Manchester, when he was Prime Minister, every vessel57 in the Fleet by the new system had its fighting crew complete.

Those who were to fill up the hiatus were the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. The brains were there; only the beef had to come, and the beef might have been taken from the Army.

When are we going to have the great Army and Navy Co-operative Society, which I set forth to King Edward in 1903—that the Army should be a Reserve for the Navy? When shall we be an amphibious nation? This last war has made us into a conscript Nation.

Well, to revert to the subject of how we got rid of the 6,000 redundant dockyard workmen. When that mass of Officers and men set free by the scrapping of the 160 ships that couldn’t fight nor run away came back to Chatham, Portsmouth, Devonport, Pembroke, and Queenstown, then in those dockyard towns the tradesmen had the time of their lives, for the money that had flowed into the pockets of the Chinese, the Chileans, the Peruvians, the Boers, the Brazilians, made the shopkeepers of the dockyard towns into a mass of Liptons, so that when the 6,000 Dockyard workers tried, as they had done in the time of yore (in the time of Childers), to get the dockyard tradespeople to agitate and turn out their Members of Parliament, the tradespeople simply replied, “You be damned!” and I arranged to find congenial occupation for these redundant dockyard workmen in private yards where they were much needed.

When I became Admiral Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard, I took another drastic step in concentrating58 all the workmen then leisurely building several different ships, and put them all like a hive of bees on to one ship and extended piece-work to the utmost limit that was conceivable. The result was that a battleship which would have taken three years to build was built in one year; for the work of building a ship is so interlaced, when they are working by piece-work especially, that if one man does not work his fellow workmen cannot earn so much, so this piece-work helps the overseers because the men oversee each other.

But there is another great principle which this hides. The one great secret of the fighting value of a battleship is to get her to sea quickly:—

You will come across some idiots whose minds are so deliciously symmetrical that they would prefer ten tortoises to one greyhound to catch a hare, and it was one of the principal articles of the ancient creed that you built ships in batches. They strained at the gnat of uniformity and so swallowed the camel of inferiority. No progress—they were a batch.

IV.—“Jolly and Hustle.”

I have just been asked by an alluring, though somewhat elusive friend, to describe to you quite an excellent illustration of those famous words in “Ecclesiastes” “Cast thy bread upon the waters for thou shalt find it after many days.” That’s the text this alluring friend suggested59 to me to exemplify. For myself, I prefer the more heavenly text where the Scripture says: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” It was quite an angel that I had to do with, and he ate my bread as follows:—

One day, when I was Admiral in North America, I received a telegram: “The President of the Grand Trunk Railway with forty distinguished American friends was arriving in about an hour’s time on some business connected with railway affairs, and could they be permitted to see the battleship ‘Renown.’” The “Renown” was my flagship. I sent a reply to the next station their special train was stopping at, asking them to lunch on board on their arrival at 1 p.m. I sent for Monsieur Augé, my wonderful chef, who on the produce of his service with me afterwards set up a restaurant in Paris (he really was excellent—but so extravagant!) and told him: “Lunch for forty, in an hour’s time.” All he said was “Oui, Monsieur,” and he did it well! I myself being really amazed.

The Company greatly enjoyed themselves. I had some wonderful champagne obtained from Admiral McCrea—of immortal memory as regards that requisite—which effectively seconded M. Augé’s magnificent lunch.

Years after—it was in March, 1902—I was in a serious dilemma as to the completion of the necessary buildings at Osborne for the new scheme of entry of Officers to be inaugurated by the King in person, who was to open the new establishment on the fourth day of August following. Every effort had failed to get a satisfactory60 contract, when after a prolonged but fruitless discussion, I was sitting thinking what the devil I should do, when an Officer came in to see me on some business and mentioned casually that he had just come from lunching at the Carlton and had happened to overhear a man at an adjacent table say that he would give anything to see Sir John Fisher, as he had given him—with many others—the very best lunch he had ever had in his life. I sent the Officer back to the Carlton to bring him. On his arrival in my room I didn’t remember him, but he at once thanked me—not for seeing the “Renown” and all the other things—but only for the lunch. He said he belonged to St. Louis and was over in England on business. He had completed a big hotel in three months, which no one else would contract to build under three years.

Then I thought of that angel whom I had entertained unawares; certainly the bread that was cast came back all right. I explained my difficulty to him—I had all the particulars. He said he had his American staff over here, who had been working at the Hotel, and he would attend with the contract and the drawings in forty-eight hours. And he did. The contract was signed, and King Edward opened the buildings on August 4th.

An expert of our own who participated in the final proceedings asked the American gentleman’s foreman how he did it, and especially how he had managed that hotel in the three months. I overheard the American’s answer: “Well,” he said, “this is how our boss does it; when he is a-laying of the foundations he is a-thinking of the roof.” “What is his name?” said the English expert. “Well,”61 replied the American, “his name is Stewart, but we always call him ‘JOLLY & HUSTLE.’” “Oh!” said the English expert, “Why that name?” “Well,” he says, “I will tell you. There’s not one of his workmen, not even the lower grades, gets less than fifteen shillings a day, and as much as he likes to eat and drink—free of cost. Well, that’s jolly. But we has to work sixteen hours a day—that’s hustle.”

So when the defences of the Humber came into my mind and no contractor could be got for so gigantic a business, I telegraphed for “Jolly & Hustle,” and when he came over and said he would do it and that he was going to bring everything, from a pin up to a pile-driver, from America, it made the contractors at home reconsider the position—and they did the work.

V.—“Buying up Opportunities.”

The words I take to head this section are as applicable to the affairs of common life as they are to religion, with reference to which they were originally spoken.

What these words signify is that Faith governs all things. Victories on Earth have as their foundation the same saving virtue of Faith.

One great exercise of Faith is “Redeeming the Time,” as Paul says. (I’m told the literal meaning of the original Greek is “buying up opportunities.”) Most people from want of Faith won’t try again. Lord Kelvin often used to tell me of his continuous desire of “redeeming the time.” Even in dressing himself he62 sought every opportunity of saving time (so he told me) in thinking of the next operation. However his busy brain sometimes got away from the business in hand, as he once put his necktie in his pocket and his handkerchief round his neck. (Another wonderfully clever friend of mine, who used to think in the Differential Calculus, I once met immaculately dressed, but he had his trousers over his arm and not on.) And yet I am told he was an extraordinarily acute business man. Every sailor owes him undying gratitude for his “buying up opportunities” in the way he utilised a broken thigh, which compelled him to go in a yacht, to invent his marvellous compass and sounding machine. At the Bombardment of Alexandria the firing of the eighty ton guns of the “Inflexible” with maximum charges, which blew my cap off my head and nearly deafened me, had no effect on his compasses, and enabled us with supreme advantage to keep the ship steaming about rapidly and so get less often hit whilst at the same time steering the ship with accuracy amongst the shoals. So it was with the ancient sounding machine: one had to stop the ship to sound, and it was a laborious operation and inaccurate. Lord Kelvin devised a glass tube which by the height of the discoloration gave you the exact depth, no matter how fast the ship was going; and the beauty of it was you kept the tubes as a register.

It was an immense difficulty getting the Admiralty to adopt Lord Kelvin’s compass. I was reprimanded for having them on board. I always asked at a Court-Martial, no matter what the prisoner was being tried for,63 whether they had Lord Kelvin’s compass on board. It was only ridicule that got rid of the old Admiralty compass. At the inquiry the Judge asked me whether the Admiralty compass was sensitive (I was a witness for Lord Kelvin). I replied, “No, you had to kick it to get a move on.” But what most scandalised the dear old Fossil who then presided over the Admiralty compass department was that I wanted to do away with the points of the compass and mark it into the three hundred and sixty degrees of the circle (you might as well have asked them to do away with salt beef and rum!). There could then never be any mistake as to the course the ship should steer. However, a landsman won’t understand the beauty of this simplicity, and the “Old Salts” said at that time “There he is again—the d—d Revolutionary!”

But to revert to “buying up opportunities”: I know no more signal instance of the goodness of Paul’s advice both to the Ephesians and Colossians in things temporal as in things spiritual than as exemplified by the Gunnery Lieutenant of the “Inflexible” in discovering a fracture in one of her eighty-ton guns. He was always thinking ahead in everything—“Buying up Opportunities.”

After the Bombardment of Alexandria we two were walking along the shore; he stopped and said, “Hullo! that’s a bit of one of our shell, and it burst in the bore of the gun.” As there were no end of pieces of burst shell about, which had exploded in striking the fort, I said, “How do you know it is?” He pointed to the marks of the rifling on the shell, which showed that it had burst64 in the bore and had been pressed into the grooves of the rifling, instead of being rotated by the copper band on its passage through the bore. Then he put his hand in his pocket, took out his clinometer, laid it on the marks of the rifling on the bit of burst shell; and the rifling of our eighty-ton guns having an increasing spiral, he calculated the exact spot in the gun where the shell had burst. And when he got on board he had himself shoved up the bore of the gun holding a piece of hot gutta percha, like that with which the dentist takes the impression of your mouth for a set of false teeth, and brought me out the impression of where the gun had been cracked by the explosion of the shell. Younghusband was his name—perhaps the most gifted man I ever met, but, as unusual with genius, he was not indolent and was always practising himself in seizing opportunities. When the constituted authorities came to inspect the gun, though Younghusband put the broken bit of shell before them, they took a long time to find that crack. One night at Portsmouth someone told Younghusband, who was having his third glass of port after dinner, that he was too fat to walk. For a considerable bet he got up there and then and walked seventy-two miles to London. Younghusband never went to any school in his life; he never left home; he never had a governess or a tutor. He was taught by his mother.

VI.—How the Great War was Carried on.

Six weeks after I left the Admiralty on May 22nd, 1915—that deplorable day, the particulars of which I65 am not at present at liberty to mention—I received most cordial letters from both Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour welcoming me to fill a Post of great magnitude.

A Group on Board H.M.S. “Standard,” 1909.

The Czar, The Grand Duchess Olga, and Sir John Fisher.

I am impelled to digress here for a few moments to tell a very excellent story of Dean Hole (famous for the cultivation of roses). He said to his Curate one day, “I am sick of hearing the name of that poor man whom we pray for every Sunday; just say ‘the prayers of the Congregation are requested for a member of the Congregation who is grievously ill.’” Next Sunday the Curate said at the usual place in Divine Service, “The prayers of the Congregation are requested for a gentleman whose name I’m not at liberty to mention!” That’s my case in regard to what happened between Saturday, May 15th, and Saturday, May 22nd, during which time I received communications which I hold in my hand at this moment, and which some day when made public will be just astonishing! I am advised that the Law does not permit even an outline of them to be given.

I was invited by Mr. Balfour to preside over an Assemblage of the most Eminent Men of Science for War purposes; the chief point was the German Submarine Menace. Also we had to consider Inventions, as well as Scientific Research.

My three Super-Eminent Colleagues of the Central Committee of this great Scientific Organisation were very famous men:—

(1) Sir J. J. Thomson, O.M., President of the Royal Society and now Master of Trinity. I am told (and I believe it) a man unparalleled in Science.

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(2) The Hon. Sir Charles Parsons, K.C.B., the Inventor of the Turbine, which has changed the whole art of Marine Engineering, and enabled us to sink Admiral von Spee. We couldn’t have sunk von Spee without Parsons’s Turbine, as those two great Fast Battle-Cruisers “Invincible” and “Inflexible” could not have steamed otherwise 14,000 miles without a hitch (there and back). They only arrived at the Falkland Islands a few hours before Admiral von Spee.

(3) Sir George Beilby, F.R.S., one of the greatest of Chemists, who, if we don’t take care, will give us a smokeless England, by getting rid of coal in its present beastly form, and turning it into oil and fertilisers, dyes, etc., etc. The Refuse he sells to the Poor fifty per cent. cheaper than coal and without smoke or ashes.

The Advisory Panel of other Distinguished Men was as famous as these Magi. There were also many Eminent Associates.

I felt extreme diffidence in occupying the Chair; however, I put it to them all in the famous couplet of the French author who, in annexing the thoughts of other people, took this couplet as the text of his book:—

I said to them all at our first Assemblage: “Gentlemen, You are the Flowers, I am the String!”

You would have thought that such a Galaxy of Talent would have been revered, welcomed, and obeyed—on the contrary, it was derided, spurned, and ignored.

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The permanent “Expert Limpets” did for us! All the three First Lords at the Admiralty whom we dealt with in succession were most cordial and most appreciative, but all three were equally powerless. Just a couple or so of instances will suffice to illustrate the reason why we at last said to Sir Eric Geddes:—

I think I have said enough. And really, after all, what is the good of raking up the past?

I have had two pieces of advice given me referring to the trials I had experienced. One was:—

And the other was:—“Fear less—hope more; eat less—chew more; whine less—breathe more (deep breathing); talk less—say more; hate less—love more, and all good things are yours.”

“Government of the people—by the people—for the people.”

(President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863.)

Some time ago the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University presided at a lecture on Democracy given at Cambridge by the Professor of History at Chicago (A. C. McLaughlin). I gather that he implied that Democracy is helpless in the game of secret diplomacy and secret treaties. Democracy now all depends upon the purpose and desire of the English-speaking people.

It’s an opportune moment to repeat John Bright’s very famous speech on a great federation of the nations that speak the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

The speech was given me when crossing the Atlantic by a splendid citizen of the United States, where I had just been receiving boundless hospitality and a wonderful welcome, and had realised the truth about a prophet when not in his own country, and had been asked to “stump the Middle West” to advocate the cause of friendship amongst all those who speak our incomparable tongue, and to establish a Great Commonwealth of Free Nations. There can be no secret treaties and no secret70 diplomacy when the Government is of the People, by the People, for the People.

This is John Bright’s speech:

That was said by John Bright.

The time has now come for this great federation which he desired—for this great Commonwealth of Free Nations.

There is only one type of treaty which is effective—“Community of Interests.”

All other treaties are “Scraps of Paper.”

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It is maintained by eminent men that the late appalling and disastrous war, in which so many millions of human beings have been massacred or maimed, would never have occurred had there been a real Democracy in power in England. They say, as a small instance, that the great Mutiny at the Nore and other mutinies were brought about by trampling on Democracy.

This is what pure and unadulterated Democracy is, and we have not got it in England:—

“EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL.”

For instance, no parent with less than nearly a £1000 a year can now send his boy into the Navy as an Officer!

Nature is no respecter of birth or money power when she lavishes her mental and physical gifts.

Therefore, we must have such State provision and such State education as will enable the very poorest in the land to let their eligible children rise to Admirals, Generals, Ambassadors, and Statesmen.

Can it be conceived that a real Democracy would have permitted secret treaties such as have been divulged to us, or have scouted the terms of Peace which were allowed only to be seen by Kings and Prime Ministers; or would a real Democracy have flouted the Russian Revolution in its first agonizing throes when gasping for help and recognition?

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In a real Democracy, would true Labour leaders have waited on the doormat?

Would a real Democracy wave the red rag of “Empire” in front of these noble self-governing peoples all speaking our tongue in their own free Parliaments, and all of them praying for the hastening of the time when “England, the Mother of Free Parliaments, shall herself be free”?

But the Glorious Epoch is now fast approaching!

A Prime Minister once complimented me on a casual saying of mine at his luncheon table. I was accounting for part of my success against

“Many giants great and tall,”

and I ventured to state that:—

Anticipate the Revolution. Do the thing yourself in your way before the agitators get in before you and do it in their way. Get rid of the present obsolete Forms and Antique Ceremonies which grate on the masses, and of Figureheads who are laughing-stocks, and of sinecures which are exasperating—and so anticipate another Cromwell, who is certainly now coming fast along to “Remove another Bauble!”

I forget what they did to the man who tried to import poisonous snakes into New Zealand (finding that happy island unblessed with this commodity). It was something quite drastic they did to him! They killed the snakes.

The Canadian House of Commons adopted by a majority of 33 a motion by Sir Robert Borden, on behalf73 of the Canadian Government, asking that no more hereditary titles should be bestowed in Canada, and declaring that the Canadian Government should make all recommendations for honours of any kind. This motion was a compromise designed to damp down the popular outcry against titles which has arisen in Canada. In one debate Sir Wilfrid Laurier offered to throw his own title on a common bonfire. He urged that all titles in Canada should be abolished.

Why should Great Britain lag behind Canada and the United States? Hereditary titles are ludicrously out of date in any modern democracy, and the sooner we sweep away all the gimcracks and gewgaws of snobbery the better. The fount of so-called honour has become a deluge, and the newspapers are hard put to it to find room for even the spray of the deluge.

The war has not begotten simplicity and austerity in this respect. On the contrary, it has made what used to be a comedy a screaming farce. There was a time when the Birthday Honours List could be printed on one day, but it is now a serial novel. The first chapter of the latest Birthday list was long, but the Times warned us that it was only “the first of a series which already threatens to outlast the week—quite apart from the gigantic Order of the British Empire.”

Chicago’s great Professor of History, Mr. McLaughlin, made the statement at the Kingsway Hall, in his address to British teachers, that now the United States have over 100 millions of people, and fifty years from now they may well have 200 millions—a great Atlantic and Pacific74 Power. The Professor added that this great War was “to protect Democracy against the greatest menace it has ever had” (in the present rule of Kings and Secret Treaties, etc., etc.). Another points out as a striking example of present old-time conditions (so pernicious to freedom and efficiency) the positive fact now existing that our Military Leaders, by a class distinction, were only selected from one twenty-fifth of the ore which we have at our disposal though we had brought five million men under arms, as all our generals commanding armies, army corps, divisions, and in most cases brigades, were drawn from among the Regular Forces who handled our small pre-War Army of two hundred thousand men. And the writer adds:

General Currie, who so ably commands all the Canadian Forces, was a Land Agent before the War. Neither Napoleon nor Wellington ever commanded a regiment. Marlborough never handled an army till he was fifty-two years of age. Clive was a Bank Clerk. Napoleon’s maxim was “La carrière ouverte aux talents.” Are we ever going to adopt it?

Peace

This truth is (and ever will be) the fact that the only pact that ever holds, and the only treaty that ever lasts is:

“COMMUNITY OF INTEREST!”

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and we can only have Community of Interest in the masses of a People always being on the side of Peace, because it’s the masses who are massacred, not the Kings and Generals and Politicians (they are plentifully fed and comfortably housed, and have the best white bread—vide the American Dentist, Davies, when he stayed with the German Emperor).

Well! the only way the masses of the People can act effectively is by means of Republics. Because then no secret diplomacy ever answers, and no one man can make war, or no coterie of men. In a Republic we get “Government of the People, by the People, for the People.”

It’s a cheap sneer to ask how long the same Government ever exists in Republican France! Nevertheless, sooner millions of changes of Government and Peace than a stable Government with War! A Republic is always Peace-loving! except when righteous fury in a gust of popular rage sweeps it into war, as lately in America; but it took four years to move them! The People pushed the President. We are going to have Bolshevism unless we foster these German Republics, and it will spread righteously to England.

These Leagues of Nations and Freedoms of the Seas and all the other items are all d—d nonsense! When War does come, then “Might is Right.” “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure!” and every treaty is a Scrap of Paper!

The Essence of War is Violence.
Moderation in War is Imbecility.76
You hit first, you hit hard, and keep on hitting.
You have to be Ruthless, Relentless and Remorseless.
It’s perfect rot to talk about “Civilised Warfare!”
You might as well talk about a “Heavenly Hell!”

From Lord Fisher to a Friend.

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The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I have been sitting this morning under a Presbyterian Minister, Dr. Hugh Black, whose eloquence so moved the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George (who kindly gave me a seat in his pew, on the other side of me being President Wilson, at the Presbyterian Church in Paris on May 25th, 1919), that the moment the service was ended the Prime Minister went straight to him in the pulpit and told him it was one of the best sermons he had ever heard. And it probably was. One word Dr. Black used was very descriptive. He described us all, except those homeless ones for whom the Saviour pleaded in Dr. Black’s text, as the “sheltered” classes. I think also our feelings in the congregation (not that I wish to derogate from the sermon) had been intensely moved by the magnificent singing on the part of the great congregation (mostly American Citizens) of the Battle Hymn of the American Republic, composed by Julia Ward Howe. The tune (“John Brown’s Body”), as Mr. Sankey said, no doubt has much to do with the glorious emphasis of the chorus; but certainly the words are magnificent:—

BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC.

It reminded me of the 76th Psalm, sung by those old Covenanters when they vanquished Claverhouse at Drumclog. We see the Battle Field of Drumclog from the room where we are now talking.

I began a letter (but diffidence made me stop it) to Sir William Watson the poet, to ask him if he couldn’t give us some such great Hymn for the Nation.

“God Save the King” is worn out. We don’t individualise now. It is as worn out as knee breeches for Court Functions or Gold Lace Coats for Sea Officers.

I have made four accurately reported public speeches, the fifth one (at Mr. Josephus Daniels’s reception by the American Luncheon Club) is too inadequate to include here. For none of these four speeches had I any notes, except for the one of a hundred words and one of fifty words, both delivered in the House of Lords. The other two were simply and solely my exuberant verbosity, and they must be read with that remark in mind. I was saturated with the subject; and when the Times reporter came and asked me for my speech before I’d made it, I told him with truth that I really didn’t know what I was going to say. I might have been like Thackeray (What a classic case his was!). He was the Guest of Honour. He got up, was vociferously cheered, and was dumb. After a death-like silence he said these words, and sat down:—“If I could only remember what I thought of to say to you when I was coming here in the cab, you really would have had a delightful speech!”

A Group on Board H.M.S. “Standard,” 1909.

1. The Empress Marie of Russia. 2. The Czarina. 3. Sir John Fisher. 4. The Grand Duchess Olga. 5. The Czar.

I.—The Royal Academy Banquet, 1903.

The Navy always readily appreciates the kind words in which this toast is proposed, and also the kind manner in80 which it is always received. I beg to thank you especially, Mr. President, for your kind reference to Captain Percy Scott, which was so well deserved. He was indeed a handy man. (Cheers.) Personally I have not the same pleasurable feelings on this occasion as I enjoyed last year, when I had no speech to make. I remember quite well remarking to my neighbour: “How good the whitebait is, how excellent the champagne, and how jolly not to have to make a speech.” He glared at me and said: “I have got to make a speech, and the whitebait to me is bête noire, and the champagne is real pain.” (Laughter.) He was so ready with his answer that I thought to myself: “You’ll get through it all right,” and sure enough he did, for he spoke thirty minutes by the clock without a check. (Laughter.) I am only going to give you three minutes (cries of “No.”) Yes. I always think on these occasions of the first time I went to sea on board my first ship, an old sailing two-decker, and I saw inscribed in great big gold letters the one word “Silence.” (Laughter.) Underneath was another good motto: “Deeds, not words.” (Cheers.) I have put that into every ship I have commanded since. (Cheers.) This leads me to another motto which is better still, and brings me to the point of what I have to say in reply to the toast that has been proposed. When I was Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean I went to inspect a small Destroyer, only 260 tons, but with such pride and swagger that she might have been 16,000 tons. (Laughter.) The young Lieutenant in command took me round. She was in beautiful order, and I came aft to the wheel and saw81 there the inscription: “Ut Veniant Omnes.” “Hallo,” I said, “what the deuce is that?” (Laughter.) Saluting me, he said: “Let ’em all come, Sir.” (Great laughter and cheers.) Well, that was not boasting; that was the sense of conscious efficiency—(cheers)—the sense that permeates the whole Fleet—(cheers)—and I used to think, as the Admiral, it will be irresistible provided the Admiral is up to the mark. The Lord Chief Justice, sitting near me now, has kindly promised to pull me down if I say too much! (Laughter.) But what I wish to remark to you is this—and it is a good thing for everybody to know it—there has been a tremendous change in Navy matters since the old time. In regard to Naval warfare history is a record of exploded ideas. (Laughter and cheers.) In the old days they were sailors’ battles; now they are Admirals’ battles. I should like to recall to you the greatest battle at sea ever fought. What was the central episode of that? Nelson receiving his death-wound! What was he doing? Walking up and down on the quarter-deck arm-in-arm with his Captain. It is dramatically described to us by an onlooker. His Secretary is shot down; Nelson turns round and says: “Poor Scott! Take him down to the cockpit,” and then he goes on again walking up and down, having a yarn with his Captain. What does that mean? It means that in the old days the Admiral took his fleet into action; each ship got alongside the enemy; and, as Nelson finely said, “they got into their proper place.” (Cheers.) And then the Admiral had not much more to do. The ships were touching one another nearly, the Bos’un went with82 some rope and lashed them together so as to make them quite comfortable—(laughter)—and the sailors loaded and fired away till it was time to board. But what is the case now? It is conceivable that within twenty minutes of sighting the enemy on the horizon the action will have begun, and on the disposition of his Fleet by the Admiral—on his tactics—the battle will depend, for all the gunnery in the world is no good if the guns are masked by our own ships or cannot bear on the enemy! In that way I wish to tell you how much depends on the Admirals now and on their education. Therefore, joined with this spirit, of which the remark of the young Lieutenant I mentioned to you is an indication, permeating the whole Service, we require a fearless, vigorous, and progressive administration, open to any reform—(loud cheers)—never resting on its oars—for to stop is to go back—and forecasting every eventuality. I will just take two instances at hazard.

Look at the Submarine Boat and Wireless Telegraphy.
When they are perfected we do not know what a Revolution will come about.

In their inception they were the weapons of the weak.
Now they loom large as the weapons of the strong.

Will any Fleet be able to be in narrow waters?

Is there the slightest fear of invasion with them, even for the most extreme pessimist? I might mention other subjects; but the great fact which I come to is that we are realizing—the Navy and the Admiralty are realizing—that on the British Navy rests the British Empire. (Loud cheers.) Nothing else is of any use without it, not83 even the Army. (Here the gallant Admiral, amid laughter, turned to Mr. Brodrick, the Secretary for War, who sat near him.) We are different from Continental nations. No soldier of ours can go anywhere unless a sailor carries him there on his back. (Laughter.) I am not disparaging the Army. I am looking forward to their coming to sea with us again as they did in the old days. Why, Nelson had three regiments of infantry with him at the battle of Cape St. Vincent, and a Sergeant of the 69th Regiment led the boarders, and, Nelson having only one arm, it was the Sergeant who helped him up. (Cheers.) The Secretary for War particularly asked me to allude to the Army or else I would not have done it. (Loud laughter.) In conclusion, I assure you that the Navy and the Admiralty recognise their responsibility. I think I may say that we now have a Board of Admiralty that is united, progressive, and determined—(cheers)—and you may sleep quietly in your beds—(loud cheers).

II.—The Lord Mayor’s Banquet, 1907.

As to the strength, the efficiency, and the sufficiency of the Navy, I am able to give you indisputable proofs. Recently, in the equinoctial season in the North Sea we have had twenty-six of the finest battleships in the world and twenty-five of the finest cruisers, some of them equal to foreign battleships, and over fifty other vessels, under eleven Admirals, and all working under a distinguished Commander-in-Chief, under very trying circumstances and in a very stormy time, and I look in vain to84 see any equal to that large Fleet anywhere. (Cheers.) That is only a fraction of our power. (Cheers.) And that large Fleet is nulli secundus, as they say, whether it is ships or officers or men. (Cheers.) Now, I turn to the other point, the gunnery of the Fleet. The gunnery efficiency of the Fleet has surpassed all records—it is unparalleled—and I am lost in wonder and admiration at the splendid unity of spirit and determination that must have been shown by everybody from top to bottom to obtain these results. (Cheers.) I am sure that your praise and your appreciation will go forth to them, because, remember, the best ships, the biggest Navy—my friend over there talked about the two-Power standard—a million-Power standard (laughter) is no use unless you can hit. (Cheers.) You must hit first, you must hit hard, and you must keep on hitting. (Cheers.) If these are the fruits, I don’t think there is much wrong with the government of the Navy. (Cheers.) Figs don’t grow on thistles. (Laughter and cheers.) But a gentleman of fine feeling has lately said that the recent Admiralty administration has been attended with the devil’s own luck. (Laughter.) That interesting personality (laughter)—his luck is due to one thing, and one thing only—hesitates at nothing to gain his object. That is what the Board of Admiralty have done, and our object has been the fighting efficiency of the Fleet and its instant readiness for war; and we have got it. (Cheers.) And I say it because no one can have a fuller knowledge than myself about it, and I speak with the fullest sense of responsibility. (Cheers.) So I turn to all of you, and I85 turn to my countrymen and I say—Sleep quiet in your beds (laughter and cheers), and do not be disturbed by these bogeys—invasion and otherwise—which are being periodically resuscitated by all sorts of leagues. (Laughter.) I do not know what league is working this one. It is quite curious what reputable people lend themselves to these scares. This afternoon I read the effusions of a red-hot and most charmingly interesting magazine editor. He had evidently been victimised by a Punch correspondent, and that Punch correspondent had been gulled by some Midshipman Easy of the Channel Fleet. He had been there. And this is what the magazine editor prints in italics in this month’s magazine—that an army of 100,000 German soldiers had been practising embarking in the German Fleet. The absolute truth is that one solitary regiment was embarked for manœuvres. That is the truth. To embark 100,000 soldiers you want hundreds and thousands of tons of transport. You might just as well talk of practising embarking St. Paul’s Cathedral in a penny steamer. (Laughter.) I have no doubt that equally silly stories are current in Germany. I have no doubt that there is terror there that the English Fleet will swoop down all of a sudden and gobble up the German Fleet. (Laughter.) These stories are not only silly—they are mischievous, very mischievous. (Hear, hear.) If Eve had not kept on looking at that apple (laughter)—and it was pleasant to the eyes—she would not have picked it, and we should not have been now bothered with clothes. (Loud laughter.) I was very nearly forgetting something else86 that the Punch correspondent said. I put it in my pocket as I came away to read it out to you. He had been a week in the Channel Fleet and he had discussed everything, from the admiral down to the bluejacket. He does not say anything about that Midshipman Easy. “In one matter I found unanimity of admission. It was that in respect to the number of fighting ships, their armament, and general capacity the British Navy was never in so satisfactory a condition as it floats to-day.” (Cheers.) So we let him off that yarn about the 100,000 German troops. (Laughter.)

III.—The House of Lords, November 16, 1915.

Lord Fisher, rising from the cross-benches immediately before public business was called, said:—“I ask leave of your lordships to make a statement. Certain references were made to me in a speech delivered yesterday by Mr. Churchill. I have been 61 years in the service of my country, and I leave my record in the hands of my countrymen. The Prime Minister said yesterday that Mr. Churchill had said one or two things which he had better not have said, and that he necessarily and naturally left unsaid some things which will have to be said. I am content to wait. It is unfitting to make personal explanations affecting national interests when my country is in the midst of a great war.”

Lord Fisher, having delivered his brief statement, immediately left the House.

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IV.—The House of Lords, March 21, 1917.

Lord Fisher addressed the House of Lords.

Immediately prayers were over he rose from a seat on one of the cross-benches. He said:—

“With your Lordships’ permission, I desire to make a personal statement. When our country is in great jeopardy, as she now is, it is not the time to tarnish great reputations, to asperse the dead, and to discover our supposed weaknesses to the enemy; so I shall not discuss the Dardanelles Reports—I shall await the end of the war, when all the truth can be made known.”

Sir William Allan, M.P., with the torso of a Hercules and the voice of a bull and the affectionate heart of Mary Magdalene, did not know Latin, and he asked me what my motto meant:

“Fiat justitia—ruat cœlum.”

I had sent it to him when he was malignantly attacking me because, as Controller of the Navy, I had introduced the water-tube boiler. Sir William Allan was himself a boiler-maker, and he had to scrap most of his plant because of this new type of boiler.

I said the translation was: “Do right, and damn the odds.”

This motto has stood me in good stead, for by attending to it I fought a great battle in a righteous cause with Lord Salisbury, when he was Prime Minister, and conquered. I have related this elsewhere. Years after, Lord Salisbury, in remembrance of this, recalled me from being Commander-in-Chief in America to be British delegate at the First Peace Conference at The Hague in 1899, and from thence I went as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.

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While I was in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, from 1899 to 1902, when I became Second Sea Lord of the Admiralty, I arranged to have lectures for the officers of the Fleet. I extract now from the notes of my lectures some points which may be of general interest, as illustrating the new strategy and tactics necessitated by the change from wind to steam.

After setting forth a few of the problems which would have to be solved in sea-fighting under the new conditions, the lecturer went on to elaborate the themes from such rough notes as I give here of the principal ideas.

A Group at Langham House. Photograph taken and sent to Sir John Fisher by the Empress Marie of Russia.

1. Mrs. Neeld. 2. Miss Diana Neeld. 3. The Princess Victoria. 4. Lady Fisher. 5. Queen Alexandra. 6. Miss Kitty Fullerton. 7. Sir John Fisher.

The above words came into my mind late last night when tired out with destroying masses of papers and letters (mostly malignant abuse or the emanations of senile dotage), I sat back in my chair and soliloquised over what had happened to all these pestilent attackers of mine; and I said to myself in those immortal words in Jonah, “Doest thou well to be angry?” and for a few brief moments I really quite felt like Stephen praying for his enemies when they stoned him! What has become of all these stone-throwers and backbiters, I asked myself! Like Jonah’s Gourd—“A worm has smote them all”—and they have withered into obscurity. But yet it’s interesting, as this is a Book of Records, to tear out one sheet or so and reproduce here some replies to the nefarious nonsense one had to deal with at that time of democratising the Navy. I reprint verbatim a few pages I wrote in October, 1906. These particular words that follow here were98 directed against those who assailed my principles of (1) The fighting efficiency of the Fleet, (2) Its instant readiness for war.

Admiralty Policy: Replies to Criticisms.

The most brilliant preacher of our generation has said what a stimulus it is to have always some friends to save99 us from that “Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you”! When criticism goes, life is done! You must squeeze the fragrant leaf to get the delicious scent! Hence, it may be truly said that the Board of Admiralty should just now heartily shake hands with themselves, because Korah, Dathan, and Abiram (in the shape of three Retrograde Don Quixotes) are trying to raise a rebellion, but the earth will now open and swallow them all up quick as in the days of Moses. They and all their company, with their small battleships and their slow speeds, and their invasion fright and foreign shipbuilding houses of cards are each and all capable of absolute pulverisation! Why people don’t laugh at it all is the wonder! Here, for instance, is a military correspondent lecturing the Board of Admiralty on types of ships; and Admirals, whose names were bywords of inefficiency and ineptitude when they were afloat, and who never—one single one of them—left anything better than they found it, are being seriously quoted by serious magazines and serious newspapers as “a most distinguished Admiral,” etc., etc. “These prophets prophesy falsely and the people love to have it so,” as Jeremiah says! This is because of the inherent pessimistic British instinct!

Perhaps the most laughable and silly emanation of these Rip Van Winkles is the outcry against large ships and high speeds, and an Admiral has gone so far as to resort to mathematics and trigonometrical absurdities to prove that slow speed and 6-inch guns are of primary importance in a sea fight!!! Archbishop Whately dealt100 with a similar critic by a celebrated jeu d’esprit entitled “Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte.” The Archbishop by a process of fallacious reasoning demonstrated with all the exactitude of a mathematical problem the impossibility of the existence of such a person as Buonaparte! But as someone has well said, if these strange oddities can convert our enemies (the Germans) to the priceless advantage of slow ships and small guns they are patriots in disguise, and Providence is employing them (as it employs worms and other such things) in assisting to work out the unfailing and invincible supremacy of the British Navy.

But to say no more—the plain man sees that it is of vital importance that we should obtain the highest possible speed in order that, in face of emergencies on the south or east or west of the British Isles, we may be able to concentrate adequate Naval Force with as little delay as possible, and that had the British Admiralty held the opinions expressed by “the Blackwood Balaam” our battleships would still be steaming at about 10 knots an hour, because he must remember that the progress which has been made from 10 knots to 22 knots (as attained in “Dreadnought” at deep, or war load draught) has been gradual, and at any period during this progression it was quite open to other Balaams to retard the action of the Admiralty by pointing out that the slight gain in speed which has been chronicled year by year in battleships was really not worth the price which was being paid for it! But, Blessed be God! In this and all other criticisms of Admiralty101 Policy the public pulse is totally unaffected, and the reputation of the Admiralty unlowered.

For 12 months past not a single battleship has been laid down in Europe, and this simply and solely owing to the dramatic appearance of the “Dreadnought,” which upset all the calculations in Foreign Admiralties and deserved the calculated letter written by Lord Selborne to the Committee on Designs. The Admiralty has done more than all the Peace party with all their dinners to arrest the contest for Sea Power!

In the criticisms we are dealing with, “Party” as usual has come before “Patriotism,” but the Sea Lords can, each one of them, confidently say, with the poet’s version of a patriot’s motto,

and so the Sea Lords have no desire to avoid any odium the Tory papers3 may be pleased to bring upon them. There is undoubted authority for stating that a skilfully organised “Fleet Street” conspiracy aided by Naval Malcontents is endeavouring to excite the British public against the Board of Admiralty, but it has fallen flat.

There is, however, a very serious danger in the102 propagation of the view so ably combated by Sir C. Dilke in his speech at Coleford, Forest of Dean, on September 27th last, that this country requires a military force of 640,000 men!

His comparison of Navy and Army expenditure is illuminating but has been totally ignored by the Press and the country. The “Fiery Cross” has been sent round to resuscitate the “Invasion Bogey.”

There has been for many years past a general feeling in this country that questions of international relationship and of national defence should be withdrawn as far as possible from the arena of party politics. Such divergences of opinion as must exist on these topics have no obvious connection with the divisions of our internal politics; and it is surely legitimate to go further than this, and say that the main problems in these departments can be dealt with in such a way as to win the assent of every reasonable man, whatever his opinions may be on Trade Unionism or Elementary Education.

At any rate successive Boards of Admiralty have for something like 20 years acted on the assumption—which has hitherto been justified—that their policy would be accepted by the public as based on a fully considered estimate of the requirements of national defence, and, if criticised (as it was bound to be from time to time), criticised on other than partisan grounds. Between the date of the Naval Defence Act and 1904 the Navy Estimates were approximately trebled. The increase was continuous under four successive First Lords, and under both Liberal and Conservative Governments.103 In 1904 the maximum of the curve of expenditure was reached, and the Navy Estimates began to decline, at first rapidly, under a Conservative Government, then more slowly, and in part subject to certain provisos, under the present Liberal Government. And this, it appears, is the moment chosen for the first considerable outbreak of political rancour in naval affairs since the modern Navy came into existence!

It is, however, of such supreme importance to the Navy that the Admiralty Board should not be suspected of being governed in its decisions on matters of national defence by partisan considerations that it may be well to set out again, and very explicitly, what are the reasons which have led the Board to adopt the policy now impugned.

Here we have to go back to first principles. It has become too much the fashion to employ the phrase “a two-Power standard” as a mere shibboleth. The principle this phrase embodies has been of the utmost value in the past, and is likely to be so in the future; but if used unintelligently at the present moment it merely gives the enemy cause to blaspheme. Great Britain must, it is agreed, maintain at all costs the command of the sea. Therefore we must be decisively stronger than any possible enemy. Who then is the possible enemy? Ten years ago, or even less, we should probably have answered, France and Russia in alliance. As they were then respectively the second and third naval Powers, the two-Power standard had an actuality which it has since lost. The United States and Germany104 are competing for the second place which France has already almost yielded. Russia’s fleet has practically disappeared. Japan’s has sprung to the front rank. Of the four Powers which are primarily in question, Japan is our ally, France is our close friend, America is a kindred State with whom we may indeed have evanescent quarrels, but with whom, it is scarcely too much to say, we shall never have a parricidal war. The other considerable naval Powers are Italy and Austria, of whom we are the secular friends, and whose treaty obligations are in the highest degree unlikely to force them into a rupture with us which could in no possible way serve their own interests.

There remains Germany. Undoubtedly she is a possible enemy.4 While there is no specific cause of dispute there is a general commercial and—on the German side—political rivalry which has unfortunately but indisputably caused bad blood between the two countries. For the moment, it would be safe to build against Germany only. But we cannot build for the moment: the Board of Admiralty are the trustees of future generations of their countrymen, who may not enjoy the same comparatively serene sky as ourselves. The ships we lay down this year may have their influence on the international situation twenty years hence, when Germany—or whoever our most likely antagonist may then be—may have the opportunity of the co-operation (even if only temporary) of another great naval Power. Hence a two-Power standard, rationally interpreted, is105 by no means out of date. But it is not a rational interpretation to say that we must instantly lay down as many ships as any other two Powers are at this moment laying down. We must take long views; we must be sure what other Powers are doing; we must take the average of their efforts, and average our own efforts in response.

Now this matter of averaging the shipbuilding, of equalising the programme over a number of years, deserves further consideration. Some Powers, notably Germany, attempt to achieve this end by creating long statutory programmes. The British Admiralty has abandoned the idea since the Naval Defence Act. For us, in fact, it would be a thoroughly vicious system. For a Power which is trying to “set the pace,” and which is glad to avoid annual discussion of the financial aspect of the question, it, no doubt, has its advantages. But Great Britain does not build to a naval strength that can be determined a priori; she builds simply and solely to maintain the command of the sea against other Powers. For this end the Admiralty must have its hands free to determine from year to year what the shipbuilding requirements are. But, again, this does not mean that our efforts must be spasmodic, that because foreign Powers lay down six ships one year and none the next, therefore we must do the same. For administrative reasons, which should be obvious, and which in any case this is not the place to dilate upon, it is very necessary that shipbuilding should approximate year by year, so far as practicable, to some normal figure, and that increases or decreases, when they become106 necessary, should be made gradually. This double principle, of determining the programme from year to year, and yet averaging the number of ships built over a number of years, has to be firmly grasped by anyone who desires to understand the Admiralty shipbuilding policy.

With this preamble we are in a position to discuss the actual situation. And first we have to consider what is the existing relative strength of Great Britain and the other naval Powers. About this there is really no difference of opinion—British naval supremacy was never better assured than at the present moment. Even admitting the combination of two of the three next naval Powers (France, Germany, and the United States) to be conceivable, it is certain that any two of them would hesitate to attack us, and it is more than probable that if they did they would be defeated, even without the assistance of our Japanese allies. The alleged alarm as to our naval strength is therefore admittedly in regard to the future, not in regard to the present. And here (to digress for a moment) we may remark that agitations have occurred in earlier years when it was supposed that some foreign Power or combination of Powers was actually in a position to sweep us off the Channel, but never before have we been invited to panic by prophecy. Is there not something slightly absurd in alarm—not calculation, for that is justifiable enough, but alarm—about our position in 1920? At any rate, it is clear that it is the future which we are called on to consider.

In this connection two facts have to be remembered: first, that we start in a position of security, and need107 therefore be in no undue haste to build more ships; secondly, that we are on the threshold of a new era in naval construction, and can therefore not rest content with the advantage which we secured in an era which is passing away. The problem need not be complicated by a somewhat futile attempt to bring the existing and the new ships of our own and foreign navies to a common denominator; we must build new ships to meet new ships, always, however, remembering that until the new ships are in commission we have got plenty of the old ones to fight with.

But here it is really impossible to avoid commenting on the gross insincerity of some recent attacks on the Admiralty. It was no doubt only to be expected that the four ships of the Cawdor memorandum, which were explicitly stated to be a maximum, should always be quoted as a minimum by anyone who wishes to belabour the present Board. But there is a further point which the convenient shortness of the journalistic memory has suffered to be overlooked. When the Cawdor memorandum was issued, it was generally (though wrongly) assumed that only two of the four ships would be battleships, and two “armoured cruisers.” And at that time the public had certainly no idea what the “Invincible” Fast Battle Cruiser type was like, with its 6 knots superiority of speed to everything afloat, and the biggest guns alive. The “Invincibles” are, as a matter of fact, perfectly fit to be in line of battle with the battle fleet, and could more correctly be described as battleships which, thanks to their speed, can drive anything108 afloat off the seas. But this was not known, and the calculations generally made in the Press added only two units per annum to our battle fleet. Yet there was no outcry; that was reserved to a later date, when it was beginning to be understood that the “Invincibles” could be reckoned side by side with the “Dreadnought,” and it had been announced that three new “Dreadnoughts,” instead of two, were to be laid down this winter. Surely the ways of the party journalist are past finding out.

In this connection it may be well also to make some observations on the diminution by the authority of the Board of programmes of shipbuilding already approved by Parliament. The allegation that there is anything unconstitutional in the procedure may be left to the constitutional lawyer to pulverise. Probably all that is usually meant by the statement is that it is desirable to let Parliament know of the change in the programme as soon as convenient after it has been decided, and to this there would usually be no possible objection. But the idea that, because Parliament has voted a certain sum of money for the current year’s programme, and certain commitments for future years (a much more important matter), therefore the Board is bound to build ships it really does not want, is not only pernicious, but also ridiculous in the extreme. The only legitimate ground for complaint, if any, would be that the Board had misled Parliament in the first instance by overestimating the requirements. The Board are faced each summer with the necessity of saying what they109 expect to have to lay down 18 months later. This, of course, is prophecy. Generally it is found to be pretty accurate, but the advent of the new era in shipbuilding (which is principally due to the lessons of the only big naval war of modern times) has made prophecy more than usually difficult. Moreover, if the matter is at all in doubt, the prophet has special inducements to select the higher rather than the lower figure. Increase of a programme during a given year will involve a supplementary estimate with all its accompanying inconveniences. If on the other hand it is found that the original programme was unnecessarily extensive, it is a comparatively simple matter to cut it down. It is best of course to have the right number of new ships in the Navy Estimates; but it is next best to have a number in excess of that ultimately required, which can be pruned as requisite.

Let us repeat: sufficient unto the year is the shipbuilding thereof. Panic at the present time is stupid. The Board of Admiralty is not to be frightened by paper programmes. They will cautiously do all that they judge necessary to secure the existing naval supremacy of this country: the moment that is threatened they will throw caution to the winds and outbuild our rivals at all costs.

H.M. Ships “Dreadnought” and “Invincible.”

The accompanying papers5 contain arguments in support of the “Dreadnought” and “Invincible.”

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The features of these novel designs, which have been most adversely criticised, are:—

1. The uniform Big Gun armament.
2. The great increase in speed.

It is admitted that strategically speed is of very great importance. It enables the fleet or fleets possessing it to concentrate at any desired spot as quickly as possible, and it must therefore exercise an important influence on the course of a naval war, rapid concentration being one of the chief factors of success.

Many adverse critics of high speed maintain that it is the weapon of the weaker Fleet, the only advantage conferred being the ability to refuse an action by running away: two cases may be cited from the actions of the late war in the East showing the fallacy of this argument and that the Japanese successes were solely due to a command of speed.

In the battle of the 10th August, 1904, after the preliminary manœuvres, the Russian Admiral turned to the eastward at 2.30 p.m. to escape to Vladivostok. The Japanese Fleet was then on the starboard quarter of the Russian and practically out of range. Captain Pakenham, the British Naval Attaché, who was on board Admiral Togo’s flagship, in his report, states that the “‘Tzæsarevitch’ (leading the Russian line) was almost out of sight.” A slightly superior speed in the Russian line would have ensured their escape, but the excess of speed lay with the Japanese and they slowly drew up into range and reopened the action;111 but it was late in the evening before they drew far enough ahead to concentrate a heavy fire on the leader of the Russian line and so break up their formation. When this was accomplished it was nearly dark and the Russians, though thrown into confusion and beaten, were not destroyed, for the approaching darkness and the destroyer threat necessitated the Japanese Battle Fleet hauling off, yet the retreat to Vladivostok was prevented.

A higher speed in the Japanese line would have wrought confusion to the Russians earlier in the day, and probably have allowed a sufficient period of daylight for their total destruction.

Again. At the opening of the Battle of the Sea of Japan in May, the Japanese Fleet, due to skilful handling, held a commanding position, giving a concentration of fire on the heads of the Russian lines. Had they not possessed superior speed, the Japanese would rapidly have lost this advantage, as the Russians turned away to starboard and compelled the Japanese to move along a circle of larger radius; their greater speed enabled the Japanese to maintain their advantage and so continue the concentration of fire on the Russian van until so much damage had been inflicted that the Russians lost all order and were crushed.

These, therefore, are two of the most convincing instances that could now be given, where speed was of overwhelming tactical value to the victorious side, and such evidence is unanswerable and is a justification of the speeds adopted in the designs of the new ships.

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Defects and Repairs

The head has got to wag the tail. The tail sometimes now wags the head. It is for the Admiralty, and the Admiralty alone, to decide whether, how, or when the defects and repairs of the Fleet are to be taken in hand.

Sir John Fisher going on board the Royal Yacht.

The sole governing condition is what the Admiralty require for fighting purposes! It is desirable to put an extreme case to accentuate this:—

In the secrets of Admiralty Fighting Policy undesirable to make known to our enemies there are certain vessels never going to be used for actual fighting, but they serve an extremely useful purpose for subsidiary purposes. In such vessels there are defects and repairs of a particular character that might stand over till Doomsday! whilst there are other vessels where only113 defects affecting purely seagoing and actually direct fighting efficiency should be attended to. All this entirely depends on our probable enemy and may vary from time to time, and the sole judge can only be the Admiralty. But what it is feared now obtains is a blind rushing at all defects and repairs of all kinds and classes in all vessels. It is perfectly natural that the Commander-in-Chief and Admirals Superintendent may wish for the millennium of having all their vessels perfect—but this cannot be. What does it lead to? Extreme local pressure accentuated by Parliamentary action to enter more Dockyard workmen. What does this mean? It means in some recent cases that practically the upkeep of three cruisers is swallowed up in pay to Dockyard workmen! No—the Admiralty Policy is sound, consistent and irrefutable, which is never to exceed the normal number of Dockyard workmen as now fixed by the recent Committee, and have such a great margin of Naval strength—such as we now possess—as admits of a leisurely and economical refit of ships without extravagant overtime or inefficient hustling of work. Therefore, what it comes to is this:—The Admiralty decide what vessels they require first and what defects and repairs in those vessels are most material, and they give orders accordingly. It is not the responsibility of the local authorities at all to say that this vessel or that vessel must be completed at once, for, as before-mentioned, it may be that in the Admiralty scheme of fighting those vessels are not required at all.

The Controller has great difficulties to contend with114 because he has not the free hand of a private employer who can discharge or enter men just as he requires. To get rid of a Dockyard workman involves agitation in every direction—in Parliament, at the Treasury and locally, and even Bishops throw themselves into the fray, like the Bishop of Winchester at Portsmouth, instead of looking after his own disorganised and mutinous Established Church. There is now a plethora of shipwrights at Chatham, because the Treasury will not allow their transfer to other yards, and a paucity of boilermakers because unwanted men occupy their places, and the scandal exists of men being entered at Devonport with men having no work at Chatham. But, of course, this is one of the blessings of Parliamentary Government, Treasury Control, and a Free Press!

Where the special influence of the Commander-in-Chief is desired by the Admiralty is to bring before them cases where defects have not been dealt with in the initial stages by the ship’s artificers and so allowed to increase as to necessitate Dockyard intervention. Such cases would be drastically dealt with by the Admiralty if only they could be informed of them, but there is an amiable desire to avoid severe punishments, and the dire result is that the zealous and efficient are on the same footing as the incompetent and the careless who get more leave and time with their friends because their vessels are longer in Dockyard hands.

It is desired to give prominence to the following facts:—It is a matter of everyday occurrence that vessels come home from Foreign stations, often immense115 distances, as from China or Australia, and are inspected by the Commander-in-Chief on arrival home and reported thoroughly efficient, and praise is given by the Admiralty accordingly, and the full-power steam trial is conducted with great care, and the mere fact of the vessel having steamed home those thousands of miles is itself a manifest evidence of her propelling machinery being efficient, and yet instantly after paying off we are asked to believe that such a vessel instantly drops down to a totally incapable condition of either seagoing or fighting efficiency, by our being presented with a bill of thousands upon thousands of pounds.

The attention of the Commanders-in-Chief of the Home Ports and of the Admirals Superintendent will be specially drawn to a new series of instructions which will specifically detail their responsibility in carrying out the orders of the Admiralty in regard to defects and repairs. It is admitted that no comprehensive statement has as yet been issued as to the order and urgency in which both Fleet and Dockyard labour should be applied.

This statement is now about to be issued—it is based, and can only be based, on the knowledge of what vessels are most required for war at that particular time, and so must emanate direct from the Admiralty, who alone can decide on this matter. For instance, at this present moment there are vessels, even in the first line as some might suppose, which would not be employed until the last resort, whilst there are others almost believed to be out of the fighting category which under certain116 present conditions might be required for the first blow. This fact came so notably into prominence some months since that it has led to the adoption of what may be termed the “sliding scale” of nucleus crews, with the Torpedo craft and Submarines at almost full complement down to the vessels in “Special Reserve” with only a “skeleton” crew capable of raising steam periodically and working only the heavy armament. So no local knowledge could determine from day to day which are the first vessels required. This is changing from day to day and it is the duty of the necessarily very few to determine the daily fighting requirements. The ideal is for only one to know, and the nearer this is adhered to the more likely are we to surprise our enemies.

The Use of the Gunboat.

In the Cawdor memorandum of last year (1905) will be found an exposition of the Admiralty policy in this matter, and attention may particularly be drawn to the following passage:—

“Gunboats, and all vessels of like class, have been gradually losing value except for definite purposes under special conditions. As far as this country is concerned, the very places consecrated as the sphere of gunboat activity are those remote from the covering aid of large ships. Strained relations may occur at the shortest notice; the false security of the period of drifting imperceptibly into actual hostilities is proverbial, and the nervous dread of taking any action that might even be construed into mere precautionary measures of defence, which experience has shown to be one of the peculiar symptoms of such a period, is apt to deprive these small vessels of their last remaining chance of security by not allowing them to fall back towards material support. The broadcast use of gunboats in peace time is a marked strategic weakness, and larger vessels can generally do the work equally well, in fact far better, for they really possess the strength necessary118 to uphold the prestige of the flag they fly, whereas the gunboat is merely an abstract symbol of the power of the nation, not a concrete embodiment of it.

“It might be thought that the withdrawal of the small non-effective vessels and the grouping of fleets and squadrons at the strategic positions for war involved the loss of British prestige, and of the ‘Showing the Flag’ (as it was termed). But the actual fact is that never before in naval history has there been a more universal display of sea power than during this year by this country. The Channel Fleet in the North Sea and Baltic receiving the courtesies of Holland, Denmark, and Germany; the Atlantic Fleet at Brest; the Mediterranean Fleet at Algiers; the Fourth Cruiser Squadron, consisting of five powerful fighting vessels, now in the West Atlantic; a powerful squadron of six of the finest armoured cruisers in the world visiting Lisbon, Canada, Newfoundland, and United States; a squadron of cruisers, under a Commodore, proceeding from Labrador to Cape Horn and back by the coast of Africa, and two cruisers visiting the Pacific Coast and the adjacent islands; the movements of the Cape Squadron and of the Eastern Fleet in China, Australia, and the Indian Ocean: so imposing and ubiquitous a display of the flag and of naval power has never before been attained by our own Navy.”

The statement goes on to explain the special circumstances—use in shallow inland waters, etc., etc., which alone are held by the Admiralty to justify the use of gunboats.

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This policy is from time to time impugned by people who have no need to count the cost of the alternative policy. Doubtless it would be convenient, as a temporary emergency arises here or there over the surface of the globe, if at that very spot some British cruiser or gunboat promptly appeared ready to protect British interests, or to sink in the attempt. Indeed, for some time this was the ideal at which the Admiralty aimed. But since the redistribution of the Fleet the Empire has had to do without the ubiquitous gunboat, and, if the truth be told, scarcely seems to have missed it. There are one or two valuable cases in point. For a long time the Foreign Office, or rather the Ambassador at Constantinople, pressed for the restoration of the second stationnaire. The Admiralty sternly refused. The only noticeable result of this dangerous policy so far has been that the French have followed our example and withdrawn their second vessel.

An even more remarkable case occurred in Uruguay. A poaching Canadian sealer had been captured by the Uruguayan authorities, and language was used as if the disruption of the Empire would follow a refusal on the part of the Admiralty to liberate her crew by force. For a time the Admiralty was practically in revolt against H.M. Government, and then—everything blew over. The dispute was settled by diplomatic action and the local courts of law.

The question of the small vessel for police duties will long be with us. Vice-Consuls and Resident Commissioners will, no doubt, continue to act on the great120 principle: When in doubt wire for a gunboat. The Foreign and Colonial Offices, to whom the dispatch of a gunboat means no more than persuading a gentleman in Whitehall to send a telegram saying she is to go, will probably never quite realise why the gentleman should be so perverse as to refuse. But the matter is really now a “chose jugée”; the Admiralty battle has been fought and won, and it only remains for the Admiralty to adhere to its principles and decline to give way simply for the sake of a quiet life.

Coast Guard

June, 1906.

The Coast Guard Service was transferred from the control of the Commissioners of Customs to that of the Admiralty by the Coast Guard Service Act, 1856, in order to make better provision for—

•   (i) The defence of the coasts of the realm;
•  (ii) The more ready manning of His Majesty’s Navy in case of war or sudden emergency;
• (iii) The protection of the Revenue;

and there is little doubt that at that time the Coast Guard force was required for these three purposes.

Since that date, however, these requirements have been greatly modified by the great developments that have taken place in steam, in electricity, and generally in the conduct of Naval warfare, and also as regards the inducements and facilities for smuggling.

It is now considered that about 170 War Signal and121 Wireless Telegraphy Stations in the United Kingdom are sufficient to give warning of the approach of an enemy’s ships, and that, as far as the use of the Coast Guard for Coast Defence is concerned, the remaining 530 Stations and their personnel are quite unnecessary.

As an Active Service force the Coast Guard is far from fulfilling modern fighting requirements, which are so exacting that a man’s efficiency depends upon his being continuously associated with highly technical duties on board ship, and employment in the Coast Guard (even with the arranged periodical training in the Fleet) is found to be inconsistent with these requirements.

Again, as a Reserve, though it fulfils the requirements of such a force, yet its cost (largely due to the heavy expense of housing the men and their families) is out of all proportion to that at which the efficient Royal Fleet Reserve can now be maintained.

The Coast Guard being treated as an Active Service force in the Estimates, the numbers are included in the number of men voted for the Fleet, and help to make up the total of 129,000; but as the 4,000 Coast Guard men are appropriated for duties away from the chief Naval ports, they are not available for the ordinary work of the Fleet, and the peace resources are correspondingly reduced, while the extra charges for the Coast Guard tend largely to increase the expense of maintaining the Active Service force.

If, on the other hand, the Coast Guard be treated as a Reserve only, the expense is still more disproportionate, as, in comparison with the small retainers, charges for122 a week’s annual drill and small prospective pension, which make up the whole expense entailed in the maintenance of the Royal Fleet Reserve, there are the Full Pay, Victualling, Housing, and numerous miscellaneous allowances and charges of a permanent force maintained in small units under the most expensive conditions.

Therefore, the maintenance of the Coast Guard by the Admiralty not only entails a reduction of the number of highly-trained active service ratings in the Fleet at sea, but also an unnecessarily large expenditure on a Reserve.

As regards the use of the Coast Guard for the protection of the Revenue, the arrangements made when the Coast Guard was transferred to the control of the Admiralty might now be considerably modified. A large proportion of the coast of the United Kingdom is still patrolled nightly by the Coast Guard as a precaution against smuggling, but looking to the increase in population and the number of towns and villages round the coasts, the development of telegraphic communication, and the great reduction in the inducements to smuggling, this service seems to be no longer required; and some other adequate arrangement for the protection of the Revenue might be made by a small addition to the present Customs Force, assisted by the local Police, in addition to the watch still kept at those Coast Guard Stations which would be maintained as Naval Signal Stations.

Even in the cases in which the existing Coast Guard may be considered to afford valuable protection to the123 Revenue, it must be remembered that in case of War or for Great Manœuvres, the men would be withdrawn to the Fleet from all stations except the Naval War Signal Stations.

In any case the employment of highly-trained seamen to perform simple police duties on shore cannot be justified, and the expense is much greater than it would be were a civilian force to be employed.

Certain other duties, principally in connection with life-saving and wrecks, under the Board of Trade, have also been undertaken by the Coast Guard; but these, however valuable, do not constitute a raison d’être for the Coast Guard, and it is quite feasible to make adequate local arrangements for carrying out these services, should the Coast Guard be removed. No more striking illustration of the feasibility of this can be given than the National Lifeboat Organisation, and to that body, aided perhaps by a Government grant, these services could, no doubt, be easily, economically, and efficiently transferred.

Owing to the growing naval armaments of other Nations, and the consequent necessary increase in the Navy, the Admiralty has found it necessary carefully to consider the whole question of the expenditure under the Naval Votes in order to eliminate therefrom any services which are unnecessary from the point of view of immediate readiness and efficiency for war. About £1,000,000 of the Naval Votes is diverted to services which only indirectly concern the Navy, and are not material to the fighting efficiency of the Service. Of124 this about half (£500,000) is annually absorbed by the Coast Guard.

From a Naval point of view the greater part of this heavy annual expenditure is wholly unnecessary, and it is also very doubtful, from what has been before pointed out, whether for Revenue purposes a force such as the Coast Guard is now required; while if it be still required in certain localities, it would be more economical to replace the present expensive Naval detachments by a Civilian service. By such a transfer the whole of the present expense of training men as a fighting force would be saved and there would be no deterioration in an important part of the Naval active personnel such as is now inevitable.

There can be no comparison between the cost of a Revenue force and that of a Naval force, the cost of Naval training, which is very considerable, being dispensed with in the former case. Therefore, there is no doubt that, from the point of efficiency and economy, the substitution of civilians for Naval ratings would be a great saving to the State.

Observatories.

21st August, 1906.

In the past Greenwich Observatory has been of great importance to the Navy, inasmuch as all the data necessary for the navigation of ships by astronomical observation have been compiled there. The testing of chronometers has been carried out at Greenwich since their invention in 1762, while the Cape Observatory was125 instituted in 1820 in order to supply data concerning Southern stars not visible from Greenwich.

In recent years, however, the familiarity with Ocean routes that has been attained; the greatly extended area of coast surveys, and the admirable system of lights and beacons established throughout the navigational zones of the world, have in the course of years caused the work of the Observatories to become of less importance to practical navigation, and more a matter of scientific research. The photographic mapping of the heavens, by which stars invisible to the naked eye are discovered, is not a necessity to navigation, nor to the Naval Service.

At the present time, therefore, it may be said that the only work done by the Observatories which is directly useful to the Navy, is the testing and storing of chronometers; observing the astronomical changes connected with the heavenly bodies for the purpose of obtaining data for the correction of the Nautical Almanack; supplying accurate time for time signals and meridian distance work, and taking magnetic observations.

This sphere of usefulness is not of advantage to the Navy alone. The Mercantile Marine derives equal benefit from the work of the Observatories. Greenwich time is indispensable to Railway Companies to enable them to work their complicated systems with accuracy, and it is equally indispensable to the Postal Authorities for the proper working of every post and telegraph office in the Kingdom. Although the staff of the Observatories is very largely occupied upon services of this public character, neither the Board of Trade, nor Lloyd’s, nor126 the various Mercantile Shipping Associations, nor the Railway Companies, nor the General Post Office, have made any contribution towards their cost, while, on the other hand, in one case, that of the Post Office, the Admiralty is charged with a heavy annual payment for postal and telegraphic communications. The London Water Companies are greatly assisted by the Greenwich rainfall observations, but they pay nothing for them, neither do they supply the Admiralty with water gratuitously.

It is fitting that the British Empire should possess a National Observatory, but it is not equitable that Naval funds should bear the whole expense.

When criticism is directed against the magnitude of the Navy Estimates, it rarely happens that the critic takes the trouble to ascertain of what Items the Votes are made up; on the other hand, money voted for the Royal Observatories is passed by the House without much question, because it happens to form part of Estimates which are of such great magnitude.

The present procedure tends therefore to obscure the actual sum total of the Navy Estimates, and at the same time it prevents the application to the Royal Observatories of the same Parliamentary criticism which is applied to the Civil Service Estimates.

Sir John Fisher to Lord Selborne, First Lord of the Admiralty.

Sir John Fisher and Sir Colin Keppel (Captain of the Royal Yacht).

Main Principles of Scheme.

Future Types of Fighting Vessels.

Four classes only of fighting vessels.

Uniform armament (except torpedo attack guns) in all classes of fighting vessels.

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Inviolate watertight bulkheads.

Subdivision of magazines.

Protection of magazines.

Abolish Ram.

No guns on main deck (so splendid light and airy accommodation for officers, and crew, with huge square ports and magnificent deck space).

Reduction of all weights and scantlings.

“Out of Date” Fighting Ships.

Removal as soon as possible of all “out of date” ships (that is, ships unfit for fighting).

To abolish gradually the employment of all slow vessels below 1st Class Armoured Cruisers.

To substitute efficient fighting vessels with nucleus crews for all the stationary obsolete vessels now in commission, and also for all the training vessels and all the Coastguard Cruisers.

Revision of Stations.

South Atlantic, West Indies, and Cape to form a squadron under chief command of the Admiral of the Cape Station, who will be a Vice-Admiral in the future with three Rear-Admirals under him.6

The Commander-in-Chief in China to have the chief command and strategic handling of the squadrons in China, Australia, East Indies, and Pacific. He can be a full Admiral with two Vice-Admirals and two Rear-Admirals131 under him. The object is to employ Flag Officers as much as possible at sea.

Effective Cruisers to be substituted for the present varying types of vessels forming all these squadrons.

Personnel.

Reduction in entry of Boys, and increase of entry of Non-continuous Service Men and of “Northampton” lads.

Introduction of new system of Reserve (long service tempered by short service!)

Nucleus Crews.

Two-yearly commissions to be instituted, and with no material change of officers and men during the two years.

All the fighting vessels in Reserve to have an efficient nucleus crew of approximately two-fifths of the full crew, together with all important Gunnery ratings as well as the Captain of the ship and the principal Officers.

The periodical exercise and inspection of the ships by the responsible Flag Officer who will take them to the war.

This Flag Officer will suffer for any want of efficiency and preparation for war of these vessels. These vessels to be collected in squadrons at Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Chatham, according to the Station to which they are going as the reinforcements.

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Signals.

Revision of our methods of Signalling to be based on the class of Signals that will be used in war.

To abolish all systems and all Signals that are only of use in peace time.

The Signal and Exercise Books of the Fleet to be ruthlessly revised and cut down with this in view.

The present establishment of Signalmen on board all vessels to be reduced to the numbers that are necessary in war (present system of superabundance of Signalmen embarked in Flagships criminally wrong).

Defence of Naval Ports.

Modern conditions necessitate certain floating defences requiring seamen to manipulate them. Soldiers apparently can’t do it!

Divided control of defence of Naval Ports impossible between Navy and Army.

Admiralty must have sole responsibility that all our Naval Arsenals are kept open for egress and ingress of our Fleet in war.

Local defences should, therefore, apparently be under the Naval Commander-in-Chief.

But all these arrangements for any such transfer of responsibility from War Office to Admiralty must be so planned as to obviate all possibility of Fleet men being used for shore work in war, and there must be no risk of lessening the sea experience of the officers and men of the Fleet; hence it will be imperative that there should be133 an entire transference of the whole of the Garrison Artillery from Army to Navy, as well as the responsibility for all ordnance.

All this involves so immense an addition to the responsibilities of the Admiralty, apart from the one chief function of the Navy of seeking out and fighting the enemy’s fleets, that we have to hesitate; but we can’t let matters go on as at present.

Notes by Sir John Fisher on New Proposals.

Organisation for War.

The object of the following remarks is to make clear what has now to be done to organise and prepare for war. What are the two great essentials?

To get these two essentials an immense deal is involved! It is believed they can both be got with a great reduction in the Navy Estimates!

This reduction, combined with an undeniable increase in the fighting efficiency of the Navy, involves great changes and depends absolutely on one condition:—

The Scheme herein shadowed forth must be adopted as a whole!

Simply because all portions of it are absolutely essential—and134 it is all so interlaced that any tampering will be fatal!

The country will acclaim it! the income-tax payer will worship it! the Navy will growl at it! (they always do growl at first!)

But we shall be Thirty per cent. more fit to fight and we shall be ready for instant war!

and in time when we get rid of our redundancies in useless ships and unnecessary men it will probably be 30 per cent. cheaper!

The outline of the various proposals will first be given. No one single point must be taken as more important than another. Each is part of a whole; As St. Paul well observes in the xii. Chapter of the I Corinthians:—

So is it of this scheme! All its parts are essential for the perfection we must have if England is to remain the “Mistress of the Seas”!

The British Nation floats on the British Navy! So we must have no doubt whatever about its fighting supremacy and its instant readiness for war! To ensure this and at the same time to effect the economy which the finances of the country render imperative there must be drastic changes! To carry these out we must have the three R’s! We must be Ruthless, Relentless, Remorseless! We must tell interested people whose interests are going to be ignored that what the Articles135 of War have said since the time of Queen Elizabeth is truer than ever!

“It is the Navy whereon under the good providence of God, the wealth, peace, and safety of this country doth chiefly depend!”

If the Navy is not supreme, no Army however large is of the slightest use. It’s not invasion we have to fear if our Navy is beaten,

It’s Starvation!

What’s the good of an army if it has got an empty belly? In Mr. John Morley’s famous and splendid words at Manchester on November 8th, 1893: “Everybody knows, Liberals as well as Tories, that it is indispensable that we should have not only a powerful Navy, but I may say, an all-powerful Navy.” And when we have that—then History may repeat itself, and Mahan’s glorious words will be applicable in some other great national crisis! the finest words and the truest words in the English language!

“Nelson’s far-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.”—(Mahan, Vol. II, page 118.)

And the Navy must always so stand! Supreme—unbeaten! So we must have no tinkering! No pandering to sentiment! No regard for susceptibilities! No pity for anyone! We must be Ruthless, Relentless, and Remorseless! And we must therefore have The Scheme! The Whole Scheme!! And Nothing But The Scheme!!!

Just let us take one instance as an illustration of a mighty reform (lots more will follow later, but the sledge136 hammer comes in handy here!). During the 12 months ending June 30th, 1904 (this last month!) the ships of the Home Fleet, the Channel Fleet, and the Cruiser Squadron were in Portsmouth Dockyard for over 30 per cent. of the year! Disorganised and unfit for sea! See what this means! A battleship costs over £100,000 a year for its up-keep, irrespective of repairs, but it’s not the money waste! it’s the efficiency waste!

Every day those Fleets and Squadrons are not together, they are deteriorating!

It is only human nature that when in Portsmouth Dockyard, from the Admiral downwards, all are hankering after their homes! and somehow or other they get there! the fictions are endless and ingenious, and extend from “the cradle to the grave!” From an unexpected confinement to the serious illness of an aged relative! (nearly always a grandmother! and the baby is always the first one!)

What is the remedy?

It’s Nelsonic—and so simple!

Nelson could not leave Toulon with all his Fleet for nearly four months out of the year! No! he stayed there for two years without putting his foot on shore! What he did was to send one or two ships away at a time to get provisions and water, and to effect any needed repairs. Let us do the same! We want a fixed base for each Fleet (and so fixed for war reasons). Thus, for example, the Channel Fleet at Gibraltar, the Home Fleet at Bantry, or the Forth, and so on. But this is going into unnecessary detail, and anticipating other137 parts of the scheme which must be adopted to make this work! Thus it will be seen later on, that to enable this great economy in money to be effected (putting aside increase of fighting efficiency!), we must have two years’ commissions! But we can’t have two years’ commissions unless we have fewer ships in commission! But we can’t have fewer ships in commission unless we have a redistribution of our Fleet! But we can’t have a redistribution of our Fleet until we rearrange our strategy! and this strategy, strange to say, depends on our reserves, and our reserves depend on a fresh allocation of our personnel, and on a fresh system of service. We must have the new scheme of Long Service tempered by Short Service! And this again largely hangs on the types of fighting ships we are going to have! But what is the type of ship? Not one that goes to the bottom in two minutes from the effect of one torpedo, and drowns nearly a thousand men, and takes three years to replace, and costs over a million sterling! How many types do we want! This is quite easy to answer if we make up our minds how we are going to fight! Who has made up his mind? How many of our Admirals have got minds?

It will be obvious then that the whole of this business is a regular case of “the house that Jack built,” for one thing follows on another, they are all interlaced and interdependent! That’s why it was said to begin with:—

The Scheme! The Whole Scheme!! And Nothing but the Scheme!!!

One essential feature which has been overlooked must be mentioned before going further because imperatively138 necessary to ensure instant readiness for war, but it hangs on all the other points previously mentioned and which are going to be examined in detail.

The reduction in the number of ships in commission which is as necessary for fighting efficiency (when the whole Navy is mobilised for war) as it is conducive to an immense economy must be accompanied by and associated with two vital requisites:

I. Every fighting ship in reserve must have a nucleus crew.

II. The reinforcements for the fighting fleets and squadrons must be collected together while in the reserve at the most convenient ports and be placed under the Flag Officer who will take them to their war stations, and this Flag Officer to understand he will be shot like a dog in case of any inefficiency in these ships in war.

Unless this is carried out the great strategic scheme in contemplation could not be entertained nor could the number of ships in commission be reduced as is absolutely essential for the efficiency of those in reserve, not on the score of economy at all, but the reduction of ships in commission is imperative for the fighting efficiency of the whole fleet when mobilised.

So we thus get one more illustration of the interdependence of all portions of the scheme and beg again to refer to St. Paul as previously quoted.

It is convenient here to mention that the paucity of efficient Admirals is a most serious matter, and will probably compel the manufacture of Commodores or of Acting Admirals under a resuscitated Order-in-Council.139 The least capable in the respective ranks of the Navy are the Admirals. It’s not their own fault solely, they have had no education, and this blot will continue till we have a Naval War College established at Portsmouth, and Flag Officers and Captains, hoping for employment, can practically prove their capacity by manœuvring two fleets of destroyers against each other. This will be much cheaper and less risky to the Empire than their manœuvring with the big ships. Experiments on the scale of 12 inches to a foot are not economical!

Mr. Childers was our Attila! He was the “scourge” of the Navy in many ways, but most of all by his disastrous and frightfully costly retirement schemes. The secret of efficiency lies in large lists of Officers! You have then a large field of selection, and a great flow of promotion, and also no Officer considers it a stigma to be passed over in company with forty others, and so not to pose as a solitary monument of ineptitude as he appears at present to himself and his friends when passed over with the present small lists of Flag Officers.

Also “Selection by non-employment” goes so easily with large lists (and with large lists is accepted as a necessity, and not resented as a personal affront!).

Purging the Navy of Obsolete Vessels.

Out of 193 ships at present in commission (not counting destroyers) organised in fleets, 63 only are of such calibre as not to cause an Admiral grave concern if allowed to wander from the protection of larger ships. There are140 among these several ships which should be paid off as soon as possible, being absolutely of no fighting value. And there are, further, several ships having trained naval crews doing the work usually performed by small merchant tramps. Further still, there are in our Home Ports many ships taking up valuable berthing space, requiring maintenance and repair, which never under any circumstances whatever would be used in war time.

The above useless vessels being in commission means awful waste of money.

Every ship that has defects taken in hand, and which would not be of use in war, is a waste of money to the country.

Of course objections will be raised, and it will be shown that the Navy cannot be run without them, but wipe them out, and in a year no one will remember that they ever existed.

It is well to review generally our distant stations and the composition of their squadrons.

The Navy and the country have grown so accustomed to the territorial nomenclature of our distant squadrons that their connection with the sea is considerably obscured, and their association with certain lands has led to a tacit belief that those particular squadrons are for the protection of the lands they frequent, and not generally for the destruction of the enemy’s fleet wherever it may happen to be. Of course no such idea is accepted by the Admiralty, but, in spite of the broad principles of strategy involved, certain fleets are composed largely with a view to work in restricted waters, which vessels141 would be a source of danger and weakness on the sudden outbreak of war with a combination of Powers.

Take the combination of ships on each of the following stations: North America, Cape of Good Hope, East Indies, and Australia. Remember the “Variag.” What happened in the small area of the theatre of operations in the present war will be repeated in the larger theatre of operations of a conflict of European Powers when the whole world will be involved. What will happen to our “Odins,” “Redbreasts,” “Fantomes,” “Dwarfs,” etc.? aye! and what will happen to our “Scyllas,” “Katoombas,” and “Hyacinths,” if caught sight of by first class cruisers of modern armament on foreign stations?7 Lucky if they can reach a neutral port, disarm, and have their crews interned for the remainder of the war. Lucky, indeed, if a far worse fate does not befall them. At all events, such wholesale scattering of the British foreign fleets would lead to irreparable loss of prestige among the smaller States where these little vessels were usually located.

Now is there any necessity for such numbers of useless fighting ships? Cannot more efficient classes be substituted for them, or, at all events, some of them?

What we have to face is the probability of a serious combination of strong Powers against us, for then we will be unable to spare two first class cruisers to go in search of individual enemy’s first class cruisers, who, if142 not caught, may sweep round and lick up or force into neutral ports all our inefficient small fry.

Surely the three Atlantic squadrons should be of such strength as to be able to rendezvous and form a fleet more or less absolutely self-protective, to say nothing of being offensive. Such a squadron, under one admiral in war time, would be an effective Atlantic squadron, and would protect our interests by holding the ocean against enemy’s cruisers.

Such squadrons can be formed without increasing the personnel of the Navy, and, moreover, the crews would be in ships that would be used in war instead of being in “floating anxieties.”

Now for the present, sufficient cruisers, first class, do not exist to meet the requirements of supplying ships to take the place of smaller obsolete ones, and also for reserve purposes.

For the present a large proportion of cruisers, second class, must be retained, but it is hoped that these will in time be replaced by cruisers, first class, in the proportion of one cruiser, first class, to three cruisers, second or third class. No one can argue that one first class cruiser is not a superior fighting unit to three cruisers second or third class. Also one defect list instead of three!

If it should be insisted on that certain ports require certain small vessels, then they should be earmarked for that purpose, and only such places be recognised which larger vessels cannot frequent, such as the rivers on the West Coast of Africa (our territory), shallow rivers in143 China where no question of neutrality can arise, or special places of this nature. It should be overwhelmingly proved to the satisfaction of the Admiralty that essential conditions necessitate the presence of useless fighting ships before they relax their efforts to have such useless ships removed.

It should be accepted as a principle that the great aim and object of the Admiralty is to have nothing floating on the waters except the four fundamental types of fighting vessels, and that (for the present) lack of ships of the necessary classes prevents this being realised, but that as the delivery of ships takes place, the substitution will automatically follow.

The Foreign Office will in time be bound to recognise the real efficiency of the scheme, even if a consul is robbed of the shadow of support of a gunboat under his window, but has the substantial strength of a first class cruiser substituted at the end of a telegraph wire.

The danger that is eternally present to the Navy is over confidence in our preparedness for war.

The chief cause of unpreparedness for war is want of appreciation of the cumulative effect of daily small changes in our ships and armament on the whole question of strategy and shipbuilding.

Changes have slipped so gradually from wooden sailing ships through slow steam iron vessels to our present splendid ships of war that the tendency has always been to subordinate our strategy to our ship construction, rather than to mould our war ship design to suit our strategy.

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Strategy should govern the types of ships to be designed.

Ship design, as dictated by strategy, should govern tactics.

Tactics should govern details of armaments.

In approaching the important question of ship design the first essential is to divest our minds totally of the idea that a single type of ship as now built is necessary, or even advisable, then to consider the strategic use of each different class, especially weighing the antagonistic attributes of nominally similar classes in the old wars.

To commence with the battleship.

The sole reason for the existence of the old line of battleship was that that ship was the only vessel that could not be destroyed except by a vessel of equal class. This meant that a country possessing the largest number of best equipped battleships could lay them alongside the enemy, or off the ports where the enemy were. Transports with the escort of a few battleships could then proceed to make oversea conquests. Squadrons of battleships or cruisers escorting the convoy of merchant ships and keeping the line of communications open. In each case the battleship, being able to protect everything it had under its wing from any smaller vessel, was the ultimate naval strength of the country. Then it was that, by means of the battleship only, was the command of the sea gained and held. Let us be quite clear on the matter, it was solely from the fact that the battleship was unassailable by any vessel except a battleship that made the command of the sea by battleships a possibility!

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Hence battleships came to symbolise naval sea strength and supremacy. For this reason battleships have been built through every change of construction and material, although by degrees other vessels not battleships have arisen which can attack and destroy them.

Here therefore there is good ground for inquiry whether the naval supremacy of a country can any longer be assessed by its battleships. To build battleships merely to fight enemy’s battleships, so long as cheaper craft can destroy them, and prevent them of themselves protecting sea operations, is merely to breed Kilkenny cats unable to catch rats or mice. For fighting purposes they would be excellent, but for gaining practical results they would be useless.

This at once forces a consideration as to how a battleship differs from an armoured cruiser. Fundamentally the battleship sacrifices speed for a superior armament and protective armour. It is this superiority of speed that enables an enemy’s ships to be overhauled or evaded that constitutes the real difference between the two. At the present moment naval experience is not sufficiently ripe to abolish totally the building of battleships so long as other countries do not do so.

But it is evidently an absolute necessity in future construction to make the speed of the battleship approach as nearly as possible that of the armoured cruiser.

Next consider the case of the armoured cruiser.

In the old days the frigate was the cruiser, she was unarmoured, that is, her sides were so much thinner than those of the battleship that she was not able to146 fight in the line of battle, but the weak gun fire of those days permitted close scouting by such unprotected vessels, she could approach a battleship squadron very closely without fear of damage, she could sail round a fleet and count their numbers without danger to herself, unless chased off by other frigates, she was a scout and a commerce destroyer. Similarly with present day armoured cruisers, they can force their way up to within sight of a fleet, and observe them, unless chased off by other armoured cruisers, but to do this they have to be given a certain amount of protective armour.

The range of eyesight has remained constant, that of gunfire has increased. Speed is a necessity to ensure safety, armour protection to ensure vision.

It is evident, from the above considerations, that the functions of the frigate have devolved on the armoured cruiser to a greater extent than have the functions of the line of battleship devolved on the modern battleship.

But how about the unarmoured cruisers and those of low speed?

With loss of protection a cruiser loses her power of reasonable approach for observation purposes, and if to this be added a loss of reasonable speed her safety is gone. Cruisers without high speed and protection are entirely and absolutely useless.

Every vessel that has not high scouting speed, or the highest defensive and offensive powers, is useless for fighting purposes.

This is true of every class of vessel between the first class armoured cruiser and the fast torpedo vessel.

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Nucleus Crews.

It is impossible to exaggerate the vital importance to the nation of having all the reserve ships absolutely ready for instant war.

Our reserve ships, as they are now, are not, and cannot be made really efficient fighting units under several months of commission. There is no doubt that great strides towards rapid mobilisation have been made of late years, but merely to hustle a complement of the required ratings into a ship, is not to make her a really efficient fighting machine.

The keystone of our preparedness for war has now to be inserted, namely, the provision of efficient nucleus crews.

This can be done to-morrow.

A nucleus crew should consist of approximately two-fifths of her engine-room complement, the whole of her turret crews, gun layers and sight-setters for all guns, all important special ratings, and two-fifths of her normal crew, her captain, and all important officers.

The ship can proceed half-yearly, or quarterly, as may be required, to sea with her fighting ship’s company to carry out firing exercises, or to work under the Admiral or Commodore who will command her and her consorts in war, and be as nearly perfectly efficient as any ship, not always at sea, can be.

No more men above our present requirements need be entered, training in gunnery and torpedo schools need not be interfered with, and a saving of money to the taxpayer effected.

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Subsidiary Services of War.

We are now busily engaged in perfecting each and all of these subsidiary services; but they are not yet perfect. In some important respects we are as yet far from it (Rome was not built in a day!), but we now emphasise the fact in order that matters may be pushed on by all concerned, from the Prime Minister downwards, with the utmost energy and vigour!

The items are not taken in the order of their relative importance, but for convenience of argument.

There is the service of all the auxiliary vessels of the Fleet for supplying coal, ammunition, stores, provisions, water, materials for repairs, &c., and also the multitudes of fast mercantile vessels we require as Scouts; and there is also the nature of the employment of the armed mercantile cruisers to be settled. All these points have been carefully considered in the past, but in all and every one of them there is that most deadly of all deadly drawbacks to fighting readiness, the leaving certain things to be dealt with “when the time comes.” The time will come like the Day of Judgment! There won’t be time for doing anything, not even for repentance! We must go to the very utmost limit of preparedness, not one little item must be left to be dealt with “when the time comes.” We want all these vessels, without any exception whatever, to be as ready for a sudden emergency as is now the main Fighting Fleet! So therefore, day by day, we must know by name each vessel for every service, and the orders for every captain of149 every single one of this multitude of mercantile auxiliaries must be prepared, and he (each several captain) must thoroughly understand these orders beforehand; they must be explained to him by “one who knows,” and when that captain leaves England for his next trade voyage (and his ship is therefore no longer available), then the operation must be repeated with the captain of the substituted vessel! It must be laid down where every ship is to load, what route she is to follow, what eventualities she has to guard against! All, and together, must be detailed and day by day kept perfect!

Again, who are the officers at every port superintending the imparting of this information every day of the year, to the daily fresh captains of daily fresh ships, replacing others daily, going on their usual trade voyages? Who is the Flag Officer in supreme charge of all these superintending Port Officers? What are the names of the retired Commissioned or Warrant Officers who may be allocated to take passage in all the more important auxiliary vessels? such, for instance, and above all, as the Ammunition and Repair ships, so as to ensure the proper control and distribution of the cargo, as well as the efficient and prompt action of the ship herself, to be at the right place at the right time. Every Commander-in-Chief must know in minute detail every particular about every one of these vessels that are coming to him. He must know it now. He must know it day by day! He must have his own agent at home to look after his interests and to be responsible to him (the Commander-in-Chief) for the completeness of all the arrangements,—if150 not complete, then this agent must report the Superintending Port Officers for their incompetency.

All this scheme above sketched out may involve immense labour and great expense, but it has got to be done! Not a bit of use having the Fleet at all, if you don’t feed it, and also feed it well!

Quite as a separate service, apart from all that has been mentioned above, is the dissemination of intelligence and its suppression.

We must not (as has been hitherto accepted) permit the splendid costly fighting vessels of the Fleet to be criminally wasted by being sent here and there as messengers! Fast unarmoured mercantile steamers must constitute the squadrons of the Sea Intelligence Department, and instead of our Admirals running after information with costly armoured cruisers, we must run after the Admirals with the information, with easily obtainable cheap (because non-fighting), fast mercantile vessels.

All this is but a brief review of what is in progress, and what has to be done, but there remains above all that daily consideration at the Admiralty, and by every Admiral in command, of what would have to be done that very day in case of war, with the most unexpected, as well as the most expected opponent!

A Retrospect (July, 1906).

The most striking fact to an outsider is the astonishing confidence and loyalty of the Navy in its rulers which has been exhibited during the last two years of relentless reorganisation.

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Naval Officers, as a class, are conservative and dislike change, and as a rule are prepared to resist it. The manner in which the recent changes have been received, root and branch and sweeping as they were, shows, as nothing else can, the necessity for reforms. Compare the insignificant agitation (which has, however, now entirely collapsed), in the Navy over the vast and drastic reforms of the last two years with the agitation in the Army over the trifling matter of getting rid of two battalions of Guards!

So let us be grateful—adequately grateful—to the officers and men of the Navy for their splendid loyalty during the introduction of reforms, some of which have hit them very hard, notably the sudden bringing home and paying off of the large number of vessels that were wiped out of the Navy as not being up to the required standard of fighting efficiency. And there was also the redistribution of the Fleet, which deprived many officers of advantageous appointments and seriously disturbed domestic arrangements.

But the fact is that the Navy sees the fighting advantages we have gained, and so has loyally responded to the demands on its sense of duty.

As an excellent writer in the “North American Review” for June so aptly expresses it, the Navy saw that it was steam-manship that was wanted, and so, as a body, they welcomed the new scheme of training both of officers and men. They saw also that to have every vessel of the Navy, large and small, mobilised and efficient to fight within three hours in the dead of night,152 as practically exemplified in the recent Grand Manœuvres, is a result which justifies all the drastic measures of the Board of Admiralty.

The Navy also recognises the incomparable fighting advantages of the new era in giving us an unparalleled gunnery efficiency, as exemplified in the fact that before that new era there were 2,000 more misses than hits in the annual gunlayers’ competition, while in the year after there were 2,000 more hits than misses! In the new order the best ship is the one that can catch the enemy soonest, and hit him hardest and oftenest; under the old system these considerations were certainly not the primary ones.

The Navy sees also that, while the fighting efficiency of the British Fleet and its instant readiness for war has become a household word amongst the Admiralties of the world, at the same time vast economies—to be reckoned in many millions—have been effected; for instance, our harbours, docks, and basins are ridded of obsolete vessels and thus made adequate for the accommodation of our fighting fleet, for which there was no room previously, and no less a sum than 13 millions sterling was at one time contemplated as necessary to give the required accommodation. The whole of that 13 millions in proposed works has been cancelled.

Nor have the officers and men been forgotten. The men have had a quarter of a million sterling practically added to their pay; one item alone is £75,000 a year for increase of pensions to petty officers, and another £47,000 a year in giving them their food allowance when153 on leave, and other similar and just concessions make up the balance. Further improvements in the position of the lower deck are now under consideration and will shortly be ready for announcement, i.e., Ratings Committee.

The officers, again, no longer pay for the bands out of their own pockets, and the system of Nucleus Crews gives them an amount of Home Service combined with sea-time, with all its domestic advantages, beyond anything ever before obtaining in the Navy.

Again, it is recognised by all but a few misguided misanthropes that the new shipbuilding policy is a magnificent departure in fighting policy. We ask the officers who are going to fight, what they want, and we build thereto. Formerly vessels were simply belated improvements on their predecessors. Admirals had to make the best use they could of the heterogeneous assemblage of vessels which the idiosyncrasies of talented designers and Controllers of the Navy had saddled us with, to the embarrassment of those whose business it was to use them in battle, and to the bitter bewilderment of types in the brain of the Board of Admiralty! Theory was entirely divorced from practice, with the lamentable result that when the two were recently brought together, and the “Dreadnought” was evolved, it was found that the whole Navy had practically become obsolete!

“First catch your hare” is the recipe in Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery Book for “jugged hare,” and so speed has been put in the forefront in every class of vessel from battleship to submarine, and as it’s no use having the154 speed without the wherewithal to demolish the enemy, the armament of our new ships, as so fully exemplified in the “Dreadnought,” has received such a development that that vessel is equal to any two and a half battleships at present existing.

The efficacy of the Nucleus Crew system has also been obvious to the whole Fleet in the unprecedented exemptions from machinery defects, and the unexampled gunnery efficiency, coupled with a saving of about 50 per cent. in repairs of ships, which incidentally has led in a large measure to the reduction of 6,000 Dockyard workmen. And it must never be forgotten that every penny not spent in a fighting ship or on a fighting man is a penny taken away from the day of battle!

The management of the Royal Dockyards has now been placed on a much sounder footing, more akin to the organisation in similar commercial establishments, where any undue extravagance or unnecessary executive machinery means loss of money to the shareholders, and is visited by pains and penalties on the officials directly responsible. At the same time the desirable possibilities of ready expansion in war time to suit the varying requirements of a purely naval repairing and building establishment have been maintained.

The Navy also sees the great strategic advantages of our Fleets exercising where they are likely to fight. As Nelson said, “The battle ground should be the drill ground.”

The placid waters and lovely weather of the Mediterranean do not fit our seamen for the fogs and gales of155 the North Sea, or accustom them to the rigours of a northern winter, when the icicles hang down over the bed or the hammock of the Torpedo Boat Commander and his men, as in the North Sea last winter when we sent 147 Torpedo Craft suddenly to exercise at sea; and though sent on a full power trial of many hours, on first being mobilised, not a single defect or breakdown was experienced. Since that date the arrangements for the Torpedo Craft have been still further perfected, and now the Destroyers are all organised according to the strategic requirements of the situation of the moment, and are definitely detailed in flotillas and divisions, with their store and repair ships and reserves, according to the approved modern methods of torpedo warfare as exemplified in the Russo-Japanese War.

The Navy also sees and welcomes the untold advantage given by the Nucleus Crew system of instant war readiness, as exemplified when last July all our vessels, large and small, in reserve went to sea unnoticed by the Press and engaged in fighting Manœuvres in the Channel with 200 pendants under the chief command of the Admiral of the Channel Fleet.

No calling out of Reserves or such disorganisation as was incidental to the old system, when the crews of ships in commission had to be broken up to leaven the ships of the Reserve that then had no crews at all.

I.—Common Entry.
(Written in 1905).

On the 25th of December, 1902, the new system of entry and training of officers for the Navy was inaugurated.

The fundamental principles of this great reform are:—

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When the details of the new scheme were published, it was stated that at about the age of 20 these officers, who up till then had all received an identical training, would be appropriated by selection to the three branches, viz., Executive, Marine, or Engineer; however, this is unlikely to be carried out in its entirety, and when the time comes, the march of progress will have prepared us to recognise that differentiation to this extent is unnecessary, and that the Fleet will be officered by the combatant officer, who will be equally an Executive, Marine, or Engineer Officer.

Let us assume this to be true. In spite of the great revolution that has been brought about since Christmas, 1902, in the Navy, and the consequent awakening and development of the minds of all officers, there is not one in one hundred who realises fully what the effects of this great reform will be.

The Cadets who are at present at Osborne College are being educated primarily as Mechanical Engineers concurrently with the special training necessary to make them good seamen, good navigators, and good commanders. The most important training they have to receive is undoubtedly that of the Mechanical Engineer, which will ultimately make them capable of dealing with and handling ANYTHING of a mechanical nature. In process of learning this they acquire a mathematical training of a very high order, and, as pure mathematics are the same all the world over, the various other subjects which the Naval Officer of the future will be required to be proficient in only necessitate a little training in the158 special application of the mathematics of which they possess a firm grasp. Navigation and nautical astronomy are simplicity exemplified once the student has learned trigonometry and algebra. Gunnery, torpedo, and electricity are simply special cases of mechanical problems. Modern seamanship is practically nothing else but a practical application of simple mechanical “chestnuts.”

What, therefore, is the meaning of it all?

It means that the Naval Officer of the future will regard machinery, mechanical work, and mechanical problems as his “bread and butter.” He will think no more of handling machinery of any sort than the ordinary mortal does of riding a bicycle; guns, gun-mountings, torpedoes, and electrical instruments and machines he will regard as special types, but differing no whit in principle from the primitive stock. Mystery will disappear. At present it is an unfortunate thing that departmental jealousy leads the members of each and every department of the Service to make a mystery of their particular speciality. The Gunnery Lieutenant, Torpedo Lieutenant, Engineer, and Marine Officer each resent discussion by “outsiders” of any point in connection with their speciality, as a piece of unwarrantable presumption, with the result that each knows all about his own job, and pursues it diligently, taking care not to poach on anybody else’s preserves, but without any regard as to whether the Service might not gain in efficiency by a little more co-operation and collaboration.

From one point of view they are right in being exclusive, because they know that no one else knows159 anything about their work, and therefore discussion with “outsiders” is mere waste of breath, but in future all this will be changed. Specialities will disappear; the Naval Officer of the future will see no greater difference between a gun-mounting and a torpedo, than an Engineer sees between the main engines and the feed pump.

However, although specialities will disappear, it will always be necessary to have “experts” in each department. We shall still require our Lieutenants G., T., and E.; but as at the present time when a Lieutenant G. is promoted to Commander he drops the G., so also it seems logical to conclude that the future Lieutenant E. on promotion to Commander should drop the E.

It is absolutely safe to predict that the Naval Officer of 50 years hence will smile when he reads that his forefathers had to have an officer of Commander’s rank appointed to a ship solely for charge of the main engines. Foreigners gasp when they hear that Lieutenants of two or three years standing command our destroyers; in other navies destroyers are usually commanded by Captains de Corvette; and then we smile when we remember youngsters like Lieutenant Rombulow-Pearse of the “Sturgeon,” who rescued the crew of the sinking “Decoy” in a gale of wind, with only his small whaler to help him, and with the loss of only one man, who disappeared nobody knows how.

The ideal complement of officers of the future therefore will be: 1 Captain, 1 Commander, 1 Lieutenant G., 1 Lieutenant E., 1 Lieutenant T., 1 Lieutenant M.,160 1 Lieutenant N., 1 Lieutenant P., and as many other watchkeepers as necessary.

Enough has been said in the meantime to show how completely the new system of entry and training of officers has remodelled the British Navy, and it is with the object of using the case of the officers as an argument in considering the case of the men, that it has been dilated on at such length.

State Education in the Navy.

(This Paper was prepared in 1902 under great obligations to Mr. J. R. Thursfield.)

Everyone must now feel that the new system of Entry and Education of Naval Officers must have a fair trial, and all reasonable people will hold that it deserves one.

There still remains to be faced an argument which is certain to appeal to democratic sentiment. Broadly stated, it is this—that the new system, as at present organised, must of necessity take all officers of the Navy from among the sons of parents who can afford to spend about £120 a year on their sons from the age of 12½ until they become Lieutenants at the age of about 20, or even over. In other words, the officers of the Navy will be drawn exclusively from the well-to-do classes.

Democratic sentiment will wreck the present system in the long run, if it is not given an outlet. But let us take the far higher ground of efficiency: is it wise or expedient to take our Nelsons from so narrow a class?

“The Dauntless Three,” Portsmouth, 1903.

Sir John Fisher, Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth.

Viscount Esher, President of the Committee of War Office Reconstruction.

Sir George Sydenham Clarke, late Governor of Victoria.

Surely some small percentage of promising and intelligent boys from the other classes could be secured and161 (if caught early enough, as is now the case) trained to be officers and gentlemen by the time they are grown up.

Nor is it the money barrier alone which excludes them. An exclusive system of nomination is distasteful, if not alien, to the democratic sentiment. Combined with the cost of the subsequent training, our present system absolutely excludes all but a very small fraction of the population from serving the King as naval officers. It admits the duke’s son if he is fit, but it excludes the cook’s son whether he is fit or not. It ought to admit both, but only if both are fit. The cook’s son may not often be fit, but when he is, why exclude him? Brains, character, and manners are not the exclusive endowment of those whose parents can afford to spend £1,000 on their education.

There seems to be only one way of solving this problem. Initial fitness must be secured, as at present, by careful selection at the outset, and if the promise is not fulfilled as time goes on, ruthless exclusion, whether of duke’s son or of cook’s son, must be the inflexible rule. But do not exclude for poverty alone, either at the outset or afterwards. Let every fit boy have his chance, irrespective of the depth of his parents’ purse. This might, of course, be done by a liberal system of reduced fees for cadets, midshipmen, and sub-lieutenants whose parents were in poor circumstances. But in the first place there would be a certain element of invidiousness in the selection of the recipients of the national bounty, and, in the second, mischievous class distinctions would inevitably arise among the cadets themselves—between162 those who were supported wholly or partially by the State and those who were not. It is most essential that there should be no such distinctions—that the cadets should be taught to look up only to those who are eminent in brains, character, and manners, and to look down only on those who are idle, vicious, vulgar, or incorrigibly stupid. Now, a common maintenance by the State would put them all on a common level of equality. Though the additional cost to the State would doubtless be great, the result would be well worth the extra expenditure.

The quarter of a million sterling required would be lost and unnoticeable in the millions of the Education Vote, yet it would be worth all the millions of the Education Vote if it makes the Navy more efficient, because

The British Nation Floats on the British Navy.

It would put the Navy once for all on a basis as broad as the nation; it would immeasurably widen the area of selection, and place at the disposal of the Admiralty all the intellect and all the character of all classes of the people.

The New Naval Education.

Masts and sails disappeared irretrievably with the demand for high speed.

Now, what went with them? Why! The education that the sole use of sail power gave to the eye, brain, and body, in battling with the elements!

It was a marvellous education which we had in the pure sailing days!

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One was alert by instinct! You never knew what might happen! A topsail-sheet carrying away, or a weather brace going, or a sudden shift of wind, or squall!

One thus got habituated to being quick and resourceful, and it was more or less a slur and a stigma not to be so! Also (as Officer of the Watch) men’s lives were in your hands! For instance with men on the yards, and any lubberly stupidity with braces or helm!

Both for Officers and Men then we no longer have this magnificent education by the Elements!

Steam has practically annihilated the wind and the sea!

What are we to do to get the same ready and resourceful qualities by other methods?

The answer is: The Gymnasium, Boat Sailing, the Destroyer, the Submarine, and the Engine Room.

Apparently, we are in this country in the infancy of Gymnastics for the training of the body when one reads of the Swedish system and its results. (“Mens sana in corpore sano.”)

The one solitary element in which we are behind, and must be behind all nations, is “Men.” We have no Conscription with the unlimited resources it gives! How should we counterbalance this want? “By introducing every possible form of labour-saving appliance,” regardless of cost, weight, and space; for instance, is it really impossible to devise mechanical arrangements for feeding the fires with coal instead of using the mass of men we now are obliged to employ for the purpose?164 The coal is got out of the bunkers in the same way now as in the first steamship ever built. It is not only we thereby save men—we ensure success (for the next Naval War will be largely a question of physical endurance and nerves).

“A machine has no nerves and doesn’t tire!”

The other point necessary to consider is “not to waste educated labour, and to utilise and cultivate specialities!”

The present system of education both of Men and Officers is that we all go in at one end like the pigs of every type at Chicago, and come out a uniform pattern of sausages at the other!

Thus, what we want is, above all things, a “Corps d’Elite” of gun-firers! I should call them the “Bull’s Eye Party” (and give them all 10s. a day extra pay!)

They must do nothing else but practise hitting the target and lose their pay when they don’t!

Where would your violin player be if he didn’t daily practise? And if you made him pick oakum, where would his touch be?

This is what Paganini said: “The first day I omit to practise the violin I notice it myself!

“The second day my friends notice it!!

“The third day the public notice it!!!”

But if the “Bull’s Eye Party” are to hit the enemy as desired (and as they can be made competent to do!) then the Admirals and Captains, and all others, must equally play their parts to allow the “Bull’s Eye Party” to get within range and sight of the enemy. Their165 education is therefore equally important. Scripture comes in here appropriately, “The eye cannot say to the hand, nor the hand to the foot,” etc., etc.

To put the matter very briefly:

“The education of all our Officers, without distinction, must be remodelled to cope with machinery, instead of sails!”

The Gymnasium, the Engine-room, the Destroyer, the Submarine, and Boat Sailing must be our great educational instruments.

Not for a single moment is it put forward that a year in a workshop and a year in an engine-room will make an efficient Engineer Officer! It is long experience in such work that does that!—as in every other thing! But in a small way, the argument of the abolition of the old Navigating Class applies here very forcibly. It was said their abolition would be absolutely fatal to the efficient navigation of the Fleet.

But what has been the result? There have been fewer cases of bad navigation since the old Navigating Class was done away with than in the whole history of the Navy! And with this immense gain—that the knowledge of navigation is now widely diffused through the Fleet.

One can suppose cases where it would be of the utmost value to us were engineering knowledge and the handling of mechanical appliances more widely diffused amongst our Officers!

But that is not the vital point! The vital point is that were a Midshipman to be continuously serving in166 the engine-room of Destroyers and larger vessels (continuously under weigh) at high speeds, he would get a training assimilating in its nature to that marvellous training of the old sailing days, which kept the wits of Officer of the Watch in the utmost state of tension, and produced the splendid specimens of readiness and resource which we read of in the sea Officers of Nelson’s time and later!

Training of Boys: No masts and sails—Gymnasium—Rifle and gun practice—Boat sailing—Little or no school. (No Binomial Theorem)—Destroyer work for sea-sickness—Sent straight from training-ships to hot foreign stations on the hot-house principle before bedding-out—Select from the very beginning the good shots and the smart signalmen and train them specially.

Training of the Men: Re-model instruction in Gunnery and Torpedo Schools—“Corps d’Elite” of three classes of (1) gun firers or “Marksmen”; (2) gun loaders; (3) gun manipulators—From the time the boy enters the Navy in the training-ship till he gets his pension, the sole object to be to select, train, and improve and retain “the good shot,” and all training subordinated to this!

Training of Officers: Return to early entry at 12 years of age—A much lower standard of entrance, educational examination, and a high standard of physical entrance examination—Colloquial French obligatory, no grammar, and no other language, dead or alive!—A combined course of “Britannia” and “Keyham”167 Colleges with at least two years of engine-room and shop work and Destroyer practice.

These great changes are not fanciful ideas!

The stubborn fact that we cannot provide what is required on the present system forces the change both as regards Officers as well as Men and Boys.

Naval Officers’ Training.
Some Opinions on the Admiralty Scheme (1902).

1. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford.

In 1902 Lord Charles Beresford, in an interview on the then recent Admiralty memorandum on the subject of the entry, training, and employment of officers and men of the Royal Navy, said:—

2. Sir John Hopkins.

I succeeded Admiral Sir John Hopkins, one of the most distinguished Officers in the Navy, in seven different appointments—as Head of the Gunnery School at Portsmouth, as Director of Naval Ordnance at the Admiralty, as Admiral Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard, as Controller of the Navy, as 3rd Sea Lord, as Commander-in-Chief in North America, and as Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean. In each of these appointments force of circumstances compelled me to have a revolution. So the following spontaneous letter, which he wrote me long after, is the more gratifying and shows his magnanimity:

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3. Chief Inspector of Machinery, Sir Henry Benbow, K.C.B., D.S.O., R.N.

A Naval Candidate’s Essay.

I give here an essay written on 20th February, 1908, by a candidate for entry at Osborne as a Naval Cadet. His age was 12½; his height four foot nothing. The subjects were suddenly set to the candidates by the Interview Committee, and they were allowed only ten minutes to write the essay in. The original of this essay I sent to King Edward.

I begin this chapter with a letter written to me on April 18th, 1918, by Colonel Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet:—

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Now follows a letter which I wrote to a High Official in 1904, and which I had forgotten, until I came across it recently. It’s somewhat violent, but so true that I insert it. I went as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty shortly after—very unexpectedly—and so was able to give effect (though surreptitiously) to my convictions. Not only Admirals afloat, but even Politicians ashore, dubbed submarines as “playthings,” so the money had to be got by subterfuge (as I have explained in Chapter V. of my “Memories”).

Some Shells for 18-inch Guns.

The shells for the 20-inch guns to be carried by H.M.S. “Incomparable” would have been far bigger, and would have weighed two tons.

Now follows a paper on “The Effect of Submarine Boats,” which I wrote while I was Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, October, 1903.

These remarks can only be fully appreciated by those who witnessed the Flotilla of Submarine Boats now at Portsmouth practising out in the open sea.

In 1918 I wrote the following letter to a friend on “Submarines and Oil Fuel.”

Nearly three months before the War, before the meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence held on May 14th, 1914, I sent the Prime Minister the following Memorandum which I had written in the previous January; and added:—

The Submarine is the Coming Type of War Vessel for Sea Fighting.

Hostile Submarines.

The Submarine and Commerce.

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I conclude with some details of British Submarines before and during the War:—

Nominally, there were 77 Submarines when I returned in October, 1914, but out of these 24 were useless, or had gone to the Antipodes, as follows:

77 - 24 = 53 total Submarines fit for Service when I returned in October, 1914.

There were 61 Submarines efficient when I left the Admiralty in January, 1910.

Of those that were on order when I returned, 14 were187 of “G” Class, but were of an experimental type, and so were not ready till June, 1916, or one year after the Submarines were ready which I ordered on my return to the Admiralty in October, 1914.

Here may be stated the great service rendered by Mr. Schwab, of the Bethlehem Steel Works. I specially sent for him. I told him the very shortest time hitherto that a Submarine had been built in was 14 months. Would he use his best endeavours to deliver in six months? He delivered the first batch in five months! And not only that, but they were of so efficient a type (“H” Class) that they came from America to the Dardanelles without escort, and were of inestimable service out there, and passed into the Sea of Marmora, and were most effective in sinking Turkish Transports bringing munitions to Gallipoli.

The type of Submarine (“H” Class) he built hold the field for their special attributes. I saw one in dock at Harwich that had been rammed by a Destroyer—I think a German Destroyer—and had the forepart of her taken clean away, and she got back to Harwich by herself all right. The Commander of her, an aged man, was in the Merchant Service. (What a lot we do indeed owe to the Merchant Service, and especially to those wonderful men in the Trawlers!)

But Mr. Schwab did far more than what I have narrated above. He undertook the delivery of a very important portion of the armament of the Monitors.

The idea was followed up in making old Cruisers immune from German Submarines—the “Grafton,” an188 old type Cruiser (and so also the “Edgar”), thus fitted, was hit fair amidships by a torpedo from a German submarine off Gibraltar, and the Captain of the “Grafton” reported himself unhurt and going all the faster for it (as it had blown off a good bit of the hull!), and those vessels were ever so much the better sea boats for it!

It is lamentable that no heed was given to the great sagacity of Mr. Churchill in his special endeavour to give further application to this invention.

In the Submarine Monitor M1, which carries a 12-inch gun, and which is illustrated in this volume, we have the type of vessel I put before the Admiralty in August, 1915. She is the forerunner of the Battleship of the future; but her successors should be built in a much shorter time than she was.

How War and Peaceful Commerce will be Revolutionised by the Oil Engine.

On September 17th, 1912, at 3 a.m., I invited two very eminent experts, Sir Trevor Dawson and his coadjutor McKechnie, to leave their beds and come into my room to see an outline of the Fast Ship of the Future, both for War and Commerce, carrying sufficient fuel to go round the Earth with and with an increased capacity of 30 per cent. as compared with similar vessels of the same displacement using steam. At length a special Government Research Department has been set up to develop the Oil Engine, and a sum prohibitive in peace time has been cheerfully accorded by War reasoning to set up this establishment on a big basis. I reiterate what is said elsewhere, that the Oil Engine will revolutionise both War and Commerce when once it is perfected—through the enormous gain it affords in space and smaller crews through riddance of stokeholds and firemen, and facility of re-fuelling and cleanliness and absence of funnels, etc., etc.

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Here is a descriptive outline of H.M.S. “Incomparable,” as set forth in the early morning of September 17th, 1912:

Really a Gem! She can be riddled and gutted outside the Central Diamond-shaped Armoured Citadel because nothing vital outside that Citadel! So lightly built she’ll weigh so little as to go Fast, with a hundred and fifty thousand horse power! She’ll shake to pieces in about 10 years! What’s the good of a warship lasting longer? The d—d things get obsolete in about a year!

Ten 16-inch guns to begin with (afterwards 20-inch guns) for main armament.

Eight broadside Torpedo Tubes (21-inch Torpedo).

32 knots speed at least.

16-inch armour on citadel and belt amidships, thinning towards the end.

850 feet long—to be afterwards 1,000 feet; 86 feet wide.

Four Torpedo Tubes each side to be well before the Citadel (submerged Tubes) so as not to interfere with machinery space.

Quadruple screws.

Anti-Submarine guns in small single turrets.

A Turtle-backed armoured hull, with light steel uninflammable structure before and abaft the armoured Diamond-shaped Citadel.

Two Conning Towers.

Hydraulic crane each side (very low in height) for lifting boats.

The light central steel hollow mast only for wireless191 and for ventilation, made of steel ribbon to wind up and down at will.

Jam up the Citadel all that is possible right in centre of Hull, and squeeze the last inch in space so as to lessen amount of 16-inch armour.

Curved thick armour deck.

Ammunition service by Hydraulic power.

Oil right fore and aft the whole ship. Enough to go round the earth!

Very high double bottom—honeycombed.

Coffer dams everywhere stuffed with cork.

This, then, is the Fast Battle Cruiser “Incomparable” of 32 knots speed and 20-inch guns and no funnels, and phenomenal light draught of water, because so very long and built so flimsy that she won’t last 10 years, but that’s long enough for the War!

I have just found copy of a letter I sent Mr. Winston Churchill dated two months later, when those two very eminent men, having cogitated over the matter, very kindly informed me that the Visionary was justified. I omit the details they kindly gave me, as I don’t wish to deprive them of any trade advantage in the furtherance of their great commercial intentions with regard to the oil engine, for it is just now the commercial aspect of the internal combustion engine which enthrals us. A ship now exists that has a dead weight capacity of 9,500 tons with a speed of eleven knots (which is quite fast enough for all cargo-carrying purposes) and she burns only a little over ten tons of oil an hour. Having worked out the matter, I conclude she would save roughly a thousand192 pounds in fuel alone over a similar sized steamship in a voyage of about 3,000 miles (say crossing the Atlantic); and, of course, as compared with coal, she could carry much additional cargo, probably about 600 tons more. Then the getting rid of boilers and coal bunkers gives another immense additional space to the oil engine ship for cargo, as the oil fuel would be carried in the double-bottom. A Swiss firm has put on board an ocean-going motor-driven ship a Diesel engine which develops 2,500 indicated Horse Power in one cylinder, so that a quadruple-screw motor ship could have 80,000 Horse Power with sixteen of these cylinders cranked on each shaft. I don’t see why one shouldn’t have a sextuple-screw motor ship with a hundred thousand Horse Power. So it is ludicrous to say that the internal combustion engine is not suited to big ships. For some reason I cannot discover, “Tramp” owners are hostile to the internal combustion engine. I hope they will not discover their error too late. I sent two marvellous pictures of a Motor Battleship to Mr. Winston Churchill on November 17th, 1912, saying to him:—

“These pictures will make your mouth water!”

However, this type of ship is obsolete for war before she has been begun, as we have got to turn her into a submersible—not that there is any difficulty in that—it has already been described that in August, 1916, a submersible vessel with a 12-inch gun was proposed and after extreme hesitation and long delays in construction was built, but she was completed too late to take part in193 the war. She might have sunk a goodly number of the German Fleet at the Battle of Jutland. But our motto in the war was “Too Late.”10

The whole pith and marrow of the Internal Combustion Engine lies in the science of metallurgy. We are lamentably behind every foreign nation, without exception, in our application of the Internal Combustion Engine to commercial purposes, because its reliability depends on Metallurgy, in which science we are wanting, and we are also wanting in scientific research on the scale of 12 inches to a foot. We have no scale at all!

We are going to be left behind!

The Board of Invention and Research, of which I was President, after much persistence obtained the loan of a small Laboratory at South Kensington, greatly aided by Professor Dalby, F.R.S., for research purposes as regards the Internal Combustion Engine; but its capabilities were quite inadequate. Then the President of the Council (Earl Curzon) was to undertake the whole question of Research on a great and worthy scale, and I got a most kind letter from him. It ended with the letter!

In this connection I have had wonderful support from Sir Marcus Samuel, who staked his all on Oil and the Oil Engine. Where should we have been in this War but for this Prime Mover? I’ve no doubt he is an oil millionaire now, but that’s not the point. Oil is one of the things that won us the War. And when he was Lord Mayor of London he was about the only194 man who publicly supported me when it was extremely unfashionable to do so.

Oil is the very soul of future Sea Fighting. Hence my interest in it, and though not intending to work again, yet my consuming passion for oil and the oil engine made me accept the Chairmanship of a Royal Commission on Oil and the Oil Engine when Mr. Churchill and Mr. Asquith found me at Naples in May, 1912.

I have come to the conclusion that about the best thing I ever did was the following exuberant outburst over Oil and the Oil Engine. I observe it was printed in November 1912, written “currente calamo,” and now on reading it over I would not alter a word. I am only aghast at the astounding stupidity of the British Shipbuilder and the British Engineer in being behind every country in the development of motor ships.

Oil and the Oil Engine (1912).

We turned coal-burning Battleships that were building in November, 1914, into oilers, with great increase of efficiency and speed.

I have chanced upon a Memorandum on “Oil and its Fighting Attributes,” which I drew up on March 3rd, 1913, for the First Lord of the Admiralty. It shows what a Great Personality can effect. I was told by an enemy of Mr. Deterding (of whom I am speaking) that when he came in as Manager of the Great Shell Oil Combine, the Concern could have been bought for £40,000. When I wrote my Memorandum, it was valued by a hostile Oil Magnate (who told me this himself) at forty millions sterling. Whether it is Oil, or Peace, or War, it’s the Man, and not the System that Wins. And Mr. Deterding is the man who shifted the centre of gravity of oil (together with an immense assemblage of clerks and chemists and all the paraphernalia of a huge financial web) from abroad to this country.

My Memorandum was as follows:—

The British Empire “has the long purse”; build reservoirs and store oil. Keep on building reservoirs and buy oil at favourable rates when they offer.

November 21st, 1917.

The report below of the Secretary of the United States Navy is interesting. I have just been looking up the record in 1886, when high officials said I was an “Oil Maniac.” I was at that time at the Admiralty as Director of Naval Ordnance, and was sent from that appointment to be Admiral Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard,203 prior to being appointed Controller of the Navy, where I remained six years. At Portsmouth Dockyard, while I was Admiral Superintendent, we paved the way for rapid shipbuilding in the completion of the Battleship “Royal Sovereign” in two years. Afterwards, with the same superintendence but additional vigour, we completed the “Dreadnought” in one year and one day ready for Battle!

Oil Burning Battleships.

Washington.

Mr. Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, issues a report urging that Congress should authorise the construction of three Battleships, one Battle Cruiser, and nine Fleet Submarines. He favours oil-burning units, and says that the splendid work which has been accomplished by these vessels would not have been done by coal-burning ships. The use of any other power but oil is not now in sight.

Perhaps the most convincing speech I ever read was made impromptu by Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon at a meeting of the Institution of Naval Architects on March 12th, 1913.

First of all Admiral Bacon disposed of the fallacy brought forward by one of the speakers, as to which is more effective in disabling the enemy, to destroy the structure of the ship or destroy the guns—the fact being that both are bound up together—if you utterly destroy the hull of the ship you thereby practically destroy the gun-fire. (This is one of those things so obvious that one greatly wonders how these clever experts lose themselves.)

Then Admiral Bacon in a most lovely parable disposed of the “Bow and Arrow Party,” who want a lot of small guns instead of, as in the Dreadnought, but one type of gun and that the heaviest gun that can be made. This is Admiral Bacon:—

The above words were spoken by Admiral Bacon two and three-quarter years before Admiral von Spee and his fast Squadron were caught up and destroyed by the British fast Battle Cruisers, “Invincible” and “Inflexible.” Admiral Bacon was a prophet! In other words, Admiral Bacon had Common Sense, and saw the Obvious.

It’s difficult for a shore-going person to realise things obvious to the sailor. For instance: in the case of a Big Gun, if twice two is four, then twice four isn’t eight, it’s sixteen, and twice eight isn’t sixteen, it’s sixty-four; that is to say, the bursting effect of a shell varies with the square. So the bigger the calibre of the gun the more immense is the desolating effect of the shell, and, incidentally, the longer the range at which you hit the enemy.

The projectile of the 20-inch gun that was ready to be made for H.M.S. “Incomparable” weighed over two tons, and the gun itself weighed 200 tons. Such a projectile, associated with a Howitzer, may effect vast changes in both Sea and Land War, because of the awful and immense craters such shell explosions would effect.

To illustrate the frightful devastating effect of such huge shell I will tell a story that I heard from a great friend of mine, a Japanese Admiral. He was a Lieutenant207 at the time of the Chino-Japanese War. The Chinese vessels mounted very heavy guns. One of their shells burst on the side of the Japanese ship in which my friend was. The Captain sent him down off the bridge to see what had happened, as the ship tottered under the effect of this shell. When he got down on the gun deck, he saw, as it were, the whole side of the ship open to the sea, and not a vestige of any of the crew could he see. They had all been blown to pieces. The only thing he rescued was the uniform cap of his friend, the Lieutenant who was in charge of that division of guns, blown up overhead between the beams. The huge rope mantlets that acted as splinter nettings hung between the guns had utterly disappeared and were resolved into tooth powder! (so he described it).

I digress here with an anecdote that comes to my mind and which greatly impressed me with the extraordinary humility of the Japanese mind. I had remonstrated with my Japanese friend as to Admiral Togo not having been suitably rewarded for his wonderful victory over the Russian Admiral Rozhdestvensky. He replied: “Sir, Admiral Togo has received the Second Class of the Order of the Golden Kite!” We should have made him a Duke straight off! Togo was made a Count afterwards, but not all at once—for fear, I suppose, of giving him a swelled head. He was a great man, Togo; he was extremely diffident about accepting the English Order of Merit, and even then he wore the Order the wrong way out, so that the inscription “For Merit” should not be seen. The Mikado asked him, after the208 great battle, to bring to him the bravest man in the Fleet; the Mikado expecting to see a Japanese of some sort. I am told that Admiral Togo brought Admiral Pakenham, who was alongside him during the action. I quite believe it; but I have always been too shy to ask my friend if it was true. All I know is that I never read better Despatches anywhere than those of Admiral Pakenham.

Reproduced by courtesy of “The Graphic”

Lord Fisher’s Proposed Ship, H.M.S. “Incomparable,” shown alongside H.M.S. “Dreadnought.”

Somewhat is said in my “Memories” of the unmistakable astoundingness of huge bursting charges in the shell of big guns. (I should be sorry to limit the effects to even Geometrical Progression!) I don’t think Science has as yet more than mathematically investigated the amazing quality of Detonation. Here is a picture (see opposite p. 176) of only eighteen inch gun shells, such as the Battle Cruiser “Furious” was designed and built to fire. Her guns with their enormous shells were built to make it impossible for the Germans to prevent the Russian Millions from landing on the Pomeranian Coast! In this connection I append a rough sketch by Oscar Parkes of a twenty-inch gun ship (see opposite). The sketch will offend the critical eye of my very talented friend, Sir Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, but it’s good enough for shoregoing people to give them the idea of what, but for the prodigious development of Air-craft, would have been as great a New Departure as was the “Dreadnought.” The shells of the “Incomparable” fired from her twenty-inch guns would each have weighed over two tons! Imagine two tons being hurled by each of these guns to a height above the summit of the Matterhorn, or any other mountain you like to take, and bursting on its reaching the ground far out of human sight, but yet with exact accuracy as to where it should fall, causing in its explosion a crater somewhat like that of Vesuvius or Mount Etna, and consequently you can then easily imagine the German Army fleeing for its life from Pomerania to Berlin. The “Furious” (and all her breed) was not built for Salvoes! They were built for Berlin, and that’s why they drew so little water and were built so fragile, so as to weigh as little as possible, and so go faster.

It is very silly indeed to build vessels of War so strong as to last a hundred years. They are obsolete in less than ten years. But the Navy is just one mass of Tories! In the old days a Sailing Line of Battleship never became obsolete; the winds of Heaven remained as in the days of Noah. I staggered one Old Admiral by telling him that it blew twice as hard now as when he was at sea; he couldn’t go head-to-wind in his day with sails only, now with the wind forty miles against you you can go forty miles dead against it, and therefore the wind is equal to eighty miles an hour. He didn’t quite take it in. I heard one First Sea Lord say to the Second Sea Lord, when scandalised at seeing in a new ship a bathroom for the midshipmen, that he never washed when he went to sea and he didn’t see why the midshipmen should now! But what most upset him was that the seat of the water-closet was mahogany French-polished, instead of good old oak holystoned every morning and210 so always nice and damp to sit on. (Another improvement is unmentionable!)

I must not leave this chapter without expressing my unbounded delight in having to do business with so splendid a man as Major A. G. Hadcock, the Head of the Ordnance Department at the Elswick Works, who fought out single-handed all the difficulties connected with the inception of the eighteen-inch and the twenty-inch guns of the “Furious” and “Incomparable.” I have another friend of the same calibre, who has consistently been in the forefront of the Battle for the adoption of the biggest possible gun that could be constructed—Admiral Sir Sydney Eardley-Wilmot; he was also the most efficient Chief of the Munitions Department of the Admiralty. When I was gasping with Hadcock over a 20-inch gun, Wilmot had a 22-inch gun! I really felt small (quite unusual with me!). Now I hope no one is going to quote this line when they review this book:—“Some men grow great, others only swell.”

When I was “sore let and hindered” in the days of my youth as a young Lieutenant, a cordial hand was always held out to me by Commodore Goodenough. He was killed by the South Sea Islanders with a poisoned arrow. Being on intimate terms with him, I sent him, in 1868, a reasoned statement proving conclusively that masts and sails were damned as the motive power of warships.

(As a parenthesis I here insert the fact that so late as 1896 a distinguished Admiral, on full pay and in active employment, put forward a solemn declaration that unless sixteen sailing vessels were built for the instruction of the Officers and men of the Navy the fighting efficiency of the Fleet would go to the devil.)

Commodore Goodenough was so impressed by my memorandum that he had a multitude of copies printed and circulated, with the result that they were all burnt and I was damned, and I got a very good talking to by the First Sea Lord. I hadn’t the courage of those fine old boys—Bishops Latimer and Ridley—and ran away from the stake. Besides, I wanted to get on. I felt212 my day had not yet come. Years after, I commanded the “Inflexible,” still with masts and sails. She had every sort of wonderful contrivance in engines, electricity, etc.; but however well we did with them we were accorded no credit. The sails had as much effect upon her in a gale of wind as a fly would have on a hippopotamus in producing any movement. However, we shifted topsails in three minutes and a half and the Admiral wrote home to say the “Inflexible” was the best ship in the Fleet. Ultimately the masts and sails were taken out of her.

It was not till I was Director of Naval Ordnance that wooden boarding pikes were done away with. I had a good look round, at the time, to see if there were any bows and arrows left.

What my retrograde enemies perfectly detested was being called “the bow and arrow party.” When later they fought against me about speed being the first desideratum, the only way I bowled them over was by designating them as “the Snail and Tortoise party.” It was always the same lot. They wanted to put on so much armour to make themselves safe in battle that their ideal became like one of the Spithead Forts—it could hardly move, it had so much armour on. The great principle of fighting is simplicity, but the way a ship used to be built was that you put into her everybody’s fad and everybody’s gun, and she sank in the water so much through the weight of all these different fads that she became a tortoise! The greatest possible speed with the biggest practicable gun was, up to the213 time of aircraft, the acme of sea fighting. Now, there is only one word—“Submersible.”

But to proceed with another Prediction:

The second prediction followed naturally from the first. With machinery being dictated to us as the motive power instead of sails, officers and men would have to become Engineers, and discipline would be better, and so you would not require to have Marines to shoot the sailors in case of mutiny. Now this does sound curious, but again it is so obvious. When the sails were the motive power, the best Petty Officers—that is to say, the smartest of the seamen—got their positions, not by good conduct, but by their temerity aloft, and the man who hauled out the weather-earing in reefing topsails in a gale of wind and balanced himself on his stomach on a topsail yard, with the ship in a mountainous sea, was a man you had to have in a leading position, whatever his conduct was. But once the sails were done away with and there was no going aloft, then the whole ship’s company became what may be called “good conduct” men, and could be Marines, or, if you liked to call them so, Sailors. One plan I had was to do away with the sailors; and another plan I had was to do away with Marines. I plumped for the sailors, though I loved the Marines.

In December, 1868, I predicted and patented a sympathetic exploder for submarine mines. In the last year of the war this very invention proved to be the most deadly of all species of submarine mines.

Quite a different sort of prediction occurs in a letter214 I wrote to Sir Maurice Hankey in 1910, and of which he reminded me in the following letter:

Letter from Sir M. Hankey, K.C.B. (Secretary to the War Cabinet).

The grounds for my prophecies are stated elsewhere. I won’t repeat them here. They really weren’t predictions; they were certainties.

I remark in passing that what the sundial said was:—

“Forsitan Ultima.”

By the way, I was called a sundial once by a vituperative woman whom I didn’t know; she wrote a letter abusing me as an optimist, and sent these lines:—

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Another woman (but I knew her) in sending me some lovely roses to crown the event of a then recent success, sent also some beautiful lines likewise of her own making. She regretted that I preferred a crown of thorns to a crown of the thornless roses she sent me. The rose she alluded to is called “Zephyrine Drouhin,” and, to me, it is astounding that it is so unknown. It is absolutely the only absolute thornless rose; it has absolutely the sweetest scent of any rose; it is absolutely the most glorious coloured of all roses; it blooms more than any rose; it requires no pruning, and costs less than any rose. I planted these roses when I left the Admiralty in 1910. Somebody told the Naval Attaché at Rome, not knowing that he knew me, that I had taken to planting roses, and his remark was: “They’ll d—d well have to grow!” He had served many years with me.

From the shape the war has now taken, it is to be assumed that Germany is trusting for success to a repetition of the methods of Frederick the Great in the Seven Years’ War. Not only are the conditions of the present war closely analogous—the main difference being that Great Britain and Austria have changed places—but during the last 15 years the German Great General Staff have been producing an elaborate study of these campaigns.

Broadly stated, Frederick’s original plan in that war was to meet the hostile coalition with a sudden offensive against Saxony, precisely as the Germans began with France. When that offensive failed, Frederick fell back on a defensive plan under which he used his interior position to deliver violent attacks beyond each of his frontiers successively. By this means he was able for seven years to hold his own against odds practically identical with those which now confront Germany; and in the end, though he made none of the conquests he218 expected, he was able to secure peace on the basis of the status quo ante and materially to enhance his position in Europe.

In the present war, so far as it has gone, the same methods promise the same result. Owing to her excellent communications, Germany has been able to employ Frederick’s methods with even greater success than he did; and at present there seems no certain prospect of the Allies being able to overcome them soon enough to ensure that exhaustion will not sap the vigour and cohesion of the coalition.

The only new condition in favour of the Allies is that the Command of the Sea is now against Germany, and it is possible that its mere passive pressure may avail to bring her to a state of hopeless exhaustion from which we were able to save Frederick in the earlier war. If it is believed that this passive pressure can achieve the desired result within a reasonable time, then there is no reason for changing our present scheme of naval operations. If, on the other hand, we have no sufficient promise of our passive attitude effecting what is required to turn the scale, then it may be well to consider the possibility of bringing our Command of the Sea to bear more actively.

We have only to go back again to the Seven Years’ War to find a means of doing this, which, if feasible under modern conditions, would promise success as surely as it did in the eighteenth century.

Though Frederick’s method succeeded, it was once brought within an ace of failure. From the first he knew219 that the weak point of his system was his northern frontier.

He knew that a blow in force from the Baltic could at any time paralyse his power of striking right and left, and it was in dread of this from Russia that he began by pressing us so hard to provide him with a covering fleet in that sea.

Owing to our world-wide preoccupations we were never able to provide such a fleet, and the result was that at the end of 1761 the Russians were able to seize the port of Colberg, occupy the greater part of Pomerania, and winter there in preparation for the decisive campaign in the following spring. Frederick’s view of his danger is typified in the story that he now took to carrying a phial of poison in his pocket. Owing, however, to the sudden death of the Czarina in the winter the fatal campaign was never fought. Russia made peace and Prussia was saved.

So critical an episode in the early history of Prussia cannot be without an abiding influence in Berlin. Indeed, it is not too much to say that in a country where military thought tends to dominate naval plans, the main value of the German Fleet must be its ability to keep the command of the Baltic so far in dispute that hostile invasion across it is impossible.

If then it is considered necessary to adopt a more drastic war plan than that we are now pursuing, and to seek to revive the fatal stroke of 1761, it is for consideration whether we are able to break down the situation which the German fleet has set up. Are we, in short, in a position to occupy the Baltic in such strength as to enable an adequate220 Russian army to land in the spring on the coast of Pomerania within striking distance of Berlin or so as to threaten the German communications eastward?

The first and most obvious difficulty attending such an operation is that it would require the whole of our battle force, and we could not at the same time occupy the North Sea effectively. We should, therefore, lie open to the menace of a counterstroke which might at any time force us to withdraw from the Baltic; and the only means of preventing this—since the western exit of the Kiel Canal cannot be blocked—

would be to sow the North Sea with mines on such a scale that naval operations in it would become impossible.

The objections to such an expedient, both moral and practical, are, of course, very great. The chief moral objection is offence to neutrals. But it is to be observed that they are already suffering severely from the open-sea mining which the Germans inaugurated, and it is possible that, could they be persuaded that carrying the system of open-sea mining to its logical conclusion would expedite the end of the present intolerable conditions, they might be induced to adopt an attitude of acquiescence. The actual attitude of the northern neutral Powers looks at any rate as if they would be glad to acquiesce in any measure which promised them freedom from their increasing apprehension of Germany’s intentions. Sweden, at any rate, who would, after Holland, be the greatest sufferer, has recently been ominously reminded of the days when Napoleon forced her into war with us against her will.

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In this connection it may also be observed that where one belligerent departs from the rules of civilised warfare, it is open to the other to take one of two courses. He may secure a moral advantage by refusing to follow a bad lead, or he may seek a physical advantage by forcing the enemy’s crime to its utmost consequences. By the half measures we have adopted hitherto in regard to open-sea mines, we are enjoying neither the one advantage nor the other.

On the general idea of breaking up the German war plan by operations in the Baltic, it may be recalled that it is not new to us. It was attempted—but a little too late—during Napoleon’s Friedland-Eylau campaign. It was again projected in 1854, when our operations in the Great War after Trafalgar, and particularly in the Peninsula, were still living memories. In that year we sent a Fleet into the Baltic with the idea of covering the landing of a French force within striking distance of Petrograd, which was to act in combination with the Prussian army; but as Prussia held back, the idea was never carried out. Still, the mere presence of our Fleet—giving colour to the menace—did avail to keep a very large proportion of the Russian strength away from the Crimea, and so materially hastened the successful conclusion of the war.

On this analogy, it is for consideration whether, even if the suggested operation is not feasible, a menace of carrying it out—concerted with Russia—might not avail seriously to disturb German equilibrium and force her to desperate expedients, even to hazarding a Fleet action222 or to alienating entirely the Scandinavian Powers by drastic measures of precaution.

The risks, of course, must be serious; but unless we are fairly sure that the passive pressure of our Fleet is really bringing Germany to a state of exhaustion, risks must be taken to use our command of the Sea with greater energy; or, so far as the actual situation promises, we can expect no better issue for the present war than that which the continental coalition was forced to accept in the Seven Years’ War.

Lord Fisher to Mr. Lloyd George.

I append a couple of extracts from Memoranda made by me in 1902, when I was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.

Automatic Dropping Mines for Ocean Use.

Scapa Flow.

Ages before the War, but after I became First Sea Lord on Trafalgar Day, 1904, I was sitting locked up in a secluded room that I had mis-appropriated at the Admiralty, looking at a chart of the North Sea, and playing with a pair of compasses, when these thoughts came into my mind! “Those d—d Germans, if dear old Tirpitz is only far-seeing enough, will multiply means of ‘dishing’ a blockade by making the life of surface ships near the coast line a burden to them by submarines and destroyers. (At this time the Germans had only one submarine, and she a failure!) Also, as their radius of action grows through the marvellous oil engine, and ‘internal combustion’ changes the face of sea war, we must have our British Fleet so placed at such a distance from hostile attack that our Force off the Enemy’s Coast will cut off his marauders at daylight in the morning on their marauding return.” I put that safe distance for the British Fleet on my compasses and swept a circle, and behold it came to a large inland land-locked sheet of water, but there was no name to it on the chart and no soundings226 in it put on the chart. I sent for the Hydrographer, and pointing to the spot, I said: “Bring me the large scale chart. What’s its name?” He didn’t know. He would find out.

He was a d—d long time away, and I rang the bell twice and sent him word each time that I was getting angry!

When he turned up, he said it hadn’t been properly surveyed, and he believed it was called Scapa Flow! So up went a surveying ship about an hour afterwards, and discovered, though the current raged through the Pentland Firth at sometimes 14 knots, yet inside this huge secluded basin it was comparatively a stagnant pool! Wasn’t that another proof that we are the ten lost tribes of Israel? And the Fleet went there forty-eight hours before the War, and a German in the German Fleet wrote to his father to say how it had been intended to torpedo the British Fleet, but it had left unexpectedly sooner for this Northern “Unknown!” Also, he said in his letter that Jellicoe’s appointment as Admiralissimo was very painful to them as they knew of his extreme skill in the British Naval Manœuvres of 1913. Also, thirdly, he added to his Papa that it was a d—d nuisance we had bagged the two Turkish Dreadnoughts in the Tyne the very day they were ready to start, as they belonged to Germany!

The mention of Jellicoe reminds me of Yamamoto saying to me that, just before their War with Russia, he had superseded a splendid Admiral loved by his Fleet, because Togo was “just a little better!!!”

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The superseded man was his own protégé, and Togo wasn’t. No wonder these Japanese fight!

Prince Fushishima, the Mikado’s brother, told me of 4,000 of a special company of the bluest blood in Japan, of whom all except four were killed in action or died of wounds—only nine were invalided for sickness. However, I remarked to him we were braver than those 4,000 Japanese, because their religion is they go to Heaven if they die for their country, and we are not so sure! He agreed with me, and gave me a lovely present.

A Pre-War Prophecy.

On December the 3rd, 1908, when I was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, I hazarded a prophecy (but, of course, I was only doing the obvious!) that should we be led by our anti-Democratic tendencies in High Places, and by Secret Treaties and by Compromising Attendances of Great Military Officers at the French Manœuvres at Nancy, into a sort of tacit pledge to France to land a British Army in France in a war against Germany, then would come the biggest blow to England she would ever have experienced—not a defeat, because we never succumb—but a deadly blow to our economic resources and by the relegation of the British Navy into a “Subsidiary Service.” I said in 1908 (and told King Edward so) that the German Emperor would, in such a case, order his generals “to fight neither with small nor great,” but only with the English and wipe them out! So has it228 come to pass, as regards the Emperor giving these orders and his having this desire!

The original English Expeditionary Force was but a drop in the Ocean as compared with the German and French millions of soldiers, and the value, though not the gallantry of its exploits, has been greatly over-rated. It was a very long time indeed before the British Army held any considerable portion of the fighting line in France, and instead of being on the seashore, in touch with the British Fleet and with easy access to England, the British Expeditionary Force was by French directions and because of French susceptibilities, stationed far away from the sea, and sandwiched between French troops. We have always been giving in to the susceptibilities of others and having none of our own! The whole war illustrates this statement. The Naval situation in the Mediterranean perhaps exemplifies this more than any other instance!

Had the French maintained the defensive in 1915, it is unquestionable that it would have been the Germans and not the French who would have suffered the bloody losses in the regions of Artois and the Champagne.

We built up a great Army, but we wrecked our shipbuilding. We ought to have equipped Russia before we equipped our own Armies, for, had we done so, the Russians would never have sustained the appalling losses they did in pitting pikes against rifles and machine-guns. This was the real reason of the Russian Catastrophe—the appalling casualties and the inability of the old régime to supply armaments on the modern scale. Had another229 policy been pursued and the British Fleet, with its enormous supremacy, cleared the Baltic of the German Navy and landed a Russian Army on the Pomeranian Coast, then the War would have been won in 1915! Also, as I pointed out in November, 1914, to Lord Kitchener, we ought to have given Bulgaria all she asked of us. When later we offered her these same terms she refused us with derisive laughter!

There was no difficulty in all this, but we were pusillanimous and we procrastinated.

We did not equip Russia! WE DID NOT SOW THE NORTH SEA WITH THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF MINES, as I advocated in the Autumn of 1914, and I bought eight of the fastest ships in the world to lay them down! This sowing of the North Sea with a multitude of mines would automatically have established a Complete Blockade! Again, we did not foster Agriculture, and we almost ceased building Merchant Ships, and robbed our building yards and machine shops of the most skilled artisans and mechanics in the world to become “cannon fodder”! But a wave of unthinking Militarism swept over the country and submerged the Government, and we were in May, 1918, hard put to it to bring the American Army across the Atlantic as we were so short of shipping.

It needs not a Soldier to realise that had the British Expeditionary Force of 160,000 men been landed at Antwerp by the British Fleet in August, 1914 (instead of its occupying a small sector in the midst of the French Army in France), that the War would certainly have230 ended in 1915. This, in conjunction with the seizure of the Baltic by the British Fleet and the landing of a Russian Army on the Pomeranian Coast would have smashed the Germans. All this was foreshadowed in 1908, and the German Emperor kindly gave me the credit as the Instigator of the Idea so deadly to Germany.

The “Monstrous” Cruisers so Derided in Parliament

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To Lord Fisher from a Naval Officer

Lord Fisher to a Friend.

The Dreadnought Battle Cruiser.

The following imaginary dialogue I composed in 1904 to illustrate the text that “Cruisers without high speed and protection are absolutely useless”:—

“The ‘Venus,’ an Armoured Cruiser, is approaching her own Fleet at full speed!

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“Admiral signals to ‘Venus’: ‘What have you seen?’

“‘Venus’ replies: ‘Four funnels hull down.’

“Admiral: ‘Well, what was behind?’

“‘Venus’ replies: ‘Cannot say; she must have four knots more speed than I had, and would have caught me in three hours, so I had to close you at full speed.’

“Admiral’s logical reply: ‘You had better pay your ship off and turn over to something that is some good; you are simply a device for wasting 400 men!’”

The deduction is:

ARMOUR IS VISION.

So we got out the “Dreadnought” Battle Cruiser on that basis, and also to fulfil that great Nelsonic idea of having a Squadron of very fast ships to bring on an Action, or overtake and lame a retreating foe. And in the great war this fast “Dreadnought” Battle Cruiser carried off all the honours. She sank the “Blücher” and others, and also Admiral von Spee at the Falkland Islands.

But the sine qua non in these great Ships must ever be that they carry the Biggest Possible Gun. It was for this reason that the 18-in. gun was introduced in the Autumn of 191415 and put on board the new Battle Cruiser234 “Furious”; and indeed all was completely arranged for 20-in. guns being placed in the succeeding proposed Battle Cruisers of immense speed and very light draft of water and possessing the special merit of exceeding rapid construction.

Alas! those in authority went back on it! It was precisely the same argument that made these same retrograde Lot’s wives go back from oil to coal. Coal, they said, was good enough and was so safe! Lot’s wife thought of her toasted muffins. Notice now especially that if a man is five per cent. before his time he may possibly be accounted a Genius! but if this same poor devil goes ten per cent. better, then he’s voted a Crank. Above that percentage, he is stark staring Mad.

(N.B.—I have gone through all these percentages!)

The Way to Victory.
Lord Fisher to the Prime Minister.

Lord Fisher to a Friend.

“Sow the North Sea with Mines.”
(Written in November, 1914).

The German policy of laying mines has resulted in denying our access to their harbours; has hampered238 our Submarines in their attempts to penetrate into German waters; and we have lost the latest type of “Dreadnought” (“Audacious”) and many other war vessels and over 70 merchant vessels of various sizes.

As we have only laid a patch of mines off Ostend (whose position we have notified), the Germans have free access to our coasts to lay fresh mines and to carry out raids and bombardments.

We have had, to our own immense disadvantage in holding up our coastwise traffic, to extinguish the navigation lights on our East Coast, so as to impede German ships laying mines. At times we have had completely to stop our traffic on the East Coast because of German mines; and the risk is so great that freights in some cases have advanced 75 per cent.—quite apart from shortness of tonnage.

The Germans have laid mines off the North of Ireland, and may further hamper movements of shipping in the Atlantic.

The German mine-laying policy has so hindered the movements of the British Fleet, by necessitating wide detours, that to deal with a raid such as the recent Hartlepool affair involves enormous risks, while at the same time the German Fleet can navigate to our coast with the utmost speed and the utmost confidence. They know that we have laid no mines, and the position, of course, of their own mines is accurately charted by them—indeed we know this as a fact. Our Fleet, on the contrary, has to confine its movements to deep water, or slowly to grope its way behind mine-sweeping vessels.

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There is no option but to adopt an offensive mine-laying policy.

It is unfortunate, however, that we have only 4,900 mines at present available. On February 1st (together with 1,000 mines from Russia) we shall have 9,110, and on March 1st we shall have 11,100 mines. This number, however, is quite inadequate, but every effort is being made to get more. Also FAST Mine-Layers are being procured, as the present ones are very slow and their coal supply very small. So at present we can only go very slow in mine-laying; but carefully selected positions can be proceeded with.

We must certainly look forward to a big extension of German mine-laying in the Bristol Channel and English Channel and elsewhere, in view of Admiral Tirpitz’s recent statements in regard to attacking our commerce.

Neutral vessels now pick up Pilots at the German island of Sylt, and take goods unimpeded to German ports—ostensibly carrying cotton, but more probably copper, etc., and thus circumventing our economic pressure.17

This would be at once stopped effectually by a mine-laying policy.

Nor could any German vessels get out to sea at speed as at present; they would have to go slow, preceded by mine-sweeping vessels, and so would be exposed to attack by our Submarines.

The Submarine Monitor M 1,

which lately returned from a successful cruise in the Mediterranean. She is designed to fight above or below water. She carries a 12-inch gun firing an 850-lb. shell, which can be discharged when only the muzzle of the gun is above water.

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A Birthday Letter. Lord Fisher to a Friend.

The German Submarine Menace. Lord Fisher to a Friend.

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MEMORANDUM.

Lord Fisher to Sir Maurice Hankey, K.C.B., Secretary to the War Cabinet.

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Why we were not as relentless in carrying out our Peace requirements at Sea as on Land is positively incomprehensible.

The German Fleet was not turned over and was afterwards sunk at pleasure by the German crews. I don’t feel at all sure that every German submarine, complete and incomplete, was handed over. Every oil engine ought to have been cleared out of Germany. Through some extraordinary chain of reasoning, absolutely incomprehensible, the three Islands of Heligoland, Sylt and Borkum were not claimed and occupied. In view of the prodigious development of Aircraft it was imperative that these Islands should be in the possession of England.

All this to me is absolutely astounding. The British Fleet won the War, and the British Fleet didn’t get a single thing it ought to have, excepting the everlasting stigma amongst our Allies, of being fools, in allowing the German Fleet to be sunk under our noses, because we mistook the Germans for gentlemen.

The Miracle of the Peace

(that took place at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th Month!) only equalled by the Destruction of Sennacherib’s Army, on the night described in the 25th verse of the 19th chapter of Second Book of Kings! The heading of the chapter is “An Angel slayeth the Assyrians.”

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A Cabinet Minister, in an article (after the Armistice) in a newspaper, stated that the Allies were at their last gasp when the Armistice occurred as it did as a Miracle! for Marshal Foch had been foiled on the strategic flank by the inability of the American Army to advance and the unavoidable consequences of want of experience in a new Army (immense but inexperienced—they were slaughtered in hecatombs and died like flies!) and so the American advance on the Verdun flank was held up, and Haig therefore had to batter away instead (and well he did it!). And though the British Army entered Mons, yet the German Army was efficient, was undemoralised, and had immense lines of resistance in its rear before reaching the Rhine! There was no Waterloo, no Sedan, no Trafalgar (though there could have been one on October 21st, 1918, for the German Naval Mutiny was known! Sir E. Geddes said so in a Mansion House Speech on November 9th, 1918). There was no Napoleon—no Nelson! but “The Angel of the Lord went forth....”

Lord Fisher to a Friend.

To Lord Fisher from an Admirer.

To Lord Fisher from Admiral Moresby.

Last night, in finishing off the examination of several boxes of old papers, I came across a forgotten letter written a fortnight after the Battle of Trafalgar from the “Dreadnought” (which ship participated in the Battle). On mentioning it I was told there was a “Dreadnought” in the Navy at the time of Henry VIII. I think one of the Docks at Portsmouth dates from that time, and the “Dreadnought” may have been docked in it. I love the delicious little touch at the end of this letter where everyone seals their letters with black wax in memory of Nelson, and the prayer and poetry are lovely. And where his acquaintance in Collingwood’s Ship “had been shortened by the Hand of Death,” and

(The Straits of Gibraltar the writer spells “Streights.”) He adds “Our splendid Success has been dearly bought. Our gallant Chief is dead. In the arms of Victory fell the greatest Hero that ever any age or Nation ever produced.”

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By W. T. Stead

I briefly summarise Lord Fisher’s four great reforms:

1. The introduction of the nucleus crew system.

2. The redistribution of the fleets in accordance with modern requirements.

3. The elimination of inefficient fighting vessels from the Active List of the Navy.

4. The introduction of the all-big-gun type of battleship and battleship-cruiser.

To these four cardinal achievements must be added the system of common entry and training for all executive officers and the institution and development of the Naval War College and the Naval War Staff.

By the nucleus crew system all our available ships of war are ready for instant mobilisation. From two-fifths to three-fifths of their complement, including all the254 expert and specialist ratings, are on board, so that they are familiar with the ship and her armament. The rest of the crew is held in constant readiness to come on board. Fisher once aired, in after-dinner talk, the daring idea that the time would come when the First Lord of the Admiralty would be supreme over the War Office, and would, as in the days of the Commonwealth, fill up deficiencies in ships’ crews by levies from the territorial forces. Landsmen can serve guns as well as sailors.

The second great revolution was necessitated by the alteration in the centre of international gravity occasioned by the growth of the German Navy. Formerly the Mediterranean Fleet ranked first in importance. Now the Home Fleet concentrates in its four divisions all the best fighting ships we possess. It is hardly too much to say, as M. Hanotaux publicly declared, that Admiral Fisher had, by concentration and redistribution, magnified our fighting naval strength by an amount unparalleled in a hundred years. That the fighting efficiency of the Fleet has been doubled under Fisher’s régime is to understate the facts. To say it has been trebled would hardly be over the mark. And what is the most marvellous thing of all is that this enormous increase of efficiency was achieved not only without any increase of the estimates, but in spite of a reduction which amounted to nearly five millions sterling—three and a half millions actual and one and a half millions automatic increase checked.

This great economy was largely achieved by the scrapping of ships too weak to fight and too slow to run away.255 One hundred and fifty obsolete and useless ships were removed from the effective list; some were sold, others were broken up, while a third class were kept in store for contingencies. They were lame ducks, all useless in war, costly in peace, consuming stores, wasting the time of officers and men. The obsolete ships were replaced on foreign stations by vessels which could either fight or fly....

Of the introduction of the “Dreadnought” and super-“Dreadnoughts” I have already spoken.

Apart from the above matters of high policy, a number of other reforms or advances have been made during the past five years which are beyond all criticism. Opinions may differ as to the details of some of these services, but there is no dispute as to their immense contribution to the fighting efficiency of the Navy. Some of these may be thus briefly enumerated:

1. Complete reorganisation of the dockyards. [6,000 redundant workmen discharged.]

2. Improved system of refits of ships, and limitation of number of vessels absent at one time from any fleet for repair.

3. Introduction of the Royal Fleet Reserve, composed only of ratings who have served for a period of years in the active service.

4. Improvements of Royal Naval Reserve, by enforcing periodical training on board modern commissioned ships in place of obsolete hulks or shore batteries.

5. Establishment and extension of Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

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6. The establishment of a service of offensive mines and mine-laying vessels.

7. The introduction of vessels for defensive mine-sweeping in harbours and on the open sea.

8. A complete organisation of the service of auxiliary vessels for the fleets in war.

9. The development of submarines, and the equipment of submarine bases and all the necessary auxiliaries.

10. The proper organisation of the Destroyer Flotillas, with their essential auxiliaries.

11. The enormous development of wireless telegraphy afloat, the equipment of powerful shore stations round the coast and at the Admiralty, and the introduction of a special corps of operators.

12. The experimental stage of aerial navigation entered upon.

13. The foundation of the Royal Naval War College and its development.

14. The establishment of Signal Schools at each port.

15. The establishment of a Navigation School.

16. Enormous advances in the Gunnery training and efficiency of the Fleet.

17. Great improvements in torpedoes and in the torpedo training.

18. The introduction of a naval education and training for Engine Room Artificers.

19. The introduction of the new rating of Mechanician for the Stoker Class for engine-driving duties.

20. Complete reorganisation of the arrangements for mobilisation, whereby every officer and man is always257 detailed by name for his ship on mobilisation, and the mobilisation of the whole fleet can be effected in a few hours.

21. The introduction of a complete system of intelligence of trade movements throughout the world.

22. The stores of the Fleet put on a modern basis both in the storehouses ashore and those carried in the ships themselves—recognising the far different conditions now obtaining to those of sailing-ship days of long voyages, necessitating larger supplies being carried, and modern conditions of production and supply enabling stores on distant stations and at home being rapidly replenished. Some millions sterling were economised in this way with increased efficiency, as the Fleet was supplied with up-to-date articles; the only thing that gained by the age of the old system was the rum.

23. The provision of repair ships, distilling plant, and attendant auxiliaries to all fleets, and the preparation of plans elaborated in a confidential handbook providing for all the auxiliary vessels required in war.

In addition to all the above reforms great improvements have been made in the conditions of service of officers and men, all tending to increase contentment and thereby advance efficiency. Some of these are as follows:

1. The introduction of two-year commissions, in place of three years and often four [so that men were not so long away from their homes and the crews of ships did not get stale].

2. Increases of pay to many grades of both officers258 and men—as regards Commanders, the only increase since the rank was introduced.

3. Ship’s Bands provided by the Service, and a School of Music established, and foreign musicians abolished.

4. The long-standing grievances of the men with regard to their victualling removed. Improvements in cooking. Bakeries fitted on board ships.

5. The Canteen system recognised and taken under Admiralty control, and the old abuses abolished.

6. The clothing system reformed, and much expense saved to the men.

7. Great improvements effected in the position of Petty Officers.

8. An educational test instituted for advancement to Petty Officer.

9. Increase of pension granted to Chief Petty Officers.

10. Allotment stoppages abolished.

11. Allowances paid to men in lieu of victuals when on leave.

12. Promotions from the ranks to Commissioned Officer introduced.

13. Warrant rank introduced for the telegraphist, stoker, ship’s steward, writer, ship’s police, and ship’s cook classes.

I print the foregoing from a return drawn up by an expert familiar with details of the Service. To the general reader they will be chiefly interesting as suggesting the immense and multifarious labours of Admiral Fisher. It is not surprising that he found it necessary to start work every morning at four o’clock.

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