Jacky Fisher

Father of Dreadnought

Introduction

by David W. Tschanz, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

On June 26, 1897, a naval review was held at Portsmouth as part of the commemoration of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. It was a humid, breezeless day and the flags hung limply on their staffs. At precisely 2 PM, the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, bearing an entourage headed by the Prince of Wales (Victoria was too frail to attend herself) cast off from the Portsmouth dock and sailed towards the flotilla.

It was an awe inspiring sight, 165 British ships of the line, plus vessels from fourteen other nations including the United States and Japan, lined up for the Grand Review. As the royal yacht passed each ship, seamen scurried to attention and fired cannon salutes. For three hours that evening, in a dazzling display of modern technology, every ship was outlined against the somber sky by hundreds of electric lights. It was, a British reporter wrote --"a fairy fleet festooned with gold."

Fantasy did not only extend to its appearance. British naval supremacy, which had been taken for granted, and gone virtually unchallenged since Admiral Horatio Nelson's defeat of the French at Trafalgar in 1805 was more a matter of style than substance. The simple fact of the matter was that the Royal Navy was a paper shark and was, as it had been through most of Victoria's reign, unfit for combat.

The reasons for this sorry state of affairs were a combination of internal and external factors that had progressively moved the Royal Navy from absolute mastery of the sea to the appearance of mastery of the sea. After Nelson's brilliant victory the Royal Navy had taken less than a generation to slip into stagnation of thought. Despite the fact that the Industrial Revolution had given Britain an edge in technology second to none, the Royal Navy tended to be less inventive and more imitative as the Nineteenth Century progressed. Most real innovations in naval technology came from off-island. While the Royal Navy was quick to exploit some of these advances -- e.g. the steam engine, steel plate and changes in ship design, it almost never developed them on its own. When there were homegrown innovations, such as the Whitehead torpedo, the naval leadership looked askance at it and refused to appreciate its value -- until some other navy had shown it how.

In fact its entire attitude toward new technology could best be described as "Why change?" In 1860, a young naval captain fervently proposed to the First Sea Lord that the Royal Navy should adopt the electrically detonated torpedo (in reality a mine). The captain was told, by his superior, "there were no torpedoes when I came to sea and I don't see why there should be any of the beastly things now."

At the same time Nelson's insistence on initiative on the part of junior officers was quickly forgotten. "Follow your seniors" was the Royal Navy's catch phrase, and, as in all hierarchical organizations where that happens, there was a general degeneration of leadership potential.

Weighted down by moribund traditions, that Winston Churchill acidly described as "rum, sodomy and the lash," British sailors were ill fed and worse led. While their social climbing officers fopped and preened, sailors spent long days at sea scrubbing decks, polish brass and chrome or wielding cutlasses in boarding drills as if they were still in the age of sail. At the same time gunnery practice was cursory even though naval bombardments were ludicrously inaccurate.

In 1881, for example, eight British battleships fired 3000 rounds at forts guarding the Egyptian city of Alexandria and scored precisely 10 hits. Other matters were largely ignored -- "looking seaworthy" had become more important than being seaworthy.

In addition, Britain's strategic security had undergone systematic erosion from the 1870s onward. At the bottom of this loss, lay the diffusion of industrial techniques from Britain to other nations. In the narrower field of naval armament Britain's superiority had been endangered by the export of high technology to other navies by her industries. Like Krupp in Germany, British firms found themselves force to expand into foreign markets to stay in business. The end result was the transfer of the technology which had assured Britain's naval superiority to other nations -- and navies they might want to build.

And build them they did.

In the 1883, the Royal Navy had more capital ships than the next three European navies -- those of France, Russia and the new German Reich combined at 41 to 33. The newly unified Kingdom of Italy had only three major warships and future naval titans the United States and Japan had none. By 1897 Britain still had the largest fleet, though it was now inferior to France, Russia and Germany with 62 versus 66 battleships; calculated against all other powers, including Italy, the United States and Japan the ratio was 62 to 96.

This restructuring of the balance of naval power was explained in part by unit-cost factors -- the shift from wood to iron, sail to steam and smooth-bore to rifled artillery had entailed huge increases in the construction cost of individual ships so that Victorian England simply could not keep up through conventional budgetary outlay. At the same time expansion of the other nations led to massive naval building programs on their parts.

Without warships Britain was perilously vulnerable to blockade or invasion. By the 1890s the British economy had become heavily dependent on maintaining open sea lanes. Her commerce ships literally kept the island alive. Cheap overseas grain prices, for example meant that 65% of British grain was imported. Naval dominance was slipping from the British and the planners looked at the possibility of commerce raiding cruisers turned against her with dread. But in real terms, Britain was the possessor of a large, ineffective navy.

Into this morass entered a man who was to save Britain from Armageddon at sea -- a hot tempered bantam rooster of a martinet with, in the words of a female admirer, eyes "like smouldering charcoals." In 1860 a First Sea Lord had treated his suggestion of electrically detonated mines with disdain. Now gritty, inexhaustible and ruthless, Sir John Arbuthnot "Jacky" Fisher had risen to First Sea Lord (1904-1910) and was about to transform the Royal Navy.

More Jacky Fisher

Back to Cry Havoc #14 Table of Contents
Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1996 by David W. Tschanz.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com