Tag: naval-history

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!

‘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.