The Lion at Sea

by Max Hennessy

  Copyright & Information

  The Lion At Sea

  First published in 1977

  © Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1977-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Max Hennessy (John Harris) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755128060 EAN: 9780755128068

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  Part One

  One

  It just wasn’t possible!

  There weren’t that many ships in the whole world!

  In a patchy but warm sun, they stretched as far as the eye could see – two hundred and fifty of them, one hundred and seventy of them British. They formed a parallelogram six miles long by two miles wide, yet not a single man and not a single ship had been brought home from abroad for this tremendous display of that principal instrument of Pax Britannica, the Royal Navy.

  The great vessels, many wearing admirals’ flags, were drawn up in two columns, first of all the dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts – Collingwood, St Vincent, Superb, Vanguard and others – great angular towering grey fortresses of floating steel sharp against the pearl-grey sky; then the battle cruisers – Indefatigable, Indomitable, Inflexible, Implacable – a whole array of them, only slightly less formidable than the dreadnoughts. Then came the armoured cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, submarines and torpedo boats, and all the ancillary vessels, representing every aspect of naval preparedness, the sea between them covered by darting cutters and picket boats like maybugs on a pond. Finally came the foreign battleships, the German Von der Tann, the French Danton, the American Delaware, and fifteen others, and the foreign potentates’ yachts, aflutter with flags – whole strings and windrows of them, all caught by the south-westerly breeze that poppled the grey water.

  It was an awe-inspiring sight. Even to British eyes well used to the pomp and majesty of the Navy. Even to the somewhat indifferent gaze of Midshipman George Kelly Maguire, on the deck of the armoured cruiser, Huguenot. A solid phalanx of machinery and armour manned by thousands of the most skilled seamen in the world, the Coronation Review lay broodingly across the entrance to the Solent, one of the most vulnerable waterways in the British Isles, like a solid bulwark against aggression. A vast new fleet that was the brainchild of that dogmatic, difficult and spiteful volcano of a man, Admiral Sir John Fisher, the great ships belonged to a navy that he had transformed almost overnight – from the antiquated collection of Victorian men-o’-war that had previously graced naval reviews, to a Twentieth Century instrument fit to meet its first challenge for a hundred years and counter anything the Germans, whom Fisher had long since seen as the enemy, could throw against it.

  With its stupefying dimensions and potential, it had been assembled to pay tribute to the newly-crowned monarch, George the Fifth, by the Grace of God King of England, Emperor of India and Defender of the Faith. And, staring from Huguenot over the ruffled grey water, untouched by the political overtones that lay behind the review and by the need in an atmosphere of growing European tension for a show of strength, Midshipman Maguire sincerely hoped in his unyielding youthful judgement that George the Fifth, King of England, Emperor of India and Defender of the Faith, appreciated what was being done for him. Because God alone knew how many gallons of paint had been slapped on by bored sailors, how many hundredweights of brass polish and holystone had been used to bring the great vessels up to the standard of cleanliness and beauty they now represented, how much sweat had been wasted, how much cursing uttered, how many hours sleep lost by officers from captains down to midshipmen like himself.

  All morning sight-seeing steamers had been leaving for the broad waters of the Solent, and the King, wearing the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, had arrived at the South Railway jetty to the crack of guns from Portsmouth harbour as Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, had fired a salute. Then, accompanied by the Trinity House yacht and other vessels – every one of them stuffed to the bulkheads with dignitaries and officials – and escorted by torpedo boats whose task it was to ensure that wayward shipping was kept well clear of the review area which picket boats had previously emptied of pleasure craft, the royal yacht, Victoria and Albert, left harbour to the din of cheers from people lining the walls of the old port.

  As Kelly Maguire watched, the clouds turned the sea to an iron darkness that caught only occasional glimpses of light, and, the great ships, sombre and black-looking with their great batteries of guns, steel turrets and ram bows, suddenly seemed less ceremonial than threatening, less decorative than purposeful. He drew a deep breath. He’d got out of the wrong side of his hammock that morning and, his boyish cheeks shaved to the bone, scrubbed, brushed and polished to within an inch of his life, he was in a questioning state of mind as he stared at all the splendour, and came to the conclusion that in recent years, despite Jacky
Fisher, despite the reforms that had been made, naval pomp seemed to have become badly confused with power.

  Aboard Huguenot, for example, the captain, the Honourable Basil Acheson, was known – without too much effort of imagination either – as God. It was normal enough, of course, for the captain of any ship to be referred to and even regarded as God, but there was always an element of jesting in it, yet on Kelly’s first morning aboard, Captain Acheson had summoned to his spacious quarters aft his three newest and youngest officers, Midshipmen Maguire, Verschoyle and Kimister, and let them know exactly where they stood in the order of things.

  ‘Aboard Huguenot,’ he had announced, ‘I am God Almighty, and you are not even junior archangels. Indeed, gentlemen, if there were dogsbodies in Heaven, then that is what you would be, so that now that you’ve been promoted from cadets to midshipmen, take care that you don’t let it go to your heads. One thing more: It is not advisable to say “Good morning” to the captain of this ship before lunch. This is not a “good morning” ship.’

  Even granting that Captain Acheson was unusual – a ‘character’, one of the last of the Victorian eccentrics, with a tendency to enjoy displaying his eccentricities – it had hardly been encouraging.

  His youthful eyes narrowed, Kelly Maguire stared again at the assembled fleet. A splash of colour fluttered from Lord Nelson’s yardarm and there was a scuffle of feet behind him, then the whole fleet seemed to burst into a riot of vivid flags as it dressed over-all. What had been a grey and sombre scene was transformed at once with gay bunting, and, as though in response, the sun appeared picking up the brasswork and white paint, the bulges of the turrets and the lines of the guns. It was as if someone had turned a floodlight on the fleet.

  ‘They’re coming!’

  To Kelly Maguire, a rebel by nature and particularly a rebel this day because he had suffered his share of lost sleep and sweat, it all seemed an awful waste of effort. Not, of course, that anyone in that year of grace, 1911, gave a fig for the opinions of George Kelly Maguire or would do for many years to come. At the age of nineteen, he was nothing more than a mere cog in a huge wheel, all bony wrists and ankles as he grew out of a uniform he was too impoverished to replace at this late stage of waiting for his translation from the humiliating rank of midshipman to the glory of his first stripe.

  ‘It’s normal enough, of course, for the very young to be rebellious at what they consider unnecessary fuss,’ Midshipman Verschoyle, standing just to his left, murmured. ‘If you’re not a socialist at twenty, you’ve no heart; if you’re still one at forty, you’ve no head.’

  Kelly Maguire frowned. The view that all men should be equal seemed at the moment to make very sound sense to a downtrodden snotty. His seniors, however, were doubtless Tories to a man and regarded egalitarianism as a dangerous new form of politics. Even James Caspar Verschoyle, Kelly’s immediate senior in the List, despite his cynical evaluations, was without doubt a hardened Tory who never suffered the slightest qualms of conscience.

  ‘But then, of course,’ Verschoyle often pointed out, ‘I’m stinking rich.’

  And, unlike Kelly Maguire, who, apart from a shock of red hair, was shortish, squarish and indifferent as to colouring and features, he was also tall, patrician and intelligent. Kelly Maguire envied him not only for his airs and graces but also because Verschoyle was an excellent boxer who had had his own way with people all his young life, for no other reason than that he’d always had too much money and too many good looks. The fact that Kelly’s father was a rear admiral and a baronet made no difference whatsoever, and Verschoyle, who knew everything about everybody, was quick to point out why. ‘He’s a rear admiral because he retired as a captain and commodore,’ he said, ‘and he’s a baronet only because his elder brother died of enteric in Bloemfontein during the Boer War. And since the title carries no wealth, young Ginger, you’re really just a lot of bog-trotters, aren’t you? – as poor as church mice and obliged to live in Ireland, unlike my family which has a town house in London.’

  Kelly scowled, far from unaware of the circumstances that made up his background. His grandfather, Colonel Seamus Aloysius Kelly – together with his younger brother, Kelly’s Uncle Patrick, lately a major in the Royal Irish Fusiliers but now retired and existing largely on his elder brother’s charity – had had to live for years off the rundown remains of the family estate, so that it had seemed wise at the time to get rid of his daughter, Kelly’s mother, as quickly as possible to the first bidder, Kelly’s father. Instead of getting rid of his daughter, however, Colonel Kelly had merely acquired another hanger-on. The only taste of glory in the long career of Admiral Maguire had been the day when he’d put up his admiral’s stripe just in time to discard it again on settling down in retirement, to wipe out by scrimping and saving some of the debts he’d incurred in a lifetime of enjoying himself at sea.

  There had never been much love lost between the two sides of the family, and no advantages whatsoever for Kelly from his father’s rank. Not even when he’d gone none too willingly to Dartmouth. It had been bitterly cold and an elderly petty officer with a nose like a ripe cherry had lined them all up, even the sobbing Kimister, who’d been brought by his mother – something that had taken a lot of living down – and let them know exactly where they stood.

  ‘You’d better get it into your ’eads ’ere and now, young gentlemen,’ he’d said, ‘You’ve got very varied backgrounds, and some of you even ’ave important fathers. Here we’re all equal and you at the moment are on the lowest rung of the naval ladder.’

  Kelly had hated it. Even his six months at sea in the training cruiser, Cumberland, where, if nothing else, he’d learned to be sick over the lee side, hadn’t seemed terribly full of promise, while his arrival in Huguenot had positively failed to warm his heart.

  ‘You are a wart,’ the sub-lieutenant of the gunroom had told him firmly. ‘An excrescence. An ullage. A growth. You probably imagine that when signalled “House your topmast”, you should reply, “fine, how’s yours?” and doubtless the only time you’ll show any enthusiasm for the navy will be on full-belly nights when we’re entertaining visitors.’

  It seemed just then to Kelly Maguire that the Navy was not only single-minded but also a touch narrow-minded, too.

  He came back to the present with a jerk. Over the lap of the water, he could hear the drone of an engine. In the line of seamen drawn up on deck behind him with the submissiveness of a herd of cows at milking time, there were a few murmurs of interest, and he saw a seaplane moving down the line of dreadnoughts, spidery, ungainly, but somehow a pointer to a different future.

  The sun had gone again and the sparkling water had become grey and sombre once more. The seaplane had disappeared now beyond the dreadnoughts and, as the wind grew keener, Kelly began to wonder how much longer they were all going to have to line the decks. He glanced to his left. Verschoyle was waiting with his own group of bearded, heavy-handed men. He seemed quite at ease, and Kelly could never imagine him seething inside with envy and humiliation. He was a tall young man, pale-faced, fair-haired, but lean-bodied with strong shoulders. Kelly disliked him, and disliked him even more because Verschoyle was clever. It would have been so much more satisfactory to be able to feel that Verschoyle would never get anywhere in the Navy or, that, if he did, he would do it only through influence and wealth. Unfortunately, this was not so and never would be. Certain he’d dislike Verschoyle until day he died, Kelly was equally certain that Verschoyle would never be a failure, and that one day he’d be an admiral while Kelly was still trailing behind among the passed-over captains.

  On his right was Albert Edward Kimister, the other midshipman who had joined with him. Kimister was a born victim. Small, slight, not as clever as Verschoyle nor as tough-minded as Kelly, he had suffered from bullying all through Dartmouth and still suffered in the gunroom of Huguenot, and Kelly had had more than one good hiding from Verschoyle
for standing up for him.

  ‘I wonder–’ Verschoyle’s low voice came over the drum of the signal halyards and the slap of water alongside ‘–how many senior officers there are still afloat to whom naval history is nothing but posturing heroics gleaming in an eternal empire of brass and new paint. Good at seamanship and having the whitest decks in the fleet, and entirely satisfied because they know how to blacklead their projectiles and paint a gun.’

  Certain to a T what to use, Kelly thought. ‘A foot of grey, an inch of black and the rest white makes a damn good colour,’ his father had often said.

  ‘Sad lack of imagination among ’em,’ Verschoyle murmured. ‘Outlook limited to The Sporting Times, Country Life and The Illustrated London News, shouldn’t wonder. I’m finding all this rather a bore, you know, young Ginger. I think I’ll get out of it.’

  ‘How?’ Kelly’s head half-turned as he spoke out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Fall in a fit.’

  ‘They’ll know you’re faking.’

  ‘Not they!’ Verschoyle looked smugly self-confident. ‘I took the precaution of reporting sick this morning. Of course, they suggested I stood down, but I heroically insisted on carrying on.’

  Kelly tried to ignore Verschoyle’s sly comments and kept his eyes ahead. Beyond the surface ships, he could see the low hulls of submarines. Despite his father’s attitude that they were a ‘damned un-English weapon,’ he had a feeling that when war came, like aeroplanes, they might prove highly important. He had argued it out many times – admittedly not with his father, who, brought up to believe the big gun was the only gentleman’s weapon, could never be persuaded to listen to such blasphemy. Not even with his mother who, being Irish and an ardent follower of hounds, was far more concerned with his unfortunate habit of falling off the horses she gave him to ride. But with Charlotte Upfold, who lived two miles away across the fields from Balmero House where Kelly lived, and was a good listener and always had been. Admittedly she was still only a schoolgirl, but she could ride – better than Kelly himself – knew how to shoot and could handle ferrets with the best of them. She was forthright, intelligent and no-nonsense, and they had been friends all their lives. It had been to her that he had bewailed having to go to Dartmouth and poured out his woes about bullying. ‘The sub-lieutenant’s left-handed–’ he could clearly remember his conversation with her ‘–and Verschoyle’s right-handed so that when they go at you with a dirk scabbard, they make cross patterns on your bum. We had a look in the Midshipmen’s bathroom.’