Captain Stephen Wentworth Roskill (1903–82) was one of the two major historians of the Royal Navy in the twentieth century. His four-volume War at Sea is perhaps the best of the official histories of the Second World War, and his two-volume study Naval Policy Between the Wars is still the standard work on the subject. The second volume of that series was delayed by a diversion into a monumental three-volume biography of Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey, published in the early 1970s, and he followed the second volume of Naval Policy with a rather provocative study entitled Churchill and the Admirals, published in 1977. This was an important contribution to Roskill’s developing conflict with that other historical giant, Professor Arthur Marder, a rivalry that has been ably chronicled by Barry Gough.*
Finally, he turned to the Beatty biography, whose background he explains in his own foreword. One important reason for Roskill’s writing the book was the access to one side of the correspondence between Beatty and his mistress Eugenie Godfrey-Fausset. This allowed the book to be subtitled ‘An Intimate Biography’. One suspects also that Roskill, whose period of the Second World War had been trespassed on by Marder, wanted to have a go at re-examining Marder’s period of the first.
There are a number of differences of opinion with Marder in Beatty, notably Roskill attributing the loss of the battlecruisers at Jutland to defects in concept and design. It is now generally accepted by leading historians that this was not the case. Indeed, it was an alibi for the highly dangerous ammunition handling arrangements in the British ships. As Norman Friedman has put it in his recent study of British capital ships, ‘the loss of the three battlecriuisers can be traced to extraordinary magazine practices rather than flaws in the battlecruiser concept. . . . After the battle, both Beatty and Jellicoe had excellent reason to avoid the magazine-practices explanation, because both could be held culpable.’†
Indeed, Beatty more so. Strangely, Roskill ignores the role of HMS Lion’s Senior Warrant Officer, Gunner Alexander Grant, who returned Beatty’s flagship to the proper ammunition handling arrangements before the battle, a measure ignored in other ships in order to increase the rate of fire. Marder mentioned this in his volume on Jutland which put me onto finding out more. Readers are recommended to see the chapter of Grant’s memoirs which I edited and published in the Navy Records Society’s seventh Naval Miscellany volume in 2008. If Grant had not, via a dramatic demonstration, convinced Chatfield of the need to change ammunition handling practices in Lion Beatty would likely have been killed in another cataclysmic explosion. It is a sign of the lackadaisical way the Battle Cruiser Fleet was run that the new practices were not imposed on the other ships. This is an important biographical point – Beatty owed his life to Grant – although it did not fit well with Roskill’s all too typical naval officer’s vendetta against the naval constructors.
At the time of writing Beatty Roskill had just become aware of Jon Sumida’s work revising the history of the Fisher era. He saw Sumida as a natural ally given the prospect of the latter’s demonstration of the weaknesses of Marder’s work on the pre-First World War period. His gunnery officer’s instincts latched on to Sumida’s views on the negative effects of the Royal Navy adopting the Dreyer system of fire control. This, both Roskill and Sumida argued, was the reason for the weaknesses in the Battle Cruiser Fleet’s shooting against the Gerrman First Scouting Group. Roskill was also friendly with Sumida’s main informant on fire control, Anthony Pollen, the son of the designer of the rival system (hardly a neutral source). The latter had just published a book (which Roskill quotes approvingly in the following) that started the great gunnery controversy that would divide naval historians in the following decades.* Perhaps it is understandable that Roskill, as I did, accepted the attractively radical Pollen/Sumida view but there is another side to this story as explained by Dr John Brooks, especially in his two major books.† Whatever the pros and cons of the two systems there can be little doubt now that the patent weaknesses of the Battle Cruiser Fleet shooting were a result of insufficient practice compounded by visibility problems, and not of the deficiencies of equipment.
Another weakness in Beatty is its discussion of officer education and training. Cadet Roskill was unfortunate to pass through Osborne and Dartmouth at the end of the First World War when the colleges were suffering from a chronic lack of suitable officers and masters. It is just historically inaccurate to compare his experiences to Beatty’s. Beatty passed through the old Britannia, moored in the Dart. It was a very different system onboard from that adopted when the colleges ashore were set up; indeed, there was a self conscious attempt to make as clean a break as possible with the old system. The old Britannia scheme that had evolved did have its weaknesses but these were not the ‘stifling of originality’ that Roskill argues. In fact, the advanced mathematics inculcated in the cadets made the best of them (eg Jellicoe, Dumaresq and Dreyer) excellent initiators and inventors of new equipment (something Roskill would find hard to accept) but not good risk-taking operational commanders, as was shown in the First World War. Beatty did indeed dislike the Britannia disciplines, naval and intellectual, and found amusement in joining his long-standing friend Walter Cowan in bullying weaker cadets, for which they were (rightly) severely punished. Roskill mentions the punishment but does not mention the reason.* Nor does he mention Cowan being Beatty’s contemporary in Britannia though they were partners in crime long before sharing HMS Alexandra’s gunroom.
Roskill also says that Beatty had not met his patron Churchill before the latter’s elevation to First Lord. There is, however, a persistent story that Beatty, commanding a Nile gunboat, had thrown the young Churchill a bottle of champagne, something the future prime minister with his liking for that drink would have long remembered and appreciated. Certainly, Churchill and Beatty got on well, perhaps too much so. Only after the briefest of experiences commanding a squadron of cruisers in the 1912 Exercises was Beatty elevated to command of the Battle Cruiser Squadron. Most of the time on exercise would have been spent converting the reserve ships and crews into individually effective ships. It is thus hardly surprising that as the Battle Cruiser Squadron grew into a Battle Cruiser Fleet its conduct was marked by serious signalling issues and consequent tactical errors, notably at Dogger Bank and Jutland. These were, in part, the fault of Beatty’s Flag Lieutenant Ralph Seymour, but Beatty never replaced him and must bear ultimate responsibilty. Admiral Goldrick has found that the correct signal that could well have turned Dogger Bank into a great victory was only a few pages away in a signal book that neither Seymour or Beatty seems to have understood.* Prowess at polo and hunting does not make a good fleet commander, however charismatic and popular.
Beatty was right to be frustrated at the outcome of Jutland, although his actions were in part responsible for the disappointing results. The effective defeat of the Battle Cruiser Fleet in the ‘Run to the South’ was caused not just by poor shooting but flawed tactics that did not take advantage of his gunnery superiority, and by an unwillingness to concentrate with the Fifth Battle Squadron. This would probably have caused the annihilation of the German battlecruisers but it would also (as Roskill points out) have diminished the Battle Cruiser Fleet’s satisfaction at a lone victory over its old rival. The result was, as Jellicoe put it, ‘unpalatable’. Equally, Jellicoe was right to be disappointed at the lack of information from his main scouting force. This would have put his fleet deployment, good though it was, on a much firmer foundation of situational awareness.
Beatty, for all his aggressive image was basically as cautious as Jellicoe. He agreed with Jellicoe’s restrictions on the Fleets’ movements after the 19 August High Sea Fleet sortie. These included restrictions of the eastward movement of the fleet as well as the southern limits that Roskill mentions. Beatty was right to emphasise the Grand Fleet’s role in containing the High Sea Fleet, but it is interesting that the loss to U-boats of two light cruisers screening the BCF should lead to the Grand Fleet being contained almost as much as its German counterpart.
In January 1918, after Beatty had been in command of the entire Grand Fleet for just over a year, things went even further. In a paper for the Admiralty and Cabinet he concluded, as Roskill quotes, that ‘the correct strategy of the Grand Fleet is no longer to endeavour to bring the enemy to action at any cost, but rather to contain him in his bases until the general situation is more favourable.’ This was hardly a Nelsonic reflection of the opportunities offered by the even greater superiority the Grand Fleet now reinforced by an American Battle Squadron. It seems clear that Beatty was believing his own propaganda of British technological inferiority, especially in shells. Jutland had shown, however, that even with supposedly inferior shells considerable damage could be inflicted given the superior size of British guns.
Beatty did well to maintain morale in the fleet in 1917-18, in stark contrast to the situation on the other side of the North Sea. He was also correct to be frustrated at the Admiralty’s unwillingness to use the Royal Naval Air Service as a true ‘fleet air arm’. It is a great pity that Beatty’s brilliant ideas of a torpedo air attack on the enemy fleet in harbour would have to wait until 1940, and it is hardly surprising that, in hope of some improvement, he supported the new air organisation created in 1918. However, as First Sea Lord he would find the new Air Ministry even more difficult than the wartime Admiralty in fulfilling the fleet’s air requirements.
Beatty’s record as First Sea Lord was better than his record as a fleet commander. His character, like Mountbatten’s three decades later, suited the intrigues of Whitehall rather than the complex challenges of command at sea. However, as Roskill demonstrates, his ruthless attempts to re-write the story of the battle of Jutland cannot be defended in their own terms. Perhaps the fairest explanation is that Beatty perceived that acceptance of his version of the Jutland failure was necessary to provide a kind of moral foundation for his activities. These included necessary reforms of the Naval Staff, a successful campaign to build cruisers (against strong opposition from Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill) and the creation of a Fleet Air Arm, albeit still one part of the RAF.
Roskill’s account, albeit old fashioned in its analysis in some important ways, still gives an insightful account of one of the most interesting and significant naval officers of the twentieth century. Beatty’s passion for the opposite sex was as great as that for the navy, polo and blood sports. The rich, good looking but mentally unstable Ethel Beatty, and the lovely Eugenie were not the only objects of his promiscuous affections. As Roskill explains, he filed their correspondence systematically, only to have it destroyed after his death.
The book is sub-titled The Last Naval Hero. He explains his reasons convincingly but, as I asked in my review of the book many years ago, is this really true? One would have thought that Keyes and Cunningham were also ‘heroes’ and at a lower level there are a number of VCs who might qualify; the much maligned ‘Bobby’ Harwood, victor of the River Plate, had something of the hero about him, although he was the opposite of Beatty, better at sea than ashore.
Although, perhaps, it tells us as much about its distinguished author as it does about its heroic subject, Captain Roskill’s Beatty remains an important book and a major contribution to the history of the Royal Navy in the last century.
PROFESSOR ERIC GROVE PHD, FRHISTS, FSNR
* Historical Deadnoughts: Marder and Roskill; Writing and Fighting Naval History, Seaforth, Barnsley 2010
† The British Battleship 1906-1946, Seaforth, Barnsley 2015, pp193-194
* The Great Gunnery Scandal, Collins, London 1980
† Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland; The Question of Fire Control, Routledge, London 2005 and The Battle of Jutland, Cambridge University Press, 2016
* The punishment book is in the archives at BRNC Dartmouth
* Information given verbally to the author