Category: Wikipedia

Inquest in the Snug

And now, for something completely different. My attention was drawn yesterday to a 2023 lecture from the then Chief Coroner of England and Wales, Thomas Teague, K.C., who said:

Now, you will find it confidently asserted by various authorities that it was abolished by the Coroners Act of 1887. That is not so. The 1887 Act was completely silent about it. The earliest prohibition I have been able to find is contained in section 21 of the Licensing Act 1902, which forbade coroners to use public houses for inquests ‘where other suitable premises have been provided’. Section 21 was repealed in 1910 and I cannot trace any successor to it, raising the tantalising possibility that there currently exists no legal prohibition – not even a qualified one – against holding inquests in pubs. If so, it occurs to me that I might, perhaps, consider issuing some measured guidance on the topic.

Section 21 read:

From and after the thirty-first day of March one thousand nine hundred and seven, no meeting of justices in petty or special sessions shall be held in premises licensed for the sale of intoxicating liquors, or in any room, whether licensed or not, in any building licensed for the sale of intoxicating liquors; nor shall any coroner’s inquest be held on such licensed premises, where other suitable premises have been provided for such inquest.

It was indeed repealed by the Licensing (Consolidation) Act, 1910, so Teague’s claim that ‘Section 21 was repealed in 1910’ was accurate. Unfortunately, he apparently did not read the rest of the act, as section 83 reads:

No meeting of justices in petty or special sessions shall be held in licensed premises, or in any room, whether licensed or not, in any building licensed for the sale of intoxicating liquors; nor shall any coroner’s inquest be held on any such licensed premises where other suitable premises have been provided for the inquest.

The qualified prohibition was copied nearly word for word in 1910 act! And thanks to the wonder of Google Books, one finds a similar section in the Licensing Act, 1953:

157.—(1) Licensed premises, or a room in a building part of which is licensed premises, shall not be used as a petty-sessional court-house or an occasional court-house.

(2) A general annual licensing meeting or transfer sessions or special sessions shall not be held in licensed premises or in any such room as aforesaid.

(3) A coroner’s inquest shall not be held in licensed premises or in any such room as aforesaid if any other suitable place is provided.

Section 157 subsection 3 was not amended or repealed by the Licensing Act, 1961 (but subsections 1 and 2 were). The Licensing Act 1964, section 190, subsection 3, reads:

A coroner’s inquest shall not be held in licensed premises or in a room in a building part of which is licensed premises, if any other suitable place is provided.

The 1964 act was repealed in its entirety by the Licensing Act 2003, schedule 7. I don’t know if the holding of inquests in licensed premises was specifically barred or qualified by another piece of legislation, but it would seem that the qualified permission granted by previous acts has definitely disappeared. It is fascinating to note that magistrates were barred from holding sessions on licensed premises by 31 March 1907 at the latest!

‘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!

‘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.

‘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’!).

‘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.

‘It was found’

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

Once more unto the Wikipedia breach, dear friends. Looking at my watchlist the other day, an edit to SMS Baden caught my eye so I had a little browse (I must have edited it long ago). This paragraph intrigued me:

The gunnery school HMS Excellent ran loading trials on the main battery guns. It was found that the guns could be prepared to fire in 23 seconds, 13 seconds faster than in the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships.[28] The ship’s watertight bulkhead and underwater protection systems also particularly interested the inspection team; they paid close attention to the ship’s pumping and counter-flooding equipment.[34] Commander W M Phipps Hornby, who lived on board Baden for weeks during the examination, wrote to the naval historian Arthur Marder in 1969 that it was his “considered opinion—which I know coincided with that of others engaged on the same job—that, considered as a fighting machine, anyhow on balance the Baden was markedly in advance of any comparable ship of the Royal Navy”.[35]

I have been looking a lot at gun-loading times recently for my book, so the claim that the Baden class had a swifter loading cycle interested me. Naturally, however, I never trust a source implicitly. So, I followed footnote 28 to the late Bill Schleihauf’s article on ‘The Baden Trials’ in Warship 2007. He wrote:

Subsequently, the gunnery school HMS Excellent ran trials of the loading arrangements in Baden’s 15in turrets (23 seconds from firing to ready-to-fire vs 36 seconds in Queen Elizabeth) and ignited full 15in propellant charges in the gunhouses of ‘B’ and ‘X’ turrets to test the anti-flash arrangements.6

Note 6 reads, ‘CB1594 Progress in Gunnery Material 1921, (TNA, ADM 186/251), pp. 42-45.’ Let’s see what this actually says:

37. Loading Trials in ‘Baden’s’ 38 cm. Turret.–Loading trials have been carried out by H.M.S. ‘Excellent.’ These trials confirmed the loading times obtained from Germany.
The following table shows the comparative loading times for ‘Baden’ and ‘Queen Elizabeth.’
Times in gun-house only are shown.

The underlined text was surprisingly omitted by Schleihauf, and is a rather important qualifier. The times in the table add up to the same 23 and 36 second times give by him, and is immediately followed by the statement:

It should be noted that gun-house times do not necessarily govern the rate of continuous fire.
While generally, the cycle in magazines and shell rooms of ‘Baden’ and ‘Queen Elizabeth’ corresponds with that of gun-house, the rate of continuous fire would probably depend upon shell-room supply in the latter and an additional 3 seconds would be required in superimposed turrets of ‘Baden’ for main cage cycle.

This comparison is therefore based on only one part of the turret and loading cycle. Wikipedia’s claim that ‘that the guns could be prepared to fire in 23 seconds’ is therefore clearly not the whole story.

The sentence on ‘ship’s watertight bulkhead and underwater protection systems’ demands no comment, apart from the fact that technically the section of the source, a 16 March 1921 paper given by Goodall to the Institution of Naval Architects printed as ‘The Ex-German Battleship Baden’, dealing with this can be said to begin on page 22 and not page 23.

Now we turn to the Hornby quote, taken from Arthur Marder’s From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, volume V, p. 311. The passage in question is a footnote:

The D.N.C. and other Admiralty experts, having made a careful examination of the raised Baden, concluded (1921) that in the principal features of design they had little to learn from their late enemy. This was going a mite too far. Commander W. M. Phipps Hornby, who lived on board the Baden for weeks, employed on salving her, got to know her internal arrangements as well as those of his own ship, the Ramillies. It is his ‘considered opinion-which I know coincided with that of others engaged on the same job-that, considered as a fighting machine, anyhow on balance the Baden was markedly in advance of any comparable ship of the Royal Navy.’ Perhaps, as he suggests, the D.N.C. and others unconsciously were loath to concede that the young German Navy had much to teach them. Commander Phipps Hornby’s memorandum for the author, June 1969.

Using final ranks without qualification is always an invidious practice, as the reader may infer that with higher rank comes greater experience. When examining the Baden in 1919, Phipps Hornby had been a Lieutenant for roughly a year. Specialising in torpedo duties, he was automatically promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Commander in 1925 after eight years. After nearly seven years as a Lieutenant-Commander, almost out of the promotion zone (he had repeatedly not been recommended, and was considered to lack leadership qualities), he retired in 1932 at his own request. His promotion to Commander on the Retired List came automatically upon reaching the age of 40. It’s also worth noting that he was directly involved in the mutiny of a Royal Fleet Reserve battalion employed during a strike at Newport in 1921 which ended the career of Captain Edward C. Kennedy (funnily enough not mentioned in his Wikipedia article), father of the late Sir Ludovic Kennedy. As to the veracity of Hornby’s claims, I’ve looked through the relevant part of Marder’s personal papers at the University of California, Irvine (specifically Box 3, folders for May and June 1969) and found no trace of this memorandum, despite there being a number of letters from Hornby to Marder, who was very fond of relying on decades-old recollections for his writing, regardless of their accuracy. As shown in that single footnote quoted, it takes a courageous (Yes, Minister fans take note) historian to take the word of a septuagenarian junior officer over the considered opinions of contemporary qualified naval architects.

And so, courtesy of flawed secondary sources, a single Wikipedia paragraph is equally flawed and misleading.

The Hunt for Red Plagiarist

Screenshot from 2 March 2022.

Back at the end of February I was idly looking at the talk page for the Wikiproject Military History when my eye spotted “HMS Topaze (1903)” amongst the pages being reviewed as a “Good Article nominee”. The criteria for a Good Article are that it should be:

  • Well written.
  • Verifiable with no original research.
  • Broad in its coverage.
  • Neutral.
  • Stable.
  • Illustrated, if possible.

As I do with any page, article or book I immediately looked at the notes and sources. I was surprised, therefore, to see “‘Fire Control in H.M. Ships’. The Technical History and Index: Alteration in Armaments of H.M. Ships During the War. 3 (23). 1919.” Note 3, “Fire Control in H.M. Ships 1919, p. 29.”, allegedly supporting the claim “The ship was equipped with voice pipes but no formal fire control system or range finder.” The reasons I was surprised were:

  1. Generally speaking the only place that you will find a volume of The Technical History and Index (TH&I), an Admiralty history on technical matters published in parts (list here) after the First World War, is in an archive (my copies come from The National Archives and the National Maritime Museum), so this automatically qualifies as original research and violates the Good Article criteria.
  2. Alteration in Armaments of H.M. Ships During the War was not part of the series title but the name of another part of the TH&I.

I checked p. 23 of both “Fire Control in H.M. Ships” and “Alteration in Armaments of H.M. Ships During the War” and there was nothing to do with Topaze on these pages. So not only was the article apparently relying on original research, but that research couldn’t even be verified! Automatic Good Article fail.

Why would someone invent a source, I wondered? How could they even invent a source like this? There aren’t that many publications which even use the TH&I, and certainly not with regard to specific ships. And then it hit me, as it should have from the beginning. I co-edit a website on fire control! One of the few places on the internet which uses the TH&I! Topaze was a member of the Gem class of cruisers, so I looked at The Dreadnought Project’s entry for the class. There are several sources given in the Armament section:

  1. Admiralty Weekly Orders. 28 Feb, 1913. The National Archives. ADM 182/4.
  2. The Technical History and Index, Vol. 3, Part 23. p. 29.
  3. Handbook for Fire Control Instruments, 1909. Plate 53.
  4. Handbook for Fire Control Instruments, 1909. p. 51, Plate 53.
  5. Handbook for Fire Control Instruments, 1914. p. 67.
  6. Handbook for Fire Control Instruments, 1909. p. 51.
  7. absent from list in Handbook of Capt. F.C. Dreyer’s Fire Control Tables, p. 3.
  8. Handbook for Fire Control Instruments, 1914. p. 67.
  9. Handbook for Fire Control Instruments, 1909. p. 51.

It would take all these sources, and nearly a dozen paragraphs, to support the claim in the Wikipedia article that “The ship was equipped with voice pipes but no formal fire control system or range finder.” Not just one single source (see note 2) which technically does not support it.

Initially I thought this was a new phenomenon, but I checked the user’s contributions to be sure. Take, for example, HMS Teazer (1917). Created in February 2017, information on fire control was added in September 2018. “Fire control included a single Dumaresq and a Vickers range clock.” Source? “‘Fire Control in H.M. Ships’. The Technical History and Index: Alteration in Armaments of H.M. Ships during the War. 3 (23): 31. 1919.” Let’s look at The Dreadnought Project page on the “R” class destroyer (1916), last edited in April 2018. The notes for the fire control section are:

  1. The Technical History and Index, Vol. 3, Part 23. p. 31.
  2. Progress in Naval Gunnery, 1914-1918. p. 35.
  3. The Technical History and Index, Vol. 3, Part 23. pp. 31, 32.

In this case the user has actually used the correct footnote to support the text, whilst still using the made up series title. In fact, if one used that title in the Wikipedia search engine one got 81 results. 81 articles containing a useless source covering up the use of material from The Dreadnought Project without attribution over the course of several years. This is infuriating, as at the bottom of every single page is the notice: “Content is available under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 unless otherwise noted.” This states:

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.

On 1 March I wrote on the user in question’s talk page:

Dear #####. It would appear that since 2018 at the latest and up to the present time you have been copying fire control information from The Dreadnought Project and incorporating it into Wikipedia articles without attribution, whilst at the same time citing (often inaccurately and incompletely) our primary source references. This practice needs to stop. We don’t mind our work being used on this website so long as it is properly attributed to The Dreadnought Project. Nor, for that matter, does WP:MILHIST. Regards,

The user’s response? To delete the offending details on the Topaze page (so now there are 80 articles with the bogus sourcing, see image from 2 March at top) and to reply:

Please WP:AGF as I meant no harm. Thank you for your feedback. I am always learning and appreciate any help. I would be honoured if you would edit the references where I am in the wrong so that they are from the correct verified sources. I hope you enjoy Wikipedia.

AGF is “Assume Good Faith”. They meant no harm, but apparently thought that plagiarising the fruit of others’ work, badly, was quite alright. It was also very nice of them to suggest that I edit dozens of pages to fix their mischief. The problem rapidly solved itself, however. Rather than properly utilise The Dreadnought Project as a source for fire control details, the user simply deleted every offending reference to the made up source, including the text it supported. By 3 March the number featuring it was already down to 39, by 4 March to 19, and by 7 March it was eight. Now there are none, which is a shame in a way because it robs many Wikipedia articles of some much-needed detail.

The state of play on 7 March, 2022.