Despite the successful surgery on Beatty’s arm, and the fact that he was able quickly to resume fox hunting, almost two years elapsed between his being wounded at Tientsin and the Admiralty’s medical board passing him fit for sea. His first appointment as a Captain was to the cruiser Juno, a comparatively modern ship (launched 1895, 5,600 tons, eleven 6-inch guns). She was allocated temporarily to the recently formed Home Fleet, then commanded by the redoubtable Admiral Sir Arthur K. (‘Tug’) Wilson. After exercises, in which Beatty showed he was a good ship handler and no stickler about the rigid naval etiquette which then prevailed, in August 1902 he took the Juno out to the Mediterranean, which was her proper station. The separation from Ethel, who never took the sacrifices demanded of her by the navy well, was evidently a lachrymose affair on her part.
After calling briefly at Gibraltar, the strategic importance of which evidently impressed Beatty, he sailed for Malta. His letters to Ethel of this period show that he had difficulty in bringing the Juno’s crew to the state of efficiency he considered essential. However, under his firm leadership it was not long before she was placed at the top in the gunnery practices and other competitions by which the efficiency of ships was then, and for many years afterwards, assessed.
The Juno had nearly reached the end of her commission when Beatty took her over, and after three months he transferred to the Arrogant, a slightly more modern ship (launched 1896, 5,750 tons). She belonged to a class known as ‘Ram Cruisers’ which had been designed to take advantage of the somewhat adventitious evidence regarding the effectiveness of ramming the enemy produced by the Austro-Italian battle of Lissa in 1866. Again Beatty’s period of command was brief, and in October 1904 he transferred to the modern and larger County class cruiser Suffolk (launched 1903, 9,800 tons, fourteen 6-inch guns). During the last part of this period of Beatty’s service on the Mediterranean station the C-in-C was Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, whose rigid system of training and discouragement of initiative did not appeal to him. However, they always remained on good terms – helped perhaps by the fact that they were both Irishmen and both horse lovers. This was the time when, under the dynamic influence of Sir John (‘Jacky’) Fisher, who became First Sea Lord on 20th October 1904,* the navy was adapting itself, albeit with widespread reluctance among many officers, to a multitude of new weapons and techniques – such as wireless telegraphy, torpedoes and the replacement of coal by oil firing. Though the wealth which Beatty now enjoyed, and the expensive pursuits such as polo which it made possible, aroused jealousy among some officers it could not be denied that in competitions and recreations the Suffolk came out at or very near the top. One incident which was widely repeated in the fleet showed Ethel at her most arrogant. Despite warnings from his Chief Engineer her husband over-drove his ship in order to get back quickly to Malta, doing serious damage to her main machinery. When there was talk of disciplinary action being taken against him Ethel is alleged to have remarked ‘What – court martial my David? I’ll buy them a new ship’. Whether true or not such a tale did the young Captain no good.
On 22nd February 1905 Ethel, who had come out to join her husband, gave birth to a son at Malta – to Beatty’s great delight. He was christened David Field, but was long known as ‘Dadie’, which was how he pronounced his name as a baby. From the start Beatty became an adoring father.
Towards the end of 1905 the Beattys returned home in order that he should take up the appointment of Naval Adviser to the Army Council. Co-operation between the two services was not assisted by Fisher’s tactlessness and ruthlessness, but Beatty got on well with the soldiers and had a hand in planning the transport of an Expeditionary Force to the continent. However, combined operations (in the modern sense) then had a low place in Admiralty plans and were not seriously investigated until much later – an omission for which a heavy price was to be exacted.
Beatty left the War Office in December 1908 to take command of the battleship Queen (15,000 tons, four 12-inch and twelve 6-inch guns), in the Atlantic Fleet. She formed part of the concentration of warships in or near home waters which was the key to Fisher’s strategic policy. As with Wilson and Beresford in the Mediterranean Beatty soon got on excellent terms with Prince Louis of Battenberg, the C-in-C, from whom he won golden opinions. But he was severely, and justly, critical of the lack of originality and imagination shown in the fleet’s tactical exercises at this time. In July 1909 he wrote sarcastically to Ethel that the recent two days at sea ‘have been most productive, principally in demonstrating how unpractised our Admirals are in the manner and methods of handling large fleets. It is not their fault. We don’t do enough of it . . . We have a very fine Fleet and the best materials . . . But we have eight Admirals, and there is not one among them unless it be Prince Louis, who impresses me that he is capable of a great effort and 34 Captains among whom there is really fine material, which seems wasted for the want of a guide or leader. . . .’1 Though one should probably discount such strictures in part as coming from a young and ambitious officer it is a fact that, except for the time when Admiral Sir William May was in command of the Home Fleet (1909-11), training suffered from what Admiral K. G. B. Dewar, one of the ‘naval intellectuals’ of the period, has aptly stigmatised as ‘tactical arthritis’ – by which he meant the rigid conformity enforced on Captains and junior Flag Officers who were merely required ‘to follow the Admiral’s motions’.2 Any tendency to unorthodoxy or originality was severely frowned on – which plainly rankled with Beatty.
Although in his letters to his wife Beatty was often critical of senior officers he kept clear of the deadly feud which developed at this time between Beresford and Fisher, and which split the navy from top to bottom. Early in December 1909 he learnt that he would get his Flag when the next vacancy occurred; but as his time as a Captain was less than that prescribed for promotion to Rear-Admiral a special Order in Council was necessary. On 1st January 1910 Beatty, then just under 39 years old, became the youngest Flag Officer in the navy since the late 18th century.* His and Ethel’s delight in this exceptional proof of the high regard in which he was held was enhanced by another son being born to them on 2nd April 1910. He was christened Peter Randolph Louis – the last in compliment to the young Admiral’s C-in-C, who stood sponsor to the infant.
In the spring of 1911 Beatty attended the Senior Officers’ War Course at Portsmouth, and took a house at Ryde, Isle of Wight, in order to have his family near him. Though he told Bryan Godfrey-Faussett that the course was ‘in parts interesting and instructive and in other parts purely a great waste of time’,3 it was in truth a poor substitute for a proper staff training, such as Beresford and a few far-sighted officers had long wanted to introduce;4 but another seven years were to elapse before that deficiency was fully remedied. The trouble lay in the fact that too many senior officers, including Fisher and Wilson, considered training for staff duties to be quite unnecessary.
Beatty’s early promotion appears to have whetted Ethel’s determination to overcome one of the handicaps under which divorced women then laboured – namely the strong opposition to allowing them to be presented at Court, or indeed to participate in any Royal functions. A letter written many years later by Eugénie Godfrey-Faussett, to Shane Leslie recalled most amusingly the scene which she made in order to achieve her purpose. It is worth quoting.
Hampton Court Palace
January 25th 1948
My dear Shane,
. . . It was a long drawn out battle to get poor Ethel (A) to Court or (B) to the Coronation of K.G.V. You remember how sticky were the laws in those days of [? towards] those who wished to attend the Court as opposed to the Divorce Court? Poor old Godfrey had been entrusted with this ticklish business,* and had been requested to read the whole of the Divorce proceedings to prove Ethel’s innocence etc. Godfrey was doing his best to help. The Lord Chamberlain was looking down his nose.5 David was threatening to leave the Navy. Ethel was putting on one of her hysterical acts . . . I remember my astonishment on entering the drawing room [of the Beattys’ house at Ryde, where the Godfrey-Faussetts were staying] to find Ethel in floods of tears and Godfrey standing with his arms folded and a heavy scowl looking like the well known picture of Napoleon! Godfrey later explained to me that she was saying that she would force David to leave the Navy unless she was received at Court and he was answering that he would drop the whole business unless she swore she would do no such wicked thing! Godfrey won the day, David remained in the Navy, and some years later the embargo was lifted and Ethel duly made her bow. Do come down here whenever you can. . . .
Yours ever
Eugenie’s memory is substantiated by the letters which passed between Beatty and her husband and between him and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which have survived apparently complete; but she does not mention that shortly after the painful exhibition put on by Ethel at Ryde she did send Godfrey-Faussett an abject if somewhat ungrammatical apology ‘for my very silly and weak behaviour when talking to you on Sunday. I fear the only excuse I have to offer is a very stupid one, that for the last few weeks since Jack first talked to me about giving up the sea, I have been most frightfully worried. I have always been so anxious for him to go on, and that I, in no way, should be a hindrance to him. The thought of his making perhaps a fatal mistake on my account came upon me as a great shock and so for a few days quite unnerved me. So do please forgive me’.6 That letter probably decided Beatty’s amicus curiae to persevere on his behalf.
Meanwhile the machinery of Court etiquette was moving exceedingly slowly. From that quarter the story begins early in March 1909 when an official in the Lord Chamberlain’s office told Godfrey-Faussett that ‘several anonymous letters have been received by [the] Lord Chamberlain about Mrs. Beatty’, which makes it plain that poisoned pens had got to work. Although the writer declared that such letters ‘do not influence the question’ he thought it right that Godfrey-Faussett should know ‘that her having been divorced and we understand having lived with Captain B. before the trial [which was almost certainly untrue] makes her case a little shady – not “snow white love” I fear’. He concluded none the less that ‘if the Judge who tried the case can supply the required notes on the trial – which go to prove that ALL the blame is on the side of the other husband (who divorced her) – then the case can be considered on its own merits. But it is too late for this year and the two Courts are full. . . .’7
It was probably the above quoted letter which caused Beatty to go into action to obtain evidence of his own innocence, and in October 1910 he sent Godfrey-Faussett ‘a certified copy of the Evidence’ given in the divorce court in America. He stressed that Ethel ‘first left Tree BEFORE I knew her’, and left him finally ‘in March ’99 when I was in China!!’.8 Godfrey-Faussett’s reaction was to advise him not to ‘fuss about it any more’, and not to ‘apply for a “Court” . . . at present at any rate’;9 but as time passed and activities in London became increasingly concentrated on the Coronation of King George V without any sign that the existence of the Beattys was to be recognised at that climax to the season, his patience evidently began to wear thin and he repeated to Godfrey-Faussett his threat to leave the navy. He wrote that while doing the Senior Officers’ Course he had ‘ample time for reflection’ and in consequence was ‘beginning to consider the desirability of leaving the service altogether’. His reason was that ‘my little lady likes the good things of this world including the gay side of it. She has a nice house in Town and is sufficiently supplied with the necessary to be able to live in London and enjoy the entertaining and being entertained that a season produces. And it has undoubtedly struck her that my being in the services for ever precludes her from anticipating [? participating] in such and [in] what to her . . . provides something of the joy of Life’. He also protested that his wife was ‘not permitted to have her patriotism and loyalty stimulated by being present at Court’, and concluded by asking for ‘a command to attend the Court Ball’ in order ‘to tide over the feeling of depression and of being overlooked’ from which they were suffering.10 This lengthy and rather pathetic plea produced a suggestion from the Lord Chamberlain’s office that as Ethel had ‘been to a Court Ball in the last reign’ and ‘she is such a personal friend of Their Majesties’ the latter might ‘wish some alteration [to be] made in her status’.11 The Coronation, however, took place on 9th August without any sign of further progress; but the King does seem to have taken note of what his equerry told him, since Ethel was commanded to attend a Court Ball a little later, and so, in Leslie’ words, was able ‘to make her bow’. In consequence her husband gave up all thought of abandoning his naval career.
It may be useful here to quote what Leslie wrote in his draft biography of Beatty about the relations between him and Ethel, and the correspondence that passed between them. That each was jealous towards the other, and that they watched each other closely for any sign of interest in another man or woman, appears again and again in their letters; and Leslie’s picture is the more valuable because he knew them both well, and was certainly no uncritical admirer of Ethel.
‘Until the war broke out’ wrote Leslie ‘he employed every means of correspondence to keep in touch with her, to keep her humoured or amused, to keep her roving affections within the unfailing orbit of his love. Telegrams were exchanged every day and he was miserable when she forgot to send hers or if the mails were late. He toiled at plans for meeting her and bringing her to ports he would touch or hotels he could reach. When she could join the Fleet the Admiral’s barge was at her untiring disposal. . . .
He always hated leaving her or seeing her depart for the London season, for Ascot, Sandown, for Paris, for Monte Carlo but he drew satisfaction if he felt she was being admired and amused. Restless and relentless she cruised south in search of pleasure, occupation, frivolity, friends and admirers. At home she passed rapidly from the pursuit of one house to another. He indulged her in all her whims and wishes, though in his letters he tried to curb her with a silk snaffle . . . He was so faithful to his dream of her that he could not bear to think she could be otherwise to him. If she did not keep all these things in her heart she kept every letter and every scrap he wrote in her treasury. Although she wrote in reply she was careless in addressing or sending them. He was always writing almost like a schoolboy of his continual disappointments when the post arrived. Again and again he wrote out the simple form of his address, but she had a weakness for mixing the names of ports; and of course it is impossible to receive letters which actually have not been written. . . .
His letters came down to routine and formula: endless inquiries and hugs for the two “Sonnies”, the utmost consideration for Ethel’s plans and pleasures, cheery response to all her gossip and very careful but unfavourable accounts of any ladies he met. A number of fair ladies, considered highly in their day, would have been surprised at the poor estimate they met in the Admiral’s letters to his wife . . . Other ladies crossing his path fared even worse and received the lowest possible marks in any beauty competition. He was jealous of her companionships but could not bear her to travel on the Continent or hunt in the Shires without male escort. Out hunting he implored her to pay attention to hounds and less to conversation at the covert’s side. He begged her not to use beauty make-up while she was still young and beautiful.’12
Many years later, when Leslie was working on his biography of Beatty, he asked one of the Admiral’s intimates Captain Augustus Agar VC, whether he thought Ethel’s vast wealth had been a handicap to Beatty’s career. Agar replied that before the war Beatty had been the subject of criticism on that score, not all of which came from within the navy, but that after the battle of Jutland it was never heard again.13 Probably such criticism had no firmer base than jealousy for the good things of life which Beatty was able to enjoy after his marriage.
Soon after the Palace squall over Ethel’s presentation had subsided she decided to follow the example of other very wealthy people of those days and add a floating and mobile home to the considerable number of static homes she already owned or rented. Beatty looked around for a suitable vessel and thought he had found one called Glencairn, a substantial ship of nearly 900 registered tons (1,570 tons gross) built at Leith in 1908. However, it turned out that she had already been bought by Lord Tredegar, the owner of vast estates in South Wales.* Beatty unwisely telegraphed to Tredegar offering to buy the yacht at a premium – and asking whether, if she was not for sale, her owner could recommend another vessel. The reply he received may be classed as the epitome of the snub aristocratic. ‘The Glencairn is not for sale’, telegraphed Tredegar, ‘and I am not a ship broker’.14 Search for an alternative was accordingly renewed, and Beatty entrusted the job to a certain Captain Grint – about whom tantalisingly little is to be found in the Leslie or Beatty papers – except the fact that he became the devoted and life-long friend of both the Beattys. Grint soon recommended a steam yacht of about 210 tons registered (680 gross) called the Sheelah, built by John Brown on the Clyde in 1902. She was bought almost on the nail and at an undisclosed price.15 To Ethel she was a godsend because she never suffered from seasickness, and when she was afloat her tortured and unstable mind probably came nearer to finding peace than at any other time.
Before the trouble over Ethel’s presentation at Court had been resolved another crisis which threatened Beatty’s career blew up. In July 1911 he wrote to the private secretary to the First Lord, Captain E. C. Troubridge,* about his employment after the 15 months spent ashore doing the War Course. Beatty had evidently asked for command of either the 1st or 2nd Division of the Home Fleet or to be appointed as Director of Mobilisation in the Admiralty when that post fell vacant. Troubridge replied that the First Lord, Reginald McKenna, could not promise either of the sea-going posts mentioned – which was surely understandable since Beatty’s name stood at the very bottom of the Flag List and the claims of more senior officers obviously had to be considered. But Troubridge gave warning that Beatty ‘not wanting [the] 3rd Division or [the] Atlantic [Fleet] has rather narrowed the choice’; so he was ‘somewhat at a loss’ to give ‘any definite reply’.16 Beatty’s reasoning was that whereas service in the North Sea or Channel was likely to bring opportunities of action in the event of war with Germany, the Atlantic Fleet, based chiefly on Gibraltar, held no such prospects; but he certainly took a serious risk in pressing his wishes to the point of refusing whatever appointment the Admiralty might offer him; for in those days, and indeed for many years after the ‘Commissioners for Executing the Office of Lord High Admiral’ were very conscious of their dignity and took a poor view of officers who argued the toss with them.
At first the prospect for Beatty looked favourable, since less than two weeks after Troubridge had written so dubiously, McKenna himself asked the young Admiral to come and see him. Though Beatty got the impression that the First Lord understood and accepted his unwillingness to go as second-in-command of the Atlantic Fleet, either he read more into the First Lord’s words than was intended or McKenna changed his mind – perhaps under pressure from senior officers who viewed Beatty’s meteoric promotion with envy. At any rate on 21st July McKenna wrote ‘in pursuance of our conversation’ and offered him the very post he had indicated he did not want.17 Five days later Beatty replied at length explaining why he wanted to serve in the Home Fleet and disliked the Atlantic Fleet job. He claimed, apparently correctly, that he had asked Troubridge to note his name for the former, that the secretary was well aware that ‘the one appointment I have always stated I’d not wish to be considered for . . . was that of 2nd in Command Atlantic Fleet’.18 Troubridge replied the same day, with rather brutal if justified frankness, that ‘The fact is that the Admiralty view is that officers should serve where they i.e. the Admiralty wish and not where they themselves wish’;19 and it can hardly be denied that acceptance of the latter as a matter of principle would have produced chaotic conditions. It is, however, certainly true that even in the early 20th century officers who possessed influence often did succeed in getting the appointments they wanted; and when, as in Beatty’s case, they enjoyed such wealth as to make them prepared to stand out against Their Lordships’ wishes a serious clash was obviously a possibility, and could only have ended with the enforced retirement of the recalcitrant officer.
Beatty’s reply to Troubridge’s somewhat minatory letter began with a sermon about the principles stated by the secretary with regard to Admiralty policy. ‘If I had lived to a hundred’ he wrote sarcastically, ‘I would never have guessed them’. He continued on an angry note, writing that ‘There is something peculiarly subtle in inviting the poor devil yearning for employment to state his desires and hopes and then offering him the one thing they know he doesn’t want’; and he ended with an ill-mannered attack on the outlook and methods of the Admiralty.20 He then went to Scotland for the grouse shooting on the Invercauld estate, which Ethel had rented from the Farquharsons; while in London rumours circulated that he had acted impetuously and in pique. These rumours evidently reached Beatty’s ears, since in August he wrote at length to the faithful Godfrey-Faussett setting out his side of the story of his conversations and communications with Troubridge and McKenna. Godfrey-Faussett took this somewhat one-sided statement of the case to Bolton Abbey, where the King was enjoying the shooting on the Yorkshire estate of the Duke of Devonshire, and read it to the Monarch who, according to his equerry, said he was ‘sorry about it and perfectly understands your feelings and is not surprised at your being disgusted at the way you have been dealt with’. But as he continued with a tally of the game killed (‘yesterday 790 brace without the pick-up’) and gave no indication regarding whether the King would take the matter up with the First Lord, Beatty may well have felt disappointed.21 It thus came to pass that, except for the few months of the senior Officers’ War Course, he remained on half pay for the two years following his promotion to Flag Rank. Admiral Chalmers considers that Beatty’s refusal of the Atlantic Fleet appointment ‘was a courageous decision’ and stressed that he was ‘always ready to dice with fate’.22 But it can surely be argued that, without his wife’s wealth and with a family to support, he could hardly have faced such a long period of reduced emoluments with equanimity; and his dealings with Troubridge and McKenna suggest that the distinction he had earned on active service in the Sudan and in China, and his very early promotions, had produced a very high degree of confidence in his own ability and more than a touch of arrogance.
The chief purpose behind Asquith’s ministerial reshuffle of 1911 was to improve relations between the War Office and the Admiralty, which had been far from cordial during Fisher’s time as First Sea Lord and had reached a nadir when Sir Arthur Wilson held that office. The issue came to a head when in the spring of that year the French sent a military force to Fez in Morocco and the Germans, seeing this move as a first step towards annexation of that country, sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir on the Atlantic coast – allegedly to protect German interests and subjects. In fact German actions, in which the Kaiser had a big hand, had a far deeper political and strategic purpose – namely that Germany should participate with France and Spain in carving up Morocco. To the British government the prospect of a potentially hostile naval base being set up on the flank of one of her most important trade routes was alarming. The crisis revealed that the navy was far from being ready for the war which at one time seemed likely, and that no war plans existed except in the mind of Admiral Wilson. Though the crisis blew over in October and was resolved by Germany recognising a French protectorate over Morocco in exchange for a slice of French Congo the aftermath rumbled around Whitehall for a long time.
If war had come an attempt by Germany to invade Britain was considered to be a real possibility, and invasion had in fact been almost continuously in the foreground of the deliberations of the Committee of Imperial Defence ever since 1904. The problem produced a split between the ‘Continental School’, who considered that in the event of war an Expeditionary Force should be sent to support the left flank of the French Army and the ‘Maritime School’, which held that although a serious invasion was not a practical operation of war as long as our fleet commanded the North Sea, a raid in considerable strength on the East Coast – or ‘Bolt from the Blue’ – was a real possibility, especially in foggy weather. In their view strong land forces should therefore be held at home in order to contain such a force until the fleet could reach the scene and deal with the enemy transports and escorting warships. The crisis came at the famous C.I.D. meeting of 23rd August 1911, when General Sir Henry Wilson, the Francophile Director of Military Operations, completely outclassed his namesake Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, the First Sea Lord, in the presentation of their cases.23 One pregnant result of this victory of the Continental School was the abandonment of the concept of Amphibious Warfare until Fisher revived it in 1914. Beatty, very naturally, favoured the Maritime School (though with qualifications about Fisher’s wilder schemes for assaults from the sea); but he did not yet carry heavy enough guns to make his views heard in high circles.
On 23rd October 1911 Churchill was moved by Asquith from the Home Office to the Admiralty, and McKenna took over the former appointment. Though the new First Lord accepted the despatch of the greater part of the Regular Army to France he also soon made his advocacy of amphibious assaults plain. But the flaw in his strategic concepts lay, firstly, in his insistence on the adoption of ‘offensive’ measures from the very beginning of a war – with scant regard for the resources available and the need for specialised equipment and intensive training for such notoriously hazardous undertakings; and, secondly, in the fact that although his ideas were imaginative they were often wildly impracticable. We will return to that subject later.
Churchill’s arrival in the Admiralty marked a climacteric in Beatty’s career. Although Churchill had not previously met him he was familiar with his exploits in command of gunboats on the Nile during the campaigns of 1896-98, when he had been serving with the 21st Lancers.24 He has also recorded his admiration for Beatty’s fearlessness and prowess in the hunting field and on the polo ground. At their first meetings Beatty also impressed Churchill by his ability to view ‘questions of naval strategy and tactics in a different light from the average naval officer’, that he ‘thought of war problems in their unity by land, sea and air’, and that he expressed himself in speech and on paper with clarity and brevity and freedom from technical jargon.’25
It is certain that the Sea Lords took a dim view of Beatty’s intransigence over the Atlantic Fleet appointment, and were reluctant if not downright unwilling to offer him further service; but Churchill took a different line, and he has told how his first meeting with the young Admiral ‘induced me immediately to disregard this unfortunate advice’.26 The outcome was that on 8th January 1912 he appointed Beatty as his Naval Secretary – the key post which Troubridge had recently vacated.*
Meanwhile Churchill’s dissatisfaction with Admiral Wilson as his chief naval colleague had come to a head, and at the end of November 1911 he dismissed him. The choice of a successor did not, however, prove easy. Churchill undoubtedly considered Prince Louis of Battenberg,27 but even at that time – before the wave of xenophobia had swept the country – his German ancestry was held in some quarters, notably by Lloyd George, to rule him out. In the end the colourless and uninspiring Sir Francis Bridgeman was appointed; but after a few months relations between the two of them had deteriorated badly, chiefly because of Churchill’s interference in every aspect of the Admiralty’s business. In November 1912 Churchill seized on Bridgeman’s dubious health as grounds for another change. But when he told the House of Commons of his intention, and quoted from private letters written by Bridgeman to Battenberg and Beatty in which he admitted that his health was indifferent, he came under heavy fire from the Conservative benches.28 Inevitably Beatty was involved in the fracas at the top of the naval tree; and he appears to have shown tact and diplomacy in handling it.* It is worth quoting what Churchill said on the subject of the physical and mental stamina demanded of a First Sea Lord.
‘The duties of the First Sea Lord’, he declared, ‘are of vital importance to the country . . . it is essential that the First Sea Lord should be thoroughly fit and capable . . . He must be able to transact a mass of detailed business day by day without being unduly fatigued. He must have good health and strength, not only sufficient to bear the daily strain, but to bear any extra or sudden strain which circumstances may throw upon him. If the First Sea Lord is not thoroughly fit and capable for reasons of health, it is the duty of the First Lord to tell him so, to suggest his resignation of his office, and, if necessary, to supersede him. . . .’29
One cannot but feel that Churchill himself deviated widely from the principle he laid down in Parliament both when he recalled Fisher to the office of First Sea Lord in October 1914 at the age of 73 and when he retained Admiral Pound in that office during the Second World War long after there was strong evidence that his health by no means came up to Churchill’s standard.30
Beatty’s correspondence shows that although he held no very high opinion of Admiral Bridgeman’s ability he liked him personally. In December 1912, about a year after Churchill had dismissed him from the office of First Sea Lord, Beatty as Naval Secretary became involved in a controversy with the Palace over whether Bridgeman or the maverick Lord Charles Beresford, who enjoyed the King’s friendship, should be promoted to fill the one available vacancy as Admiral of the Fleet. He told Lord Stamfordham, the King’s private secretary, that although such promotions rested with the Monarch, a search for precedents had proved that the Admiralty always submitted recommendations. As Bridgeman had held all the high commands possible, including the office of First Sea Lord, and the Admiralty had declined to recommend Beresford for promotion, he was confident that the King would not be placed ‘in an awkward position’ if the former was preferred to the latter. The King evidently accepted this advice, since Bridgeman was promoted; and so ended what Beatty described to Stamfordham as ‘this lamentable controversy’.31
Because there was no proper Naval Staff at the beginning of Beatty’s time as Naval Secretary he evidently acted not only as personal Staff Officer to the First Lord but as a sort of one man Naval Staff – which certainly reveals an extraordinary state of affairs in Whitehall. At any rate there exist in his papers a number of cogent memoranda in his hand which were produced for Churchill at this time. They dealt with such matters as which bases should be developed for the Home Fleet (he favoured Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, and Cromarty Firth and Rosyth on the east coast of Scotland),* the threat to surface ships from mines and submarines (in appreciating which Beatty was far ahead of nearly all his contemporaries), the need for powerful light forces to be based on Harwich and Yarmouth, the probable strategic employment of the German Navy, the functions of our own battle cruisers, co-operation with the French Navy and a multitude of other subjects. Though these papers make it evident that Beatty had not yet mastered the art of clear and concise literary expression, they do show the wide range of his thinking, and how wrong were those who regarded him only as a gallant and rather swashbuckling character. It is also a fact that many of the ideas Beatty propounded at this time were adopted during the next two or three years.
Churchill always subjected his professional colleagues and advisers to intense pressure, and Beatty’s letters to Ethel written in 1912-13 while she was on the Continent – usually gambling at Monte Carlo – are of particular interest in revealing how he reacted to and withstood that pressure. His two years on half pay, his comparative youth, and his sporting interests probably all contributed to his ability to cope with Churchill’s restless and dynamic energy, and also to his ability to view far-ranging problems with a clear eye. What Beatty lacked, as did Churchill, was knowledge of the technical side of modern warfare; and decisions had been taken during the Fisher era which vitiated both the capacity of our big ships to stand up to heavy punishment and their ability to inflict such punishment on an enemy. But it would be unfair to blame Churchill for the lack of magazine safety arrangements, the inefficiency of our armour-piercing shell, and the rejection by the Admiralty of an advanced fire control system capable of producing good results at long ranges, since the crucial decisions had been taken some years earlier. We will revert to that subject in the next chapter.
We have seen how Lord Charles Beresford, for all his defects of character and of conduct, had long favoured the creation of a Naval Staff and as a first step had initiated the Naval Intelligence Department as early as 1887;32 but little was done to develop the idea for more than a decade. In 1908 Maurice Hankey, the remarkable Marine officer who had just become Assistant Secretary to the C.I.D., produced a paper stressing the need for such an organisation;33 but he was not yet influential enough to get it adopted in face of the opposition of many top Admirals, including Fisher and A. K. Wilson. Churchill, however, needed no persuasion on such an issue, and on 1st January 1912 he announced publicly that a Naval War Staff was to be created.34 Though his scheme was a long overdue step in the right direction it suffered from the serious defects that the Chief of the War Staff had no executive authority, that the First Sea Lord was not also made Chief of Naval Staff, and that no trained Staff Officers existed to put flesh on Churchill’s skeleton proposals. It thus came to pass that the Navy entered the war handicapped by faulty organisation at the top. Beatty was well aware of the need for a Staff and supported Churchill’s efforts to conjure one into existence; but, as with Hankey in 1908, he did not yet possess the rank and influence to overcome what the influential American naval historian Captain A. T. Mahan called ‘the inertia of a conservative class’.*
A few months after Churchill promulgated his staff proposals it became known that the German Admiralty was pressing for an amendment to the Navy Law of 1900 – the legislative measure which had first aroused British apprehensions. The new ‘Novelle’ as it was called proposed that three new Dreadnoughts should be laid down in 1912, 1914 and 1916 and that a third fully commissioned squadron of battleships should be created. If carried out these measures would make the existing British naval building programme quite insufficient to maintain the 10% superiority in capital ships over the next two largest naval powers established in 1889 and redefined in 1908. Hectic negotiations between the two countries followed, in which Beatty was only concerned as a sort of personal staff officer to Churchill. First the enormously wealthy Anglo-German financier Sir Ernest Cassell took advantage of his friendship with Albert Ballin, the head of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, to pave the way to persuading the Kaiser to modify the Novelle.35 Then followed the famous Haldane Mission to Germany of 1912;36 but none of these comings and goings succeeded in getting the German proposals modified, and in May the Reichstag voted to adopt the Novelle as it stood. The consequence was that Anglo-German naval rivalry was intensified, and Britain and France drew closer together. The road to Armageddon was now clearly signposted, and because Germany could have 25 fully manned battleships in the North Sea by the end of 1913 the British fleet was reorganised to increase the Home Fleet to 33 battleships in full commission plus eight in reserve with nucleus crews at the expense of the Mediterranean forces. Beatty was naturally in full accord with Churchill over these measures.
Meanwhile other developments were exerting a profound influence on British naval strategy and dispositions. The 1912 naval manoeuvres had brought out the submarine threat to surface warships clearly – a threat which Fisher had foreseen as early as 1904 when he wrote to Admiral May, then Controller of the Navy, ‘It’s astounding to me . . . how the very best among us absolutely fail to realize the vast impending revolution in naval warfare and naval strategy that the submarine will accomplish!’37 The lessons drawn from the 1912 manoeuvres impressed Churchill far more than his principal naval colleagues. Though Beatty certainly sided with the First Lord the view that the submarine threat had been exaggerated prevailed. These developments did, however, have the important result of bringing about the abandonment of the long-held strategy of adopting a close blockade of the German North Sea bases. Instead an ‘Observational Blockade’ was first adopted; but that was dropped in favour of ‘Distant Blockade’ from bases in the far north, shortly before the outbreak of war – despite the fact that Churchill, who always belonged to the ‘seek out and destroy’ school, deprecated any strategically defensive measures and did not like the change.
Churchill delighted to use the luxurious Admiralty yacht Enchantress, a converted passenger liner of some 4,000 tons, to visit naval bases, ships and squadrons, overseas as well as in the British Isles – so much so that he spent a total of six of his first eighteen months as First Lord on board the yacht. Beatty, however, was a good deal less fond of these expeditions than his master – probably because Churchill always brought along with him a crowd of political colleagues whom he wished to impress, and his Naval Secretary had perforce to join in entertaining them; but he was impressed by Churchill’s determination to make himself informed about every aspect of naval strategy and administration, telling Ethel that ‘Winston talks about nothing but the Sea and the Navy, and the wonderful things he is going to do’.38 Professor Marder has written that Churchill was ‘a great trial, personally, to most of his colleagues’;39 but that does not apply in general to Beatty as his Naval Secretary, since it was at this time that a strong bond of affection and admiration developed between them. On 9th December 1912 Prince Louis of Battenberg moved to the appointment for which he had been considered a year earlier, and during his term of office relations between the dynamic, if sometimes erratic, First Lord and his naval colleagues entered a more settled period. Beatty undoubtedly welcomed the arrival of Prince Louis, with whom he had long been on friendly terms.
In the summer of 1912 very important exercises were carried out in the North Sea to investigate the ability of the Germans to land an invasion force on the East Coast and the likelihood of the navy successfully intercepting such a force. It was probably to test Beatty’s capacity as a sea-going admiral that Churchill gave him command of a squadron of six old armoured cruisers for the period of the exercises. Beatty chose as his Flag Captain Ernle Chatfield who, like himself was to rise to the highest rank and hold the highest office which their service could offer. Beatty hoisted his flag in the Aboukir on 2nd July, and Chatfield, who had not previously known him at all well, has recorded that his six weeks in that ship ‘were illuminating and exciting’, and that he quickly realised that he ‘was with a man of exacting character’.40 They only had a very short time to bring the squadron, all of whose ships had for some years been in reserve with only skeleton crews, to the state of efficiency Beatty required; but he and his command came through this severe test satisfactorily, and so confirmed Churchill in his high opinion of him.
When in the spring of 1913 command of the Battle Cruiser Squadron fell vacant Churchill had no hesitation ‘in appointing him [Beatty] over the heads of all to this incomparable command’.41 When Beatty turned over his duties as Naval Secretary to the First Lord to Rear-Admiral (later Admiral Sir Dudley) de Chair he told his relief that ‘You have to have a bloody awful row with Winston once a month and then you are all right’;42 which shows how clearly Beatty had come to understand the need for subordinates to have the moral courage to stand up to their superiors, no matter how difficult they might be.
*Not on Trafalgar Day (21st Oct.) as Fisher was later fond of saying and many writers have repeated.
*Rodney became a Flag Officer at 31 and Keppel at 37. Nelson became Rear-Admiral of the Blue at 39.
*Though Eugénie here refers to her husband as ‘Godfrey’ their son George assures me that in the family he was always referred to as ‘Bryan’.
*Courtenay Charles Evan Morgan, 3rd Baron and 1st Viscount (2nd creation) Tredegar. (1867-1934).
*Later Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge (1862-1926)
*Soon after Beatty’s appointment the title was changed from ‘First Lord’s Private Secretary’ to ‘Naval Secretary’, presumably because Churchill brought in his own Private Secretary.
*On 26th Nov. Bridgeman wrote to Beatty that he had begun to draft a letter of resignation but had changed his mind when he felt better in health. Quite properly Beatty probably showed it to Churchill.
*See Map 1, pages 74-5
*Mahan was actually referring to the long interval which frequently elapsed between weapon developments and the changes in tactics which should result therefrom; but the same argument can reasonably be applied to changes in administrative methods such as the need for a staff arising from the same cause. See Allan Westcott, Ed. Mahan on Naval Warfare, Selections from the writings of Rear-Admiral A. T. Mahan, (Little, Brown, Boston).