Jellicoe was evacuated to Weihaiwei, where he slowly recovered, but the wound seriously weakened him in the years to come. Like Beatty, he temporarily lost the use of his left arm and until later in life often suffered painful cramps. My father always felt that it was the bullet that had remained lodged in his lung that probably caused his death in 1935, when he caught pneumonia.
Seymour’s troops made it back but losses were heavy. Out of the party of 228, there were sixty-eight casualties. The names of the German dead can be seen carved onto impressive marble tablets hung on the wall of the Marinekirche in Wilhelmshaven.
This was Jellicoe’s second encounter with Beatty. Both encounters had seen Jellicoe in mortally dangerous circumstances. The action must have brought him closer to Beatty, but most of the evidence seems to point more to the ties that he felt for the German soldiers with whom he fought so closely. They were, of course, to be his future adversaries.
Aged twenty-nine and newly promoted captain, Beatty held equal rank to Jellicoe, a man four years his senior in the Navy List. ‘He had been placed ahead of 291 commanders whose average age was forty-three.’* Beatty received great praise from Seymour and from Captain Edward Bailey, his shore commander.
Beatty helped in the defence of Tientsin, relieved on 13 July, and would have liked to go on to Peking in the successful relief (commanded by Count von Waldersee), but his own wounds were more serious than he made out and he was strictly forbidden. Instead, he went back to England, arriving in Portsmouth to be given letters from Ethel suggesting that their liaison should continue, but that he should first mend physically. Beatty underwent a difficult operation to regain the use of his left arm, although he never fully recovered the use of two of his left-hand fingers.
Beatty’s affair with Ethel Tree was conducted with great caution. Signing his letters to her from China ‘Jack’, he waited patiently while her divorce from Arthur Tree was in progress. Despite considerable opposition within Beatty’s family, from his father and even his sister ‘Trot’, who felt the move could damage his career, the two, David aged thirty and Ethel aged twenty-seven, married on 22 May 1901 at Hanover Square registry office, just ten days after Ethel’s divorce had come through. In so readily agreeing to it, she had not contested Arthur’s accusations of adultery and on that basis lost custody of their son, Ronald. On the Tree side of the family it was the same – it was some time before Ronald was reconciled with Beatty. Eventually, he became a great admirer.
Back from China, Jellicoe found his reputation and public profile worked in his favour. He was asked by Admiral Sir William May, Third Naval Lord and Controller, to come to the Admiralty as his assistant. Jellicoe accepted and started in November 1901. The post took responsibility for all the ships of the Navy – their design, construction and repair. The engineer-in-chief, the director of naval construction and the director of dockyards reported to May. Again, the Navy took advantage of his talent and expertise, and in each post he had served with distinction and merit. Scheer, the man destined to be his opposite number, was enjoying a similar path and was now commanding the pre-dreadnought Elsass, the German equivalent to HMS Queen. This was between Berlin assignments and a later appointment as Chief of Staff of the High Seas Fleet, a stint in the Admiralty and command of a battle squadron.
There was no better post from which Jellicoe could gain an intimate understanding of the technology of the Royal Navy. Travelling around the country was part of the job – visiting ports, shipbuilding yards and repair docks. When in Glasgow he would sometimes stay at Sir Charles Cayzer’s house, in Ralston. It was a chance for Jellicoe to get to know Cayzer’s daughter, Gwen, better.
The Beattys, however, faced a certain amount of social stigma because of Ethel, being a divorcee, and an American one to boot. Shane Leslie talked of her in a way that made it clear that the situation often drove David to despair. ‘I have paid dearly for my millions’, was his comment in later life. She was very strong-willed and had a streak of arrogance, born of her great inherited wealth, which left many astonished.
She also hated David’s being in the Navy and had often stood in the way of decisions that he needed to take. On one occasion, when he commanded the battle-cruisers, she tried to get their cruising plans changed so that she could more conveniently meet her ‘Jack’ (a rather ironic choice of nickname, given that this was the name by which John Jellicoe, the man she came to despise as standing in her husband’s way, was also known). Beatty chided her angrily: ‘You must not bother Prince Louis [of Battenberg] or Winston [Churchill] by asking them where we are going and asking them to send us here or there because you want to spend Whitsuntide with me. It won’t do. The Admiralty have a good deal to do without having to consider which port will suit the wives best.’21
Jellicoe came to the conclusion that Gwen Cayzer was the one for him when he sprained his knee while on one of Sir Charles’s ships that was fitting out. Naturally, he went back to Ralston to be nursed back to health by Gwen. She was almost twenty years younger than the forty-two-year-old captain whose heart she soon captured. Theirs was to be a strong bond. In July 1902 they got married and set up house in an apartment above Harrods. It was far above Jellicoe’s income. His captain’s pay was £410 per annum and the rent £400, but it did not pose a problem, as Gwen had her own funds. ‘My married life was one of the most perfect happiness … Our love grew if possible stronger as the years passed by,’ John Jellicoe recounted later.
Beatty recovered from his wounds and in May 1902 was pronounced fit for sea duty. In June he took command, as captain, of the cruiser Juno, part of the Channel Squadron under the command of Arthur Wilson. By the time that he left the ship in December, the Juno had dramatically improved her gunnery performance. Looking forward, it was unfortunate that Beatty was not to have the time needed to bring the Battle Cruiser Fleet’s gunnery up to a similar standard.
In August the following year, Jellicoe went back to sea as captain of the first-class cruiser Drake, a very long, 500ft, four-funnelled armoured ship that could steam at just over 24 knots. He had actually visited Drake when he was working for the controller and on his first days on board he warned his officers to make sure that doors were properly locked down. This was timely. The doors leaked and repairs had to be made. One recommendation that came out of the experience was to place the main armament of the classes of armoured cruiser laid down in the 1904/5 programme on the upper deck to avoid too much water intake in heavy seas – the Drake had suffered considerable flooding through the lower 6in casemates at sea.
In November 1903 Beatty was given command of Arrogant. Andrew Lambert quipped of the matching of man to name, ‘Clearly someone in the Admiralty had a sense of humour’.22
In March 1904 Jellicoe was joined by his wife in Bermuda. With her came her younger sister, Constance, or Connie. Here she met one of the other captains, Charles Madden (who would later become Jellicoe’s chief of staff at Jutland). They were married two years later.
The Drake was meanwhile in harbour undergoing repairs on her steering gear when an unfortunate incident took place. As the Russian fleet sailed for the Far East, it came across a collection of British fishing boats out of Hull near the Dogger Bank. The Russians somehow believed them to be Japanese torpedo boats, and opened fire. There was substantial damage and death and the British public clamoured for action. Only adroit diplomacy kept the situation from sparking a war.
With Fisher becoming First Sea Lord (the first time that this new title was used), Jellicoe returned to the centre of technological development. In October 1904 he was brought into the team that would design the Dreadnought. Fisher had told Lord Selborne that he wanted ‘the five best brains in the navy below the rank of Admiral’ to work on the project that would include Jackson, Jellicoe and Bacon.23 He could vouch for them as he had ‘tested each of them for many years’.
Besides Jellicoe, the group also included Captain Henry B Jackson (soon to be controller), Captain Reginald Bacon (Jellicoe’s future bio
grapher and soon to become naval assistant to the First Sea Lord), Captain Charles Madden, Captain Wilfrid Henderson and Henry Card, chief constructor at Portsmouth. Alexander Grade of Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering provided industrial advice.
The earliest results of the work of the group was the launching of the Dreadnought in 1906. Her 12in guns, normally the single longest construction element, were Jellicoe’s work. He managed to get them in time. One story was that he did this by taking them from Lord Nelson and Agamemnon, but this was unlikely as the tender offers for the mountings were only received in June 1905. More probably, he was able to steal materials from a number of mountings in the early stages of production for a number of other ships.24 Fisher’s simultaneous reforms of the Navy were discussed in the previous chapter.
Beatty was elsewhere; Ethel joined him in October when he went to the first-class armoured cruiser Suffolk. In February 1905 Jellicoe relieved Rear Admiral Barry as DNO. Here he managed to wrest control of manufacturing away from the War Office and, as the newer guns delivered increased range, started to focus more and more on spotting and range-finding issues. He worked closely with Percy Scott, the man most closely associated with revolutionising British naval gunnery performance, appointed as inspector of target practice in March in the knowledge that he had to find new, innovative solutions to the increasing issues of long-range gunnery.
The shortcomings of British ammunition at long range was another issue also begging to be settled, but Jellicoe had been moved on before any action could be taken. It was a mistake. Before leaving the post of DNO Jellicoe had requested the Ordnance Board to design and produce a new armour-piercing shell effective at ranges at which future sea battles were likely to be fought.
In order to determine the effectiveness against armoured ships of the shell supplied for the various guns I arranged for extensive firing trials to be carried out in 1910 against the old battleship Edinburgh, which had been specially prepared by the addition of modern armour plates. As a result of these trials, before the end of my term of office as Controller, the Ordnance Board were asked in October 1910 to endeavour to produce an armour-piercing shell which would perforate armour at oblique impact and go on in a fit state for bursting.25
However, ‘[b]efore the matter was resolved, Jellicoe departed and subsequent Controllers allowed it to drop.’26 The issue of faulty ammunition would come back to haunt the British within a decade.
We have seen in Chapter 2 how the Kaiser’s interference in the situation in Morocco in an attempt to drive a wedge between Britain and France, which may have seemed a storm in a teacup, had been dangerous nevertheless. Two European power ministers were immediately at loggerheads: Théophile Delcassé, the French foreign minister, declared that there was no need for the international conference for which Bülow was pushing, even though by June Germany was threatening war over the issue. Although by April 1906 the Moroccan crisis had been settled, it had taken Europe to the very brink, with the French mobilising troops on Germany’s borders and the Germans calling up the reserves. Britain had sided with her old cross-Channel foe but there was a strong feeling that the country’s possible entry into a war was being decided not in Whitehall, but in the ministry on the Quai d’Orsay. When the Treaty of Algeciras was signed, Germany had been heavily outplayed: it was now increasingly behaving like the rogue state of Europe.
No sooner had one crisis for Germany been resolved than another came along: none other than the Dreadnought. With a single event, Britain had changed the rules of naval competition. Jellicoe’s view, mirroring that of Fisher, was that this type of innovation was not to be viewed in the same way as an arms race. He saw it as maintaining peace:
In peace strategy, the initiative is probably as important as in war. So long as we maintain the initiative we keep our rivals in a chronic state of unreadiness, confuse their building policy and, by maintaining a perpetual superiority in each individual unit, tend to preserve peace by postponing the moment when they could make war an advantage.27
Many say that he was wrong. Dreadnought sparked a fire of catch-up by Germany. Tirpitz’s response was to use the natural public reaction of fear successfully to get his third Navy Law passed, making it clear that Germany would now build ‘all big-gun’ ships of its own, to keep up in the naval race.
In 1907 Jellicoe was promoted to rear admiral, then asked if he would take a position of command in the Atlantic Fleet. This he did in August, joining the pre-dreadnought Albemarle, whose sister ship Exmouth served as the flagship of the commander-in-chief, Admiral Sir Assheton Curzon-Howe. With him came William Goodenough as flag captain. Nine years later Goodenough would provide the key tactical intelligence to support Jellicoe’s situational awareness at Jutland. The reputation and zeal that Jellicoe brought to each new assignment had earned him a Commander of the Victorian Order in 1906, then a Knight Commander after that year’s Cowes Regatta. He was now Rear Admiral Sir John Jellicoe.
While with Albemarle in Quebec in 1908, Jellicoe received instructions from the First Lord, Reginald McKenna, offering him the post of Third Sea Lord and Controller. Perhaps, for the first time in his career, Jellicoe hesitated. He knew that the post would put him right in the centre of political controversy – whether national investment should be in dreadnoughts or social welfare. He replied saying that, while he would take the position, he would prefer to have stayed second-in-command of the Atlantic Fleet. He made his conditions known to McKenna: the country needed a strong dreadnought and destroyer construction programme. In 1908 the dreadnought programme had been halved and now, for 1909, Jellicoe proposed four such vessels. As soon as he was back in England, he took six weeks’ leave, knowing that his new post would demand all of his energy and talents.
In April Winston Churchill entered the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade and immediately allied himself with David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in opposition to the Admiralty proposals. Jellicoe’s unease stemmed from his belief, not entirely well-founded, that the German programme was accelerating and that its ships were generally of superior quality to their British equivalents. Krupp was building gun mountings and outpacing British production. Since the critical factor in how long a battleship needs for construction is not the ship itself but the provision of her guns, this was a serious issue.
He also repeatedly tried to persuade Churchill to focus not only on gun calibre, but on the total displacement of a ship. If ships of equal displacement were compared, it was clear that the ratio of weight in British ships was biased toward gun weight and higher calibre rather than armour; armour was what German ships had. They were coupled with better watertight subdivisions and generally wider beams: he concluded that this had to give them a distinct advantage.
Beatty was appointed captain of the pre-dreadnought Queen in the Atlantic Fleet. Ethel did not bother to see him. She hated Gibraltar and this was one of the principal reasons why, years later, when offered the command of the Atlantic Fleet Beatty turned it down. His career was not going well and it was only due to Jacky Fisher’s personal intervention that it caught a second wind. Not having held a fleet captain’s command for long enough precluded Beatty from flag rank. Fisher managed to get through an Order in Council – legislation often used in emergencies in place of normal parliamentary process – to make an exception. On 1 January 1910 Beatty became the youngest flag officer since Nelson. The Times commented: ‘Rear-Admiral Beatty will not only be the youngest Officer on the Flag list, but will be younger than over 90% of the Officers on the Captain’s List’. He was close on Jellicoe’s heels.
That same summer Jellicoe was invited by Usedom to the Kiel regatta. Usedom was now, as an admiral, in command of the Kiel naval base and for Jellicoe this was an ideal opportunity to get to know the man whom he believed would be his eventual foe a little better. They had been comrades in arms ten years before in China, but Usedom was wary nonetheless.
As a result of this trip Jellicoe returned with a better unders
tanding of the investment that the Germans had made in dry docks (initially constructed for non-military purposes) and went on to win the argument about having a floating dock constructed at Cromarty (albeit not as wide as he would have liked). Still, the strengthening of the new bases, such as the one at Rosyth, was much slower than he thought wise. The need arose from the changing alliances that Britain was building. With Germany emerging as Britain’s principal enemy, the northern bases were becoming key.
Jellicoe also came back to an issue he had looked at when he had been DNO, namely the quality of British armour-piercing shells. Tests were carried out against an old battleship that had been strengthened with additional armour plates for the test. Again it was found that the shells burst on impact rather than after penetration. But Jellicoe’s term in office was once more too short and his successor dropped the issue. He was successful in arguing the case for parallel engine rooms so that a ship’s speed could be maintained even if a torpedo hit had put one set of engines out of action.
In December 1910 Jellicoe took command of the Atlantic Fleet, flying his flag in the pre-dreadnought Prince of Wales. The following year started with a terrible personal tragedy. While he was at sea, his daughter Agnes Betty died, aged just five, of a mastoid infection.* The cruel news came by telegram. It must have been shattering for him. Yet it was difficult for him to grieve; all around him matters were coming to a head.
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