Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  In January 1883, Jacky Fisher, who had entered the navy "penniless, friendless, and forlorn," traveled to the Isle of Wight and for two weeks, joined the household of his sovereign. "I am all right," he wrote to his wife, who had stayed home. "Two cups of tea and bread and butter, and a very comfortable sofa and a delightful sitting room… [next to] my bedroom, deliciously quiet, have all combined to rehabilitate me." In March, Fisher's former Commander-in-Chief, Sir Beauchamp Seymour, now elevated to the peerage as Lord Alcester, was invited to Osborne House and wrote to ask Fisher about dress and protocol. Briefing the Admiral, Fisher sketched a picture of his own visit. The prescribed dress for dinner, he said, was knee breeches and pumps, "but I was let off with trousers on account of being an invalid… She [the Queen] talks to one a good deal more than I expected… She is sometimes silent for awhile, preparing her next subject of conversation, and I believe the [best] plan is to remain silent also. They say 'Your Majesty' to her much more frequently than I was led to suppose. The Princess [Beatrice] sits next to her, and the most pleasant place is next to the Princess, as she is so very pleasant and helps on the conversation. The other folks at the table talked in a very low tone… I would suggest your asking Ponsonby if you are to kiss the Queen's hand on first seeing her. I ought to have done so, but they did not warn me about it, so when she put her hand out I was all adrift… You are very much left to yourself during the day… You had better take sortie matches with you in case you want a light in the night, as they don't have them. A little oil lamp burns all day in all the rooms and passages… Dinner is not till 9 o'clock… breakfast at 9:30 and lunch at 2 p.m… The Queen is uncommon particular about medals, etc. being put on the right way."

  One night at dinner during this stay, when Fisher was seated far down the table from the Queen, an uncharacteristic burst of laughter from this quarter reached the ears of the august lady. She inquired as to its cause. Fisher spoke right up: he had been telling Lady Ely, he said, that there was enough flannel wrapped around his tummy to go around the room. The Queen laughed too. Thereafter, every year until her death, she invited Fisher to come to Osborne if he was stationed in England.

  In April 1883, Fisher's health was sufficiently improved for him to return to duty. Lord Northbrook, the solicitous First Lord,* sent him back to Excellent, this time-twenty-one years after his first arrival-as commanding officer. From this point, Fisher was not to go to sea again for fifteen years. He remained on Excellent only two years, but in this time he developed a devoted coterie of younger officers who shared his sense of alarm and urgency about improving the offensive power of the fleet. Two of these lieutenants, both to be heard from in the future, were especially concerned about the accuracy of naval gunnery; they were Percy Scott and John Jellicoe.

  In the summer of 1885, when Fisher left Excellent, he began a span of fifteen months when the navy could find no job for him. Not surprisingly for a man of his energy, these doldrums were cause for despair. Besides, he found that he still suffered from his old Egyptian malady, dysentery. It was in the summer of 1886 that, in order to treat this lingering disease, he first went to the famous Bohemian spa of Marienbad. Set amidst pine forests two thousand feet above sea level, Marienbad offered the curative balm of the sparkling spring waters of the Kreuzbrunnen. Those who came were not all invalids, nor were their diets always rigidly simple. Trout, grouse, and peaches from local streams, farmlands, and orchards appeared regularly before the visitors, who might have spent the day playing golf, fishing, or shooting and who could look forward to an evening

  * During this winter, while Fisher was recovering, Lord Northbrook gave a party to which he was invited. Mr. Gladstone was present. The First Lord took Fisher up to the Prime Minister and said, "I want to introduce Captain Fisher who commanded the Inflexible, our biggest battleship with 24 inches of armor and four 80-ton guns." Gladstone looked at Fisher for a moment and then said slowly, "Portentous weapons! I really wonder the human mind can bear such a responsibility." "Oh, sir," Fisher quickly replied, "the common vulgar mind doesn't feel that sort of thing." A witness observed the old statesman take another look at Captain Fisher and then permit himself a slight smile.

  of music, cards, or conversation. The Prince of Wales discovered Marienbad in 1899, and thereafter beautiful women and distinguished and fashionable gentlemen crowded into the spa's splendid little hotels. Every morning, some of the most famous faces in Europe could be seen strolling along the Promenade, discreetly watched by detectives keeping an eye out for anarchists or jewel thieves. Among the detectives, other men with notepads, busily sketching, turned out to be tailors, fixing their gaze on the figure of Prince of Wales, moving slowly along the Promenade in a blue jacket, white flannel trousers, and a soft felt hat. Within a season, fashionable gentleman across Europe would wear what the tailors had seen and copied.

  Fashion added glitter to Marienbad's attractions, but most people still came to improve their health. Fisher's account of his experience is typical: "When all the doctors failed to cure me, I accidentally came across a lovely partner I used to waltz with, who begged me to go to Marienbad in Bohemia. I did so and in three weeks I was in robust health… it really was a miracle and I never again had a recurrence of my illness." Thereafter, whenever he could, he spent several weeks in the summer at his "beloved Marienbad." Usually he went alone, although at least once he was accompanied by his daughter Dorothy. He traveled eight hundred miles from London, crossing the Channel at Calais, going by train through Cologne, Mainz, and Nuremberg to the Austro-Hungarian frontier and on to Marienbad. Once there, he stayed in a modest hotel, the Zum Grunen Kreuz, next door to the famous Hotel Weimar, where the Prince and his retinue put up. He had little money and he spent it carefully: "I got breakfast for tenpence, lunch for a shilling, and dinner for eighteen pence… and a bed for three and a sixpence… Once… I did a three weeks' cure there, including railway fare and every expense, for twenty-five pounds."

  Fisher thrived in the cross section of men and women he met at Marienbad. "Every day is happy in this delightful place, even when it is; raining cats and dogs as it is at present," he wrote. He met many distinguished English countrymen: judges, generals, ambassadors, and businessmen. "If you are restricted to a Promenade only a 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… I almost think I knew Campbell-Bannerman the best. He was 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."

  In 1895, Fisher went on from Marienbad to Switzerland. He climbed to the top of the Gorner Grat above Zermatt, reaching nearly 10,300 feet "fresh as a daisy"; but he had to come down after only an hour, "the sun so burning hot… our faces and necks so fearfully burnt." He watched with amusement the behavior of two tall young ladies who, one of his companions observed, "were husbandeering and not mountaineering." By the time he reached Geneva, Fisher's sunburn was painful and his temper was foul. He called Geneva "over-rated… a very second-class place" and Mont Blanc "a fraud." He unleashed his feelings against other tourists, particularly "the flood of Americans… so overwhelmingly nauseous and disagreeable… [that] I will never come abroad again… Foreigners cannot distinguish them from English, and so I am not surprised we are so unpopular abroad." There were too many Americans in Paris, too: "The Americans swarm so everywhere that the whole place abroad is quite nauseous to me. Such vulgar brutes they all are, both men and women."*

  In November 1886, fully recovered, Fisher became Director of Naval Ordnance, a post he held for five years. His field was the design and construction of all guns, torpedoes, and ammunition aboard British warships. His greatest triumph was the development of quick-firing, breech-loaded guns which could get off a shell every seven seconds and thus help to deal with the growing threat of fast French torpedo boats swarming out from their bases at Brest on the Atlantic or
Bizerte on the Mediterranean to attack the British battle fleet. Fisher himself laconically claimed a different achievement: it

  * Fisher's antagonism towards Americans continued for another decade. In 1901, as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, he approvingly quoted the Kaiser's pronouncement that "what the world had to fear were the Slavs and the Yankees." "The Yankees are dead set against us," Fisher quoted another source. "Only 1/4 of the population of the United States are what you may call natives; the rest are Germans, Irish, Italians and the scum of the earth, all of them hating the English like poison."

  Like many of Fisher's opinions, especially outside the naval field, these views were subject to sudden, violent change. In 1906, Fisher's only son married a Philadelphia heiress. Fisher went to America for the wedding and fell in love with everything he saw. His son's father-in-law, he wrote to a friend in England, worked in a forty-story building filled only with clerks employed by his business. He went to a luncheon with "about 70 multimillionaires and… told them it was a damned fine old hen that hatched the American Eagle! They all stood up and cheered like mad!" His conclusions were not that different from Joseph Chamberlain's: "Their language [is] English, their literature English, their traditions English, and, quite unconsciously to themselves, their aspirations are English. What damned fools we shall be if we don't exploit this into a huge Federation of English-speaking peoples!"

  was during his term at Naval Ordnance, he said, "that wooden boarding pikes were done away with" in the Royal Navy.

  Fisher's task was complicated by the fact that in 1886 control of naval gun manufacture and supplies of ammunition, which had been lifted from the Admiralty during the Crimean War, still remained in the hands of the War Office. The army, with little knowledge or interest in naval requirements, was responsible for delays in arming new ships and for keeping the Admiralty generally in the dark as to the quantity of naval ammunition it had on hand. Fisher, frustrated by this irrational arrangement, fought it vigorously, with the full support of an admiring First Lord, Lord George Hamilton. But the soldiers were well entrenched and it was not until another two decades had passed and Jacky Fisher was First Sea Lord that the navy finally gained full control over the design of guns for its ships. Even then, naval ammunition continued to be stored ashore in army depots.

  In 1890, Fisher was promoted to Rear Admiral, and from May 1891 t0 February 1892 he served a brief stint as Admiral Superintendant of the Portsmouth Dockyard. He was impatient with all delay and relentless in his demand for efficiency. The most important construction in the yard during his tenure was Royal Sovereign, the first of a new class of seven 14,500-ton battleships designed by Sir George White and armed with four 13.5-inch and ten six-inch guns Fisher was generally irritated by the fact that it took at least three; and a half years to build a battleship and some took up to seven. He was specifically angry because Royal Sovereign, which had been laid down twenty months before his arrival at the yard, was still less than half completed. Fisher's solution was to pull workmen off other ships and concentrate them on the most important ship "like a hive of bees." He was constantly at the building slip, learning workmen's first names, praising, joshing, bullying. As a result, Royal Sovereign was finished and commissioned twelve months after Fisher's arrival; her total building time of thirty-two months from laying of the keel to commissioning into the fleet was a record for that day. Fisher's approach to ships which came into his dockyard for repairs was similar. One battleship came in needing replacement of a single heavy gun barrel, normally a two-day job. Fisher had a chair put on the gun platform the first morning, declaring that he would sit there until the job was done. At midday, a table was brought and his lunch was served. The new gun was installed in four hours.

  In May 1892, Fisher went back to the Admiralty to commence five land a half years as Third Sea Lord, charged with designing, building, fitting out, and repairing all the ships of the fleet. Once again, imagination and innovation held sway. Under Fisher's leadership, the water-tube boiler was introduced into British warships. Traditionally, heat from the furnaces passed in tubes through large tanks of water to raise the temperature and make steam. Fisher reversed the process, passing water in tubes directly through the furnaces, raising steam much more rapidly and with less expenditure of coal. He introduced a new class of small, fast ships into the fleet to screen the big ships and deal with the growing mass of French torpedo boats. Fisher himself supplied the name "destroyers" for these craft; they were meant to "destroy" the French torpedo boats.

  During these years, Fisher was knighted (1894) and promoted to Vice Admiral (1896). In August 1897, he went back to sea for the first time in fifteen years, as Commander-in-Chief of the North Atlantic and West Indies Station. He had only one battleship (his flagship, the light, fast Renown) and five cruisers, but he whipped things into shape as if war were imminent. Suddenly, everything on this peaceful, almost sleepy station was bustle and speed. "There were no half-measures with Jacky," a junior officer remembered. "It was first in everything or Look Out! We were beaten once getting out torpedo nets. Result: no leave for the next few days until we reduced time to what was afterwards… never beaten again… Jacky was never satisfied with anything but 'Full Speed.' We shoved off from the accommodation ladder at full speed, then reversed engines at full speed. He loved dash and making a fine effect."

  On board ship, he inspired fear and awe. "He had a terrific face and jaw, rather like a tiger, and he prowled around with the steady, rhythmical tread of a panther. The quarterdeck shook and all hands shook with it. The word was quickly passed from mouth to mouth when he came on deck, 'Look out, here comes Jack.' Everyone then stood terribly to attention while the great one passed on and away." Officers who did not measure up were sent home in ignominy. "On the other hand, if any of us were in trouble or any of the youngsters were sick, he and Lady Fisher were the first to enquire about it." While at Halifax and Bermuda, he regularly asked a group of midshipmen ashore to join himself and his wife for the weekend. There, off duty, he encouraged junior officers and midshipmen to talk freely and give him their ideas. He did not mind when they stood up to him, providing their arguments were sound. "Williamson and Paine pulled his leg and chaffed him in the most astounding way," reported an awed lieutenant. "Repartee was bandied about and Jacky used to go into convulsions of merriment."

  When in 1898, the Fashoda crisis threatened to actually produce a war with France, Fisher's war plans were dramatic. He would send Renown to the Mediterranean to bolster the fleet in the main theater of action, and he and his cruisers would attack and mop up the French West Indies. The high point would be an assault on Devil's Island designed to kidnap the celebrated Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whose arrest and trial in 1894 had convulsed the French Army and French society. It was Fisher's intention to carry Dreyfus across the Atlantic and set him ashore on the French coast where, Fisher believed, the captain's appearance would confuse and disrupt the officer corps of the French Army. When the French stepped back from Fashoda and the crisis ended, Fisher was sad. "One ought not to wish for war, I suppose," he said, "but it was a pity it could not have come off just now when I think we should have made rather a good job of it."

  Fisher was happy in the North American and West Indies command and not at all pleased to learn that his tour was being terminated eighteen months early so that he might serve as British naval delegate to the forthcoming First Hague Peace Conference. Fisher's selection had been made personally by Lord Salisbury, who remembered how effective Fisher had been in fighting the War Office on the issue of naval gun manufacture. (Lord Salisbury remembered even more clearly because Fisher's principal military antagonist had been Colonel Alderson, Salisbury's brother-in-law.) Salisbury declared that he expected Fisher to fight with the same vigor at the peace conference. "So I did," said Fisher, "though it was not for peace." Fisher's disappointment at his premature removal from his term of sea duty was appeased by the promise that, when the peace conference was over, he w
ould be given the Mediterranean Fleet, "the tip-top appointment of the Service," he told his; daughter.

  The first Hague conference originated in a proposal issued by Count Mikhail Nikolaevich Muraviev, the Russian foreign minister, in the name of the young Tsar Nicholas II. Mankind would benefit, the Russian proposal suggested, if the nations could agree on limitation of armaments, on rules to mitigate the horrors of war, and on establishment of permanent machinery to arbitrate international disputes. Many disdained the proposal. "It is the greatest nonsense and rubbish I ever heard of," King Edward said to Lady Warwick. "France could never consent to it-nor We." For once the King and his nephew were in agreement. The Kaiser wrote disapprovingly to his cousin Nicky: "Imagine a monarch holding personal command of his army, dissolving his regiments sacred with a hundred years of history… and handing his towns over to Anarchists and Democracy." The Admiralty's view was offered by the First Lord, Edward Goschen, when he presented the Naval Estimates (the Admiralty's annual budget request) to the House of Commons: "If you think that war is simply an absurd possibility, if you think you can have peace without power, if you believe in the sweet reasonableness of Europe in arms, then I admit that these Estimates are a crime."

  Despite all doubts, no nation could afford to offend the Tsar by outright refusal to come, and twenty-two states sent delegates to the conference, which lasted from mid-May to the end of July 1899. The chairman of the British delegation, Sir Julian Pauncefote, British Ambassador to the United States, had strict instructions from the Cabinet: Great Britain must retain her supremacy at sea; no limitation of naval armaments could be permitted to threaten her maintenance of the Two Power Standard. The Sea Lords, the army, and the Cabinet also opposed any restrictions on new weapons or explosives. Fisher's presence in the delegation was intended to make sure that no mischief come from the conference. With forty-five years of naval service behind him and command of Britain's primary fleet ahead of him, the colorful Admiral was a highly visible symbol and reminder of Britain's naval might. Fisher himself made no bones of what he thought of limiting armaments. No foreigner, he declared bluntly to anyone who listened, should have the power to limit the size, strength, or freedom of action of the British Navy. Signing his name in a journalist's autograph book before the conference began, he wrote, "The supremacy of the British Navy is the best security of the peace of the world."