FISHER
Sir JOHN ARBUTHNOT, 1st Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, GCB,
OM, GCVO (1841–1920) [58]
“Jackie” Fisher was born on 25 January 1841 in the British colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the eldest of the eleven children of Captain William Fisher of the 95th (Derbyshire) Regiment, then ADC to the governor of Ceylon, and his wife Sophia, daughter of a New Bond Street wine merchant. Captain Fisher left his regiment and settled in Ceylon as a coffee planter. Three of his sons served in the Navy, two reaching senior flag rank and one being lost at sea as a lieutenant. John Fisher’s godmother, Lady Horton, settled at Catton Hall, Derbyshire, where she prevailed on her neighbour, Sir William Parker [26], to give him a nomination as a naval cadet. Fisher joined the Navy in July 1854 in the 2nd-rate Calcutta, in which he took part in the Baltic campaign during the Crimean War. Between May and July 1856 he served in the Mediterranean Fleet in the 2nd-rate Agamemnon.
Fisher was appointed midshipman on 13 July 1856, in the frigate Highflyer in which he served in the Second China War and took part in the attack on Chinese war-junks at Fat-shan Creek (1 June 1857) and the storming of Canton (Guangzhou) (29 December 1857). In the unsuccessful attack on the Taku Forts by Rear-Admiral James Hope [39] (20 May 1859), he was in the gunboat Banterer, employed in rescuing the wounded, with his own commanding officer among them. He was promoted acting mate on 25 January 1860 and was appointed by Hope, as C-in-C, China station, to be his flag mate in the frigate Chesapeake. His first command was for four days in Hope’s yacht, Coromandel. On 21 March 1860 he was appointed acting lieutenant (confirmed on 4 November 1860) in the paddle frigate Furious, in which he took part in the capture of the Taku Forts (1 August 1860). He returned home in August 1861 and was confirmed as a lieutenant with seniority from 4 November 1860. In January 1862 he joined the gunnery school Excellent at Portsmouth, from which in 1863 he became gunnery lieutenant of the new frigate Warrior, the Navy’s first armoured ship. He returned to Excellent in June 1864. Fisher married in April 1866 the daughter of a clergyman, the twenty-five-year-old Frances Delves-Broughton, whom he had first met at Portsmouth in 1861. They later had a family of three daughters, all of whom married officers in the Royal Navy, and one son.
Fisher was promoted to commander on 2 August 1869. He was appointed in November 1869 commander of the 1st-rate Donegal on the China station, where he later transferred to the flagship, the armoured ship Ocean. Between September 1872 and November 1876 he was again in Excellent, training as a torpedo warfare specialist, with promotion to captain on 30 October 1874, followed by temporary command of the corvette-ram Pallas in the Mediterranean Fleet. He served as a flag captain of the battleship Bellerophon on the North America and West Indies station from April 1877 to June 1878, and of the battleship Hercules in the Channel from June to August 1878. He then held a brief command of the frigate Valorous until going on half-pay in September 1878. In January 1879, on the recommendation of Sir Geoffrey Hornby [45], C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet under whom he had previously served, Fisher was re-appointed to Pallas. He then joined the fleet at Constantinople (Istanbul) as the strained relations between the United Kingdom and Russia mellowed in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin. Between September 1879 and January 1881 he was flag captain of the battleship Northampton on the North American and West Indies station and, while there, was involved in the search for his brother’s ship, the training frigate Atalanta, lost without trace in May 1880.
Fisher returned home to command the new battleship Inflexible, commissioned in October 1881. After joining the Mediterranean Fleet, Inflexible took part in the British bombardment of Alexandria (11 July 1882), in response to an Egyptian nationalist uprising led by Colonel Arabi (‘Urbi) Pasha. During the subsequent landings, Fisher commanded the naval brigade and, in conjunction with Captain Arthur Wilson [59] of the torpedo depot ship Hecla, devised an armoured train fitted with naval ordnance. He was awarded the CB, but contracted a severe form of dysentery which made him unfit for duty for the following nine months. In April 1883 he became captain of Excellent, where, with his characteristic contempt of traditions that had outlived their time, he reformed the system of gunnery training. During 1885, when there was a threat of war between the United Kingdom and Russia over the disputed control of Penjdeh on the borders of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, a fleet was assembled in the Channel under Hornby’s command. Fisher was appointed captain of the fleet (chief of staff) in Hornby’s flagship, the armoured ship Minotaur, but the international crisis was resolved by diplomacy and the fleet was then dispersed. Between 1886 and 1890 Fisher was Director of Ordnance and Torpedoes at the Admiralty, and hastened the introduction of breech-loaders and quick-firing guns. He considered leaving the Navy at this time to take up a lucrative offer of employment with the arms manufacturer, Whitworth, but then decided to stay in the Service. He was promoted to rear-admiral on 2 August 1890 and spent 1891 as admiral-superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard.
From February 1891 to August 1897 Fisher was third naval lord on the Board of Admiralty and Controller of the Navy. As the member responsible for the design and construction of ships, he played an important part in implementing new developments in artillery and armour. He brought the first destroyers into service and, in “the Battle of the Boilers”, approved the adoption of water-tube boilers for large ships. He was also the leading spokesman for the first naval lord, Sir Frederick Richards [52], in the struggle for funds for naval rearmament that culminated in the resignation of William Gladstone, the Prime Minister of the day, in 1894. He was awarded the KCB in 1894.
Sir John Fisher was promoted to vice-admiral on 8 May 1896. From August 1897 to March 1899 he was C-in-C, North America and West Indies, with his flag in the battleship Renown. During the Spanish-American War (April-August 1898), in order to avoid any incidents with British merchantmen in the area, he made a point of establishing good relations with Rear-Admiral William T Sampson, United States Navy, commanding the squadron blockading Cuba. At the time of the Fashoda incident late in 1898, when war between the United Kingdom and France seemed likely, Fisher prepared a plan to release the unfortunate Captain Dreyfus from the French West Indian prison on Devil’s Island. The intention was to restore him to his homeland, where it was thought his presence would spread dissension, though it is doubtful whether Dreyfus, a French patriot, would have assisted his country’s enemies in this way.
During May and June 1899 Fisher was the British naval delegate at the first Hague conference, where, apart from the establishment of an international Court of Arbitration, nothing of importance was agreed. Fisher himself saw no place for moderation in the conduct of warfare, and later argued privately that war was best deterred by the thought that it would be waged without mercy, including the slaughter of non-combatants. He thought that the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur (Lushun) in February 1904, without a declaration of war, was a sound decision, as the attack itself was a declaration of war. He went on to advocate a similar policy in respect of the growing German fleet, which he envisaged sinking at anchor in Kiel, just as Nelson had destroyed the Danish fleet at Copenhagen.
In September 1899 Fisher was appointed C-in-C, Mediterranean, with his flag once more in Renown. He set about improving the training and efficiency of his fleet, and encouraged his junior officers to study naval warfare and to give him their own ideas. His relations with his senior officers were less agreeable, as he openly criticized them to their juniors, and made offensive signals, in clear, to his successive seconds-in-command, Sir Gerard Noel [61] and Lord Charles Beresford. In the summer of 1901 he took the chance of a visit to Malta by Lord Selborne, then First Lord of the Admiralty in Salisbury’s Cabinet, to press his ideas for comprehensive naval reform. He was promoted to admiral on 2 November 1901.
Fisher became second naval lord at the Admiralty in February 1902. His first major reform was to lower the age of entry of cadets from fifteen to twelve and to train all future officers in a common syllabus befo
re they joined either the executive or engineering branches, or the Royal Marines. A new college was set up at Osborne House, Isle of Wight, to be attended by cadets in their first three years, after which they would transfer to the new Royal Naval College then being built at Dartmouth to replace the old training ship Britannia. This provoked much opposition from traditionalists, and some aspects of it, particularly the inclusion of Royal Marine cadets, and the concept that executive and engineer officers should be interchangeable, eventually proved unworkable. Fisher himself came to admit that the College’s fees, unless subsidized, would bear hardly on less affluent families from whom most engineer officers had previously come. True to his nickname of “Radical Jack”, he argued that all cadets should be selected by merit rather than nomination and that fees should be abolished, so as to allow the Navy to draw its officers from all classes of society. The new college opened in September 1903, at the same time that Fisher was appointed C-in-C, Portsmouth. He served there, working on various schemes for further reforms, until October 1904, when, to the alarm of many senior admirals, he was appointed to the Admiralty with the new title First Sea Lord (replacing that of first naval lord) in the Board under the Earl of Selborne in A J Balfour’s Cabinet.
In April 1905 Selborne was succeeded at the Admiralty by Earl Cawdor, who continued to support Fisher until leaving office on the fall of the Conservative ministry in December 1905. Fisher was promoted to admiral of the fleet on 4 December 1905, by a special Order in Council, so that he could remain in office after reaching the retirement age for his previous rank. He remained as First Sea Lord under Lord Tweedmouth, who came into office with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet. Under pressure to produce efficiency savings, Fisher reduced costs by abolishing the Pacific, North America and South East Coast of America stations and closing long-established naval bases in Canada, the West Indies and Ceylon. Some hundred and fifty older ships, scorned by Fisher as too weak to fight and too slow to run, were taken out of commission (though half of them were subsequently brought back again). This allowed him to re-deploy their crews to previously unmanned ships of the reserve fleet, which could be brought up to full strength by reservists on mobilization.
Meanwhile, in the vanguard of developments in ship design, he introduced the concept of a new kind of battleship, faster and more heavily armed than any then in service, with a main armament consisting entirely of heavy guns of the same calibre. The first of this class, Dreadnought, was completed in December 1906. He also brought into service a new type of ship, the battle-cruiser, of which the first, Invincible, was completed in 1908. Originally intended to outmatch enemy heavy cruisers, a role in which it proved extremely successful, the battle-cruiser was classified by Fisher as a capital ship. With the guns of a battleship, but with limited armour, it was seen by him as powerful enough to operate in advance of the main battle-fleet, but fast enough to disengage when necessary. Speed, he said, was their armour. Improved engine design, with turbines replacing triple expansion, gave higher speed to both types of ship. Looking to the future, he gave thought to the evolving importance of underwater warfare and envisaged large submarines equipped with heavy guns and surfacing to give battle. Demands for further savings at the end of 1907 led the Second Sea Lord, Sir Henry May [65], and his two juniors to threaten resignation if Fisher agreed to unacceptable cuts in the rebuilding programme.
These reforms, following those Fisher had forced through as second naval lord, attracted the opposition of several other senior admirals, who questioned both the wisdom and speed of his actions. In response, he adopted an attitude of personal hostility to any naval officer who challenged his views, and of favouritism to those who agreed with him, who were said to be “in the Fishpond”. The Navy was split into two camps, with the popular, well-connected and outspoken Lord Charles Beresford, by this time C-in-C, Channel Fleet, becoming one of Fisher’s leading opponents. Fisher’s sallow complexion and distinctive facial appearance had given rise to a legend that he was the son of a Chinese or Siamese mother, and Beresford freely referred to him as “the Oriental”. Anyone who questioned his reforms was perceived by Fisher as a Beresford sympathizer, and treated as an enemy, irrespective of earlier friendships. Among these were Sir Gerard Noel [61], Sir Henry May [65], Sir Hedworth Lambton (later Meux) [66] and Sir Doveton Sturdee [73]. One of his favourites was Prince Louis of Battenberg [74], who in turn admired Fisher, though not always uncritically. A particular issue was the formation of an Atlantic Fleet, based at Gibraltar, and the addition of active ships to the Reserve fleet to form a Home Fleet, in both cases at the expense of the Channel Fleet. Beresford, a Member of Parliament, forced an enquiry into allegations of favouritism at the Admiralty. Fisher was supported by King Edward VII [44] and by Reginald McKenna, who had become First Lord of the Admiralty in Asquith’s Liberal Cabinet in April 1908. He also gained the eventual support of the enigmatic and influential Lord Esher, an intimate of the King. Early in 1909 Fisher abolished the Channel Fleet and absorbed most of its ships into an enlarged Home Fleet in which both active and reserve elements were combined. Beresford was obliged to haul his flag down earlier than expected and come ashore. Fisher himself entered the Lords at the end of 1909, when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, and left the Admiralty in January 1910.
1. Sir Edmund Hawke, Lord Hawke. [7]
2. Sir Richard “Black Dick” Howe, Earl Howe. [9]
3. William IV, formerly Duke of Clarence, “The Sailor King”. [11]
4. Sir John Jervis, Earl of St Vincent. [12]
5. Sir Fairfax Moresby. [33]
6. Sir Edward Seymour. [57]
7. Sir John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher of Kilverstone. [58]
8. The Hon. Hedworth Lambton (later Sir Hedworth Meux) with canine friend. [66]
9. Sir John Jellicoe, Earl Jellicoe. [68]
10. Left to right: Sir David Beatty, Earl Beatty [69]; Rear-Admiral Hugh Rodman, USN; HM King George V [64]; Vice-Admiral W.S. Sims, USN; HRH the Prince of Wales [84] (later HM King Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor).
Lord Fisher then became chairman of a commission whose recommendations led to the replacement of coal by oil as the fuel for marine engines. He maintained contact with McKenna and with Winston Churchill, who became First Lord in McKenna’s place in October 1911. He continued on good terms with Battenberg, who became First Sea Lord at the end of 1912. When Battenberg resigned his appointment on 29 October 1914, two months after the outbreak of the First World War, Fisher was re-appointed First Sea Lord. He arrived too late to have an immediate effect on the position in the South Atlantic, where a British squadron was defeated by the Germans at Coronel (1 November 1914), but immediately despatched two battle-cruisers that avenged Coronel at the battle of the Falkland Islands (8 December 1914).
With the British Expeditionary Force engaged in a stalemate in the Western Front, Fisher urged a return to the traditional British way in warfare, using the Army as the sword of the fleet in landings upon the enemy coast. Indeed, he had little use for soldiers other than as marines and, in the pre-war battle for funds, had made enemies among the military by belittling the usefulness of the Army. His favoured scheme was a descent on the Baltic shores of Prussia, from where a Russian army could march to Berlin, and he devoted much time to planning a force of light craft for use in this theatre. He remained convinced that the Navy should control the Baltic as it had in former wars, but even Churchill would not support him. The small ships intended by Fisher for inshore operations in the Baltic eventually found a valuable role as anti-submarine vessels when the German U-boat offensive became a major threat to British survival later in the war. Churchill was more interested in using the Navy to force a passage through the Dardanelles, a plan that Fisher agreed to only with reluctance, foreseeing that it would become a combined operation with the Army.
The expedition to the Dardanelles became just as much a stalemate as the Western Front. Churchill called for more ships, but Fisher was not prepared to w
eaken the Grand Fleet he had created as the keystone of his naval strategy. Nor was he prepared to tolerate Churchill’s continual interference in the details of naval operations. He told Asquith that he would only remain in office on six conditions, which were to be published to the Fleet. These included the removal of Churchill from the Cabinet, and of Sir Arthur Wilson (his old comrade in the Egyptian campaign, who had formerly been “in the Fishpond”, and was at this time Churchill’s special adviser) from the Admiralty; the appointment of an entirely new Board of Admiralty; and the transfer of all naval affairs, operational and administrative, into his own hands. When this was refused, he resigned on 15 May 1915, despite attempts to dissuade him by Esher, McKenna, the other Sea Lords, and Wilson himself.
After resigning, Fisher left his office at the Admiralty building and for several days was nowhere to be found. Churchill considered this as tantamount to desertion, a view shared by George V [64], who had never been a Fisher enthusiast. A former naval officer himself, the King later declared that Fisher should have been dismissed in disgrace, or preferably hanged at the yardarm for abandoning his post in the face of the enemy. Fisher never again returned to high office, though he was found employment as chairman of the Admiralty’s Inventions Board. After the war he published his memoirs and defended the record of his ships at the battle of Jutland, pointing out that no British battleship was sunk and claiming that the battle-cruisers had suffered losses only because they had not taken advantage of the speed he had given them. He died on 10 July 1920 and was buried at Kilverstone, being succeeded in the peerage by his son.
British Admirals of the Fleet Page 14