Month: January 2018

In a chapter in Naval Leadership and Management 1650-1950 (Boydell, 2012) Dr. Mary Jones makes the following claim (pages 170-171), concerning the Edwardian Royal Navy:

Torpedo lieutenants were not as highly regarded as gunnery lieutenants, being thought too independent of mind:‘good, but lacking in tact and judgement, difficult to employ with others.’ was the sort of confidential report that appeared for torpedo officers.

Echoing my earlier post in this series, this would be damning if true. Sadly for Dr. Jones, her claim is rather undermined by the fact that the officer in question, Thomas W. Kemp, was not a torpedo lieutenant but a captain, and crucially was not and never had been a torpedo officer. Yet she sees fit to damn the treatment of one of the three (at that time) principle specialisations in the Military Branch of the Navy. This isn’t even a confidential report in the normal sense, but a report on Kemp made after he went through the Royal Naval War College at Portsmouth in February-May 1908 (for the record his last confidential report before attending the college, from Rear-Admiral H. S. F. Niblett in January 1908, was ‘Of sound judgement, slow but sure. I should be glad to see Captain Kemp appointed to any ship under my orders’). As in my previous post, this illustrates the dangers of relying on one example to make a point.

No doubt I will be thought churlish. But when one is paying £60 for a book the reader who is spending that much is understandably likely to place a great deal of faith in its content, and can reasonably expect a certain level of accuracy.

Part of a series on bad history.

In The Rules of the Game Andrew Gordon wrote of what he mockingly calls the ‘Dartmouth battery farm’, the Britannia training establishment at Dartmouth, ‘many would have echoed the bleak comment that “there is no period of my life that I look upon with less pleasure than I do the time I spent in the Britannia”’.

This would be damning if true. Thousands of Naval Cadets passed through the training ship system between 1857 and 1905. Would they all have ‘echoed the bleak comment’ quoted by Gordon?

Apparently not. Vice-Admiral Henry Fleet recalled ‘the Britannia days afforded a good deal of pleasure and happiness’. Admiral Sir Frederic Fisher (Lord Fisher’s younger brother) enjoyed ‘a delightful year’ in the ship. Admiral Sir Charles Dundas of Dundas wrote ‘Those of us who joined the Navy in the seventies still nurse warm recollections of the training ship’. Admiral Sir Edward Kiddle reminisced, ‘My years there were very happy ones.’ There are many more positive recollections of the ship which I could quote, but four is enough. So far, in dozens of memoirs, I have not discovered a view of Britannia anywhere near as negative as the one above.

And what of the original source of Gordon’s claim? The quote was taken from the memoirs of Captain the Honourable Sir Seymour Fortescue. What Gordon neglects to mention is that during his time in the Britannia from 1869 to 1870 Fortescue managed to contract not just scarlet fever but small pox, at the same time, and by his own account suffered accordingly. This little fact is located on the same page. What was Gordon thinking? Did he actually think that Fortescue’s unique experience was representative of the Britannia experience as a whole? Or did he think it was a great line to impress and shock the reader? Or did he actually just not read that part of the page? In any case, his assertion is both wrong and misleading. Reader beware.