Author: Simon Harley

Quixotic naval historian.

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!

‘Lowly 15th’

Sir Warren Fisher.

Looking through edits on my Wikipedia watchlist this morning, I checked the article for Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield, and noticed a reference to Sir Warren Fisher, quondam Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and Head of the Home Civil Service. I had a look at his article because I couldn’t remember if he was a brother of Admiral Sir William W. Fisher (he was not), and I was struck by the following claim:

After failing to get into the Indian Civil Service and the medical examination for the Royal Navy, he came a lowly 15th in the Inland Revenue entrance exams in 1903.

My ‘Bullshit’ sense started tingling immediately. Luckily, it is very easy to establish the veracity of this statement by consulting the annual reports of the Civil Service Commissioners, who were responsible for administering many examinations for public service. If we look at that for 1903, the 48th annual report (published in 1904 as a Command Paper, Cd. 2211), we find (pp. iv-xi) that there were 214 candidates at the August 1903 examination for Class I clerkships in the Home Civil Service, the Indian Civil Service and Eastern Cadetships. Fisher actually placed 16th, with 2,878 marks. The top marks were 3,991, obtained by A. C. McWatters, who went to the Indian Civil Service, and later became Secretary to the Government of India in the departments of Finance and Labour and Industry. The bottom marks, 1,674, were obtained by an E. Walker, who placed 126th, and curiously also went to the Inland Revenue. Clearly, therefore, Fisher did not sit ‘Inland Revenue entrance exams’ and he did not place a ‘lowly 15th’, but rather 16th out of 214 overall, and 7th in the Home Civil Service!

Where did this claim come from? It turns out it has been there since Fisher’s article was created way back on 18 March 2005 by someone with an IP address in Sterling or Dulles, Virginia. Nearly 20 years! The original text read, ‘After failing to get into the Indian Civil Service and the medical examination for the Royal Navy he came a lowly 15th in the Inland Revenue entrance exams in 1903.’ In all that time all that had altered was the addition of a comma.

Next step, out of pure devilry, I decided to see if someone had fallen for this nonsense. Google Books, ahoy! After a cursory search, there appears to be one. Professor Helen McCarthy, in her 2014 Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, wrote (page 109):

The very antithesis of the bowler-hatted bureaucrat, Fisher’s career had begun inauspiciously at the Board of Inland Revenue in 1903 (he scraped through the exam, coming a mediocre fifteenth).

No source is given, but it is clear from whence it came. The ‘lowly’ 15th has now become ‘mediocre’, and because of that he is deemed to have ‘scraped through the exam’ and started ‘inauspiciously’ at the Revenue, when he was in fact the top-placed Class I entrant there for 1903!

Somewhat Embarrassing

H.M.S. Canada during the Great War.
Image: IWM Q 84615.

A while back someone highlighted a passage related to the battleship Canada (later Almirante Latorre) in Norman Friedman’s book The British Battleship. Friedman wrote (p. 168):

The British CO [Commanding Officer] was unaware that the Chileans had required additional spare boilers, so on the ship’s run to Scapa Flow after commissioning he used all his boilers, generating 52,692 SHP (333.5 rpm); it was estimated that this would equate to 24.3 knots.

In the endnotes (p. 387) he claimed that:

The official DNC history of warship construction equated the 52,692 SHP performance to 21.5 knots. Presumably the actual speed was somewhat embarrassing, as it exceed [sic] that of the Queen Elizabeths.

DNC was Department of the Director of Naval Construction. It’s a very entertaining conspiracy theory, but it does not withstand scrutiny. The relevant document, Battleships ‘Agincourt,’ ‘Erin,’ ‘Canada’, held at The National Archives under ADM 1/8547/340, written in July 1918 and printed by D.N.C.’s department in September that year, states quite clearly under the heading ‘Speed’:

Owing to War conditions no speed trials were carried out, but during her run to the Base the machinery maintained a collective H.P. of 52,700 S.H.P. for two hours, corresponding to an estimated speed of over 24 knots [emphasis added].

Possibly there is another ‘official D.N.C. history of warship construction’ Friedman is referring to, but, thanks to his execrable referencing (which Seaforth/Naval Institute Press continue to tolerate for no good reason), we may never know. In the mean time, the one official history which many historians know of makes clear that Canada was capable of the equivalent of more than 24 knots!

Traditional Wording

An old view of the Old Building of the Admiralty.

In the 1979 book The Admiralty N.A.M. Rodger wrote (pp. 138-139):

Before the [1914-1918] war their Lordships had strenuously resisted a Treasury proposal to employ women typists instead of highly-paid boy clerks, concluding their case, with the ringing declaration that ‘their Lordships cannot conceal their decided preference for the boys’.

This all sounds too good to be true. Then one reads Rodger’s chapter endnote: ‘ADM 116/1297, which does not, alas, support the traditional wording.’ I have looked in ADM 116/1297, and, indeed, it does not support this ‘traditional wording’. So why in the name of God did he see fit to propagate a myth in such a bizarre manner?

In fact, the source material referenced by Rodger refers specifically to Hired Extra Clerks and not Boy Clerks. Hired Extra Clerks were relatively high-paid compared to women: if they were employed solely as typists then they could earn from 25 shillings a week to 40s. a week. Female typists, on the other hand, in other Government departments started at 20s. a week, rising to a maximum of 26s. This is all spelled out in the relevant correspondence.

By comparison, Boy Clerks were not highly-paid at all. Entered at 15 or 16, they earned 15s. to 16s. a week (substantially less than a contemporary Female Typist), and at the age of 18 their employment was terminated, unless they happened to pass for and obtain higher positions in the Civil Service (many did not). They were a form of cheap clerical labour, essentially serving an apprenticeship, but with no guarantee of a career. That Rodger could have confused Boy Clerks for something else for the sake of a laugh at the Admiralty’s expense, which he knew to be false, is unfortunate.

‘Rare but not unprecedented’

Admiral of the Fleet Sir Philip Vian, painted by Oswald Birley.

I was reading the Wikipedia article on Sir Philip Vian the other day and was struck by the following statement: ‘On 1 June 1952 he was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, a rare but not unprecedented recognition for an officer who had not reached the pinnacle of the Royal Navy as First Sea Lord.’ The source given for this was a National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) page, which claimed: ‘On his retirement, he was promoted Admiral of the Fleet, a rank that is normally confined to First Sea Lords, in recognition of his exceptional service during WWII.’

It is not difficult to see from where the NMRN got the idea. In his [Oxford] Dictionary of National Biography entry for Vian, Vice-Admiral Sir Peter Gretton wrote, ‘He had been promoted vice-admiral in 1945 and admiral in 1948 and on his retirement in 1952 he was specially promoted admiral of the fleet, a rank normally confined to first sea lords.’ Is this true?

It is a fact that every non-Royal holder of the rank since the promotion of Lord Mountbatten in 1956 has also served as First Sea Lord. But what about in 1952? Using Wikipedia’s helpful list, if we take the last ten Admirals of the Fleet promoted before Mountbatten, going back to Lord Cunningham in 1943, then seven of these were promoted before serving as First Sea Lord (as in Cunningham’s case) or never served as First Sea Lord at all! So Gretton and the NMRN were at best wildly misleading, and someone on Wikipedia decided to elaborate on this way back in 2008. The latter has now been rectified by me, a mere 15 years late.

Austro-Hungarian Perspective on Jutland

Colloredo-Mannsfeld, painted in 1914.

After the Battle of Jutland the amazingly named Fregattenkapitäne Hieronymus Graf von Colloredo-Mannsfeld, Naval Attaché of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy at the embassy in Berlin, visited the German fleet and sent a report on the battle to his superiors. It is dated 17 June 1916, less than three weeks after the fight, and therefore gives a relatively raw insight into the German experience. Arthur Marder used a British naval intelligence translation of the report in his Jutland volume of From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, and a copy is in his papers at the University of California, Irvine. I first read it years ago when I was sent photos of it by a friend who had done research there. When I consulted the Marder papers for the second time last year I made my own photographs of the document. I’ve been meaning to transcribe it for a very long time, and in the end it didn’t take too long, despite there being over 40 sheets of typescript. It is now on The Dreadnought Project: http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/Austro-Hungarian_Naval_Attach%C3%A9_Report_on_the_Battle_of_Jutland.

A Hungarian historian named Mihály Krámli has translated a post-war copy of the report which is in a Hungarian archive. His translation is now available at NavWeaps. Apparently he believes his “translation is more ‘to the letter’, closer to the original German.” However, it is also admitted that the British translation “includes some closing remarks which are not part of the Marinesektion version found in the archives.”

Onboard Ship Communication During World War I

A rating portrayed wearing headsets and mouthpiece of a ‘Telaupad’ in the 1927 film The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands.

In the Daily Mail’s ‘Answers to Correspondents’ column on 12 December 2023 appeared the following question and answer relating to the Royal Navy in the First World War:

QUESTION What methods were used for onboard ship communication during World War I?

A network of voice pipes was used for shipboard communication during both world wars, consisting of two cones of wood or metal, one end shaped to fit the speaker’s mouth and connected to the other via a long air pipe to a receiver cone, which was flared to amplify the sound.

The pipe was insulated by a covering of waterproof textile material, which, being a bad conductor of sound, enabled long lengths of tube to be used without excessive interference.

Naval voice pipes had a removable cork-mounted whistle, which would be blown to alert the receiver to a pending message.

Voice pipes had obvious advantages in naval warfare. They didn’t depend on electrical power, were immune to EMP (electromagnetic pulse) and would keep working even when damaged. However, voice pipe communication between two watertight compartments presented a risk of flooding, so they were equipped with shut-off valves on either side.

You can see examples of voice pipes on HMS Belfast, which is on display on the River Thames in London, and on HMS Cavalier at Chatham Dockyard Museum.

By the end of World War II they were displaced by internal ship telephones and intercom systems, though some ships still retained the voice pipes in case of electrical blackouts.

Paul Adams, Bristol.

Voice pipes are but one example of intra-ship communication (and depending on how badly they are damaged they will not work). I sent a response to the column on 29 December. As of today it has not been published.

Dear Sir,

QUESTION What methods were used for onboard ship communication during World War I?

Paul Adams in his 12 December answer is correct that voice-pipes were used for shipboard communications. However, they were not the only method. In a British battleship or battle cruiser of the First World War one would also use bugles, telephones, messengers (in the form of boys and men), pneumatic tubes, electric telegraphs (for sending and receiving Morse code between compartments), and various mechanical indicators and dials for transmitting orders and information like range, bearings and speed.

Yours sincerely,

Simon Harley

Co Editor-in-Chief, The Dreadnought Project

‘Early Age’

Fisher as a Vice-Admiral. I cannot find a photo of him as a Lieutenant or Commander offhand.

Browsing through Wikipedia edits today I noticed the claim on Jacky Fisher’s page that ‘On 2 August 1869, “at the early age of twenty-eight”, Fisher was promoted to commander.’ The quote is taken from Ruddock Mackay’s Fisher of Kilverstone, p. 56. This didn’t sound particularly early to me: for some reason I know off the top of my head that Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, Bart., four years older than Fisher, had been promoted to that rank aged only 23 in 1859 (and Captain aged 29 in 1865). Tellingly Reginald Bacon didn’t make the claim either in his life of Fisher. I wondered—how early could 28 be for promotion to Commander in 1869? There was only one way to find out. With an hour’s train journey at hand (enlivened by being marooned by Swedish rail operator MTRX) I went through all the Lieutenants promoted in that year with Navy Lists for 1869 and 1870 and The National Archives online list of service records (which contain dates of birth). There were 39 new commanders in 1869 as far as I can see. The oldest (Harcourt T. Gammell) was 40 and the youngest (the magnificently named Thornhaugh P. Gurdon and The Honourable Edward S. Dawson) were 26. The mean age was 30, and the median and mode ages 31. Six were younger than Fisher and one (Henry J. Martin) was also 28, but two months older.

So, was Fisher really at such an ‘early age’ when promoted? The evidence suggests not, even though he was in what was referred to as a ‘promotion billet’, First Lieutenant of the Excellent, gunnery training ship at Portsmouth! He had also won promotion to Lieutenant aged just 19 which gave him a slight head start over the rest of his contemporaries.

If anyone wants the Excel sheet I compiled for this little exercise, send me an email.

UPDATE 20/01/24: I see now that it was possibly Rear-Admiral Sir William S. Jameson who originated the claim in his 1962 The House that Jack Built, p. 95, writing Fisher ‘was promoted to Commander at the early age of twenty-eight’. It is interesting how many people have repeated the claim without bothering to check. Among those who have done so are Geoffrey Penn, Roger Parkinson, Barry Gough, Terry Breverton and Paul Ashford Harris (the last wrote ‘remarkably early age’!).

Poor Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Jacky Fisher.

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!