Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  H.M.S. Britannia had not yet been established as a school for cadets, and in 1854 boys accepted by the navy went directly to sea on a warship to learn by doing. Fisher’s assignment was to Calcutta, then in port at Plymouth. Fisher traveled to Plymouth, where he called on the port admiral, his sponsor, Sir William Parker, whom he had never met. Parker invited the boy to dinner, “but I told him I thought48 I had better get on board my ship.... [Sir William] was amused and told me to dine and sleep at his house. He told me all about Lord Nelson whom he had served under a great many years. Only his wife was at dinner—he wore tiny little epaulettes at dinner and the next morning he sent me off to my ship... as I stepped on board I had a bucket of salt water over my feet. They were holystoning decks and the white-haired First Lieutenant, with his trousers turned up above his knees and no shoes or stockings, roared at me like a Bull of Bashan and afterwards gave me an orange.... The oldsters among my messmates all had white hair.... They had been all their lives in a Midshipman’s berth—they were failures. Our ship had the failures as the Captain had been tried by Court Martial in his last ship for cruelty—he had flogged all his crew.”

  Fisher had entered on a stern life. “The day I joined49 as a little boy, I saw eight men flogged—and I fainted at the sight,” he was to write. He found that he suffered from seasickness, which continued to plague him all his life. The food was still Old Navy: maggoty biscuits, foul water. “Whenever you took a bit50 of biscuit to eat,” he remembered, “you always tapped it edgeways on the table to let the ‘grown-ups’ get away.... A favorite amusement was to put a bit of this biscuit on the table and see how soon all of it would walk away.... The water was nearly as bad as the biscuit. It was turgid, it was smelly, it was animally.”

  Calcutta was an old, second-rate ship-of-the-line with two gundecks and eighty-four smoothbore muzzle-loading cannon mounted in broadside array. She had been in reserve and was being recommissioned for service in the war with Russia when Fisher boarded. In June 1855, she sailed for the Baltic, where an Anglo-French fleet was blockading Russian ports on the Gulf of Finland. Without an engine, however, she was useless and on arrival she had to be towed into the anchorage by a paddle-wheel steam gunboat. After two months, the Admiral rid himself of her by sending her home. The following March, Fisher joined his second ship, Agamemnon, at Constantinople, where she was anchored after serving with the Allied fleet off the Crimea. Once again, Fisher arrived too late for action, and when peace was declared his ship was used as a troop carrier to return soldiers to England.

  Up to this point, Fisher’s short naval career had provided him with little excitement. Then, on July 12, 1856, he was promoted from cadet to midshipman and embarked in the twenty-one-gun steam corvette Highflyer. At fifteen, he was about to enter five colorful years on the China Station.

  Highflyer’s captain was Charles F. A. Shadwell, whom Fisher later described as “about the greatest saint51 on earth. The sailors called him, somewhat profanely, ‘Our Heavenly Father.’ He was once heard to say ‘Damn’ and the whole ship was upset.... He always had the Midshipmen to breakfast with him, and when we were seasick he gave us champagne and gingerbread nuts.... His sole desire for fame was to do good, and he requested that when he died he should be buried under an apple tree so that people might say, ‘God bless old Shadwell!’ He never flogged a man in his life.”

  Saintly Captain Shadwell was especially fond of young Jack Fisher. Shadwell was fascinated by astronomy, had published works on the subject, and, in consequence, had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Alone with this unusual interest among naval officers on the China Station, he seized the opportunity to pass it along to this lively midshipman. “He was always teaching me52 in his own cabin,” Fisher remembered. “He taught me all I know [on the subject]. I could predict eclipses and occultations and play with the differential calculus through him.”

  Shadwell also gave Fisher a lesson on style in command. In June 1857, Highflyer joined in an attack on hundreds of pirate junks on the Canton River. When the Chinese abandoned their junks to flee across the rice paddies, a British landing party swarmed in pursuit. Under heavy fire, Fisher recalled, “our captain [Shadwell] stood on the river bank53 (everyone else took shelter). I shall never forget it. He was dressed in a pair of white trousers, yellow waistcoat, a blue tail coat with brass buttons, and a tall white hat with a gold stripe on the side... and he was waving a white umbrella to encourage us... to go for the enemy.”

  The following spring, attacking a network of Chinese forts at the mouth of the Pei-ho River in North China, Captain Shadwell and the British China Squadron suffered a bloody defeat. The river mouth was barred by heavy chains strung between iron stakes, this apparatus being covered by the guns of the forts. Bombardment of the forts had little effect, while the British gunboats were badly hit. In Plover, the flagship, twenty-six of thirty-six men on board were killed or wounded, including the Admiral, who had part of his thigh shot away. A landing party, Fisher among them, was sent ashore to try to seize and silence the guns by assault. Crossing a wide flat of soft mud, the British sailors and marines were caught by heavy, accurate fire. “You sank up to your knees54 at least every step,” said Fisher. “They had horrid fire-balls firing at us.... I saw one poor fellow with his eye and part of his face burnt right out. If a piece struck you, it stuck to you and burnt you away till it was all gone.” In the slaughter on the mud flat and aboard the ships, 89 men were killed and 345 wounded. “I never smelt55 such a horrid smell in my life as... bringing the wounded out [to the ships]. Abaft the mainmast it was nothing but blood and men rolling about with arms and legs off.” When the sun came up another horror met British eyes. During the night, the Chinese had come down from the forts to the mud flat “and hauled what fellows they could find56 out of the mud, cut off their heads, and stuck them on the walls.”

  Captain Shadwell was wounded in the action by a musket ball which lodged in his foot. A series of operations was performed, the last emergency surgery for a burst artery. “They had not time57 to give him chloroform,” Fisher reported, “so you can fancy the agony the poor old gentleman endured, and the old fellow said quite innocently afterwards, ‘Well, Fisher! I am afraid I made a great deal of noise this morning.’” Eventually, it was decided to invalid Captain Shadwell back to England. “We are all very, very sorry,”58 said Fisher. “He doesn’t like leaving the ship at all. He says perhaps someone will succeed him that doesn’t understand the boys and won’t know how to bring us up.” Before leaving, Shadwell gave Fisher a pair of his own studs carrying his family motto, “Loyal au mort,”59 which Fisher wore until he died sixty years later. And when the Admiral came to see Shadwell off and asked what he could do to be helpful, Shadwell pointed to Fisher and said, “Take care of that boy!”60

  In March 1860, Fisher was promoted to acting lieutenant and in June he went aboard Furious, a sixteen-gun wooden paddle-wheel sloop. Within two weeks, Fisher was writing: “She [Furious] is such a horrid old tub...61 and Oliver Jones, the Captain... is an awful scoundrel. There has been one mutiny on board her already.” Years later, looking back, Fisher broadened his first impression: “[He was] Satanic...62 for like Satan, he could disguise himself as an angel.... He told me that he had committed every crime except murder... [but he was] fascinating... he had such charm, he was a splendid rider, a wonderful linguist, an expert navigator, and a thorough seaman.... This man led me a dog’s life... he used to send me up to the maintop in my tailcoat and epaulettes after I had been dining with him... he being ‘three sheets in the wind’ as the sailors say. He was a rich man and had unparalleled champagne and a French chef. He might tyrannize us but he fed us.”

  Captain Jones hated higher authority, but he insisted on absolute obedience to himself. Ordered to leave the Gulf of Pechili (now Po Hai) in North China before winter set in, he deliberately remained behind until his ship was seized and held fast in drifting ice. Then, with the temperature below zero, Jones decreed battle drill at four A.M.
with shot passed up to the guns and all the yards and topmasts struck. Grumbling ensued among the officers as well as the men; indeed, said Fisher, “I believe I was the only officer63 he did not put under arrest.” Nevertheless, on this captain so very different from the saintly Shadwell, Jacky Fisher managed to make his mark. When the twenty-year-old acting lieutenant left his ship, Captain Jones wrote of him: “As a sailor, an officer,64 a Navigator, and a gentleman, I cannot praise him too highly.”

  By the time Furious reached England in August 1861, Fisher had spent five years in China, served in five ships, risen from naval cadet to acting lieutenant, and marked himself among his superiors as an exceptional young officer. Once home, he scored brilliantly in the examinations required to confirm his permanent lieutenant’s commission and then was reassigned to the Navy’s Gunnery School aboard H.M.S. Excellent. Excellent, an old, mastless three-decker moored in Portsmouth Harbor, focussed primarily on gunnery, but it was also a research center where innovative officers attempted to adapt developing technology to use in naval warfare. Fisher managed, over the next twenty-five years of his career, to spend four tours of duty totalling fifteen years in this elite establishment, leaving it finally as commanding officer. On board Excellent and her sister H.M.S. Vernon, moored nearby, which Fisher developed into an independent torpedo school, he worked out systems and tactics with modern breech-loading guns and different types of torpedos. Here was the core of the navy, not aboard the far-flung ships where tradition, seniority, and brightwork ruled with a lifeless hand.

  Fisher never laid ambition aside. During his first tour in Portsmouth, he spent his free afternoons walking the downs behind the base, shouting into the wind to develop a voice of command. Nor was he shy. “The Lords of the Admiralty65 were paying their annual visit to the... [Excellent],” an old seaman remembered, “and one of the Admirals was heard to remark, ‘Is this Lieutenant Fisher as good a seaman as he is a gunnery man?’ Lieutenant Fisher at once stepped forward and said..., ‘My Lords, I am Lieutenant Fisher, just as good a seaman as a gunnery man.’”

  In April 1863, after fourteen months on Excellent, Fisher became gunnery officer on H.M.S. Warrior, Britain’s first ironclad, then assigned to the Channel Fleet. Warrior, like Inflexible in 1882 and Dreadnought in 1906, was not only the most modern and powerful ship in the Fleet, but the forerunner of new ship designs for years to come; Fisher, by a blend of ability and luck, managed to connect himself with each of these pioneer vessels. Aboard the huge, black-hulled hybrid with her three towering masts and two funnels, Fisher commanded the battery of forty guns. Her captain was the able and respected Sir George Tyron, subsequently to become one of the most famous officers of the nineteenth-century Royal Navy. “She had a picked crew66 of officers and men, so I was wonderfully fortunate to be the Gunnery Lieutenant and at so young an age.” Fisher, still only twenty-two, was blissfully happy: “I got on very well except for skylarking in the wardroom,” which brought admonitory frowns to the face of Sir George Tyron. Fisher was exceedingly popular with his fellow officers, for good reason: “I never went ashore67 so all the other lieutenants liked me because I took the duty for them. One of them was like Nelson’s signal—he expected every man to do his duty.”

  When he left Warrior, Fisher returned to Excellent, where he remained five years as a gunnery instructor, switching just before his tour was up to torpedoes. He was fascinated by these new weapons. First introduced in stationary form (we would call them mines) during the American Civil War, they took advantage of the hydrostatic principle that an explosion under water against the side of a ship has more effect than a shell with the same explosive charge bursting on deck because the force of the explosion is compounded by water pressure and thus can punch a hole in the side of the ship. The first moving torpedoes were developed by a Briton, Robert Whitehead, working independently of all governments at Fiume on the Adriatic in the 1860s. Although Whitehead’s first primitive weapon traveled at only seven knots for a distance of only a few hundred yards and exploded only a few pounds of powder, Fisher was intrigued. His advocacy of the possibilities was not always enthusiastically supported. “A First Sea Lord told me68 that there were no torpedoes when he came to sea and he didn’t see why the devil there should be any of the beastly things now,” Fisher wrote later. He advised his lordship that a Whitehead torpedo, “costing only £500, would make a hole as big as His Lordship’s carriage (then standing at the door) in the bottom of the strongest and biggest ship in the world and she would go to the bottom in about five minutes.”

  Fisher’s recognition as a torpedo expert procured for him, in June 1869, a trip to Germany where, along with taking note of German developments in this field of weaponry, the twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant had lunch with King William I of Prussia (soon to become Emperor William I of Germany), the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the Prussian General Staff. The occasion was a ceremony inaugurating a small fishing village on the river Jade as a naval port for the new North German Confederation. The port, named Wilhelmshaven after the King-soon-to-be-Emperor, would later become the main base of the High Seas Fleet. Sitting at the table, Fisher spoke to the King and to Bismarck in English. Later, half jestingly, he said, “I never can make out why69 I didn’t get a German decoration. I think perhaps they thought me too young. However, I had the honor of an empty sentry box placed outside the little inn where I was staying; and if I had been of higher rank there would have been a sentry in it.”

  It was during his second tour in H.M.S. Excellent that Fisher married. The marriage was unusual in that he married young. Most Royal Navy lieutenants could not afford a wife; they married late or not at all. Nor did young women looking for husbands search with diligence among a group of men famous for their long absences at sea. Fisher’s passion and vitality simply overrode such objections, although when he married in 1866, he and his wife were both twenty-five.

  Frances Katherine Broughton, whom Fisher always called Kitty, was a Victorian maiden with a long neck and an oval face. She was of modest family: her father was a village rector and her two brothers were junior officers in the navy. Her goals in marriage were the same as her husband’s. During their engagement, she wrote to a cousin that “Jack would certainly7076 rise to the top” and that she had promised herself and him never to stand in his way. Through fifty years of marriage, she was faithful to her promise, remaining in the background, bringing up his children, a son and three daughters, during his years at sea. (Kitty cannot have complained too much; all three of her daughters married naval officers.) Fisher himself was deeply in love when he married and remained a devoted husband all his life. Although Kitty could not match him in either intellect or energy, his brimming high spirits never spilled over into infidelity—despite his rash boast to King Edward that he had ravished every virgin in London. (“Splendid,”7177 the King replied. “If true.”)

  Fisher’s next assignment was as commander (second-in-command) of the battleship Ocean, flagship of the China Station. He did not want to go; he was much happier living at home with Kitty and working at the torpedo school. In addition, China was far distant from the navy’s center stage. “The mere fact7278 of... [visiting] the Admiralty gives one a great lift, as one gets to know the bigwigs intimately,” he wrote to Kitty. “I feel quite sure that it is a most horrid mistake being so far away from England—one... gets forgotten.”

  The prolonged two-and-a-half-year absence from Kitty was painful for Fisher, and during these thirty months in the Far East, love and aching loneliness poured from his pen: “My own most darling Kitty...7379 I really do not think7480 there is any man and wife who have more perfect love for each other and trust in each other than we have.” “I think it must be true... that God in some mysterious manner does make man and wife one body in those cases in which their love for each other is pure.” “In 17 days7581 it will be two years since we said ‘goodbye.’... I never can again feel so miserable as I did then.” He also missed
his children and admonished her about their health: “Dorothy requires cod-liver oil.82 She dislikes fat and occasionally has little rough places on her face... signs showing that the child is wanting in fat. Cod liver oil is the way to put it into her.” Much of their correspondence was about religion, and Fisher lectured and urged her in her faith: “Mind, my own darling,83 that you do your very utmost to have Him always in your mind.” “I so often hope,84 my darling, that we may be able to make our children love our Savior with all their little hearts.” Kitty responded by sending him little prayers which she had written and which he was to repeat daily to ward off temptation. To Kitty, Jack confessed that he was not completely the serenely confident young man the world took him to be. He admitted that he delighted in his ability to stir the men or rouse the midshipmen, “but, my darling,85 this is just the point in which I am such an arrant imposter and take so many people in by my manner: really and truly, I’m a humbug.” He doubted his ability ever to learn a foreign language, a lack which would bar him from one avenue of advancement, the post of Naval Attaché at a foreign court: “I feel my want of French86 and German the more I think of it, and I almost despair of ever learning them.” As the long tour neared an end, he began to dream of being home: “Now, my darling, I must say good night87 as it’s past 10 p.m. and I have to be up at 4 a.m. What shall you say to my getting up at 4 a.m. every morning when I’m at home... but I daresay a week or two will soon get me back into those dear old habits of waking about 7:30 as on a Saturday morning and being down to breakfast at sharp 10!!! Eggs & bacon, hurrah...”

  Fisher found H.M.S. Ocean in Hong Kong in December 1870. His new home was an elderly wooden line-of-battle sailing ship with armor bolted on her sides, an auxiliary steam engine, and a broadside armament of muzzle-loaded guns. Fisher immediately got to work, and, applying lessons learned on Excellent, installed a system of electrical firing so that all the guns on each broadside could be fired simultaneously by the push of a button. Venerable Ocean thus became the first vessel in the Royal Navy with this advanced technology. Nor did Fisher neglect the traditional duties of a ship’s commander. Using his own brisk methods, he saw to it that the ship’s white superstructure and black hull always glistened with fresh paint. “Every man was provided88 with painting pots improvised out of bully tins,” recalled a member of the crew. “When the ship went into harbor... immediately after the anchor was dropped, the whole of both watches would... scramble over the ship’s side, and in half an hour the ship would be painted from stem to stern.”