In mid 1911 relations with Germany broke down, nearly to crisis point. This was brought about by France moving troops into the interior of Morocco in April. By doing so France had broken with the terms of the Treaty of Algeciras and the Franco-German Accord of 1909 that had ended the first Moroccan crisis, and essentially set out the basis of equilibrium between France and Germany. France would be allowed her territory if Germany’s commercial interests were respected.
As we saw in Chapter 2, the Kaiser’s attempts to use the Agadir Crisis to break up the Triple Entente had not been successful. However, Germany’s gunboat diplomacy in sending the Panther to Agadir had escalated tensions and a planned meeting between the Atlantic Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet was cancelled. The Kaiser was furious and, through Prince Heinrich, conveyed his feelings: Jellicoe, now as wary as Usedom had been earlier, did not now feel comfortable giving the real reason or explanation to the Kaiser’s brother.
Ethel continued to make David Beatty’s life hell. She threatened him with an end to his life in the Navy unless he found a way to get her presented at court. He did this through Eugénie Godfrey-Faussett’s husband. He was naval AdC to George V and had nurtured a close relationship with Prince Albert, the future King George VI, whose boredom with London gave the Godfrey-Faussetts the means to curry favour. After Jutland, Prince Albert came back to London and, along with his wife, Godfrey-Faussett did what they could to alleviate the ennui of the young prince. On 29 January 1916, for example, they took him to the London Hippodrome with Portia Cadogan, whom the prince had three times suggested be present, even if she was, in fact, already close with his elder brother. Godfrey-Faussett was successful in getting Ethel presented. For his pains, Beatty ended up taking Godfrey-Faussett’s wife as his own lover.†
Ethel simply would not have her husband in Gibraltar as second-incommand of the Atlantic Fleet. Rear Admiral Beatty turned down what would have been a significant promotion. Unsurprisingly, the reaction of the Navy was not one of great understanding. The naval secretary to the First Lord, Captain Ernest Troubridge, wrote to Beatty: ‘The fact is that the Admiralty’s view is that officers should serve where the Admiralty wish and not where they themselves wish’. But this was Beatty, supremely confident to the point of arrogance. At best his pay would be docked, not that it mattered that much to him. This also signalled another close brush with Jellicoe’s career, as Beatty would have served as Jellicoe’s second-in-command. The experience of working together would have served them both well.
The thirty-nine-year-old Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty. Beatty asked for an interview, which was granted. Instead of being thrown out for having turned down a promotion, Beatty was offered a position as Churchill’s naval secretary. It was the critical appointment of his career. Churchill was struck by Beatty – by ‘the profound sagacity of his comments expressed in a language free from technical jargon’.28 But soon enough Beatty sounded like Jellicoe: ‘I hope to be able to squeeze some sense into him’. It was inevitable that Beatty and Churchill should lock horns occasionally – both were young and displayed the cockiness of their age – but eventually theirs became a strong working relationship.
In December 1911 the honour of Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath was bestowed on Jellicoe. This was followed six months later by his inclusion in the Coronation honours list, with a promotion to vice admiral. In September 1912 he was promoted to command the 2nd Battle Squadron of the Home Fleet, his flag hoisted on the new dreadnought Hercules, serving in this role as Sir George Callaghan’s second-in-command.
This finally gave him the command experience of a battle squadron as well as the hands-on command of a dreadnought. Jellicoe exerted a considerable degree of independent thinking and innovation in battle exercises. Temple Patterson cited him dropping the single line-ahead formation, taking ‘successful independent action with his squadron against the rear of the “enemy”, Sir George subsequently approving’.29 Was it a refusal to delegate or a desire for action that got Jellicoe up from his sick bed in August 1916 when the German Fleet was out again off Sunderland?
At this point he was also very much in favour of fast divisions and the principle of offensive destroyer actions. There were also criticisms. Sir Francis Bridgeman (from whom Sir George had taken over) at the time made an astute comment on Jellicoe: ‘He must learn to work with his captains and staff more and himself less … At present he puts himself in position of, say, a glorified gunnery Lieutenant. He must trust his staff and captains and if they don’t fit, he must kick them out.’30 In my own opinion, Jellicoe was, in fact, a keen supporter of his staff, but he was also a workaholic and not known as a delegator.*
Jacky Fisher was aware that he owed Churchill much for getting Jellicoe the second-in-command role: he had been promoted over twenty-one other vice admirals. Jellicoe was not fully aware of why be was being moved to the Home Fleet and actually asked to remain in command of the Atlantic Fleet. He did not know that Fisher was grooming him for the ultimate role. As Fisher rather melodramatically declared, ‘If war comes in 1914 then Jellicoe will be Nelson at the Battle of St Vincent. If it comes in 1915 he will be Nelson at Trafalgar.’ Jellicoe loathed that kind of talk.
Outside his fleet duties Jellicoe was also a member of the committee enquiring into the supply and sourcing of liquid fuels. This would have far-reaching results. He also closely followed the tests on Thunderer of the director-firing system. Invented by Scott and first fitted on Neptune, it essentially centralised the task of spotting and firing the guns from a director position mounted high above the ship. For Jellicoe, the comparative Thunderer/Orion tests where the two ships were pitted against each other were conclusive and he lobbied strongly for the system, even though there was still considerable opposition both within the fleet and from the Admiralty.31 This was probably why, in 1914, only eight capital ships had been fitted, although Jellicoe sped up the implementation so that all but two had the system by the time of Jutland. In December he was back again at the Admiralty as Second Sea Lord. He continued to run up against Churchill, who unfailingly took an over-keen personal interest in all things technical.
Speaking of Churchill, Jellicoe said:
It did not take me very long to find out that Mr Churchill was very apt to express strong opinions upon purely technical matters. Moreover, not being satisfied with expressing opinions, he tried to force his views upon the board. His fatal error was his entire disability to realise his own limitations as a civilian … While his gift (wonderful argumentative powers) was of great use to the Admiralty when we wanted the naval case put well before the government, it became a positive danger when the First Lord started to exercise his powers of argument on his colleagues on the board.32
In March 1913 Beatty joined the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron. It must have been a moment with a great sense of personal achievement, but the manner of his assumption of command remained pure Beatty. He was late, unprepared to cut short a holiday in Monte Carlo. As his flag lieutenant he took on Ralph Seymour. It was a decision that had little to do with his skills or reputation: Beatty had not known him before. In all probability it had more to do with the fact that Seymour was very socially well-connected and that his sister was a close friend of Churchill’s wife.
That May, three years before what both sides would call Der Tag, the day of reckoning between the British and German fleets, Jellicoe was invited to Berlin to what would be the last formal meeting of the kings and emperors of Europe; the occasion was the marriage of the Kaiser’s daughter, Victoria Louise of Prussia, to Ernest Augustus of Hanover (once Victoria Louise’s husband, he became the Duke of Brunswick). Jellicoe got to meet Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the German chancellor, see the working of a Zeppelin reconnaissance airship up close and dine privately with the Kaiser and Tirpitz. Talking after dinner, the latter politely declined Jellicoe’s invitation to stay with him in Britain saying that he ‘would certainly be murdered if he were to visit England’, as his shipbuilding programmes h
ad so raised public ire. Two months later, in July, Jellicoe out-manoeuvred his own commander-in-chief, Sir George Callaghan, in a battle exercise. Jellicoe’s Red Fleet simulated a possible German invasion of the Humber Estuary which was cut short ‘for fear of giving useful information to the Germans’.33 Eric Grove feels that it was probably Jellicoe’s success at these manoeuvres that singled him out as Churchill’s choice to replace Callaghan as the commander of the Grand Fleet in the first days of war and not to wait for the previously agreed timing at the end of the year.
The men and their marriages
Beatty and Jellicoe had both married into considerable wealth, but Beatty regretted the penalty that he had to pay. His was an unhappy marriage and one from which his career seemed constantly under threat, although it miraculously remained immune. Ethel’s influence and outspoken comments on Jellicoe were quite another matter. That the two men would eventually come to represent different schools of naval thinking was a matter of course, but she brought a shameful degree of acrimony.
This was perhaps inevitable for a number of reasons. One was certainly Beatty’s personality. He had a streak of vanity and was very sensitive to criticism or failure. His sense of frustration at not being seen as another Nelson when victory had been snatched from his grasp at the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915, then again at Jutland and in the action-less aftermath, was tangible. (At Dogger Bank, Beatty had successfully managed to sink the armoured cruiser Blücher but signals that had been meant to order a pursuit of the rest of the German force had been muddled; the pursuit halted to pound an already crippled ship.) Where Jellicoe naturally tried to understand the lessons of Jutland, Beatty became increasingly concerned with his image and career. To this he sacrificed any relationship that he had built to that point with Jellicoe.
One of Beatty’s biographers, Andrew Lambert, heartily praised Beatty who came to be known as the first ‘modern’ admiral (Roskill called him ‘the last naval hero’), mainly for his eight-year term as First Lord of the Admiralty, Lambert was also forthright, though, in his criticism of his character. Of his wartime accomplishments, he wrote searingly:
His career was advanced by fortune, publicity and money; his reputation reflected an image rather than reality; his victories only existed in the pages of wartime newspapers. In later life he waged a devious, if not downright dishonest campaign to maintain the illusion of glory by traducing the reputation of another officer, splitting the navy right down the middle in the process.34
The physical appearance of each of these two admirals painted a portrait of contrasts. Jellicoe was diminutive, his large nose not the most attractive of features, but his eyes were sparkling, and full of energy and intelligence. Beatty was broad-shouldered and square-jawed, a handsome man – a rake. He always wore his hat at a slight angle and insisted on having six buttons on his naval tunics, not the regulation eight. No one else in the Navy did that, not even the King. Beatty had the Irish side in him, Jellicoe was thoroughly English.* Mountbatten would call Jellicoe’s looks similar to those of a tapir, while of Beatty, (he) ‘loved the man, cap jauntily aslant, really going for the enemy, giving the order to close Hipper’s ships after two ofhis own had been blown up’.35 It was not surprising with his looks, his elan, his dash and charisma that Beatty came to be seen and hero-worshipped as the Nelson of the twentieth-century Navy. Jellicoe’s only proximity to any Nelson-like characteristic, Andrew Gordon concluded in a 2015 BBC programme, was the ‘intimacy with his men.
Beatty had an aura ‘which radiated in part from his genuine accomplishments and in part from his successful exhibitionism’. Jellicoe, almost consistently, was remembered for his soft-spoken nature, his kindness and his modesty.
There is a telling description of Beatty’s and Jellicoe’s behaviour on Iron Duke, a ship that Beatty later described as having ‘too much Jellicoe in it’ when he moved his flag to Queen Elizabeth, more fondly known as the ‘Big Lizzie’. To reach the bridge often meant going through the ratings’ galley. Jellicoe would walk through, his presence only obvious by the click of his steel heels on the plates and his occasional ‘Excuse me’, as he passed a rating; Beatty would be preceded by a group of armed men.†
Such were the two sailors in whose hands the fate of the nation lay in May 1916.
* On my desk at home is a silver inkwell that my father gave me. It reminds me daily of the type of man my grandfather was: it was awarded for the 1874 Britannia First Admiralty Study Prize.
* The young midshipman was probably Philip Roberts-West, whom Jellicoe later intervened to save during the First World War when his nerves had the better of him; Prof Temple Patterson maintained that Jellicoe never really recovered from the effects of the immersion. Some have used this conclusion to suggest that this ‘terror’ was what lay behind the turn-away. I doubt it.
* Fritzi was later to become my cousin James Loudon’s, Prudie’s son’s, godfather.
† My mother had a small silver German officer’s peaked cap, gifted by von Usedom to my grandfather, but sadly lost by one of my siblings.
* Gibson and Harper, p36; also Roskill, p34. Beatty was promoted to captain on 9 November 1900, having served only two years in the previous rank.
* Betty, as she was known in the family, was christened Agnes Betty Gardiner Jellicoe, named after Gwen’s mother, Lady Agnes Elizabeth Cayzer. She was buried at St John’s Church, Cranmore, Middlessex, in a grave beautifully adorned with carved angels.
† There is a story – but I do not know whether it was actually true or merely the idle gossip of ill-wishers – that Beatty kept the correspondence of various girlfriends on his desk, arranged in small piles with colour-coded paperweights on each.
* This is arguably a curious comment from Bridgeman. Jellicoe was a key figure in developing staffs afloat when he became Second Sea Lord and was later criticised by one of his admirals for having too large a staff when he was in command of the Grand Fleet.
* Beatty had talked to a fortune-teller, a Mrs Robinson, about his future prospects and sometimes would be heard to wonder out loud about what the omens might hold. It was surprising for so strong and confident a man.
† Gordon quoted an electrician who, I believe, was called Joe Cockburn: ‘An electrician who served on Jellicoe’s Iron Duke, named Joe, recalled that in his cabin, he had some partitions taken down and an enormous table fitted with holes in the middle where he could get up through. On it he had a model of every naval ship in Europe, and he would spend hours working out all his various moves, one in particular called the “Grid Iron”. I made some ship models for him for his operations table, and he just said, “Thanks Joe”. That was the kind of officer he was.’
4
Men From the Same Mould: Scheer and Hipper
The two German commanders with whom the British would join battle, Rein-hard Scheer and Franz Hipper, were born in 1863. In the same year the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, then aged four, made his first visit to his royal cousins in England for the marriage of Victoria’s eldest son Bertie, later Edward VII, to Princess Alexandra of Denmark.
Born on 30 September, Scheer had a middle-class upbringing. His father, Julius, was a minister in Obernkirchen in Lower Saxony and also, as rector of the town’s school, a teacher. From his mother, Marie Rheinhart, Scheer inherited his name, though it is said that his real name was Arthur.
Hipper was also born in September, on the 13th. His family was from Weilheim, a small town around forty miles south of Munich, close to the Alpine village of Oberammergau. Hipper’s father Anton was, like Scheer’s, middle-class and ran a hardware store. Hipper’s father died when the boy was just three, leaving his widow Anna to care for Franz and his three brothers, who were brought up in a Catholic school that Franz attended from the age of five.
The 1870s were tumultuous years for the new Germany. The victorious war against her neighbour sowed the seeds of a deep French bitterness and a longing for revenge that would play its part in the final weeks before war broke out in
August 1914. Two years after Bavaria joined the newly created German Reich, the ten-year-old Hipper was sent off to Munich to attend Gymnasium, home for the next six years.
On 22 April 1879 Scheer joined a training ship, a small sailing frigate, SMS Niobe, as an officer cadet. He was following closely in the footsteps of Tirpitz, who had trained on the same ship fourteen years before. Built in 1848, Niobe had in 1859 been sold by the Royal Navy to the nascent Prussian navy. Scheer spent three months on her, learning basic navigation and engineering. When he came back in September he went straight to the Kiel naval academy.
Meanwhile, Hipper was finishing Gymnasium and decided to skip Abitur – the equivalent of today’s A-levels – and leave with a qualification of Obersekunda. This was specifically designed for those following a technical career path. He joined the Einjährigfreiwilliger, an organisation that fed the ranks of the reserve-officer class.
Like Jellicoe, Scheer excelled. In the 1880 sea-cadet exams in Kiel, his marks earned him second spot. Considering that he had only achieved a ‘satisfactory’ rating entering as a cadet, it was a clear sign of his subsequent application. After graduation and promotion to sea cadet in June, he spent six months studying gunnery, torpedo warfare and infantry tactics. It was perhaps unsurprising that infantry tactics should be included, as the Kiel academy was modelled on the Prussian military academy and the navy headed mostly by army officers.
Scheer joined another old British ship, this time the 91-gun Renown, followed by a stint in the armoured frigate Friedrich Karl. In his last year as a cadet, Scheer joined Hertha on a world tour to Australia (Melbourne), Japan (Yokohama and Kobe) and China (Shanghai).
Hipper decided, too, that the navy would be the best place for him. He had become obsessed with the idea through a friend of his who had been in the merchant marine. He secretly underwent the medical examinations required for all cadets. When found to be in fit state, he confronted his mother with his decision. Though she did what she could to dissuade him, she never regretted his decision and lived long enough to see the honour of the Kaiser’s ennoblement of her son following the Skagerrakschlacht. She would die four months after the battle.
Jutland_The Unfinished Battle Page 12
