While Jellicoe worked on gunnery development, Beatty was learning seamanship on Ruby, after which he continued shore training at Greenwich. Beatty is said to have taken full advantage of being so close to the exciting social life of London and his studies probably suffered as a consequence. Nevertheless, his first in the torpedo course earned him a posting to a torpedo boat.11 It was not necessarily a high road to promotion, but maybe because of this experience, and an obvious interest in the torpedo as a weapon, Beatty always placed a higher priority on the offensive potential of the torpedo-boat destroyer (or TBD). Like Scheer and Hipper he was captivated by the excitement of the fast, aggressive weapons. Jellicoe, on the other hand, would end up reversing the position of his then commander-in-chief, Admiral George Callaghan, when he took over the Grand Fleet from him in 1916. While Callaghan stressed the role of the ‘destroyer’ to attack an enemy’s line, Jellicoe was inclined to the opposite: he preferred to see the main role for the destroyer as defending his own line.
Jellicoe’s career started to pick up. Only thirty-one in 1891, he was promoted to commander and his first return to sea duty was to serve as executive officer on Sans Pareil under Captain A K Wilson (later Admiral Wilson, fondly known as ‘Tug’ and, maybe less friendly, as ‘old’ ard ‘eart’). Kenneth Dewar’s criticism would be that Jellicoe ‘only had 16 months in a seagoing ship between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-three [sic]’. Looked at another way, this shows that Jellicoe’s reputation was already such that this did not count against him. In fact, the real figure for the amount of time Jellicoe had spent at sea was considerably higher: around thirty months if you include the ten that he served as the commander of the Sans Pareil before turning thirty-three; if you add on his service on Handy, Excellent s tender, it was closer to forty-eight.
After the torpedo-boat destroyer experience Beatty was assigned to the battleship Nile in January 1892 and then, in July, to the Royal Yacht, Victoria and Albert. It was not a particularly enjoyable posting as the Queen was in mourning for Prince Albert (he had died more than thirty years previously). Beatty was probably quite happy to rejoin Ruby in August.
After little more than a year, at the request of Admiral Sir George Tryon, Jellicoe took up the post of executive officer on Victoria, a sister ship of the Sans Pareil, the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1893, at the time that the Mediterranean was considered a potential conflict zone, with France and Russia closing ranks, and with the recent advent of a Russian squadron. Tryon, with a formidable intellect, was regarded as one of the stars of intricate naval manoeuvre.
The naval disaster of the century place off the Tripoli coast in 1893, between the two battleships Victoria and Camperdown. Admiral Tryon had tried to accomplish a manoeuvre at sea that involved a course-reversal of two lines of ships steaming in parallel, effected by the two leading ships turning inwards concurrently to initiate the turn of each of their lines. It is still not known whether Tryon intended that at the end of the manoeuvre each ship would resume a parallel course (albeit in the opposite direction), or whether the resulting parallel lines would be inverted, but they just got much closer. There was simply not enough room in which to accomplish the tricky endeavour and, despite repeated requests to abort from Camperdowns captain, Rear Admiral A H Markham, Tryon persisted. He and 357 others went to their graves when Camperdown rammed Victoria.
Jellicoe was below decks on Victoria with a fever of 103 degrees and suffering a bad case of piles. His subsequent immersion saved his life and cured his fever. Had it not been for the intervention of a young midshipman who offered help,* he would probably have drowned, so weak was he from the fever.12 He was one of 291 men who got off safely. He even managed to get his clothes back: his chest of drawers was spotted bobbing on the surface and pulled in.
The disaster was later satirised, in a cinematic depiction of the cult of blind obedience in the Victorian Navy.13 Beatty’s nephew biographer says that this was the moment when ‘there began [his] lifelong friendship with Jellicoe’,14 as Beatty was transferred to Camperdown in September. They would not have been long together: Jellicoe was soon away, appointed to a new battleship, Ramillies, the very next month. I have never seen any evidence to support this notion of friendship. Stephen Roskill wrote that this was a period in which Beatty’s enthusiasm for the Navy waned because of all the spit and polish. He yearned for something more, something through which to prove himself. Nevertheless, he was to stick it out for another two years until he transferred to Trafalgar in 1895.
On Ramillies Jellicoe enjoyed visits to Malta, with range-shooting and athletics. He later said that it was ‘pleasant to recall those days when keen competition served to cement friendships’. Ramillies had strong competitors from the old Agincourt and the modern first-class cruiser, Hawke, both commanded by friends, Stanley Colville and Cecil Burney, while Sir Michael Culme-Seymour’s flag lieutenant on Ramillies was Hugh Evan-Thomas, later to command the 5th Battle Squadron at Jutland. Culme-Seymour’s naval service was a long and important one. He was to hold all the top positions: Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Channel Fleets as well as of Portsmouth. Francis Bridgeman, his flag captain, was also already acquainted with Jellicoe as he had been on Excellent when Jellicoe was on its junior staff.
Jellicoe praised the Ramillies, a high freeboard battleship of the latest design and one of the finest in the world at the time. He admired the ship because of her speed of coaling and performance in team sports. Viewed from the perspective of the continuous gunnery transformations of the early twentieth century, her fighting capacity was limited: ‘Gunnery efficiency in the modern sense was I fear non-existent. An annual competition in prize firing was carried out off Malta at a range of some 1,600 yards and fire control was unheard of, as was long-range practice … Gunnery work took rather a back seat in considering the smartness and efficiency of a ship’s company.’15
What, meanwhile, Beatty yearned for – action – finally came in 1896 when an Anglo-Egyptian expedition led by General Sir George Herbert Kitchener embarked on the reconquest of the Sudan and the avenging of General Sir Charles Gordon’s death at the hands of the Mahdist rebels in 1885 at Khartoum.
A naval element was needed to bring supplies to the army and make sure that river communications were under their control. Kitchener thought that Colville would be a wise choice to lead the expedition and since the latter knew Beatty not only from the Royal Yacht but also from before, it was natural that he should ask for him. Yet it was not an obvious choice. Beatty was ‘a twenty-five-year old navy Lieutenant of no particular distinction’, but his spirit and character must have made a distinct impression.16 It was, in Andrew Lambert’s words, Colville who ‘made Beatty’s career’.17
What perhaps was not known was that Kitchener had actually asked for Jellicoe to fill this role but his commander at the time, Culme-Seymour, said that he could not be spared (without consulting Jellicoe: he was at sea, on target practice) and that because of his bouts of Malta fever he probably would have been unsuitable anyway. Colville went in his place, something that upset Jellicoe considerably. He wrote that he was ‘deeply disappointed’. It was another occasion on which the Jellicoe-Beatty paths could have crossed.
During the campaign there were moments when Beatty displayed extraordinary courage. One occasion was when his gunboat, the Abu Klea, was hit and an unexploded shell lay in her magazine. Beatty did not hesitate. He picked it up and threw it overboard. Then, after Colville was seriously wounded at Wadi Haifa, Beatty took over command and managed to get further downstream in preparation for Kitchener’s last push in this first part of the campaign; he was also in command of the successful attack on Dongola.
As a result of his actions, Beatty was awarded the Distinguished Service Order after Kitchener had praised the role of the river gunboats in his first dispatch in October; Kitchener could not ‘speak too highly of this officer’s behaviour’.
In January 1897 Jellicoe returned to England where he w
as promoted to captain after his commission on Ramillies had ended. While Beatty was in the Sudan, Jellicoe was to develop further skills and experience in ordnance. In January he was appointed to the Ordnance Committee, having previously served, as we know, as the assistant to the DNO. At this point the committee was still managing armaments for the army and the Navy, with a view that this would simplify research and production. It was also heavily engaged in the testing of the Vickers 6in breech-loading gun, which would emerge in one version or another as a standard armament for cruiser-size Royal Navy ships until well into the Cold War.
More important things were afoot, however. One was Jellicoe meeting his future wife, Gwen Cayzer, daughter of the very successful British shipowner, Sir Charles Cayzer. Another was his being asked by Vice Admiral Sir Edward Seymour to come as his flag captain to the China Station to which he had just been appointed. Jellicoe enthusiastically accepted, taking up the position on Centurion in December.18
In China, Jellicoe really established his first German naval connections. He became friends with Prince Heinrich, the younger brother of the Kaiser. It was an important connection: Prince Heinrich was Hipper’s principal mentor and sponsor in the imperial navy along with Henning von Holtzendorf. Later, Jellicoe’s younger daughter Prudence (my Aunt Prudie and the sibling to whom my father George was probably closest) went out with Crown Prince Wilhelm’s fourth son, Prince Friedrich of Prussia, better known as Fritzi.* At the time, Prince Heinrich was in command of the German East Asia Squadron, covering the growing colonial presence in China that the Kaiser and the German Reichstag was expensively funding. Jellicoe also got to know one of the future commanders-in-chief of the High Seas Fleet and chief of the German naval staff, Captain Henning von Holtzendorff, as well as Captain Guido von Usedom; Usedom later took over Jellicoe’s role as Edward Seymour’s chief of staff and became responsible for the docks in Kiel.†
Beatty was still in the Sudan. After a short leave, he returned at Kitchener’s explicit request. Overall command of the gunboats passed to Colin Keppel, and Beatty served alongside Walter Cowan (a partner in crime on Britannia) and the Honourable Horace Hood. His boat, El Teb, capsized on a cataract, and he and most of her crew of fifteen were swept along in the hazardous and swift currents of the Nile. Taking command of Fateh, Beatty continued downriver, seizing targets ahead of Kitchener’s land army. He was able to watch Churchill’s famous charge at Omdurman from the crow’s nest. When Churchill later asked Beatty what he had seen, Beatty’s only reply was that ‘it looked like plum duff: brown currants scattered about in a great deal of suet’.19
Eventually, after the Battle of Omdurman, Khartoum was retaken. The battle is now most notably connected with Churchill’s vivid descriptions of one of the last cavalry charges of the British Army, that of the 21st Lancers in 1898. Churchill is said to have met Beatty when, drawing close to his gunboat, he inquired if they had something to drink. A bottle of champagne was thrown over to land, safely, at Churchill’s feet, cushioned by the sand.
Then came the reaction of the British to what they felt was a French challenge to their regional security. After the flare-up subsided, Beatty’s role was lauded and he was promoted to commander. Jellicoe had had to wait until he was thirty-one; Beatty was twenty-seven. He had served only half of the time that was normal for the rank: six rather than twelve years. He came back to Britain a hero, and there met his future wife, American heiress Ethel Field Tree, daughter of Marshall Field, the millionaire department-store owner.
In China the carving-up of substantial territories by the Western imperial powers continued. Britain had recently leased Weihaiwei, the Germans Tsingtao, the Russians Port Arthur and the French Kwangchou. Against this foreign invasion, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists – the Boxers – reacted. It was a rebellion that could easily have been turned against the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, but in fact it was being cleverly turned against the foreigners by her and particularly against the religious zealotry of the Western missionaries.
Jellicoe was enjoying these last days of the nineteenth century before the twentieth was welcomed in. He held shooting matches with Prince Heinrich and usually won. He visited Japan and the Philippines, which had just been annexed by the Americans despite fierce, local guerrilla resistance.
On the other side of the world in Africa, a territorial dispute between France and Britain over Fashoda had the effect of cooling relations with the French, and Britain diplomatically manoeuvred against its traditional rival. And even though it was rebuffed, an overture to Berlin was made in 1899 by the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, for a closer working relationship. The mood in Germany, however, was changing. The Kaiser had a vision for his country that was echoed in what the foreign minister, von Bülow, called ‘Weltpolitik’: the desire to assert itself globally.
Germany struck out on a new path, becoming an imperialist force, intent on altering, challenging and upsetting the international balance of power. The Kaiser had his own dreams. Impressed by the British Diamond Jubilee naval review, Germany and her new leader, the Kaiser, set out on the creation of a fleet with the hope of forcing Britain into an alliance on the former’s terms and the way that the passing of Germany’s first Navy Law the following year saw the beginnings of a new North Sea battle fleet that would eventually lead to a naval arms race with Britain and to war, not an alliance.
In China, however, the Europeans opted more for co-operation than competition. It was to their mutual benefit to push their demands as a united threat. Beatty now came to China as well. In April he was appointed as executive officer of Barfleur, the flagship of Rear Admiral James Bruce, second-in-command of the China Station. Again, Beatty’s superior was Stanley Colville, with whom he had served on Alexandra and Trafalgar, and most recently on the Nile riverboats.
What had started north in Shantung province spread south in 1900 to Peking, where foreigners felt increasingly under threat. A step-change came with the murder of the top German diplomat, Clemens von Ketteler. Fearing for their lives, foreigners barricaded themselves into the foreign legation quarter. They felt more and more isolated and cut off, especially when the rail link southeast to Tientsin was cut. Then the Chinese army switched sides. The dowager empress had found a way to use the hatred that the Boxers felt towards foreigners to her advantage.
On 28 May the British ambassador in Peking, Sir Claude MacDonald, asked for help and succeeded on the 30th in getting permission from the Tsungli Yamen, an office established by the imperial government to deal with foreigners, for troops to enter the capital. The next day Seymour took his British squadron to join the other allied ships at anchor at the Taku Forts. Russian, French and German battleships joined up, and numbers were increased by additional units from the Japanese, the Austrians and the Italians, these last arriving on the trot resplendent in their long-plumed Bersaglieri helmets. As Seymour was the senior officer present, they agreed to merge forces under his command.
On 4 June the last successful escape was made from Peking. Thereafter, no one could get out to reach the allied expeditionary force. Jellicoe was sent to Tientsin to gather intelligence and on 9 June he heard from Peking that unless the foreign quarter was speedily relieved, the worst could be expected. He did not hesitate and signalled back to Seymour that landing parties should be prepared. Beatty, meanwhile, had landed 150 troops from the Barfleur the day after Seymour left for Tientsin, where he found a garrison of 2,400 surrounded by 15,000 Boxers.
As Roskill wrote, Seymour ‘proceeded to act with more courage than judgement’.20 A mixed expeditionary force of 2,129 British, Americans, Russians, Germans, Japanese and Italians set out on 10 June for Peking and the besieged legation. Jellicoe was commander of the British contingent, the largest, 915 strong. With them they had seven field guns and ten machine guns.
Almost immediately they ran into trouble as the railway line had been torn up. The Taku Forts were taken after a short bombardment, ensuring that the allied ships could still reac
h the port. In the fighting around the railway station Beatty was wounded, twice, in the left arm below the shoulder and in the left wrist. He was hospitalised but discharged himself after a few days without permission and still clearly in considerable pain.
On 19 June, after hearing from a German officer that the lines had been taken up behind them, cutting the expedition off from Tientsin, Seymour ordered that the Peking relief force be turned around; it could make no further headway. The expeditionary force had been advancing up both sides of the river, pulling junks carrying the wounded. The advances on either side were, not unnaturally, uneven and often one side’s flank was exposed. At one point an advancing party of 150 cavalry attacked the British left flank. They were mistaken for Russian but turned out to be Chinese.
From the village ahead, Peitsang, two cannons also opened up. Jellicoe, together with ten sailors from the Centurion, charged the village with fixed bayonets, hoping to flush out the Boxers. Coming round a corner he was hit hard with a bullet, which spun him around. Piercing his left lung, he was soon coughing up blood and his assisting doctor did not think he would make it. With Jellicoe injured, Guido von Usedom, who had taken over the rearguard, was nominated by Seymour to take over as chief of staff. Later he too was wounded in the knee. Jellicoe, believing that he might die after the British doctor, Sibbald, had indicated he probably would, wrote a six-line will leaving everything to his mother.
With the help of Beatty’s and Christopher Cradock’s men, Seymour managed to get Jellicoe and some two hundred other wounded out safely on the night of 22 June, taking them downriver by junk where they stumbled on a great arsenal at Hsiku. Met by a wall of fire, Seymour organised two attacks, one by the British from the northwest, the other by the Germans from the southwest. After an hour they had taken the fort. It was bursting with stores, tons of rice and seven million rifle rounds, and even some Krupp field and Maxim machine guns. The supplies allowed them to hold out. Several counter-attacks were launched during the night. All were repulsed but not without quite serious casualties. Food began to run low.
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