Recently I was idly browsing through Angus Konstam’s 2009 Osprey ‘Fortress’ volume on Scapa Flow, helpfully entitled Scapa Flow. Early on I read a quote from Jacky Fisher. Naturally, Konstam gave no source, but it’s not difficult to find that it must be from one of Fisher’s articles in The Times newspaper in 1919. A different version appears in Fisher’s Records, published the same year. As usual, something didn’t smell right. I therefore compared the two texts. The one on the left is from Fisher’s article. The one on the right is Konstam’s version in Scapa Flow. The discerning reader will notice just how much has been altered and cut out in what is ostensibly a direct quotation. Many words altered or excised, and for what? Literally nothing. If an author can’t even copy someone else’s work properly then you have to wonder what else they can’t do (in his most recent book The Convoy my name is spelled Harvey. What a surprise).
Incidentally, Fisher was talking out of his backside. His claim of having rediscovered Scapa Flow has been debunked in many places, for example This Great Harbour by W. S. Hewison. The Surveying Service had a fairly rigid season in which they could do work, so everything had to be planned well in advance. The Surveying Ship Triton‘s season began on 31 March 1905, and she worked around the East Coast of England until May, before proceeding to Westray – in the Orkneys, but off the Flow. After surveying there, on 7 August the survey of Hoy Sound began, before the ship headed south on 17 October. Her season ended on 1 November. In fact, for the next three seasons the Triton did both the East Coast of England and the Orkneys, and it wasn’t until August 1908 that Scapa Flow was surveyed. As the superintending Lord of the Hydrographic Department, Fisher would have been well aware of all this!
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