After the maneuvers, while Wilson was still at Gibraltar, Fisher and his colleague locked themselves into a cabin to talk privately about war plans. “I believe in the various talks61 I had with Wilson that we have arranged for every eventuality in case of war and are in complete accord on every point,” Fisher wrote to Lord Selborne. “He has one copy, copied by himself from the one copy I made out in my own writing so no one will or ought to know our plans, except that they are in accord with the general principles laid down by the Admiralty.” (This policy, useful for preventing unauthorized leaks—other than those committed by Fisher himself in sharing his thoughts with the London press—would not have been helpful were either or both admirals to be rendered insensible early in war.)
In the spring of 1902, Fisher’s three-year command of the Mediterranean Fleet was coming to an end. It had been a great success—“Nearly everything62 I have asked for has been given eventually,” he wrote to his daughter—and Fisher was looking beyond. The Anglo-French colonial agreement had been signed, Entente was in the air, and, instead of worrying about the French fleet at Toulon and the French torpedo boats at Bizerte, Fisher was writing to England about the alarming growth of the German Navy. “Personally, I have always been63 an enthusiastic advocate for friendship and alliance with France.... The Germans are our natural enemies everywhere. We ought to be united with France and Russia.” He did not think his own future particularly bright. He was sixty-one in 1902 and although he had been promoted to the rank of full admiral while in the Mediterranean, he doubted that there was much prospect of higher office. “I am ‘tabooed’64 by the Admiralty... and in consequence the Mediterranean will probably be my last appointment,” he wrote to Arnold White. To Thursfield, he added: “I hear a syndicate65 of Admirals (mostly fossils) has been formed to prevent my future employment.” His best hope, he thought, was to be made Commander-in-Chief of one of the great naval bases like Devonport as a dignified stepping-stone to retirement. Already, he had written his son, Cecil, asking him to keep an eye out for “a few acres of land66 and nice cottage” near Bury St. Edmunds.
Lord Selborne, however, had other ideas. On February 9, 1902, he wrote to Fisher:
My dear Admiral:67
...You have several times pressed me to relieve you in the Mediterranean... [to] allow you to see if you cannot grow better cabbages than anyone else in a secluded English village. I am now going to take you at your word, only instead of growing cabbages I want you to come... and take Admiral Douglas’ place as Second Naval Lord.
...[In making this offer] I want to make an observation or two to obviate any possibility of misunderstanding in the future.... I make no promise as to your succeeding the present First Naval Lord when his time is up. I reserve complete freedom of choice of his successor for myself or my successor when the time comes.
My second point is that if we ever differ, as in the natural course of events we probably occasionally shall, no one off the Board must ever know of our differences. Each member of the Board has his eventual remedy in resignation, a remedy which a wise man reserves for some special occasion only. But so long as we do not resign, our solidarity to the service and world outside must be absolute.
Fisher was overjoyed and quite prepared to accept the discreet admonition from a man eighteen years his junior about his bad habit of running to the newspapers. “I think it shows68 an extraordinary Christian spirit on the part of Lord Selborne and the Admiralty to ask me to come and sit amongst them, after the way I have harassed them, blackguarded them and persecuted them for the last three years,” he wrote to his daughter. Writing his last letters from Malta, Fisher glowed with pride in his own accomplishments: “I feel very sad69 at leaving such a fine fleet, and so much increased since I joined it when practically we had only 8 battleships of an old type, and now we have practically 15 brand new ones. Then we had only 8 destroyers. Now we shall have practically 32, etc. etc. etc.... We had 53 vessels in all with us last time and it was a very goodly show.”
From a different quarter, that of the Foreign Office, came another favorable view of Fisher’s tenure as Commander-in-Chief. Writing to bid the Admiral farewell, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire wrote from Constantinople: “My object was to keep70 things as quiet as possible during the South African troubles and that I could follow this policy without any fear that it would be put down to timidity was in great measure due to the state of efficiency to which you had brought the Fleet in the Mediterranean and to the fact that foreign powers knew and fully understood this.”
Fisher’s accomplishment was best known and appreciated within the fleet. The week of his final departure from Malta was filled with testimonials. A dinner was given in his honor by the officers of the fleet; eight hundred asked to come and only 170 could be admitted because of the size of the hall. The governor gave a dinner, other admirals gave dinners, there was a dance on board Ramillies, and a dinner and smoking party aboard Renown for all fleet officers. “...They began singing71 ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘Goodbye Dolly Grey’ and then danced the ‘Lancers,’ Father with the old Chief Engineer of the Dockyard,” Fisher’s daughter wrote to her brother.
Fisher’s actual departure was done in bravura style. At noon, when a gun was fired, Renown slipped her mooring and steamed out of the Grand Harbor at sixteen knots “like a torpedo boat72 with the largest Admiral’s flag that has ever been flown.” As she passed beneath the ramparts, her own guns thundering out a salute to the Governor, Fisher caught sight of companies of soldiers running to line the ramparts in his honor. “As usual,73 they were all half an hour late,” he noted, “and we saw them all doubling up just as we were leaving the harbor. One does not wonder at South Africa when one sees every day the utter ineptitude of Military Officers.” Fisher’s daughter Beatrix watched her father go: “As we passed the ships74 they cheered over and over again, drowning the bands and [gun] salutes, ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ etc.—the soldiers on shore cheering too. You never saw anything so lovely as the Renown as she fired the parting salute to the Governor with the sun shining on the smoke.... They say over a thousand copies of Father’s photo were bought by bluejackets last week....”
In June 1902, Fisher returned to the Admiralty as Second Sea Lord.fn2 His province was personnel, and he focussed his attention on the selection and training of officers. Cadets were to be enrolled at twelve and thirteen as they had been in Fisher’s own youth half a century before, and not at fifteen as the practice had evolved in the later years of the nineteenth century. This change especially pleased the Prince of Wales,fn3 an old navy man. “You can’t get them too young,”76 he wrote approvingly to Fisher.
More controversial were Fisher’s attempts to break down the traditional barriers of social class that afflicted the navy. Jacky Fisher’s own origins had been as far down the social scale as the navy was likely to reach. Fisher wanted to deepen the pool. “Surely we are drawing77 our Nelsons from too narrow a class,” he said. “Let every fit boy have his chance, irrespective of the depth of his parents’ purse.” The new Second Lord also wanted to drop the bar between deck officers and engineer officers. Traditionally, the deck officers, who would advance to become captains and admirals, came from the upper levels of British society, while the engineer officers, who spent their lives in the bowels of the ships, came from the lesser classes. The two trained in separate schools and wore different uniforms. Only recently had engineer officers been permitted to enter and dine in the wardroom; still, they could never expect to command a ship.
Fisher’s plan was that all cadets, no matter what their social origins or eventual assignments, should receive the same education in seamanship and engineering. At twenty-two, on reaching the rank of lieutenant, an officer would specialize in engineering or deck. But an engineering officer would still be competent to stand watch on the bridge and a deck officer to take his turn watching gauges in the engine room. On reaching the rank of commander, all officers would drop their specialties and have equal opport
unity to proceed to higher command.
Fisher’s scheme stirred great resistance. Members rose in Parliament to protest the disgraceful proposal to send “our officers... down in the coal hole.”78 From the fleet came the story of the uppish deck officer who said to a chief engineer, “Look here, Brown,79 it doesn’t matter what rank the Admiralty like to give you, and I don’t care whether you walk in to dinner before me or after me. All I know, Brown, is that my Ma will never ask your Ma to tea.” The old admirals, whom Fisher dubbed “the Mandarins”80 and “the fossils,”81 fought hard. “They look on me,”82 he wrote to his son, “as a sort of combined Robespierre and Gambetta.” “My dear Walker,”83 he wrote to a friend, “I had no idea that admirals could be so rude to each other.”
But Fisher also had powerful support: from the King, the Prince of Wales, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, and the First Sea Lord. More important to him personally, he had the fervent backing of the abler young senior officers of the navy. “I have in my drawer84 letters from 24 Captains and Commanders, the very pick of the service, in favor of the scheme,” he wrote to Thursfield. “I prefer these 24 opinions of the coming admirals who are going to command our fleets and administer the Admiralty, to any 24 admirals now existing but who are passing away.”
As always, Fisher’s energy and appetite for work were phenomenal. When he could find nothing to do in his office, he walked the corridors with a placard hung around his neck proclaiming, “I HAVE NO WORK85 TO DO” or another commanding, “BRING ME SOMETHING TO SIGN.” He gave one of his rare public speeches at the banquet of the Royal Academy on May 2, 1903, managing in ten minutes to provide the audience with laughter and cheers, chaff the army, spill wine on the Secretary of State for War, and provide the nation with a pithy, oft-quoted phrase of reassurance about the navy. “On the British Navy86 rests the British Empire,” he declared. “Nothing else is of any use without it, not even the army.... No soldier of ours can go anywhere unless a sailor carries him there on his back.” Fisher emphasized this statement by a sweep of his arm which propelled a glass of port onto the immaculate white waistcoat of St. John Broderick, the Army Secretary, who was sitting next to him. Fisher rushed on in high spirits: “I am not disparaging the Army.... The Secretary for War particularly asked me to allude to the Army or else I would not have done it....” In conclusion, Fisher told his listeners to have confidence in the navy and the Admiralty, assuring them that “you may sleep quietly87 in your beds.” Afterwards, Fisher was elated by the reception he received. “The Lord Chief Justice88 [who sat on Fisher’s other side] told me that my speech was the best that had been delivered inside the walls of the Royal Academy.... The Prince of Wales was very delighted and cheered me like anything.... The Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. John Morley, Sir Ernest Cassel.... in fact, shoals of them came up to me afterwards and congratulated me.”
Command of the great naval base at Portsmouth, the senior command in the Royal Navy other than that of First Sea Lord, often served to prepare an officer for that ultimate post. On August 31, 1903, Fisher hoisted his flag in H.M.S. Victory as Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth. Here, his role was to preside over all the activities of the largest naval base, naval dockyard, and cluster of naval training schools in Great Britain. His duties included supervision of the training of naval cadets, of the naval gunnery and torpedo schools, and of the building and repair of ships in the dockyard. Fisher stepped beyond these official boundaries. It was during his brief (fifteen-month) tour at Portsmouth that he turned serious attention to submarines.
Fisher was already convinced that the torpedo was the naval weapon of the future. The problem was delivering the torpedo to the target. In 1903, the effective range of torpedoes was one thousand yards; any ship firing torpedoes had to close to that range. Fisher, as Director of Naval Ordnance in the 1880s, had worked to make that as difficult as possible for French torpedo boats attacking British warships. He installed quick-firing guns on the decks of Her Majesty’s ships which would blanket the Frenchmen in a barrage of fire. Later, he developed fast, anti-torpedo-boat vessels which could screen the heavy ships and keep torpedo boats out of range (he called these vessels destroyers). Between them, quick-firing guns and destroyers made surface torpedo attack almost impossible in daylight. And thus the importance of the submarine. Fisher, switching his perspective from defense to attack, realized that the underwater craft was a means of bringing torpedo launching tubes within range of major enemy warships in daylight.
When Fisher first looked into them, submarines were far from the deadly weapons they became in the two world wars. Lack of speed, limited radius of action and time underwater, restricted vision in daylight, and total blindness at night made them seem harmless, even risible. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford dismissed them as “Fisher’s toys.”89 As the potential of the undersea craft became more apparent, scorn was mingled with fear. The British Navy did not wish submarines to become effective. Britain had invested the safety of her islands and empire in surface sea power. Submarines could put battleships, and the huge sums invested in them, at risk. Submarines, grumbled the British admirals, were unmanly, unethical, and “un-English,”90 the weapon of cowards who refused to fight it out on the surface and should be banned from civilized warfare. Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet, so despised “this underhand method91 of attack” that he bade the Admiralty to announce publicly that all submarine crews captured in wartime would be treated as pirates and hanged.
Fisher saw things differently. It was true that the submarine was the weapon of the weaker power; it was true that he had worked to protect British surface sea power from all craft which could launch torpedoes; and it was true that he was working on plans for a giant new surface warship, a super battleship. But, as he saw it, Britain should disdain no new weapons. Submarines might be un-English, but if they could sink English battleships, they could also sink foreign battleships. Fisher’s objective was to send enemy ships to the bottom of the sea. He did not care whether the weapons that sent them there were cowardly, underhanded, or un-English; he only cared that they worked. If submarines could fire torpedoes into enemy warships, Britain should have submarines, and the more the better.
When Fisher arrived in Portsmouth, Captain Reginald Bacon had just been assigned to the newly created post of Inspecting Captain of Submarine Boats. Under the supervising guidance of the Commander-in-Chief, Bacon had been given the navy’s entire submarine force—six small boats—and instructed to experiment and develop tactics. Fisher and Bacon suited each other perfectly; the Admiral described the captain as “the cleverest officer92 in the Navy,” and Bacon later said of his patron, “The submarine was93 Lord Fisher’s child and his dynamic energy overrode all naval and departmental obstruction.”
Bacon’s officers and crews considered themselves an elite corps and, in fleet maneuvers in March 1904, they made a distinct impression. Their “enemy” was the Home Fleet, and they kept hitting Sir Arthur Wilson’s proud battleships and cruisers with so many unarmed torpedoes that umpires had to rule two of the surface ships “sunk”—which did not at all please “Tug” Wilson. (Unfortunately, one of Bacon’s submarines was rammed and sunk with all hands by a passing merchant ship, which had not been warned that an undersea craft might be lying beneath its bow.) The real lesson of the maneuvers, Bacon reported, was that the presence of submarines “exercised an extraordinary restraining influence94 on the operations” of a battle fleet: battleships always had to be accompanied by a large screen of destroyers. Fisher enthusiastically pronounced the submarines a huge success: “I don’t think95 it is even faintly realized the immense impending revolution which submarines will effect as offensive weapons of war.”
Fisher was looking far ahead. Essentially, until the outbreak of war in 1914, the submarine was still considered a defensive weapon, useful in defending harbors and coastlines in conjunction with mine fields, which they might one day replace. Submarines could establish a mobile defense and make th
e approach of enemy surface ships extremely hazardous. Strung across a narrow waterway, such as the Straits of Dover or the Strait of Gibraltar, a group of submarines could make passage by enemy ships almost impossible. Bacon was emphatic on the point: “The risks of allowing96 a large ship to approach such a port [defended by submarines] are so great that I unhesitatingly affirm that in wartime it should never be allowed.” This was the beginning of the end of the classic British naval strategy of close blockade of enemy ports. Faced with the likely presence of enemy submarines, British ships could not lie close off enemy harbors waiting to intercept enemy ships or squadrons which ventured out. Instead, the blockading fleet would have to withdraw over the horizon, maintaining only the thinnest screen of surveillance and then, when the alarm had sounded, come thundering up, surrounded, as Bacon had said, by clouds of destroyers to protect the big ships from the lurking submarines.
For four months in the autumn of 1903, Fisher sat on a panel whose assignment was to reorganize the British Army. The Boer War had revealed much bumbling in the army and, once the war was over, the Balfour government appointed a Royal Commission to find out what was wrong. Lord Esher was the chairman and Sir George Clarke and Sir John Fisher the other members. Fisher’s selection came as a not unpleasant surprise to him and rather a shock to the Admiralty, which had not been consulted. “Lord Selborne and all the rest97 seem very jealous at my being selected by the King and Prime Minister, and apparently His Majesty and the P.M. made up their minds without consulting anyone, but that’s not my fault,” he wrote to his son. “I am the target for envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness.” Then, good news: “The King will never forgive98 anyone who stands in the way of my being on the committee,” he reported cheerfully. The Admiralty, whose opposition had been based on its belief that being Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, was a full-time job, grudgingly gave way. “The Board will expect me to fulfill99 all my duties at Portsmouth,” Fisher wrote, and he agreed to do so. To facilitate the arrangement, meetings of the Royal Commission were held in Fisher’s office on the base.
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