Month: December 2024

Impressing One’s Peers

Courtesy of trying to track down a detail N. A. M. Rodger’s new book, The Price of Victory, I was forced to look at The Royal Navy Day by Day, third edition, published in 2005 and written by Captain A. B. Sainsbury RNR and Lieutenant-Commander F. L. Phillips RNR. It claims that the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty was ‘started’ on 21 January 1887. That date, also used by Rodger, is dubious (that’s a story for another day), but one can live with that. However, someone decided to add this (pp. 28-29):

Until 1901 its name was always at the bottom of the Departmental List, but in the Navy List of April 1903 it appears as second only to the Secretary and the Hydrographer, and DNI became directly responsible to the First Sea Lord – a fact which probably impressed his peers more than the work he did.

To put it mildly, this is drivel. Unfortunately for our intrepid historians the official paperwork on the 1903 change has survived at The National Archives (ADM 1/7656). The Permanent Secretary to the Board of Admiralty, Sir Evan MacGregor, wrote a minute on the subject on 17 January 1903:

The time has come when it seems desirable to review the order of sequence.
At present no principle whatever appears to be followed, apparently when a new department has been created it has been inserted with respect chiefly to the convenience of the Printer and the amount of space in a page available. The Controllers Dept has however grown to the extent of occupying parts of 3 pages, so I think the paging may be set aside, and the Departments follow one another irrespective of paging. The order of sequence in the Navy Lists does not mean any superiority of one Dept over another.
I have explained briefly the reasons for the alterations proposed, and have endeavoured not to make more alterations than necessary. The chief object is really to bring the Intelligence Dept to a more prominent position as intimately connected with the Board.
The Controllers Dept had also though the paging system got down before the proper position.
As the Admiral Supt of Naval Reserves and the Deputy Adjutant General do not hold Civil appointments it seems more appropriate to place them elsewhere, with a note where to be found.

The Senior Naval Lord, Lord Walter Kerr, minuted his concurrence on 19 January, observing, ‘I am inclined to leave the Hydrographers Department in the position it has held for so long.’ The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selborne, initialled his approval on the 20th. Kerr was referring to the fact that the Hydrographer had appeared in the Navy List after the Secretary’s Department since the Napoleonic Wars, a fact evidently unknown to Sainsbury and Phillips, but known to a Senior Naval Lord in 1903! The example below is from March 1815.

As to whom the D.N.I. was responsible, the instructions of 1887 (re-issued in 1904) were unequivocal:

The Senior Naval Lord will supervise the Intelligence Department, but the Director of Naval Intelligence will apply to the other Naval Lords on all matters which are connected with any information which they may at any time require, will furnish them with any information which they may at any time require, and take care that they are put in possession of all intelligence received by the Department with which they should be acquainted.

So to recap, the Naval Intelligence Department came under the Senior Naval Lord from its inception, so no one was suddenly going to be impressed by its work in 1903. The department’s place in the Navy List was down to the printers rather than any sort of conspiracy or deprecation. Sometimes it is better for historians to write nothing rather than invent something to appear clever.

Rank Dishonesty

Fitch wearing army uniform with naval cap and khaki cover. He wore the rank insignia of a major.

Yesterday my attention was diverted to Admiral Sir Ernest Troubridge and his service in Serbia during the First World War. I knew there had been some writing on the subject so I had a good Google to see what I could find. It turns out that a man named Charles E. J. Fryer evidently cornered the market on the subject in the 1980s and 1990s, writing an article in The Mariner’s Mirror and two monographs. I had a glance through them, and immediately noticed some peculiarities with regards to references to a member of Troubridge’s staff.

‘Together with his secretary, Lieutenant-Commander Henry Fitch’ (‘The Watch on the Danube’ (1987), p. 302); ‘ In addition there were Lieutenant-Commander Henry Fitch, whom Troubridge selected to be his Secretary and Paymaster from among the company of his former flagship, the Defence’. ‘Henry Fitch, six years Kerr’s junior, joined the Navy in 1909, and was a Sub-Lieutenant in the Defence‘ (The Royal Navy on the Danube (1988), p. 55); ‘his secretary, Lieutenant Henry Fitch’ (The Destruction of Serbia (1997), p. 116).

Henry Maldon Fitch did indeed join the Service in 1909 (his service record is held by The National Archives). In 1914 he was not a Sub-Lieutenant in the Defence: He was a member of the Accountant Branch and held the rank of Assistant Paymaster. With less than four years’ service in that rank he had the relative rank of Sub-Lieutenant. When Troubridge selected him to be his Secretary (not ‘Secretary and Paymaster’) his uniform suddenly became a lot brighter: under the regulations, as a Secretary to a Flag Officer who was not a Commander-in-Chief held the relative rank of Lieutenant-Commander! He went from one stripe of ½ inch gold lace (with the Accountant Branch’s white stripe) to two and a half at the age of 23.

Fryer must have known from reading the source material that Fitch was not a Sub-Lieutenant, a Lieutenant, or a Lieutenant-Commander, yet still wrote it anyway. That the editor of The Mariner’s Mirror or his peer reviewers (if they had them back then) didn’t catch it is absurd. It is not helped that Fitch wrote in his memoirs of the elevation to Secretary, ‘It meant a sudden jump from one to two and a half stripes—from the rank of Sub-Lieutenant to that of Lieutenant-Commander, missing out the rank of Lieutenant altogether.’ (Fitch, My Mis-Spent Youth, p. 126) Fitch himself would have known damned well he wasn’t a Military Branch officer and didn’t hold Military Branch ranks. C.V. inflation is nothing new!