Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  The 1912 Novelle

  In Germany, General Helmuth von Moltke considered war inevitable and was pushing for a faster engagement than was comfortable for Tirpitz, who still did not have the advantage in fleet-to-fleet ratio that he wanted. He was getting there, fast, but Moltke was worried that Russia would also pick up the pace. He wanted to pre-empt the strength that he feared was coming from the east.

  The crisis was brought about by another North African confrontation in 1911 and the obvious snub to the Kaiser that resulted from it.62 For Tirpitz, it was further affirmation that more visible naval strength was needed. He was now keener than ever to show the British and French that he was not a man to be trifled with. A fifth Novelle was being passed in June, with three new battleships proposed for the Flottenbauprogramm but, importantly, adding Zeppelins and a small fleet of seventy-two submarines.

  Each diplomatic failure that Wilhelm precipitated, as he had just twice done in the space of five years with Morocco, directly benefited Tirpitz. With this final pre-war Novelle, Tirpitz envisioned a fleet of sixty-one heavy ships that would be ready in 1918, but Moltke would not give him the time. The year 1914 started with Tirpitz’s promotion to the rank of grand admiral. It ended in war.

  Fisher was brought back by Churchill to the Admiralty for a second term as First Sea Lord, ironically in October, the very month that he had predicted as being the date for the outbreak of war. (His predecessor, Lord Louis Battenberg, had resigned because of his German name. This was before George V had taken the decision to change his own family name to Windsor.) Fisher’s relations with Churchill fell apart after the failure of the Gallipoli assault in 1915. He had never been a great supporter of the Dardanelles plan and had preferred the idea of an assault directly on German territory in the Baltic, but he had served Churchill as well as he could.

  Two months before Jutland, Grand Admiral von Tirpitz retired from active military service. Having worked closely with his emperor for over a decade in building the High Seas Fleet into a forbidding fighting machine, he ended up disagreeing fundamentally with the Kaiser who, now that he had his fleet, did not dare to use it.

  * In a short but charming meeting in Munich with Dr Wolf von Tirpitz on 31 May 2015, Skagerrakstag, he dismissed this rumour, saying that his father, Rudolf, had always found it far-fetched.

  † This was the war with Austria that ended with the dissolution of the German Confederacy and Prussia’s dominance over Austria symbolised by the founding of the North German Confederation.

  * The so-called ‘Battle of Havana’ was a minor affair but it was one of the very few engagements with the French in which the Prussian navy actually played any part at all. Hence it was played up in Prussia and Knorr was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class, for his part in an action on 9 November 1870 against the French dispatch boat, the Bouvet.

  * German torpedo boats were designated according to the yard where they were built. Hence the ‘S’ class was Schichau, ‘B’ class Blohm, und Voss, ‘G class, Germania, and ‘V’ class, Vulkan.

  * My grandfather, Sir John Jellicoe, became First Sea Lord at the end of 1917 while his son, George, my father, was – if I am not mistaken – the last First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1963. The writer, Graham Greene was closely related to Sir William Graham Greene who, at Jutland, was Secretary of the Admiralty. His granddaughter is my neighbour. Another friend who lives nearby in Switzerland is a close relation of Sir Edward Carson, who was First Lord of the Admiralty when my grandfather was 1SL. Small world.

  * This committee was formed at the end of 1904 to push forward the design of new battleships. Its members included Philip Watts (Director of Naval Construction), Lord Kelvin, R E Froude of the Admiralty Experimental Works, Henry Card, Sir John Thornycroft, Prince Louis of Battenberg, John Jellicoe, Reginald Bacon, Captain Henry Jackson and Rear Admiral Alfred Winslow.

  3

  A Contradiction, Not A Team: Jellicoe and Beatty

  If you were to look for two officers to take command of the Grand and Battle Cruiser Fleets in August 1914, it would be hard to find two admirals more different than John Jellicoe and David Beatty. Everything that Beatty was, Jellicoe was not. One man’s strengths were often the other’s weaknesses and each had been sponsored and nurtured in their positions of command by forces greater than themselves.

  Beatty’s chance meeting with Winston Churchill during the Sudanese campaign, at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, led to a friendship born of shared experience, though Churchill was the younger. Jellicoe was one of Fisher’s anointed and a member of his inner circle of Young Turks known collectively as the ‘Fishpond’. Jellicoe probably would have got to where he did without Fisher’s support; Beatty, without Churchill’s, probably not, and certainly not without a war to accelerate promotion.

  They were, wrote Keith Yates, ‘a study in contrasts, not just in their physical appearance and dress, but in their temperament, strengths and weaknesses. While Jellicoe was calm, deliberate and realistic in assessing his own forces and those of his enemy, Beatty was highly strung, impatient for action, and supremely confident of his superiority over his enemy.’1 The quiet Jellicoe was intellectually brilliant, modest and warm-hearted. Beatty was known for his flamboyance and vanity, but also for his courage and charisma. With supreme command at sea, both men became increasingly cautious. Though their paths crossed in the years leading up to Jutland, the individual journeys were very different.

  The two officers can be looked at in quite distinct ways. Amid the increasingly unstable events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their paths touched, then drew apart again. This pattern gives an idea of how their characters and careers were formed, of the influences in the early stages of their careers, and how these same continued to shape them in later years.

  John Rushworth Jellicoe was born on 5 December 1859. It was a time of great change within the British Empire. The year 1859 also, coincidentally, saw the birth of the future Wilhelm II. Jellicoe’s lineage left no doubt that the sea was his calling. His father, John Henry Jellicoe, had been at age twelve already at sea in a merchant ship, and by twenty-one he had his first command. Through his marriage to Lucy Henrietta (née Keele), John Henry entered a family with a naval tradition that went back to Nelson.

  John Jellicoe’s maternal great-great-grandfather, Philip Patton, had fought at La Hogue in 1692, the decisive sea battle of the Nine Years War, and his son, another Philip, rose to the flag rank and was Second Naval Lord at the Admiralty at the time of Trafalgar. Jellicoe’s second name, Rushworth, was also from one of Lucy’s ancestors, a Royal Navy captain, Edward Rushworth, who died in 1780 in Barbados. Captain John Henry, Jellicoe’s father, was an outstanding officer in the Southampton-based Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, where diligence and natural abilities helped him rise through its ranks to become commodore and a member of the board of directors. Southampton thus became John Jellicoe’s home for the first ten years of his life.

  David Richard Beatty was eleven years Jellicoe’s junior. Born on 17 January 1871, the future admiral came into the world out of wedlock. This remained a closely held secret that his nephew (and one of his biographers), Charles Beatty, claimed had a profound impact throughout his life, saying that David lived ‘under a family bane which dogged him until high office became a burden and private life a cage’.2 Indeed, had it become known, the social costs for Beatty would have been enormous and probably adversely affected his eventual brilliant naval career.

  Technically, David Beatty could have been disinherited by younger, legitimate siblings. As it was, his elder brother Charles inherited the estates; later, they fell to the admiral’s nephew when Charles died in 1917 after a riding accident. David’s father’s military career was not a harbinger of his son’s later achievements. As was the practice at the time, David Longfield Beatty had purchased his commission in the 4th Hussar Regiment and when he retired a captain he had never actually seen active service. David’s father was also a dark influence on t
he boy – in Robert Massie’s words, ‘eccentric, irascible, and tyrannical and … a heavy drinker’.

  His birth was registered by his father simply writing his mother’s name as ‘Edith Catherine Beatty’, when she was still Katherine (or Katrin) Edith Chaine (née Sadleir), the wife of a fellow officer – in fact, David’s father’s colonel – in the 4th Hussars. The circumstances of the two future officers were thus very different. Jellicoe’s father’s achievements had been won the hard way, while Beatty came from the moneyed Anglo-Irish. The Jellicoe house in Southampton, 1 Cranbury Place, was modest. Beatty grew up in large houses, surrounded by servants.

  Even if Jellicoe’s family struggled to pay for their promising boy’s schooling (and at one point came close to abandoning it because of the hardships that it was causing), his intellect got him noticed. His break came when he was given a recommendation to the Navy by a family friend of his father’s, Captain Robert Hall, then Naval Secretary to the Admiralty. The recommendation was soon justified. In 1872 the young ‘Jack’ passed his entrance exam, second in a class of thirty-nine pupils. In the static training ship Britannia he could not have done better. Jellicoe was awarded a first in each of his four terms and finally passed out with a first-class certificate in 1874 with more seniority and was promoted in July to midshipman.*

  Jellicoe’s first ship duty was on the port ship, the hulk of the once mighty wooden three-decker Duke of Wellington in Portsmouth. A strange coincidence was that forty years later his flagship would be Iron Duke, the name by which, of course, the victor at Waterloo came to be known.3 But it was not until Newcastle, a fully rigged frigate that also had auxiliary steam power, that he experienced his first ocean-going duty. After a ten-day sail to Gibraltar, Jellicoe went on to St Helena, Rio de Janeiro, the Falklands, Bombay and Japan. He was discovering the world and his sea legs.

  These two and a half years under sail must have been magical days. To the end of his life Jellicoe loved to sail and even ended up having a small class of dinghy named after him when, after the war, he went out to New Zealand as governor general. It would be the same for Beatty, who spent toughening-up tours on a small wooden steam corvette, Ruby. All four major commanders at Jutland – Scheer, Hipper, Beatty and Jellicoe – learnt the ropes, their tactics and command of men, under sail.

  Jellicoe’s second sea appointment was in July 1877, the mighty 10,600-tonner Agincourt. She was a five-masted, broadsided, armour-plated ship, a kind of ‘super Warrior’: the flagship of the Channel Squadron. The squadron relied on sail rather than on their inefficient steam engines to give the necessary range to what was the Navy’s strategic reserve.

  While the conditions on Agincourt were tough and onboard duties disciplined, Jellicoe started here to make friendships that lasted all his life. With him as fellow midshipmen were his cousin, Charles Rushworth, and Cecil Burney, who would later became his second-in-command in the Grand Fleet. When the ship was sent out to reinforce the Mediterranean Fleet during a war between Russia and Turkey, Rushworth was drowned, and as a consequence Jellicoe’s workload increased. Soon he was in charge of the ship’s steamboats and cutters, as well as acting as one of the three signals officers and AdC to the admiral. He learnt to ride well; occasionally he used the admiral’s horse to take messages between ships anchored around the bay in the Gulf of Xeros, the other side of which, at Gallipoli, would be so hard fought-for thirty-seven years later.

  Later in 1877 Jellicoe did a short stint in the sailing sloop Cruiser, after which he sat his sub lieutenant exams, coming third in maths out of 109 candidates. On his nineteenth birthday he passed his seamanship examinations before going to Greenwich for the sub lieutenants’ course at the Royal Naval College. He then went on to Portsmouth for specialist gunnery and torpedo instruction.

  Two years later, in March 1880 Jellicoe was appointed to the centre-battery ironclad Alexandra, the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet. Beatty too would start his career on Alexandra six years hence, but Jellicoe had got there by hard slog, not connections. When he left the ship in August, he travelled back to England via Italy. It was not the romantic grand European tour he imagined: he came down with dysentery and was forced onto half-pay for three months.

  Fit again by February 1881, he was appointed for a second time to Agincourt, where he had to serve for a year of watch-keeping duties before he could apply for any specialisation in the Navy, but he already knew that it was going to be gunnery. It was an exciting post: the ship was sent out to the Mediterranean, again as reinforcement. She reached Port Said by way of Alexandria, where Jacky Fisher made a name for himself in Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour’s bombardment. Jellicoe joined Orion, an armoured ram recently acquired from Turkey, but his real adventure started when he was sent back with a message for the admiral. Disguised as a refugee, Jellicoe travelled clandestinelyby canal boat delivering the admiral’s messages.

  While Jellicoe was in the Middle East, Beatty was growing up in Irish fox-hunting country. His grandfather died in 1881 and his father took over the running of the eighteenth-century family mansion, Borodale, in County Wexford (that David eventually took as the association with his title, although the house burnt down in the 1930s). Beatty’s initial career steps contrasted strongly with Jellicoe’s. Knowing that he wanted to get into the Navy but also aware that he was not greatly gifted academically, Beatty was enrolled in 1882 at Burney’s Naval Academy in Gosport, a crammer, to get him over the initial career hurdle. Jellicoe, meanwhile, having chosen his specialisation, began the ‘long course’, first at Greenwich and then at Whale Island, Portsmouth, to study to become a gunnery lieutenant. Typically, at Greenwich he came out top of his class; at Portsmouth too he became a gunnery lieutenant, first class.

  Jellicoe’s appointment to the staff at the Whale Island Gunnery School on Excellent in 1884 brought him together with Fisher. As captain, Jacky Fisher took an active interest in Jellicoe from this moment on; his patronage would shape Jellicoe’s career in giving him the best grounding in technical know-how, as well as the active fleet service that was needed for highest command. This was the path to the aforementioned Fishpond, Fisher’s cabal of young officers who would so decisively influence the future of the Royal Navy in matters such as gunnery and fire control. This included men such as Percy Scott, one of gunnery’s radical thinkers: ‘I don’t care if he drinks, gambles and womanizes; he hits the target,’ exclaimed Fisher of his protégé.4

  Beatty followed Jellicoe to Britannia at the start of 1884 aged almost thirteen, the age of entry having been reduced. He passed tenth in his class of ninety-nine.5 Beatty did make his mark at Dartmouth, but not in a positive way – in fact, for bullying, although a supportive biographer put it this way: ‘rigid discipline and endless routine clashed with his lively, sociable character’.6 When Beatty passed out two years later, his performance was average: he was placed eighteenth out of thirty-four pupils.7

  Jellicoe now had his first real chance of combat. A war scare in 1885 with Russia, whose southern expansionist ambitions were slowly but inexorably bringing it closer to confrontation with Great Britain, led to Admiral Hornby assembling a fleet in the southwest of Ireland to threaten St Petersburg. He took Fisher with him on Minotaur, Agincourt’s sister ship, ‘for service with the squadron … to report on points connected with gunnery’. Jellicoe in turn was chosen by Fisher ‘for experimental duties during cruise’, and later went on to serve as gunnery officer on Monarch under Captain Edmund J Church in the Channel Squadron.8

  With the performance that Beatty had put in at the Britannia, it was not surprising that he was initially posted to the ‘undesirable’ China Station.9 More impressive was his mother’s immediate and effective lobbying with Charles Beresford, which resulted in his gaining the ‘navy’s prime midshipman appointment’ to Alexandra in February 1886.

  This was the trajectory of Beatty’s early career. The time spent on Alexandra gave him important connections, the sort that would help him later: Stanley Colville, Colin Kepp
el, Walter Cowan, Richard Phillimore and Reginald Tyrwhitt, and the Duke of Edinburgh’s eldest daughter, Marie, which gave him a key advantage at court. Within months, in May 1886 he won his promotion to midshipman and assignment to Colville on watch-keeping duties.

  In April 1886 Jellicoe was transferred to the turret ship Colossus, the most modern ship afloat and armed with breech-loading 12in guns;10 though she had two masts, she carried no sail as the masts were used purely as signalling and observation platforms. While serving on Colossus Jellicoe rescued a seaman who had fallen overboard during rough weather. After Captain Cyprian Bridge had congratulated him, he went about his business, returning quietly to his cabin to change into dry clothes.

  Time on ship was not exciting – mostly endless drills, deck- and brass-cleaning – and to keep the men fit and focused the officers needed constantly to organise activities like inter-ship sports competitions. Jellicoe’s idea had a twist: to ensure that the sailors were at their peak, some say he invented a field-gun exercise that would become the predecessor of the competition held annually at London’s Royal Tournament (subsequently known as the British Military Tournament) until the end of the twentieth century.

  In December 1886 Jellicoe embarked on eighteen months as the experiments officer on Excellent. The work here helped the development of the new, standard 4.7in and 6in quick-firing (QF) guns that revolutionised naval warfare through their ability, by sheer volume of fire, to increase the chances of hitting other ships in engagements at sea.

  When Jellicoe’s mentor Fisher became Director of Naval Ordinance in September 1889 he took the young lieutenant with him as his assistant. Long hours would become a daily routine, but the experience gained was valuable, for here he was responsible for the development and testing of all new gunnery ideas – that is, guns, ammunition and mountings – for the Navy.