Dreadnought
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Three weeks later, he was back for a secret weekend meeting on board the Enchantress at Plymouth, three days of “continuous talking14 and practically no sleep.” A professional bond was established and the Admiral began to bombard the new First Lord with densely written ten-page letters, beginning “My beloved Winston,” studded with underlinings and exclamation points, containing “every sort of news and counsel,15 from blistering reproach to supreme inspiration,” and ending with “Yours to a cinder” or “Yours till Hell freezes” or “Till charcoal sprouts.” Fisher’s urgent advice was that Churchill promote Jellicoe to Second in Command of the Home Fleet to give him the experience and seniority necessary to take command of Britain’s main fleet on the outbreak of war. Churchill acceded; Jellicoe, although twenty-first in seniority among vice admirals, was appointed. Ecstatically, Fisher reported the news to his daughter-in-law:
The greatest triumph of all16 is getting Jellicoe Second-in-Command of the Home Fleet. He is the future Nelson SURE!” To Pamela McKenna, he elaborated: “In two years17 he [Jellicoe] will be Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet.... The Battle of Armageddon comes along in September 1914. That date suits the Germans, if ever they are going to fight. Both their Army and Fleet then mobilized and the Kiel Canal finished and their new [naval] building complete.
Basking in his new role, Fisher wrote in glowing terms about Churchill: “So far every step18 he contemplates is good, and he is brave which is everything. Napoleonic in audacity, Cromwellian in thoroughness.” This praise halted abruptly in April 1912 when Churchill promoted three admirals who were close to the King and who had sided with Beresford during the schism in the navy. “I regret that in regard19 to... what you have done in the appointments of Sir Hedworth Meux, Sir Berkeley Milne, and Sir Reginald Custance, I fear this must be my last communication with you in any matter at all,” Fisher wrote to Churchill. “I am sorry for it but I considered you have betrayed the Navy in these three appointments, and what the pressure could have been to induce you to betray your trust is beyond my comprehension.” To Esher, Fisher made the nasty supposition that the appointments were the fault of Churchill’s young wife, Clementine: “Winston, alas!20 (as I have had to tell him) feared for his wife the social ostracism of the Court and succumbed to the appointments of the two Court favorites recently made—a wicked wrong in both cases! Winston has sacrificed the Country to the Court and gone back on his brave deeds... so I’ve done with him!”
Fisher continued to grouse and harrumph, at one point describing the First Lord as “a Royal Pimp,”21 but Churchill ignored both complaints and insults. Soon Fisher was boasting to his son: “...as regards Winston Churchill22... no doubt, I sent him an awful letter and he really has replied very nicely that no matter what I like to say to him, he is going to stick to me and support all my schemes and always maintain that I am a genius and the greatest naval administrator, etc., etc., etc.... However, there is no getting over the fact that he truckled to Court influence... and I have rubbed this into WC and he don’t like it.... Still, for the good of the Navy I am reluctantly feeling compelled to continue my advice to him as to new Dreadnoughts and other fighting business.”
Churchill was coming to the Mediterranean and, as Fisher would be in Naples, the First Lord decided to woo the old lion in his lair: “My dear Fisher,”23 he wrote on May 15, “The Prime Minister and I are coming to Naples on the 24th.... I shall look forward to having a good talk with you and I therefore defer replying to your last letter which I was so glad to get. If the consequences of the recent appointments were to be what you apprehend, I should feel your censures were not undeserved. But they will not be. The highest positions in the Admiralty and in the Fleet will not be governed by seniority; and the future of the Navy rests in the hands of men in whom your confidence is as strong as mine.... For the rest let us wait till we can talk freely. Writing is so wearisome and unsatisfactory.”
Churchill was going to Malta and Gibraltar to meet the Mediterranean admirals and discuss—along with Kitchener, who was coming from Egypt—the defense of the Imperial lifeline through the inland sea.fn1 For this reason, he was accompanied by the Second Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and by Beatty, his Naval Secretary. But he was also going to relax under blue skies and, to share this pleasure, he invited Clementine, her sister, his sister-in-law, and Asquith, who brought along his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Violet. The party embarked in the Enchantress in Genoa and two days later found themselves entering the Bay of Naples. In her diary, Violet Asquith described what happened: “Some of us went ashore24... straight to the museum... back to the yacht for luncheon and there was Lord Fisher! His eyes, as always, were like smouldering charcoals.... He was very friendly to Father and Prince Louis but glowered a bit, I thought, at Winston.... As the day wore on I noticed signs of mellowing in Lord F. which I feel will turn to melting before long. I whispered at tea to Winston: ‘He’s melting.’ His mind was far away. He gazed at me blankly and said in a hard, loud voice: ‘What’s melting?’ Distracted, I replied: ‘The butter.’ which brought an old-fashioned look from our hostess [Clementine] who eyed the bread and butter anxiously. When we got back to the Enchantress Lord F. and W. were locked together in naval conclave.... I’m sure they can’t resist each other long at close range.” Fisher remained on board overnight, and the next morning Violet reported: “Danced on deck25 with Lord Fisher for a very long time before breakfast.... I reel giddily in his arms and lurch against his heart of oak.” Between Violet’s dancing and Winston’s wooing, Fisher was conquered. “I was nearly kidnapped26 and carried off in the Admiralty yacht!” Fisher wrote to a friend. “They were very sweet about it! My old cabin as First Sea Lord all arranged for me! I had a good time and came out on top! The Prime Minister is ‘dead on’ for my coming back, and he has put things so forcibly to me that, with great reluctance to re-enter the battlefield, I probably shall do so....” To Lady Fisher, the Admiral listed Churchill’s compliments: “WC said the King was always talking27 about me to him, and had acknowledged how much I had done, but that I was absolutely wedded to certain ideas he couldn’t approve of. WC turned round to him [the King] and said that everything now that was said at home and abroad of the ‘present overwhelming supremacy and efficiency of the British Navy’ was solely and only and entirely due to me! and that ‘there would shortly be 16 ships with 13½ inch gun, when not a single German ship had anything but a 12 inch gun, which compared to the British 13½ inch gun, was only a pea-shooter and he said the King shut up then. I also heard indirectly from Esher that Winston Churchill always sticks up for me to all the Court people besides the King....”
The new First Lord’s relationship with the navy was not all paperwork and strategic talk. For Churchill, bursting with excitement and energy, it was Fun. One of the perquisites of office was that he selected the women who christened new dreadnoughts. Within seven weeks of his appointment, Winston stood by while Clementine christened the battleship Centurion. Two years later, Jennie christened the battleship Benbow. There were sweeter delights: the First Lord was the only man in the kingdom other than the monarch to have a yacht paid for out of the public purse. The Admiralty yacht Enchantress, a handsome 3,500-tonner, came with comfortable staterooms, an excellent wine cellar, and a crew of one hundred to take the First Lord wherever he wished to go. Winston made it “largely my office,28 almost my home” and, during his first eighteen months in office, spent 182 days on board, visiting every British naval station and dockyard in the United Kingdom and the Mediterranean. As lord of the Enchantress, he could play host to whomever he liked, including the Prime Minister, who did not have a yacht, and who keenly enjoyed cruising under the warm sun of the Mediterranean.
Churchill used the yacht to visit the Fleet; he wanted to know the ships and the men—his ships and his men, as he thought of them. “These were great days,”29 he wrote in The World Crisis. “From dawn to midnight, day after day, one’s whole mind was absorbed.... Saturdays, Sundays, and any other spar
e day, I spent always with the Fleet at Portsmouth or at Portland or Devonport or with the Flotillas at Harwich. Officers of every rank came on board to lunch or dine.... I got to know what everything looked like and where everything was and how one thing fitted into another. In the end, I could put my hand on whatever was wanted.”
The navy never knew where he would turn up. Suddenly, he would appear, ebullient and inexhaustible, bounding up the gangways of the dreadnoughts, disappearing down the hatches of the submarines, eager to see everything and have everything explained. He communicated his enthusiasm to everyone. He took Arthur Balfour and Lord Morley into one of the turrets of the dreadnought Orion, where “in cramped and oily quarters,30 with a mass of machinery penning them on every side,” he lectured on how the guns were worked. Asquith was amused by Winston’s exuberance. The Prime Minister went to witness target practice and soon the First Lord was “dancing about the guns,31 elevating, depressing, and sighting.” “My young friend yonder,”32 Asquith observed, “thinks himself Othello and blacks himself all over to play the part.” When Violet Asquith accompanied her father to the Mediterranean she observed “W[inston] in glorious form33 though slightly over-concentrated on instruments of destruction. Blasting and shattering are now his idées fixes. As we leaned side by side against the rail, past the lovely, smiling coastline of the Adriatic bathed in sun, and I remarked ‘How perfect!’, he startled me by his reply: ‘Yes—range perfect—visibility perfect’—and details followed showing how effectively we could lay waste the landscape and blow the nestling towns sky-high.” Beatty, also on the cruise, wrote to his wife that “Winston talks about nothing34 but the Navy and all the wonderful things he is going to do.” Back in London, Lloyd George chided his former ally in naval economy: “You have become a water creature.35 You think we all live in the sea and all your thoughts are devoted to sea life, fishes and other aquatic creatures. You forget that most of us live on land.”
May 1912 saw Churchill’s first great naval review as First Lord: “The flags of a dozen admirals,36 the broad pennants of as many commodores and the pennants of a hundred and fifty ships were flying together. The King came in the Royal Yacht.... One day there is a long cruise out into the mist, dense, utterly baffling—the whole Fleet steaming together all invisible, keeping station with weird siren screamings and hootings. It seemed incredible that no harm would befall. And then suddenly the fog lifted and the distant targets could be distinguished and the whole long line of battleships, coming one after another into view, burst into tremendous flares of flame and hurled their shells with deafening detonations while the water rose in tall fountains. The Fleet returns—three battle squadrons abreast, cruisers and [destroyer]flotillas disposed ahead and astern. The speed is raised to twenty knots. Streaks of white foam appear at the bows of every vessel. The land draws near. The broad bay already embraces this swiftly moving gigantic armada. The ships in their formation already fill the bay. The foreign officers I have with me on the Enchantress bridge stare anxiously. We still steam fast. Five minutes more and the van of the Fleet will be aground. Four minutes, three minutes. There! At last. The signal! A string of bright flags falls from the Neptune’s halyards. Every anchor falls together; their cables roar through the hawser holes; every propeller whirls astern. In a hundred and fifty yards every ship is stationary. Look along the lines, miles this way and miles that, they might have been drawn with a ruler. The foreign observers gasped.”
Prompted by Fisher, Churchill took an interest in the lot of the common seamen and petty officers. Navy pay, which had not changed in sixty years, was raised; annoyances in the form of petty discipline, inadequate leave, and slow promotions were eliminated. “No First Lord in the history of the Navy37 has shown himself more practically sympathetic with the conditions of the Lower Deck than Winston Churchill,” wrote an unofficial navy magazine. A reporter for the Daily Express accompanied him on a visit to a submarine in 1912: “He had a yarn38 with nearly all the lower deck men of the ship’s company, asking why, wherefore, and how everything was done. All the sailors ‘go the bundle’ on him because he makes no fuss and takes them by surprise. He is here, there, everywhere.” Sympathy with enlisted men and encouragement that they and their petty officers voice their grievances did not increase Churchill’s popularity with officers. On one occasion, poking about a cruiser, he had the officer guiding him show him the brig. When the officer returned to the wardroom, his fellow officers shouted, “Why didn’t you lock him up?”39 What Churchill saw as a proper interest in the condition of the men, officers scorned as an attempt to curry favor with the lower ranks. Once, visiting a battleship, the First Lord ordered the ship’s company assembled on deck for his inspection. Then he put the officer in charge to a test:
“Do you know your men by name?”40 the First Lord asked.
“I think I do, Sir; we have had many changes recently, but I think I know them all,” the officer replied.
“What is the name of this man?”
“Jones, Sir.”
“What is your name?” asked Churchill, addressing the seaman.
“Jones, Sir.”
“Is your name really Jones or do you say so only to back your officer?”
“My name is Jones, Sir.”
When Churchill departed, the officer and his fellow officers on the ship were in a “choking wrath.”
To senior captains and admirals—some almost old enough to be his father—Churchill seemed especially disrespectful. A bumptious young man of thirty-six with a ballyhooed experience of war as a junior cavalry officer was overriding professional naval opinion, interfering in technical matters, jumping to harebrained conclusions. They dealt with him their own way. Churchill watched the old battleship Cornwallis firing at a target and, as soon as the guns were silent, wanted to know how many hits had been scored.
“None,”41 replied the admiral.
“Not one? All misses? How do you explain it?”
“Well, you see, First Lord, the shells seem to have fallen either just short of the target or else gone just a little beyond it.”
The Sea Lords confronted the problem every day. The First Lord treated them as his subordinates, issuing orders rather than asking for their advice. From his dicta and personality there was no appeal; Prime Minister and Cabinet were firmly behind him. On one memorable occasion when one of the Sea Lords accused Winston of ignoring the time-honored traditions of the Royal Navy, the First Lord replied savagely, “And what are they?42 I shall tell you in three words. Rum, sodomy, and the lash. Good morning, gentlemen.”
Eventually, in the Bridgeman Affair, Churchill’s bruising treatment of the Sea Lords reached the attention of the House of Commons. Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman was a competent, colorless officer who had been happily serving as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet when Churchill brought him ashore to replace Sir Arthur Wilson. Bridgeman came, reluctantly but dutifully, “to help things along43 if I can.” By October 1912, the mild-mannered Bridgeman already had locked horns on a variety of issues with the tempestuous First Lord. Eventually, he stated that Churchill’s constant interference in technical decisions and repeated overriding of naval traditions were denigrating the authority of senior officers and would harm the efficiency of the service. The First Lord did not take this criticism well, and Bridgeman threatened to take his case to the Prime Minister and the King.
From that moment on, Bridgeman’s doom was certain. On November 14, Churchill mentioned to Prince Louis that he would soon be moving up to First Sea Lord. Bridgeman was recuperating from appendicitis and two attacks of bronchitis. In letters to Battenberg and Beatty, he had mentioned the possibility of resigning and spoken wistfully of going to a warmer climate where he could sit in the sun and recover. Reports of these letters reached Churchill, who seized on Bridgeman’s health and wrote to the Admiral that he was aware of the great sacrifice the First Sea Lord was making by remaining at his post. “If, by any misadventure,44 we were to be involved in war,” the First
Lord continued, “I feel that the burden might be more than you could sustain.” Bridgeman misinterpreted what in fact was a buffered call for his resignation as simply a well-wisher’s concern about his health, and replied that he was already better and fit to carry on. This letter was highly unwelcome to Churchill, who, foolishly headlong, already had submitted Bridgeman’s resignation to the Prime Minister and the King. On December 2, Churchill dropped his pretence of solicitude and bluntly informed Bridgeman that his resignation had been accepted.
A change of this magnitude attracted comment in the press, particularly as Churchill had already forced the resignations of four Sea Lords within the year. On December 11, Lord Charles Beresford rose to ask about the matter in the House of Commons. Beresford saw Churchill not only as a youthful interloper at the Admiralty, but also as the agent of his own archenemy, Fisher.