Category: Research

‘Nobody Else Ever Did This’: Cunningham and Destroyer Command

Lord Cunningham as First Sea Lord.

In a recent CIMSEC podcast on the subject of leadership Professor Andrew Lambert of King’s College London discusses the career of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Cunningham:

He was so determined not to be a junior officer on somebody else’s ship that when in his very early twenties he was given command of a very small torpedo boat he made sure that he was the best torpedo boat commander in the Navy so no flotilla commander would release him back into a big ship. He then moved on destroyer command, and he managed to hold one destroyer command for four years which was absolutely unprecedented. He did not serve on a big ship under another captain from his early twenties until he was the captain of the big ship. Nobody else ever did this. Nobody. But Cunningham got away with it because he was that good.

Cunningham was not in his ‘very early twenties’ when he was given command of T.B. 14 in May 1908: He was 25 (four months and six days to be exact). The reference to a four year long destroyer command is incorrect in a number of respects. It was not ‘absolutely unprecedented’ as a cursory glance at an October 1915 Navy List and service records show. Vice-Admiral Geoffrey Mackworth commanded the destroyer Ferret from October 1911 to March 1916 as a Lieutenant-Commander and Commander for five years and five months. Captain William B. Mackenzie (a) commanded the Bulldog as a Lieutenant-Commander from November 1911 to July 1916 for four years eight months. I saw several more just under the four year mark and I gave up less than a quarter of the way through the list of ships.

Of course, however, Cunningham did not just command the same destroyer for four years. He commanded the vessel in question, Scorpion, for just under seven years (2,517 days according to his service record).

Now we come to Professor Lambert’s assertion that ‘nobody else’ avoided serving under another captain at sea until they themselves became the captain (we have already eliminated the lower boundary of ‘very early twenties’). Now, to be clear, my research ends by and large at 1919 and anything beyond that is what I have picked up along the way. So I had to rack my brain for destroyer officers. The only only I could think of offhand was Admiral of the Fleet Lord Tovey, who distinguished himself in command of the destroyer Onslow at Jutland. Cunningham last served under another captain in 1908 in the armoured cruiser Suffolk and his first command of a big ship was Calcutta in 1926. Tovey left the Amphion in 1914. Whilst he spent considerably more time ashore on account of appointments at the Admiralty he too would never serve under another captain again. He took command of the Rodney in 1932. Their periods between serving in a big ship and commanding a big ship are remarkably similar:

  • Cunningham: 18 years 13 days.
  • Tovey: 17 years eight months five days.

To sum up:

  • Cunningham was not in his ‘very early twenties’ when he was given his first command.
  • He did not hold one destroyer command for four years.
  • Holding a destroyer command for four years was not ‘absolutely unprecedented’.
  • ‘Nobody else’ managed to leave the big navy and not return to it until they were in command simply is not true.

Apparently pointing these errors out constitutes ‘manufactured outrage’. The reader can decide whether that is a fair accusation.


Sources

Cunningham service record. The National Archives. ADM 196/47/82.
Mackenzie service record. The National Archives. ADM 196/45/248.
Mackworth service record. The National Archives. ADM 196/45/53.
Tovey service record. The National Archives. ADM 196/49/257.

Aerial Policing in 1912

Winston Churchill is popularly supposed to have instituted a policy of ‘Aerial Policing’ over Iraq in 1920, whereby air power was used to suppress insurgency rather than a more expensive ground-based solution. BBC News claims ‘It was a policy Churchill had first mused on in the House of Commons in March 1920, before the Iraqi uprising had even begun.’

The policy actually goes back eight years. On 31 March 1912 Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote a minute for his colleagues concerning the ‘Situation in Somaliland’, the British colony on the Coast of Africa:

In a few years time when aeronautics have developed the question of dealing with this fellow will become a reasonable proposition. It is purely a question of expense. He is not worth a 4,000,000l. expedition. But if 200,000l. or 300,000l. would do the work, as it may easily do in the near future, I should be quite ready to approve the expenditure. We must be certain of our tackle, however.

First Lord’s Minutes Vol. I. 1911-1913.

This ‘fellow’ is presumably a reference to the leader of the Somali Dervishes, Sayid Mohamed Abdullah Hassan, ‘the Mad Mullah’, who had already been harassing the British for over a decade. Fast forward eight years and many skirmishes later (including one where Adrian Carton de Wiart lost an eye) to 1920, and a flight of Royal Air Force Airco DH.9As is popularly supposed to have helped crush the Mullah’s revolt at the same time air power played a part in suppressing the Iraqi revolt.

The Historical Section’s New Clothes

PK
Peter Kemp, O.B.E.

Followers on Twitter may know that I do not have much time for the late Lieutenant-Commander Peter Kemp, onetime head of the Naval Historical Branch. In a 1966 article entitled ‘War Studies’ for the RUSI Journal he referred to the Historical Section of the Naval Staff which had been formally created after the First World War. Kemp wrote:

As a result of pressure from the Secretariat, the Section was reduced to two officers, was to be constituted only on a temporary basis, and was to be dissolved as soon as a Staff History of the last war was completed. The two officers concerned were not to be paid salaries, but would be employed on ‘piece rates,’ a small sum (£50) to be  given them on the completion of each section of the war history. This iniquitous arrangement continued until 1927 when, one day, the First Sea Lord (Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty) happened to meet one of the two officers of the Section in an Admiralty corridor and remarked on his ragged clothes. The whole sordid story was laid bare, and Lord Beatty, in addition to lending the officer concerned enough money to pay his debts and buy a new suit of clothes, directed such a blast at the Admiralty Secretariat that the Historical Section was at once put on a more permanent and properly salaried status. ‘It is deplorable,’ wrote Lord Beatty, ‘that a great Government Department should treat two such valuable officers in such a niggardly fashion . . .I shall take the matter up with the Chancellor of the
Exchequer. It seems to me that professional and technical history is of the greatest importance and I personally see no finality to this work.’

Like many a historian before and since Kemp declined to give a source for an explosive claim, which falls apart on a number of levels. The idea that Beatty would personally appeal to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for salaries or allowances is utterly ludicrous. For matters affecting staffing the Board would have to approve the Admiralty Secretariat writing to the Treasury Secretariat for additional funding to be made available. The notion that Beatty, a sailor and not a politician, would talk to the Chancellor and directly obtain funds is simply wrong.

And, of course, it can not and is not true. The Historical Section of the Naval Staff first appears in the Navy Estimates in 1921. That year it had five ‘Temporary Assistants’ earning £400 to 600 a year. In 1922 the number of staff of the Section rose to six: a Commander on £1,103 a year, a Lieutenant-Commander on £866, and four Temporary Assistants on £350 to £500 a year. In 1923 the number remained the same, except the sums changed. The Commander was now retired and obtained £400 in addition to his retired pay. The Lieutenant-Commander earned £3 less, and the four Temporary Assistants were now given £315 to £450 per annum. In 1924 the number of Temporary Assistants was reduced to three at the same range of salaries. The pay of the Commander was increased to £500 and that of the Lieutenant-Commander decreased by another by a tiny amount again, this time to £861. 1925 saw the strength of the Section remain at five, although the pay of the Lieutenant-Commander was yet again reduced, to £823 this time. In 1926 the lower limit of pay of the Temporary Assistants was raised from £315 to £360, and our long-suffering Lieutenant-Commander’s pay sank to £795. In 1927 it was lowered to £792, but otherwise the staffing and pay of the Section remained exactly the same.

Under the Training and Staff Duties Division in the Estimates there was ‘Provision for preparation of Monographs, &c., for the Staff College.’ The sums provided in the Estimates were not inconsiderable: 1923, £700; 1924, £1,200; 1925, £1,800; 1926, £1,000; 1927, £600; 1928, £150. This amounts to £5,300 over five years, in addition to the salaries of the staff of the Historical Section.

The amount of money involved casts doubt on Kemp’s story of a man in rags wandering the Admiralty accepting alms from the professional head of the Royal Navy. The records at The National Archives, of course, may tell a different story, but the Navy Estimates strongly suggest that Kemp’s tale is a fantasy.

Bad Referencing

For my research I am naturally interested in all references to naval education and training. If I see a reference to a primary source given in a secondary source I always try to follow it up, not only to see if it is given correctly but also to see if there is anything else germane to my book which the author may not have considered relevant to theirs. Sometimes this does not always work out. Last week I came across the following quote in Dr. Harry Dickinson’s doctoral thesis, ‘Educational Provision for Officers of the Royal Navy 1857-1877’, pages 80-81:

There is also evidence that not only were officer numbers unsatisfactory but that the quality was poor. Testimony to the Tarleton Committee of 1872 portrayed a picture of young officers in the 1850s spending inordinate lengths of time as Midshipmen, either lacking the ability or the inclination to pass for Lieutenant. A letter to the committee of 19 March 1872 cited the cases of officers who were still Midshipmen at ages ranging from 22 to 26 years old and suggested that

it is not unreasonable to suppose that such officers are of no use to the Service even if they eventually pass, and if they are entering without intention of passing they are probably setting a bad example to younger officers.59

Endnote 59 is the same as endnote 58, which gives us:

H Vansittart Neal to Tarleton Committee. 19 March 1872. Microfilm Section, Central Library, Liverpool

Tarleton Papers Reel 5/10 MS 165

I have been carefully through Reel 5/10 twice now and there is no letter from H. Vansittart Neale, who at any rate was a relatively junior civil servant at the Admiralty who would never be expected to pass such scathing judgement on officers (and as far as I can tell was not even in the Commission Branch which dealt with officers in 1872, but in the unrelated Legal and Miscellaneous Branch).

Moving on to Dickinson’s monograph, published by Routledge as Educating the Royal Navy, we see the same in much similar form on page 62:

Neither did they produce the numbers required to properly man the fleet, indeed evidence offered to the Rice Committee later in the century suggested that over the decade from 1847, about one-third of the naval cadets entering the service were either discharged at their own request or as unsuitable.39 Even when young officers of this period remained in the Service, it was argued, the quality was often poor, with one witness noting that there were still plenty of midshipmen aged between 22 and 26 years either unable or unwilling to pass for lieutenant. ‘It is not unreasonable,’ he suggested, ‘to suppose that such officers are of no use to the Service’ and that ‘they are probably setting a bad example to the younger officers’.40

Note how the Tarleton Committee of 1872 in the text of the thesis has now become the Rice Committee of 1875. Endnote 39 gives us ‘Report of the Committee on the System of Training Cadets on Board HMS Britannia (The Rice Report), C 1154, 1875, para. 1831.’ Endnote 40 on the other hand gives us, ‘First Report of the Committee appointed to consider and arrange the Establishment at Greenwich Hospital for the Education of Officers of the Royal Navy, (The Tarleton Report), 1872.’ I have a copy of the first report of the Tarleton Committee and it is not a long document, which makes Dickinson’s curious omission of a page number not as serious as at first glance it might appear. This quotation does not appear at all in it (nor, in fact, do any quotations from anyone else). Neither does it appear in the Rice Committee’s report, nor any of the other major reports on education in the Royal Navy in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The upshot of this is that there is an important quotation (for my purposes) which has been attributed to two different sources and appears in neither. Dr. Dickinson clearly realised that something was amiss when converting his thesis into a monograph and altered the context and endnotes accordingly, but to no avail. To say that this kind of sloppiness is unfortunate is an understatement, and it is regrettable that it wasn’t caught by him, his university or his publisher. I can still quote it, but by making it clear that it is unlikely to be written by the author mentioned in the thesis, nor that it can be found in any of the sources cited by Dickinson. All in all, extremely unsatisfactory.

Bad History and Anti-Semitism

Earlier today I was reminded of a quote concerning the Admiralty war room at the outbreak of World War One. It can be found in Nicholas Lambert’s 2005 article ‘Strategic Command and Control for Maneuver Warfare’ (Journal of Military History). The quote is from the diary of Captain Philip W. Dumas, about to take over as Assistant Director of Torpedoes, and according to Lambert it reads:

The scene was wild thousands of telegrams littered about and no-one keeping a proper record of them. [Director Operations Division Arthur] Leveson shrieking—a disheveled looking man—and the only person with his head screwed on the right way seemed to be [Assistant Director Operations Division Philip] Vyvyan.

There are a couple of things wrong with this. Vyvyan was called Arthur, not Philip, and was Assistant to the Chief of the Staff, not Assistant Director Operations Division (that was that other notorious diarist Herbert Richmond). But what is most surprising is the description of Leveson as ‘a dishevelled looking man’. On referring to the Dumas diary it is very difficult to see how Lambert could have possibly read that last word as ‘man’. In fact it looks very much like Dumas calls Leveson ‘a dishevelled looking jew’. The reader can judge for themselves:

Dumas

One thing is for certain, and that is that ‘man’ does not appear in that sentence, whilst it would appear from a look at his writing that the j, e and w match that word letter for letter. If anyone else has another suggestion I am more than happy to hear it. Quite why Lambert felt the need to be so creative one can only imagine.

Leveson can of course mean ‘Son of Levi’, but in this case Dumas was wide of the mark: Arthur Leveson’s parents had married in 1860 in the Parish church of Savenake, Wiltshire, and his father Edward had become a Freemason in 1857.

As to Dumas, his diary is informative but one can tell he had an unpleasant side. On 4 August we find him writing ‘there is a notice in Prince Louis’ office that no telephone message is to be sent to his house because he has German servants though it doesn’t say so’. The German-born Admiral His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg was First Sea Lord at the time, and despite having been a British subject for over 40 years at this point was accused of holding pro-German sympathies. The innuendo in Dumas’ writing is as thick as a knife.

Quite Interesting, Quite Misleading

Bridge
Cyprian Bridge, a Naval Cadet of the 1850s.

And so, more Fake News! This time from QI, who tweeted on Wednesday:

Sadly, this is completely misleading. The ‘entrance exam for the Royal Navy’ is ridiculously vague. In the 1850s there were seven types of officer one could enter the Navy as (Military Branch, Masters’ line, Accountant, Medical, Engineer, Naval Instructor, Chaplain). This is to ignore the entry requirements for the lower deck. We will presume that the reference is to Naval Cadets of the Military Branch, the boys who were destined to one day command ships and fleets, and also the most numerous class of officer. Now to establish the entry requirements, which were divided into academic and medical, for two entrance examinations, not the one stated in the tweet.

Academic

The academic requirements from 1849 to 1857 remained the same, and exceedingly short (and also covered the medical!):

They must be in good health, fit for Service, and able to write English from dictation, and must be acquainted with the first four Rules of Arithmetic, Reduction, and the Rule of Three.

In 1857, with the introduction of a training ship (forerunner to today’s Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth), the requirements became more involved:

  1. To write English from Dictation, and in a legible hand.

  2. To read, translate, and parse an easy passage either from a Latin or French author.

N.B.—The aid of a Dictionary will be allowed for these Translations.

And to have a satisfactory knowledge of

  1. The leading facts of Scripture and English history.
  2. Modern Geography, in so far as relates to a knowledge of the principal Countries, Capitals, Mountains, and Rivers. To be able to point out the position of a place on a map when its Latitude and Longitude is given.
  3. Arithmetic, including Proportion, and a fair knowledge of Vulgar and Decimal Fractions.
  4. Algebra, including Fractions.
  5. The First Book of Euclid to Proposition XXXII. inclusive.

Candidates above the age of 14, in addition to the Examination required for those between the ages of 13 and 14, must have a knowledge of:

  1. The use of the Globes, with correct definitions of Latitude, Longitude, Azimuth, Amplitude, and the other Circles of the Sphere.
  2. Vulgar and Decimal Fractions.
  3. Algebra, including Simple Equations.
  4. The First Book of Euclid.
  5. A practical knowledge of the Elements of Plane Trigonometry, and its application to the Numerical Solution of Easy and Useful Problems.

As Drawing will prove a most useful qualification for Naval Officers, it is recommended that Candidates for the Service should be instructed therein.

Now, what did Naval Cadets who went through the ordeal say? The Honourable Edmund Fremantle was ‘asked to write a few lines of dictation’. Cyprian Bridge realled, ‘We had to write from dictation about a passage which in print would probably have taken up some twenty or thirty lines’. Evelyn Wood (who later left the Navy for the Army and became a Field Marshal) had to listen to a ‘half page from the Spectator’ and write it down.

This myth probably stems from Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher who claimed ‘all the entrance examination I had to pass was write out the Lord’s Prayer, do a rule of three sum and drink a glass of sherry!’. No mention of chairs, and he also had to do maths and drink!

Medical

The medical strictures were simple all through the 1850s. As we have seen, from 1849 to 1857 the candidate had to ‘be in good health, fit for Service’. In the 1857 regulations this became:

The candidate must be in good health and fit for the Service, that is, free from impediment of speech, defect of vision, rupture, or other physical inefficiency.

In 1851 it had been decreed that ‘The Medical Examination is to be conducted by such Naval Surgeon as the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth may direct.’ Now let us see what the various memoirists made of it. Cecil Sloane-Stanley recalled ‘I was made to cough and jump and perform various athletic movements for the doctor’s edification in a state of complete nudity’. The Honourable Victor Montagu had to undress and ‘was put through various exercises’. And then we come to James Gambier.

If the medical examination had not been a farce, of course I should never have got into the Service, for I was so short-sighted that I knew no one across a dinner-table. But the examining doctor, a beetle-browed, frowsy old Scotchman, satisfied himself in respect of our sight by spreading out his fingers within about ten inches of our noses. Then he jammed a finger alternately into each ear and, roaring in the other, asked if we could hear. I said I could hear quite plainly. After this he banged each boy separately in the back, and then, producing from a cupboard a thing like a fog-horn, listened to our breathing. Finally he started us all racing round the room and skipping over the backs of chairs—an amusing spectacle—all of us naked as we were born. That ended the examination, and we were pronounced fit to serve the Queen.

That Gambier was accepted despite severe short-sightedness suggests that the surgeon was less than competent, which may explain the jumping and hither and thither he and other candidates were subjected to.

Conclusions

There was no single entrance examination for Naval Cadets. It did not necessarily involve writing out the Lord’s Prayer, nor jumping over chairs, neither of which at the same time, nor was it confined to anything like these two activities. Could a candidate be made to do either of them? Evidently so. Was it the norm or was it prescribed? Evidently not. Quite interesting, but also quite misleading.

The Introduction of the Rank of Sub-Lieutenant

A tweet from the interesting account @OnthisdayRN on Twitter this morning makes the following claim with regard to the introduction of the rank of Sub-Lieutenant:

The problem with this tweet is that it is inaccurate on two important counts:

  • The rank of Mate was replaced by that of Sub-Lieutenant on 16 April 1861. The change was made in an order in council of that date concerning relative rank, and then promulgated in circular No. 462 of 7 May 1861. Sadly the original paperwork on the introduction of the rank does not seem to have survived in Admiralty papers at The National Archives, although there is a May 1861 docket concerning who had been given commissions as Sub-Lieutenant by that point.
  • The change from a single ¼-inch stripe of braid to a ½-inch stripe of lace was made on 26 March 1863 in an Admiralty memorandum (No. 32. E.) of that date (copy in TNA, ADM 1/5832). This is when Lieutenants, Commanders and Captains ‘shipped an extra ring’.

Neither of these events took place on 16 May 1863 as the tweet claims. As the saying goes, ‘A lie is half way around the world while the truth is putting on its trousers.’ The tweet by @OnthisdayRN is surely no lie, but it certainly has gained traction whilst the truth no doubt will not. The account owner must be aware of their error by now but has not moved to correct it. Certainly the Captain of Britannia Royal Naval College, Jolyon Woodard, should have been aware of the inaccuracy of the tweet after yours truly pointed it out, yet chose to endorse it by replying to it.

When Historians Mislead: Part II

Vernon
H.M.S. Vernon, the home of torpedo training, in 1896.

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.

When Historians Mislead: Part I

HMS HINDUSTAN-1-DARTMOUTH-HMS BRITANNIA TO RIGHT-TB
Hindostan and Britannia at Dartmouth.

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.

Too Many Tweets Make a …

WWIIOn 27 July Dan Snow, well-known TV personality, published a startling tweet on Twitter:

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The validity of the comparison to one side, Snow’s figures were completely and utterly wrong. If we ignore the vagueness of ‘1914’ and take the British declaration of war against Germany as our starting point, the historian is blessed with detailed figures presented to Parliament by the First Lord of the Admiralty in 1919. At the outbreak of war the Royal Navy had 648 warships, as well as 12 in the Auxiliary Patrol, and 97 other auxiliary vessels, which gives a total of 757. At the Armistice the Royal Navy had 1,354 warships, 3,727 vessels in the Auxiliary Patrol Service, and 570 auxiliary vessels, for a total of 5,651. Not much more, one notes, than the figure of 5,300 claimed for 1914!

Snow subsequently claimed that the figure came from the ‘historical branch guys at Dartmouth’, i.e. Britannia Royal Naval College. One can hardly blame the man for accepting their total if he was referring to archival staff at the college. It is staggering however that they gave him such wildly inaccurate information in the first place. Later that day Snow was gracious enough to post a correction, using an image provided by me:

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But as one can see, its nominal reach was minuscule compared to the original: 15 retweets and 69 likes as opposed to 311 and 543 respectively. Given that Snow has 190,000 followers it is more than likely that thousands of people will have seen the incorrect figure of 5,300 ships, posted in the early afternoon. By the same token it is fair to assume that fewer will have seen his correction tweeted at 11.22 at night.

This little episode reinforces my belief that any historian, be they popular, amateur, or academic, has a responsibility to be as accurate as possible. This does not apply just to Snow (who should have double-checked his information before publishing it) but whoever gave him the figure in the first place. How many people will now have that figure of 5,300 imprinted on their brain, ‘because the guy off the TV said it’? Even if it is one, that is one too many.

Corrected: Lamentable lapse in grammar spotted by Jonathan Boff.