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 Biographyentry 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.
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.”
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.
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’!).
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!
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.
Jack Gwillim as Captain Edward Parry in The Battle of the River Plate (1956).
When the actor Jack Gwillim died in 2001 a couple of obituaries mentioned his service in the Royal Navy prior to his career on stage and screen. The Telegraph wrote that ‘In 1946 he was invalided out of the Navy as a commander, having been the youngest of that rank at the time of his promotion.’ The Guardiandeclaimed ‘In 1946, he was invalided out of the service with arthritis while a commander, the youngest of that rank at the time of his promotion.’
There are two grave errors in this, one more serious than the other. Gwillim was never a Commander per se, he was a Commander (S), which matters in the days before the General List of the 1950s. He had joined the Navy as a Paymaster Cadet and served in the Accountant Branch. Until 1944 all its ranks were prefixed ‘Paymaster’, at which point they were suffixed (S), to distinguish them from their Executive Branch counterparts.
The other error is fascinating. Gwillim was promoted to the rank of Commander (S) on 30 June 1945 at the age of 35 years 6 months 15 days. Seven other Lieutenant-Commanders (S) were promoted in the same batch. I have been able to find the dates of birth of five of those officers. Four of them were born in 1910, and therefore younger than Gwillim! Where do these fake facts come from? The similarity of the Telegraph and Guardian‘s claims shows that no one thought once to check it.
And now for something completely different. In his 1959 official life of Queen Mary (great grandmother of the present King), helpfully entitled Queen Mary, 1867-1953, James Pope-Hennessy repeatedly referred to Queen Louise of Denmark (great great great grandmother of the King) as ‘Droning Louise’, eight times in all. Fast forward 60 years, and Pope-Hennessy’s research for the book was edited by Hugo Vickers and published in 2018 as The Quest for Queen Mary. In the introduction Vickers wrote:
Pope-Hennessy had to face Sir Owen Morshead, whose knowledge of Danish was clearly limited, asking him whether it was really necessary to describe Queen Louise of Denmark as ‘Droning Louise’ – he wondered if this was an adjective ‘denoting a silly old droner’. Pope-Hennessy was obliged to explain to Morshead that that was the Danish for Queen.
This was so entertaining that Ysenda Maxtone Graham repeated it in her review of the book for The Times:
Vickers has an ear for the hilarious. In his introduction he describes the lengthy process of censoring that Pope-Hennessy’s draft biography had to go through before it was passed for publication. Sir Owen Morshead, the royal librarian, was worried by Pope-Hennessy’s referring to Queen Louise of Denmark as ‘Droning Louise’. ‘He wondered if this was an adjective “denoting a silly old droner”. Pope-Hennessy was obliged to explain to Morshead that Droning was in fact Danish for queen.’
All very clever. Except that the Danish for Queen is in fact Dronning.
I eagerly await my usual 100 Guinea fee for correcting stupid errors, payable either by the Palace, HarperCollins or Hachette UK.
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 asafightingmachine, 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.
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 hisWikipedia 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.
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