Category: Archives

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.

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.

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.”

‘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’!).

‘The Erin is I fear going to be a trouble to me’

H.M.S. Erin in dock at Invergordon.
Photograph: Naval History and Heritage Command NH 41762.

In Aidan Dodson’s new book on The Windfall Battleships he refers (page 23) to the battleship Erin:

Fuel stowage was, however, only two-thirds that of her British contemporaries, and difficult to access. As CinC Grand Fleet remarked to DNC:

The Erin is I fear going to be a trouble to me. She only has 1000 tons of coal that is available for steaming. The rest is athwart Engine Rooms & can’t be trimmed forward for real steaming. The nominal 2000 tons is a fraud. I am telling her to use oil whenever possible to help the coal out.

The source given is a letter of 19 September 1914 from Admiral Sir John Jellicoe in d’Eyncourt’s papers at the National Maritime Museum. The word ‘athwart’ is more likely ‘abreast’. Dodson leaves it at that, which is a shame, as it would be interesting to know if the Ship’s Covers at Woolwich provide more information on Erin‘s bunkerage. However, elsewhere in d’Eyncourt’s papers (I’m not saying where, this isn’t a research charity) is a 28 September minute from W. H. Gard, one of the Assistant Directors of Naval Construction:

d’Eyncourt embodied this in his reply to Jellicoe on 29 September, which he also showed to Rear-Admiral Frederick Tudor, the Third Sea Lord:

Lesson to be learned? There are always two sides to a story.

‘It was found’ II

S.M.S. Baden. Photograph: Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R17062.

In my last post I looked at some Wikipedia claims about the German battleship Baden, based on secondary sources. One of these sources was based on a ‘memorandum’ for Arthur Marder by a retired British naval officer, Commander Windham Phipps Hornby, and I wrote that I had ‘found no trace of this memorandum’ in Marder’s papers. Fast forward four months, 12,000 miles, and more research, and I found the ‘memorandum’, which is actually anything but. Marder was in the habit of getting his draft manuscripts read through by a legion of retired naval officers: Stephen Roskill, Peter Gretton, Peter Kemp, to name a few. The reader might have been forgiven for assuming that this ‘memorandum’ related specifically to the Baden, or ship design and construction. It was in fact a 10 page list of corrections and comments on the draft of Marder’s From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow Volume V. Addressing page 456 line 16 Phipps Hornby wrote:

Here, with the utmost respect, I categorically disagree with the D.N.C. and the other Admiralty experts. Having lived onboard the Baden for weeks, employed on salving her, I had got to know her internal arrangements as well as those of my own ship, the Ramillies. And my considered opinion – which I know coincided with that of others engaged on the same job – was that, considered as a fighting machine, anyhow on balance the Baden was markedly in advance of any comparable ship of the Royal Navy. Possibly the British Constructors and others, understandably if unconsciously, were loath to concede that the young German Navy had much to teach them.
Of course, the Germans either kept to a minimum, or else altogether dispensed with, anything that did not conduce directly towards fighting capability. Thus the much inferior accommodation in the German ships has already been noted. Again: in the British capital ships the Engineers had at disposal a quite extensive workshop, equipped with a variety of machine tools. Nothing comparable was found in the Baden. Such small workshops as there were equipped only with benches and vices. I do not recollect to have seen a machine tool in the ship.
What did impress me was the range of spares the Baden seemed to carry. Did any at any rate at all important component fail, a replacement for it was to hand.

In the last post I touched on the potential danger of relying on Phipps Hornby alone. Here we see that he had been careful to qualify his statement, which qualification Marder saw fit to ignore: he couldn’t even correctly reproduce Phipps Hornby’s emphasis.

‘Lessons Learnt’

Admiral Sir William James.

In 1962 Admiral Sir William James, former Room 40 handler, Naval Assistant to First Sea Lord, Deputy Chief of Naval Staff and Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth (among many other appointments) wrote a rather remarkable letter to The Naval Review:

SIR,-In his letter under ‘Lessons Learnt’ (N.R., July, 1961, p. 314) Captain Roskill says that ‘in the case of the Official Military History series the Government decided that, as most of the sources used were confidential and likely to remain so for many years, the author’s references should be printed only in a specially prepared edition’. It might be inferred that, in thirty or forty years time, these sources will be released for study by historians or biographers and provide material for new books on the war. I do not think that this will happen. I do not think that these confidential sources will ever see the light. If in forty years time the Admiralty announced that all documents covering the two world wars were now open to inspection I do not think there would be a single caller.
I say this because, whilst interest in the personalities of the statesmen and commanders of the armed forces, and in the general course of major campaigns and battles, remains constant (normal education includes campaigns and battles from Caesar to Wellington and will eventually include the two world wars), interest on the lower level, the detailed conduct of a war at headquarters, soon wanes and eventually fades altogether. This fading today is accelerated by the advent of the atomic age. When the methods of waging war and the weapons were more or less static Admiralty confidential records might be of some use when another war broke out, but methods are now changing so rapidly that Admiralty officers would be wasting their time if they sought guidance in confidential records of earlier wars.
The most cogent reason for doubting whether release forty years hence would cause a flutter is that books about both world wars now fill a good sized library. Nearly every one of the men who were responsible for the Grand Strategy and the overall conduct of the campaigns have given full accounts of their stewardship. Sir John Fisher’s [sic] autobiography and letters (recently published by Professor Marder), Churchill’s account of his period at the Admiralty, Lord Wemyss’s autobiography, Jellicoe’s autobiography and the biography of Admiral Oliver leave little untold about the higher direction of the Kaiser’s War. Churchill’s ‘Second World War’, Cunningham’s autobiography and Horton’s biography leave little to be told about the higher direction of Hitler’s War. And for both wars there has been a flood of
books, historical and autobiographical, covering every phase. Full-length books have been written about every minor engagement and about the war service of individual battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines.
What, then, it is fair to ask, can there be in the confidential records that might in thirty or forty years be of interest to anyone? This is not in any sense a criticism of the Admiralty practice of interning documents. There are many reasons for not releasing for inspection records of the conduct of a war on the departmental level. But in these interned papers there can only be titbits for a historian or biographer
and people who have lived through thirty years of the atomic age will not have any interest in these titbits.

This is perhaps indicative of the Stone Age mentality of history at the time, but given how much paper work James himself must have filled out in the Grand Fleet and at the Admiralty during the war alone it beggars belief that he thought none of it would have been useful. Fortunately for people like me, and I suspect many readers, there has been more than that ‘single caller’ and a lot more than mere ‘titbits’ still waiting to be found in the archives sixty years after release.

‘It is Clear’

Recently I started reading Corbin Williamson’s chapter on the early 20th century Royal Navy in The Culture of Military Organizations (edited by Mansoor and Murray). Regrettably it appears to be based solely on secondary sources, with no evidence of archival research whatsoever. Whilst flicking through I stumbled across the rather bold statement:

By 1900, conventional wisdom held that officers with specialization, especially in gunnery and torpedoes, enjoyed an advantage in achieving higher ranks. The senior leaders of World War I were almost all gunnery or torpedo specialists.

Williamson, The Royal Navy, 1900-1945, pp. 324-325

The sources given are Robert Davison, The Challenge of Command, p. 6, and a chapter by Nicholas Rodger. The latter I do not have – a deficit which shall be rectified the next time I visit the British Library or an archive. Davison, on the other hand, writes, ‘Looking through the roster of the senior flag officers during the First World War, it is clear that nearly all who held high command were either gunnery or torpedo specialists, with the notable exception of David Beatty.’ No source is given. Is this the case though?

Neither Williamson nor Davison are precise as to what level they are referring to. What ranks do ‘senior leaders’ and ‘all who held high command’ delineate? Those who held certain ranks? Those who commanded squadrons or held the status of Commander-in-Chief? We will apparently never know. However, we can draw up our own roster.

During the First World War a Supplement to the Monthly Navy List was published. It gives all ‘Flag Officers in Commission, Officers in Commanding Squadrons’ (all those entitled to fly a flag or broad pendant afloat or ashore) in list form, as well as the composition of the various fleets and squadrons. In peace time this information was found in editions of the Navy List, after the seniority lists of the Royal Marines and before the ‘List of Ships and Vessels of the Royal Navy with their Officers and Present Stations’. But, during the war at any rate, the section was published separately. The National Archives has a complete wartime set under the catalogue record 359.3 ADE.

Using the service records in ADM 196 the specialisation or otherwise of the officers named can be identified. There are four categories: those who did not specialise, also known as the ‘salt horse’ officer; those who specialised in gunnery duties; those who specialised in torpedo duties; and, not mentioned by Davison, those who specialised in navigating duties. By the First World War there was a fourth specialisation – signals – but none of those on the flag list had qualified (although Allan Everett and Hugh Evan-Thomas, to name two, were recognised authorities).

I have used the Supplements corrected to 10 September 1914 (the first in The National Archives’ collection) and 1 November 1918 to show the situation at the beginning and at the end of the war. The following charts speak for themselves.

At the beginning of the war, with 54 flag officers and commodores flying their flags, the ‘salt horse’ outnumbers each other individual category. And what of the state of affairs at the end of the war, when another 20 officers were employed – an increase of more than a third?

It is difficult to see how Davison drew his conclusions. By war’s end the proportion of non-specialist officers may have shrunk in relation to the others, but they still formed the largest bloc by far! It is clear, therefore, that the advantage held by specialist officers in being employed afloat and ashore in the First World War has been over-stated.

There are, of course, caveats: the Supplements do not include members of the Board of Admiralty or heads of department in London. Nor does it include Chiefs of the Staff. Nor does my analysis break down employment by rank or differentiate between type of command. Even if, however, the vast majority of the ‘salt horse’ officers were flying their flags or broad pendants ashore or in subordinate positions (such as second-in-command of a battle squadron), it is worth pointing out that the supreme qualification for advancement was actually having flown one’s flag (for the flag officer) or being deemed worthy of flying a broad pendant (for a captain). Under the regulations they would theoretically be less likely to be retired on promotion to rear-admiral or left unemployed for so long that they would be retired for non-service. That is an investigation for another day, however.

Note: Earlier versions of these charts on Twitter showed one more gunnery specialist than torpedo, the result of a mis-reading of The Hon. Sir Somerset A. Gough-Calthorpe’s service record.

Update 15/02/2022: I recently obtained a copy of Rodger’s chapter, ‘Training or Education: A Naval Dilemma over Three Centuries.’ It does not support Williamson’s claim whatsoever.

Salvation Lies in Extravagance

Edwin Montagu

On 23 March 1915 the newly-appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Edwin S. Montagu, wrote to Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, about the looming ‘Shell Crisis’ which would, in a matter of weeks, be a factor in the latter succeeding the former. Montagu proposed that the War Office should have a civilian Secretary of State instead of Lord Kitchener or that Lloyd George be appointed Minister of War Contracts (‘one or the other’). He also outlined his idea of what should drive procurement:

I am quite clear that the only attitude in which a Minister can hope for salvation at the end of this war is the attitude which says – it is possible that I paid too much for this; by careful search I might have made a less extravagant bargain for that; it is true that these things are not as good as they should be, but I went on the belief that something is nearly always better than nothing and that extravagance is the only method to speedy equipment.

Churchill Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, CHAR 13/44/122.

Whether Montagu would have advocated the same principle with regard to PPE, Track and Trace, and vaccine procurement is anybody’s guess.