On Monday, October 25, 1911, Churchill and McKenna exchanged offices. In the morning McKenna came to the Home Office and Churchill introduced him to the leading officials; after lunch Churchill went to the Admiralty, where McKenna presented the Sea Lords and heads of department. McKenna’s attitude throughout was gloomy but correct. He was not happy to be shunted out of the Admiralty, and his friends and supporters in the navy and around the country shared his view. Telegrams and letters poured in, expressing gratitude for his struggle against the economizers during his three and half years as First Lord. The blow was heightened by the fact that McKenna’s replacement was one of the two arch-economizers in the Cabinet, Winston Churchill.
Some in Parliament and elsewhere did not understand McKenna’s chagrin at switching from the Admiralty to the Home Office. In the informal ranking of Cabinet posts, the Home Secretary was Number Three, just behind the Prime Minister and the Chancellor; the First Lord stood further back. Indeed, this had been Churchill’s own opinion in 1902, when he had scorned Austen Chamberlain’s desire to become First Lord as “a poor ambition.”1
Apprehension about the new figure moving into the Admiralty was widespread. Observers saw a brilliant, self-confident young man of great physical courage and inexhaustible energies, with eloquent powers of expression. His rise had been meteoric. A Cabinet Minister at thirty-three, two years at the Board of Trade, twenty months at the Home Office; now, at thirty-six, he was still half a generation younger than his colleagues (Lloyd George was forty-eight, Grey forty-nine, Haldane forty-five, and Asquith fifty-nine). Yet despite his talent, he bore a heavy weight of disapproval. The stigma of having changed parties never left him. “Turncoat,” “opportunist,” “wind bag,” “self-advertising mountebank” were some of the names flung at him. The Conservative Spectator greeted his appointment by saying, “We cannot detect2 in his career any principles or even any constant outlook upon public affairs; his ear is always to the ground; he is the true demagogue....”
Churchill did not care what anyone said about him. Once past the two carved stone dolphins which guarded the entrance to the Admiralty building, ensconced in the furniture, carved with dolphins, that dated from Nelson’s day, Churchill was in rapture. “That is because3 I can now lay eggs instead of scratching around in the dust and clucking,” he explained. “It is a far more satisfactory occupation. I am at present in the process of laying a great number of eggs—good eggs.” He moved swiftly. His first act was to hang on the wall behind his desk a large chart of the North Sea. Every day the duty officer marked with small flags the position of the principal ships of the German Navy. Each morning, on entering the room, Churchill stood before the chart and studied the whereabouts of the High Seas Fleet. His purpose, he said, “was to inculcate in myself4 and those working with me a sense of ever-present danger.” He made quick decisions on a number of matters. Orders had not been placed for twenty new destroyers authorized in the 1911 Estimates; the new First Lord placed the orders immediately. The unguarded naval magazines which had kept him awake as Home Secretary the previous summer were transferred to the Admiralty and put under permanent guard by Royal Marines. Before his arrival, only a clerk stood guard at the Admiralty nights, weekends, and holidays to respond to reports and alarms arriving from around the globe. Churchill initiated a watch system of naval officers to stand duty around the clock. He ordered the Sea Lords to stand watch; one of the four was always to be near the Admiralty building.
He made a controversial appointment to the key role of Private Naval Secretary to the First Lord. Rear Admiral David Beatty, at forty the youngest flag officer in the navy, was not a conventional officer. His career had been splendid and celebrated: he had commanded a Nile gunboat at the Battle of Omdurman; he had been with the Naval Landing Party during the Boxer Rebellion; he had been promoted rapidly, some thought too rapidly. Handsome and dashing, he had married a daughter of Marshall Field, the Chicago Department-store mogul, and his wife had brought him a dowry of £8 million; this sat poorly with admirals and captains struggling to make ends meet on regular navy pay. Others complained that he was too fond of life ashore; Beatty and his beautiful wife were often seen in society; he rode superbly and followed the hounds with relish—good stuff for a cavalry officer, but odd for an admiral. Worst, he was arrogant: offered the post of second in command of the Atlantic Fleet, a billet for which many officers would have been grateful, he had turned it down as not sufficiently interesting. Not surprisingly, the Admiralty turned its back. Beatty had been left to languish ashore on half pay for eighteen months. The prospect was that before long he would be retired.
When Churchill became First Lord, Beatty asked for an appointment. Everything that Churchill had heard was favorable: youth, enterprise, courage. Beatty’s father had been in the 4th Hussars, Churchill’s regiment. Beatty’s gunboat on the Nile had used its guns to support the charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman. Churchill was not influenced by Admiralty complaints that his visitor “had got on too fast”5 and “had too many interests ashore.” When Beatty walked in, Churchill looked him over and said, “You seem very young6 to be an admiral.” Unfazed, Beatty replied, “And you seem very young to be First Lord.” Churchill took him on immediately. Beatty set to work in a room adjoining the First Lord’s, accompanied him on all his inspection tours, and provided a sounding board across every field of strategy and technology. In April 1913, when one of the most sought-after commands in the navy, the Battle Cruiser Squadron, fell vacant, Churchill appointed Beatty. Beatty led the battle cruisers into the most violent actions of the North Sea war. After Jutland, as Admiral, he took command of that huge agglomeration of dreadnoughts on which Britain’s security rested: the Grand Fleet.
Seeking guidance, Churchill turned to Jacky Fisher, now retired. They knew each other well, having spent two weeks together in Biarritz in 1907 at the house of a mutual friend. Fisher, then First Sea Lord, had talked through the days and nights while Churchill listened. Fisher “fell desperately in love7 with Winston Churchill. I think he’s quite the nicest fellow I ever met and such a quick brain that it’s a delight to talk to him.” The King, also in Biarritz, noticed the new relationship and told Lady Londonderry that he found them “most amusing together.8 I call them ‘the chatterers.’” Churchill’s opposition to the 1909 Naval Estimates cast a shadow over the relationship, although the younger man wrote to assure the Admiral of his “unaltered feelings.”
After leaving the Admiralty, Fisher left England to live in retirement in Lucerne. He had been fond of McKenna and his wife (writing to them as “My Beloved First Lord” and “My Beloved Pamela”), but as soon as he learned that Churchill was to become First Lord, he began sending recommendations: Battenberg to succeed Wilson as First Sea Lord, Jellicoe to go as Second in Command of the Home Fleet, and so on. Churchill anticipated Fisher’s letters. On the morning of October 25, before leaving the Home Office to go over to the Admiralty, he wrote:
My dear Lord Fisher,9
I want to see you very much. When am I to have that pleasure? You have but to indicate your convenience and I will await you at the Admiralty.
Yours vy sincerely,
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
Fisher came like a shot. Three days later, Churchill and both McKennas met the boat train at Charing Cross. Fisher spent three hours with the McKennas, both of them “fearfully cut up10 at leaving the Admiralty,” then motored with Churchill to Reigate, a small town south of London, where Asquith and Lloyd George were waiting for them. The dialogue was primarily between the First Lord and the Admiral. “I had certain main ideas11 of what I was going to do and what, indeed, I was sent to the Admiralty to do,” Churchill said. “I intended to prepare for an attack by Germany as if it might come the next day. I intended to raise the Fleet to the highest possible strength.... I was pledged to create a War staff. I was resolved... to provide for the transportation of a British Army to France should war come.... I had the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer at my back.” In Fisher, Churchill found “a veritable volcano12 of knowledge and inspiration; and as soon as he learned what my main purpose was, he passed into a state of vehement eruption.... Once he began, he could hardly stop. I plied him with questions and he poured out ideas.” When the Reigate conversations began, Churchill had no thought of recalling Fisher to the Admiralty. “But by the Sunday night13 the power of the man was deeply borne in upon me and I had almost made up my mind to do what I did three years later and place him again at the head of the Naval Service.... All the way up to London the next morning I was on the brink of saying ‘Come and help me’ and had he by a word seemed to wish to return, I would surely have spoken. But he maintained a proper dignity, and in an hour we were in London.” Fisher returned to Lucerne.
Three weeks later, he was back for a secret weekend meeting on board the Enchantress at Plymouth, three days of “continuous talking14 and practically no sleep.” A professional bond was established and the Admiral began to bombard the new First Lord with densely written ten-page letters, beginning “My beloved Winston,” studded with underlinings and exclamation points, containing “every sort of news and counsel,15 from blistering reproach to supreme inspiration,” and ending with “Yours to a cinder” or “Yours till Hell freezes” or “Till charcoal sprouts.” Fisher’s urgent advice was that Churchill promote Jellicoe to Second in Command of the Home Fleet to give him the experience and seniority necessary to take command of Britain’s main fleet on the outbreak of war. Churchill acceded; Jellicoe, although twenty-first in seniority among vice admirals, was appointed. Ecstatically, Fisher reported the news to his daughter-in-law:
The greatest triumph of all16 is getting Jellicoe Second-in-Command of the Home Fleet. He is the future Nelson SURE!” To Pamela McKenna, he elaborated: “In two years17 he [Jellicoe] will be Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet.... The Battle of Armageddon comes along in September 1914. That date suits the Germans, if ever they are going to fight. Both their Army and Fleet then mobilized and the Kiel Canal finished and their new [naval] building complete.
Basking in his new role, Fisher wrote in glowing terms about Churchill: “So far every step18 he contemplates is good, and he is brave which is everything. Napoleonic in audacity, Cromwellian in thoroughness.” This praise halted abruptly in April 1912 when Churchill promoted three admirals who were close to the King and who had sided with Beresford during the schism in the navy. “I regret that in regard19 to... what you have done in the appointments of Sir Hedworth Meux, Sir Berkeley Milne, and Sir Reginald Custance, I fear this must be my last communication with you in any matter at all,” Fisher wrote to Churchill. “I am sorry for it but I considered you have betrayed the Navy in these three appointments, and what the pressure could have been to induce you to betray your trust is beyond my comprehension.” To Esher, Fisher made the nasty supposition that the appointments were the fault of Churchill’s young wife, Clementine: “Winston, alas!20 (as I have had to tell him) feared for his wife the social ostracism of the Court and succumbed to the appointments of the two Court favorites recently made—a wicked wrong in both cases! Winston has sacrificed the Country to the Court and gone back on his brave deeds... so I’ve done with him!”
Fisher continued to grouse and harrumph, at one point describing the First Lord as “a Royal Pimp,”21 but Churchill ignored both complaints and insults. Soon Fisher was boasting to his son: “...as regards Winston Churchill22... no doubt, I sent him an awful letter and he really has replied very nicely that no matter what I like to say to him, he is going to stick to me and support all my schemes and always maintain that I am a genius and the greatest naval administrator, etc., etc., etc.... However, there is no getting over the fact that he truckled to Court influence... and I have rubbed this into WC and he don’t like it.... Still, for the good of the Navy I am reluctantly feeling compelled to continue my advice to him as to new Dreadnoughts and other fighting business.”
Churchill was coming to the Mediterranean and, as Fisher would be in Naples, the First Lord decided to woo the old lion in his lair: “My dear Fisher,”23 he wrote on May 15, “The Prime Minister and I are coming to Naples on the 24th.... I shall look forward to having a good talk with you and I therefore defer replying to your last letter which I was so glad to get. If the consequences of the recent appointments were to be what you apprehend, I should feel your censures were not undeserved. But they will not be. The highest positions in the Admiralty and in the Fleet will not be governed by seniority; and the future of the Navy rests in the hands of men in whom your confidence is as strong as mine.... For the rest let us wait till we can talk freely. Writing is so wearisome and unsatisfactory.”
Churchill was going to Malta and Gibraltar to meet the Mediterranean admirals and discuss—along with Kitchener, who was coming from Egypt—the defense of the Imperial lifeline through the inland sea.fn1 For this reason, he was accompanied by the Second Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and by Beatty, his Naval Secretary. But he was also going to relax under blue skies and, to share this pleasure, he invited Clementine, her sister, his sister-in-law, and Asquith, who brought along his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Violet. The party embarked in the Enchantress in Genoa and two days later found themselves entering the Bay of Naples. In her diary, Violet Asquith described what happened: “Some of us went ashore24... straight to the museum... back to the yacht for luncheon and there was Lord Fisher! His eyes, as always, were like smouldering charcoals.... He was very friendly to Father and Prince Louis but glowered a bit, I thought, at Winston.... As the day wore on I noticed signs of mellowing in Lord F. which I feel will turn to melting before long. I whispered at tea to Winston: ‘He’s melting.’ His mind was far away. He gazed at me blankly and said in a hard, loud voice: ‘What’s melting?’ Distracted, I replied: ‘The butter.’ which brought an old-fashioned look from our hostess [Clementine] who eyed the bread and butter anxiously. When we got back to the Enchantress Lord F. and W. were locked together in naval conclave.... I’m sure they can’t resist each other long at close range.” Fisher remained on board overnight, and the next morning Violet reported: “Danced on deck25 with Lord Fisher for a very long time before breakfast.... I reel giddily in his arms and lurch against his heart of oak.” Between Violet’s dancing and Winston’s wooing, Fisher was conquered. “I was nearly kidnapped26 and carried off in the Admiralty yacht!” Fisher wrote to a friend. “They were very sweet about it! My old cabin as First Sea Lord all arranged for me! I had a good time and came out on top! The Prime Minister is ‘dead on’ for my coming back, and he has put things so forcibly to me that, with great reluctance to re-enter the battlefield, I probably shall do so....” To Lady Fisher, the Admiral listed Churchill’s compliments: “WC said the King was always talking27 about me to him, and had acknowledged how much I had done, but that I was absolutely wedded to certain ideas he couldn’t approve of. WC turned round to him [the King] and said that everything now that was said at home and abroad of the ‘present overwhelming supremacy and efficiency of the British Navy’ was solely and only and entirely due to me! and that ‘there would shortly be 16 ships with 13½ inch gun, when not a single German ship had anything but a 12 inch gun, which compared to the British 13½ inch gun, was only a pea-shooter and he said the King shut up then. I also heard indirectly from Esher that Winston Churchill always sticks up for me to all the Court people besides the King....”
The new First Lord’s relationship with the navy was not all paperwork and strategic talk. For Churchill, bursting with excitement and energy, it was Fun. One of the perquisites of office was that he selected the women who christened new dreadnoughts. Within seven weeks of his appointment, Winston stood by while Clementine christened the battleship Centurion. Two years later, Jennie christened the battleship Benbow. There were sweeter delights: the First Lord was the only man in the kingdom other than the monarch to have a yacht paid for out of the public purse. The Admiralty yacht Enchantress, a handsome 3,500-tonner, came with comfortable staterooms, an excellent wine cellar, and a crew of one hundred to take the First Lord wherever he wished to go. Winston made it “largely my office,28 almost my home” and, during his first eighteen months in office, spent 182 days on board, visiting every British naval station and dockyard in the United Kingdom and the Mediterranean. As lord of the Enchantress, he could play host to whomever he liked, including the Prime Minister, who did not have a yacht, and who keenly enjoyed cruising under the warm sun of the Mediterranean.
Churchill used the yacht to visit the Fleet; he wanted to know the ships and the men—his ships and his men, as he thought of them. “These were great days,”29 he wrote in The World Crisis. “From dawn to midnight, day after day, one’s whole mind was absorbed.... Saturdays, Sundays, and any other spare day, I spent always with the Fleet at Portsmouth or at Portland or Devonport or with the Flotillas at Harwich. Officers of every rank came on board to lunch or dine.... I got to know what everything looked like and where everything was and how one thing fitted into another. In the end, I could put my hand on whatever was wanted.”
The navy never knew where he would turn up. Suddenly, he would appear, ebullient and inexhaustible, bounding up the gangways of the dreadnoughts, disappearing down the hatches of the submarines, eager to see everything and have everything explained. He communicated his enthusiasm to everyone. He took Arthur Balfour and Lord Morley into one of the turrets of the dreadnought Orion, where “in cramped and oily quarters,30 with a mass of machinery penning them on every side,” he lectured on how the guns were worked. Asquith was amused by Winston’s exuberance. The Prime Minister went to witness target practice and soon the First Lord was “dancing about the guns,31 elevating, depressing, and sighting.” “My young friend yonder,”32 Asquith observed, “thinks himself Othello and blacks himself all over to play the part.” When Violet Asquith accompanied her father to the Mediterranean she observed “W[inston] in glorious form33 though slightly over-concentrated on instruments of destruction. Blasting and shattering are now his idées fixes. As we leaned side by side against the rail, past the lovely, smiling coastline of the Adriatic bathed in sun, and I remarked ‘How perfect!’, he startled me by his reply: ‘Yes—range perfect—visibility perfect’—and details followed showing how effectively we could lay waste the landscape and blow the nestling towns sky-high.” Beatty, also on the cruise, wrote to his wife that “Winston talks about nothing34 but the Navy and all the wonderful things he is going to do.” Back in London, Lloyd George chided his former ally in naval economy: “You have become a water creature.35 You think we all live in the sea and all your thoughts are devoted to sea life, fishes and other aquatic creatures. You forget that most of us live on land.”
May 1912 saw Churchill’s first great naval review as First Lord: “The flags of a dozen admirals,36 the broad pennants of as many commodores and the pennants of a hundred and fifty ships were flying together. The King came in the Royal Yacht.... One day there is a long cruise out into the mist, dense, utterly baffling—the whole Fleet steaming together all invisible, keeping station with weird siren screamings and hootings. It seemed incredible that no harm would befall. And then suddenly the fog lifted and the distant targets could be distinguished and the whole long line of battleships, coming one after another into view, burst into tremendous flares of flame and hurled their shells with deafening detonations while the water rose in tall fountains. The Fleet returns—three battle squadrons abreast, cruisers and [destroyer]flotillas disposed ahead and astern. The speed is raised to twenty knots. Streaks of white foam appear at the bows of every vessel. The land draws near. The broad bay already embraces this swiftly moving gigantic armada. The ships in their formation already fill the bay. The foreign officers I have with me on the Enchantress bridge stare anxiously. We still steam fast. Five minutes more and the van of the Fleet will be aground. Four minutes, three minutes. There! At last. The signal! A string of bright flags falls from the Neptune’s halyards. Every anchor falls together; their cables roar through the hawser holes; every propeller whirls astern. In a hundred and fifty yards every ship is stationary. Look along the lines, miles this way and miles that, they might have been drawn with a ruler. The foreign observers gasped.”
Prompted by Fisher, Churchill took an interest in the lot of the common seamen and petty officers. Navy pay, which had not changed in sixty years, was raised; annoyances in the form of petty discipline, inadequate leave, and slow promotions were eliminated. “No First Lord in the history of the Navy37 has shown himself more practically sympathetic with the conditions of the Lower Deck than Winston Churchill,” wrote an unofficial navy magazine. A reporter for the Daily Express accompanied him on a visit to a submarine in 1912: “He had a yarn38 with nearly all the lower deck men of the ship’s company, asking why, wherefore, and how everything was done. All the sailors ‘go the bundle’ on him because he makes no fuss and takes them by surprise. He is here, there, everywhere.” Sympathy with enlisted men and encouragement that they and their petty officers voice their grievances did not increase Churchill’s popularity with officers. On one occasion, poking about a cruiser, he had the officer guiding him show him the brig. When the officer returned to the wardroom, his fellow officers shouted, “Why didn’t you lock him up?”39 What Churchill saw as a proper interest in the condition of the men, officers scorned as an attempt to curry favor with the lower ranks. Once, visiting a battleship, the First Lord ordered the ship’s company assembled on deck for his inspection. Then he put the officer in charge to a test:
“Do you know your men by name?”40 the First Lord asked.
“I think I do, Sir; we have had many changes recently, but I think I know them all,” the officer replied.
“What is the name of this man?”
“Jones, Sir.”
“What is your name?” asked Churchill, addressing the seaman.
“Jones, Sir.”
“Is your name really Jones or do you say so only to back your officer?”
“My name is Jones, Sir.”
When Churchill departed, the officer and his fellow officers on the ship were in a “choking wrath.”
To senior captains and admirals—some almost old enough to be his father—Churchill seemed especially disrespectful. A bumptious young man of thirty-six with a ballyhooed experience of war as a junior cavalry officer was overriding professional naval opinion, interfering in technical matters, jumping to harebrained conclusions. They dealt with him their own way. Churchill watched the old battleship Cornwallis firing at a target and, as soon as the guns were silent, wanted to know how many hits had been scored.
“None,”41 replied the admiral.
“Not one? All misses? How do you explain it?”
“Well, you see, First Lord, the shells seem to have fallen either just short of the target or else gone just a little beyond it.”
The Sea Lords confronted the problem every day. The First Lord treated them as his subordinates, issuing orders rather than asking for their advice. From his dicta and personality there was no appeal; Prime Minister and Cabinet were firmly behind him. On one memorable occasion when one of the Sea Lords accused Winston of ignoring the time-honored traditions of the Royal Navy, the First Lord replied savagely, “And what are they?42 I shall tell you in three words. Rum, sodomy, and the lash. Good morning, gentlemen.”
Eventually, in the Bridgeman Affair, Churchill’s bruising treatment of the Sea Lords reached the attention of the House of Commons. Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman was a competent, colorless officer who had been happily serving as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet when Churchill brought him ashore to replace Sir Arthur Wilson. Bridgeman came, reluctantly but dutifully, “to help things along43 if I can.” By October 1912, the mild-mannered Bridgeman already had locked horns on a variety of issues with the tempestuous First Lord. Eventually, he stated that Churchill’s constant interference in technical decisions and repeated overriding of naval traditions were denigrating the authority of senior officers and would harm the efficiency of the service. The First Lord did not take this criticism well, and Bridgeman threatened to take his case to the Prime Minister and the King.
From that moment on, Bridgeman’s doom was certain. On November 14, Churchill mentioned to Prince Louis that he would soon be moving up to First Sea Lord. Bridgeman was recuperating from appendicitis and two attacks of bronchitis. In letters to Battenberg and Beatty, he had mentioned the possibility of resigning and spoken wistfully of going to a warmer climate where he could sit in the sun and recover. Reports of these letters reached Churchill, who seized on Bridgeman’s health and wrote to the Admiral that he was aware of the great sacrifice the First Sea Lord was making by remaining at his post. “If, by any misadventure,44 we were to be involved in war,” the First Lord continued, “I feel that the burden might be more than you could sustain.” Bridgeman misinterpreted what in fact was a buffered call for his resignation as simply a well-wisher’s concern about his health, and replied that he was already better and fit to carry on. This letter was highly unwelcome to Churchill, who, foolishly headlong, already had submitted Bridgeman’s resignation to the Prime Minister and the King. On December 2, Churchill dropped his pretence of solicitude and bluntly informed Bridgeman that his resignation had been accepted.
A change of this magnitude attracted comment in the press, particularly as Churchill had already forced the resignations of four Sea Lords within the year. On December 11, Lord Charles Beresford rose to ask about the matter in the House of Commons. Beresford saw Churchill not only as a youthful interloper at the Admiralty, but also as the agent of his own archenemy, Fisher.
“Might I ask the First Lord45 if it is a fact that ill-health and no other cause was the reason for the First Sea Lord’s resignation?” Beresford asked.
“So far as I am aware, no other cause whatever,” Churchill replied.
“Might I ask on which side the proposal for resignation emanated—from the Admiralty or from the First Sea Lord?” Beresford continued.
“Very well,” Churchill declared. “Since the Noble Lord presses it: the proposal emanated from me.”
Churchill worried that the affair was getting out of hand. The press trumpeted that a distinguished sailor with a long and honorable career was being summarily cast aside by a tyrannical Minister who knew nothing about the navy, but who dismissed everyone who did not bow to his demands. Even people who did not know the details, or who thought well of Winston, felt that Bridgeman had been mistreated. Attempting to improve his position, Churchill bullied Bridgeman even further, commanding him to state that health alone, rather than policy disagreements, had brought his resignation. Bridgeman replied to this browbeating by replying honestly that he could not do it; he reminded Churchill of specific disagreements and of the fact that, on one occasion, he had suggested his own resignation as a remedy.
Frustrated and furious, Churchill turned all his rage on Beresford in the House of Commons. When the former Admiral rose again at Question Time, Churchill attacked him with rhetorical violence.
“What I ask the Noble Lord to do46 is to state specifically what he had in his mind—if he has anything in his mind.”
“It is his habit in matters of this kind to make a number of insinuations—” Churchill began.
“That is not true,” Beresford interrupted.
“Insinuations of a very gross character,” persisted Churchill, “some of which transgress the limits of Parliamentary decorum; to cover the Order Paper with leading and fishing questions, designed to give substance and form to any gossip or tittle-tattle he may have been able to scrape together, and then to come down to the House, not to attempt to make good in fact or in detail... but to skulk in the background, waiting for an opportunity.... I have not ever since I became First Lord of the Admiralty made any reply to the Noble Lord’s scurrilous and continuous personal attacks, none. I sought no quarrel with him.... but within a fortnight he made a speech in which he said I had betrayed the Navy... and ever since he has been going about the country pouring out charges of espionage, favoritism, blackmail, fraud, and inefficiency.”
“I deny that entirely,” Beresford interrupted again. “I never used the word ‘blackmail.’ Give the date and the place.”
“Certainly,” Churchill replied evenly. “In the constituency of the honorable member for Eversham—my memory is very good on these points—he used the great bulk of those offensive expressions, needless to say, unsupported by any facts or arguments.... I have never taken these things too seriously. I am not one of those who take the Noble Lord too seriously. I know him too well. He does not mean to be as offensive as he often is when he is speaking on public platforms. He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, ‘Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, they do not know what they have said.’... Under a genial manner... the Noble Lord nourishes many bitter animosities on naval matters.”
Ultimately, the House, which was familiar with Beresford’s obsession with Fisher, sustained the First Lord. Significantly, even Bridgeman sided with Churchill, writing after the exchange in the Commons: “I do hope the whole business47 is now at an end, but I hear rumours of a deep-laid agitation against Churchill; I am using every bit of influence I possess to arrest it.... I am afraid Beresford is difficult to hold and I unfortunately can do nothing with him.”
Churchill’s relations with King George V were correct but cool. Having spent fifteen years in the navy and risen by merit to the rank of Captain before his brother’s death made him Prince of Wales, George V shared most of the views and prejudices of the navy’s senior officers. In the Fisher-Beresford contest, the King became a Beresford man, and accordingly was not pleased when Churchill made the former First Sea Lord his principal advisor. For his part, Churchill respected the monarch without placing much weight on his opinions. After a royal visit to the Enchantress, Winston reported to his wife that the King had talked more stupidly about the navy than anyone he had ever heard. Three times in three years, the two became entangled over the names to be given to new dreadnoughts. Traditionally, a First Lord proposed names and the King amended, counterproposed, and then agreed. In November 1911, immediately after becoming First Lord, Churchill proposed Africa, Assiduous, Liberty, and Oliver Cromwell for the four battleships in that year’s Estimates. The King rejected naming a dreadnought Cromwell after the man who had chopped off the head of King Charles I. He accepted Africa and proposed Delhi, Wellington, and Marlborough. The four ships eventually went to sea with the names Iron Duke (which Churchill liked better than Wellington), Marlborough, Emperor of India, and Benbow. The following year, the First Lord proposed four names from England’s warrior history for the four great fifteen-inch-gun, oil-burning superdreadnoughts of the 1912 class. On his desk, the King read: King Richard the First, King Henry the Fifth, Queen Elizabeth, and—again—Oliver Cromwell. Lord Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary, immediately wrote to Churchill that “there must be some mistake48... that name was proposed for one of the ships of last year’s program; His Majesty was unable to agree to it and... personally explained to you the reasons for his objection.” This time, Churchill persevered. “Oliver Cromwell was one of the founders49 of the Navy and scarcely any man did so much for it,” he wrote to Stamfordham. “It seems right50 that we should give to a battleship a name that never failed to make the enemies of England tremble.” King George refused to budge and the First Lord declared, “I bow.”51 The new ship was named Valiant, and of Churchill’s original choices, only Queen Elizabeth went to sea. The other two dreadnoughts were named Warspite and Barham, and a fifth sister of the class, Malaya, was named after the colony that paid to build her.
Churchill’s final brush with the King on the subject of names occurred over two ships of the 1913 class. The First Lord proposed Ark Royal and Pitt. The King had various arguments against Ark Royal, but he rejected Pitt on an intuition derived from his own many years at sea. Sailors, he knew, tended to find obscene or scatological nicknames for the ships they served on; Pitt was much too easy and would have an inevitable result. Churchill, presented with the argument, grumbled that this suggestion was “unworthy of the royal mind.”52 The 1913 dreadnoughts, the last of the prewar building program, were given names to please a monarch: Royal Sovereign, Royal Oak, Ramillies, Resolution, and Revenge.
As peacetime First Lord, Winston Churchill’s most significant achievement was the design and building of the Queen Elizabeth class of superdreadnoughts. This division of five large, fast, heavily armored ships, powered by oil and carrying heavier guns than those on any previous dreadnought, played a decisive role at the Battle of Jutland, the long-awaited Armageddon of Jacky Fisher’s dreams. Immeasurably superior to any earlier battleship, they continued to form the backbone of British naval strength well into the Second World War, when Winston Churchill, once again First Lord and then Prime Minister, had reason to be grateful for their presence.
The dominant naval weapon of the era, despite the advent of the torpedo, was the great gun: the long-barreled naval cannon which fired a heavy shell down a rifled tube, lofting the spiralling projectile thousands of yards to plunge onto an enemy ship, piercing and penetrating heavy armor to burst inside turrets or hull, spreading fire, devastation, chaos, and death. The size and weight of one of these shells grew immensely as the diameter of the barrel and the projectile increased. Dreadnought, Fisher’s first all-big-gun ship, was armed with ten heavy guns, each firing a shell 12 inches in diameter and weighing 850 pounds. In the building programs that followed, 1906 through early 1909, a total of sixteen dreadnoughts—ten battleships and six battle cruisers—were equipped with 12-inch guns. In the 1909 program, at Fisher’s urgent demand, the diameter of barrel and shell was dramatically increased to 13.5 inches.fn2 This addition of only an inch and a half in the diameter of the shell increased the projectile’s weight from 850 pounds to 1,250 pounds.
By the time Churchill arrived at the Admiralty, eighteen dreadnoughts with 13.5-inch guns had been launched, laid down, or authorized, although none had gone to sea. Nevertheless, as soon as he became First Lord, he immediately sought to go one size better. Within a few months, he would have to stand before the House of Commons and, in the 1912 Naval Estimates, ask for money to build five more giant ships. He decided to propose an even bigger gun, which would hurl a mammoth 15-inch, 1,920-pound projectile 35,000 yards. He took his plan to Fisher. “No one who has not experienced53 it has any idea of the passion and eloquence of this old lion when thoroughly roused on a technical subject,” Churchill wrote. “To shrink54 from the endeavour was treason to the Empire,” Fisher roared at Churchill. “What was it that enabled Jack Johnson to knock out his opponents? It was the big punch.”
Emboldened, Churchill ordered the new gun designed and produced. Redesigning dreadnoughts to carry the new weapons was complicated and risky. If the guns were enlarged, everything must be enlarged: turrets, armor, the ships themselves. This meant a significant increase in cost. And all this had to be done before it was known whether the new gun would work. “If only we could make a trial gun55 and test it thoroughly before giving the orders for the whole of the guns of all the five ships, there would be no risk,” Churchill wrote about his dilemma. “But then we should lose an entire year and five great vessels would go into the line of battle carrying an inferior weapon to that which we had it in our power to give them.” Worried, the young First Lord went back to Fisher: “He was steadfast56 and even violent. So I hardened my heart and took the plunge.” Forty of the huge rifles were ordered. One gun was rushed along four months ahead of the others to test it for stress, range, and accuracy in actual firing. Even so, Churchill and the navy were irrevocably committed. The first of the new ships, Queen Elizabeth, did not go to sea for three years. During all this time, Churchill waited in suspense: “Fancy if they failed.57 What a disaster. What an exposure. No excuse would be accepted. It would all be brought home to me—‘rash, inexperienced,’ ‘before he had been there a month,’ ‘altering all the plans of his predecessors’ and producing ‘this ghastly fiasco,’ ‘the mutilation of all the ships of the year.’ What could I have said?” The gun was a brilliant success, and British dreadnoughts which carried it were able to fire a shell 40 percent heavier than any that could be fired back at them. Even during his long, anxious wait, Churchill was entranced with what he was creating. In May 1912, he told the annual banquet of the Royal Academy that “everything in the naval world58 is directed to the manifestation at a particular place during the compass of a few minutes of a shattering, blasting, overbearing force.” A few days later, describing the impact of a heavy shell upon a warship, he gave the House of Commons a graphic metaphor. In order to imagine “a battle between two great59 modern iron-clad ships, you must not think of... two men in armor striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two egg shells striking each other with hammers.... The importance of hitting first, hitting hardest, and keeping on hitting... really needs no clearer proof.”
The new ships could deliver a knockout punch; it remained to provide them with armor and speed. In the Queen Elizabeths there was no skimping on armor; key areas such as the waterline and turrets were covered by thirteen and a half inches of solid steel. Churchill’s ships could deliver and take a punch. Still, he was not satisfied. He wanted speed. The standard twenty-one knots of British dreadnoughts was not enough to overtake a fleeing enemy and bring it to battle. He needed battle-cruiser speed, twenty-five or twenty-six knots.
Here, as in almost everything, he followed Fisher’s constant cry: “Speed! Speed!60 Do you remember the recipe for jugged hare in ‘Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery’? First, catch your hare....” “The first of all necessities61 is speed so as to be able to fight When you like, Where you like, and How you like....”
The battle cruisers had achieved their speed by sacrificing armor. This Churchill would not do. “I do not believe in the wisdom62 of the battle cruiser type,” he wrote. “To put the value of a first class battleship into a vessel which cannot stand the pounding of a heavy action is false policy.” The First Lord and his designers tried other avenues. They could give up a turret. All previous dreadnoughts had carried ten 12-inch or ten 13.5-inch guns paired in five turrets. A full broadside from the ten rifles of a 13.5-inch-gun ship, an Orion, a King George V, or an Iron Duke, weighed fourteen thousand pounds. But the great weight of the fifteen-inch shells in the new class gave a broadside of even greater weight, sixteen thousand pounds, fired from only eight guns. Two guns, an entire turret, were sacrificed and this two thousand tons devoted to propulsion machinery. More boilers were installed. Still it was not enough.
The solution was oil fuel. Oil burned more fiercely than coal and gave off more heat. Steam created under higher pressure drove the shafts and turned the propellers faster. The ships moved more quickly through the water. Oil had other advantages. Oil could be transferred at sea from tankers to warships, dispensing with the constant need to go into port to take on coal.
“The ordeal of coaling ship63 exhausted the whole ship’s company,” Churchill wrote. “...With oil a few pipes were connected with the shore or with a tanker and the ship sucked in its fuel with hardly a man having to lift a finger.... Oil could be stowed in spare places in a ship from which it could be impossible to bring coal. As a coal ship used up her coal, increasingly large numbers of men had to be taken, if necessary from the guns, to shovel the coal from remote and inconvenient bunkers to bunkers nearer to the furnaces or to the furnaces themselves, thus weakening the fighting efficiency of the ship.... For instance, nearly a hundred men were continually occupied in the Lion shoveling coal from one steel chamber to another without ever seeing the light of day or of the furnace fires.”
Oil fuel was already in use in many smaller ships. Submarines could not run on coal, and when Churchill arrived at the Admiralty, seventy-four submarines and fifty-six destroyers dependent exclusively on oil were built or building. Two American battleships, Oklahoma and Nevada, ordered in 1911, were to be oil powered. But America produced its own oil; the British Isles did not. Here lay the risk and gamble for Churchill. Converting dreadnoughts to oil meant giving them greater speed; it also meant basing British naval supremacy on a fuel obtainable only from overseas. Oil would have to be found, acquired, transported, and stored in enormous reserve tanks in quantities sufficient for many months of fighting.
Even the vigorous Churchill could not accomplish all this by simple decree. He needed advice. He needed facts. He needed enthusiasm. He turned to Fisher and asked the Admiral to return to England and preside over a Royal Commission on Oil Supply. His letter was warm, blunt, stern, and supplicatory: “This liquid fuel problem64 has got to be solved.... [It requires] the drive and enthusiasm of a big man. I want you for this, viz. to crack the nut. No one else can do it so well. Perhaps no one else can do it at all. I will put you in a position where you can crack the nut, if indeed it is crackable.
“I recognize it is little enough I can offer you. But your gifts, your force, your hopes, belong to the Navy... and as your most ardent admirer and as the head of the Naval Service, I claim them now, knowing you will not grudge them. You need a plough to draw. Your propellers are racing in air.”
Fisher could not resist; he returned immediately and plunged into the work of the Royal Commission. Within six months, the Commission made its recommendation: the advantages of oil for the fleet were so overwhelming that a four-year reserve should be obtained and stored. Parliament authorized the spending of £10 million for storage tanks. Churchill simultaneously sent experts to the Persian Gulf to examine the potential of oil fields in that region. In July 1914, another £2.2 million was authorized to acquire a controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. From the Queen Elizabeths forward, the new ships of the Royal Navy burned oil. The “lamentable exception,”65 as Churchill termed it, was the 1913 Revenge class of fifteen-inch-gun battleships, which because of fears that wartime oil supplies would be inadequate were designed for coal. When Fisher returned as First Sea Lord at the outbreak of war, one of the first orders he gave was that Revenge, Royal Oak, Royal Sovereign, Resolution, and Ramillies—their hulls still on the building ways—be redesigned for oil.
The navy benefitted from another important technical change during the Churchill years, although in this instance the First Lord served as referee rather than as instigator. Sir Percy Scott had never been satisfied with the state of Royal Navy gunnery. The greater range of the new guns created more problems in hitting the target. Artillerymen on land train their cannon around in the direction of the target, elevate the muzzle to achieve the proper range, and fire until the target is destroyed or they are told to stop. At sea, it has never been this easy. Besides the ceaseless roll of the deck, which requires constant changes in elevation, both firing ship and target ship are moving across the water, creating endlessly changing angles. Traditionally, solving these angles, estimating distances, feeling the roll of the deck were the task of the gunlayer, one to each great gun, inside the turrets of the battleships. In peacetime the system worked. Firing practice usually involved stationary targets, positioned at ranges no greater than two thousand yards. Under these conditions, the gunlayers, peering down their barrels, could see where their shells were falling, make corrections, and—to the delight of senior officers and astounded spectators—pulverize the target. Sir Percy Scott considered this a dangerous exercise in fantasy. In wartime, he argued, individual gunlayers in the turrets would face not only the concussive blast of the guns, billowing heavy smoke, and spray resulting from high speed, but the fact that the target would be shooting back. At ranges four and five times greater than in peacetime, the individual gunlayer at turret level could not even see where his shells were landing. The result would be catastrophic: gunlayers who could not see, guns which could not be aimed, shells which could not strike—a fleet blind and helpless. Scott’s solution was what he called Director Firing.
A single master gunlayer, posted high in the conning tower or on the foremast, would aim and fire simultaneously all the heavy guns on the ship. From this eyrie, above the blast and smoke of his own guns and the spray from the splash of enemy shells, with an excellent line of vision to the target, he and his assistant could observe the geysers as their own shells struck the sea near the enemy. They could calculate what adjustments were required, electrically transmit their orders to the guns, and then, when all was ready, press a key to fire all guns at once in a mighty broadside salvo. Broadside firing was an integral part of Scott’s concept: not only was the master gunlayer more likely to select the right target than blinded individual gunlayers, but once the target had been selected and range accurately measured, the simultaneous arrival of a blizzard of heavy shells would be far more devastating than even the accurate delivery of a single burst.
Scott’s dream remained locked in his head when in 1910 he retired and went to work for Vickers. But he remained in constant contact with Jellicoe, who as Director of Naval Ordnance had recommended that all capital ships be equipped with Director Firing. Jellicoe carried his enthusiasm to the Home Fleet when, in December 1911, Churchill appointed him second in command. But the innovation continued to be rejected; Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet and Jellicoe’s superior, was one of many admirals who were determined to keep the old and—as they saw it—tried and true system of independent gunlaying. Director firing, they argued, was putting all one’s eggs in a tiny, exposed basket. What would happen if the electrical lines from the director’s perch to the guns were severed by shell fire—not to mention if the entire unarmored director’s platform were shot away?
Scott knew he was right, and once he was out of the navy he could not be muzzled. He carried his case to Churchill and, with Churchillian persistence, insisted that the First Lord listen. Churchill warned that the Sea Lords were opposed, but in the end, Scott’s demand that his system be exposed to a competitive trial appealed to him. By command of the First Lord, the new 13.5-inch-gun dreadnought Thunderer was equipped with Scott’s director system. Her officers were dismayed—“We were by no means pleased66 at having this unpopular new system thrust upon us,” discreetly complained the ship’s gunnery officer—but worked diligently to master the techniques.
On November 12, 1912, off Berehaven, the trial toward which Scott had worked finally took place. Two new dreadnoughts, identical except that one had director firing and one did not, were to fire under the same conditions of range, light, and state of the ocean. Thunderer’s challenger was her sister Orion, which, using the old system of individual aiming and firing, had the best gunnery record in the Fleet. The sea was up, giving each ship a roll to the side of five degrees. They raised speed to twelve knots and then, steaming in line, each trained its guns on its own separate towed target nine thousand yards away. When the order to fire was given, each dreadnought had three minutes to bombard its own target. Time after time Thunderer’s salvos, sometimes of five guns, sometimes of the full ten, rolled out and smothered the target. She fired thirty-nine heavy shells in three minutes, scoring thirteen direct hits, two ricochets onto the target, and ten “possible hits” in the water (close enough to have hit a real ship bigger than the towed target). Orion’s individual gunlayers could hardly find the target at all. The battleship fired twenty-seven times, scoring two hits, one ricochet, and one “possible.” The press, invited to observe, trumpeted the dimensions of Scott’s triumph: three times as many hits for Thunderer, said the Daily Telegraph; five times as many, said The Times; the correct figure was six times as many. Even after this test, “a very large number of officers67 remained sceptical,” wrote Jellicoe. “There was considerable opposition and the great majority of ships were not fitted with it.” In fact, progress was slow, but steady. At Jutland, only two of the thirty-six British dreadnoughts of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet opened fire without benefit of Percy Scott’s ingenious system.
As First Lord, Churchill focussed his prodigious energy and powers of concentration on the navy. He was fascinated by the development of technical innovations, which, incorporated into ships, could provide the fleet with a margin of superiority on the day of battle. But there was more. Churchill was a romantic with a historical vision on the grandest scale. He saw the great ships with which he had been entrusted as figures in a gigantic drama of human destiny. On them, on their sailors and officers, on the Admiralty, and on himself rode the enormous weight of Britain’s future. In a memorable passage in The World Crisis, he described these feelings:
“I recall vividly68 my first voyage from Portsmouth to Portland where the Fleet lay. A grey afternoon was drawing to a close. As I saw the Fleet for the first time drawing out of the haze, a friend reminded me of ‘that far-off line of storm-beaten ships on which the eyes of the Grand Army never looked’ but which had in their day ‘stood between Napoleon and the dominion of the world.’ In Portland harbour the yacht lay surrounded by the great ships; the whole harbour was alive with the goings and comings of launches and small craft of every kind, and as night fell ten thousand lights from sea and shore sprang into being and every masthead twinkled as the ships and squadrons conversed with one another. Who could fail to work for such a service? Who could fail when the very darkness seemed loaded with the menace of approaching war?
“For consider these ships, so vast in themselves, yet so small, so easily lost to sight on the surface of the waters. Sufficient at the moment, we trusted, for their task, but yet only a score or so. They were all we had. On them, as we conceived, floated the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire. All our long history built up century after century, all our great affairs in every part of the globe, all the means of livelihood and safety of our faithful, industrious, active population depended upon them. Open the sea-cocks and let them sink beneath the surface, as another Fleet was one day to do in another British harbour far to the North, and in a few minutes—half an hour at the most—the whole outlook of the world would be changed. The British Empire would dissolve like a dream; each isolated community struggling forward by itself; the central power of union broken; mighty provinces, whole empires in themselves, drifting hopelessly out of control, and falling a prey to strangers; and Europe after one sudden convulsion passing into the iron grip and rule of the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant. There would only be left far off across the Atlantic unarmed, unready, and as yet uninstructed America to maintain, single-handed, law and freedom among men....”
fn1 The visit was to result in the decision to transfer Britain’s Mediterranean battleships to the North Sea and to leave guardianship of British interests in the Mediterranean in the hands of the French Navy.
fn2 The first two ships of the 1909 “We Want Eight!” program, Colossus and Hercules, were equipped with 12-inch guns. The next six, Orion, Conqueror, Monarch, Thunderer, Lion, and Princess Royal, were given the new 13.5-inch guns.