Jutland_The Unfinished Battle

by Nicholas Jellicoe

  On 14 May 1916, two weeks before Jutland, Beatty was interviewed by a journalist, Cecil Roberts, in Rosyth:

  There we now met the legendary figure, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty. He was to be the last spectacular figure in British naval history. Never again would the service touch such a height of power and glory. He was a lion of a man with his handsome, strong-jawed face, bulldog air and his habit of wearing his peaked admiral’s cap at a rakish angle. He was the perfect image of the public’s idea of a daring sea-dog in the Drake tradition. His postcard photo was in every newsagent’s window.

  When Roberts visited Jellicoe a few weeks later in Scapa Flow, the picture that he painted was a little different. Here was a small man. A rather weather-beaten, kind – but not strong – face with sparkling warm eyes. Jellicoe had the style of another generation but with an air of quiet confidence.

  Jellicoe was tight-lipped in what might have been a drawing room except for a large chart on the wall by the fireplace. Could this be a battleship? It was so peaceful and homelike. There were easy chairs and a divan covered in flowered chintz. French windows opened onto a stern walk bright with potted geraniums. I was astonished to see in one corner a baby grand piano with open keyboard and sheet music on its rack. A silver photograph of Lady Jellicoe stood on its flat top. Near a divan chair was a revolving bookcase. A large carpet, curtained windows and a log fire burning in the open grate, completed the domestic scene … Admiral Jellicoe himself, apart from the heavy gold lace on his sleeves and his ribbon decorations, contributed to the illusion (of the indestructibility of such great ships). Sturdy, medium in height [he was five-and-a-half feet tall], with a smiling round face and twinkling eyes, in other garb he might have been a country vicar like his brother. He had nothing of Beatty’s leonine appearance. He had the reputation of being a quick worker who never showed any temper.72

  The two men’s matrimonial lives were very different. Beatty’s marriage to Ethel was tough. For weeks at a time, Beatty would share his home ashore, Aberdour House, with his mistress Eugenie Godfrey-Faussett. Jellicoe’s family was a happy and close-knit one. Their personal styles were also quite distinct. Jellicoe was low-key; it was easy to see why he was so loved below deck. I cannot imagine the wives getting along for one minute.

  Joe Cockburn, a young torpedoman on Iron Duke, who used to make ships’ models for Jellicoe, gave a very endearing description of how he remembered his commanding officer: ‘at sea Sir John, a figure in a duffle coat and sometimes wearing a white cap cover, would come through the mess decks with an “excuse me”, and that would be Sir John making his way to the bridge. When Beatty came on board, it was “CLEAR LOWER DECKS” and a file of marines wearing short arms with Beatty in the middle. We never liked him.’73

  For many, however, this is what made David Beatty the kind of leader of men he was. Goodenough, who worshipped both admirals, said it well: ‘It was not his great brains … it was his spirit, combined with comprehension of really big issues … The spirit of resolute, at times it would almost seem careless advance’. He then pinned it down: ‘I don’t mean without taking care; I mean without care of consequence’.74

  Jellicoe, on the other hand, was a cerebral leader who played the fleet as if it were a chessboard, calculating moves and probabilities. ‘It is difficult to believe that Jellicoe was wrong to centralise his battle fleet and its tactics’, Correlli Barnett summarised, ‘The truth was that the Grand Fleet was only capable of rigid textbook manoeuvres; and Jellicoe was cool-headed enough to realise it.’75 He was not one, as much as some historians might have liked him to have been, keen to leave anything to chance.76

  The admirals’ deaths and their memorials

  John Jellicoe died on 20 November 1935. The flags of the navies of three nations – Britain, France and Germany – flew at half-mast, honouring a man who, twenty years previously, had commanded the British Navy in what is still acknowledged as one of the greatest – and most controversial – fleet actions of all time. His death was honoured by friend and foe alike as the news was flashed around the empire.

  George, my father – then only eighteen – had temporarily left the family house at No. 9 Egerton Gardens in Chelsea for a short walk down the King’s Road. He had thought that his father was recovering. When he got to Sloane Square tube station he was struck by an awful premonition and rushed back. It was too late. Once home, the butler told him his father had just died.

  Jellicoe’s body lay in state in Westminster Abbey, in the Henry VII chapel. On the morning of 25 November 1935, a grey, foggy Monday, the coffin was taken to Horse Guards Parade, from where a procession started down Northumberland Avenue, along the Embankment, up New Bridge Street and Ludgate Hill, to arrive at St Paul’s fifty minutes later. Seven Admirals of the Fleet, among them one French and one German, Vice Admiral Förster, and one field marshal and one marshal of the Royal Air Force accompanied the gun carriage. From his Jutland comrades-in-arms were Goodenough, Chatfield and Beatty.

  Behind the coffin was my father. I have watched the Pathé News footage of him as he walked silently, looking bewildered and lost behind the cortege, mounting the steps to St Paul’s, flicking his falling hair to one side. He was just sitting his exams at Winchester. Behind him were the admiral’s three sons-in-law, Major Latham, Lieutenant Wingfield and Lionel Balfour. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of York followed the family, and were in turn followed by 158 admirals (The Times reported that another 130 admirals were in the abbey itself). The prominent display of a swastika flag placed near Jellicoe’s coffin, sent by Admiral Erich Raeder, Scheer’s chief of staff at Jutland, bore a strange witness to the camaraderie of those who fought against each other in the North Sea, but alongside each other in northern China. Jellicoe had planned to visit the new, young German navy and it had been their intention that he should have been invited to the opening of the Laboe Memorial on 31 May 1936, Skagerrakstag. Whenever I’ve been there I’ve wondered whether he would actually have gone. Despite the old friendships, he would not have wanted to have his name associated with the new German politics. Admiral Förster, who had been Seydlitzs gunnery commander at Jutland, represented the German navy. The ex-crown prince’s son, Prince Frederick, ‘Fritzi’, represented his great uncle, the former Kaiser, who sent a large wreath.

  Beatty served as one of the pallbearers. ‘What would the Navy say?’ he was heard to ask. I feel that it was a last act of the warm friendship that the two had sometimes shared before Jutland. It was sad that the battle had so twisted a fair bond: ‘Self-appointed champions poured forth a stream of calumny and uninformed criticism upon one or other of the two admirals. This was deplorable and gave a false impression of the relationship that actually existed between the two men’.77 Beatty’s tribute to his old comrade-in-arms was warm and heartfelt: Jellicoe, he said, ‘had epitomised the highest ideals for which the British Navy stands. The country owes (him) a great debt of gratitude for the valiant work he did during the war … He was an upright man and a model of integrity in everything he undertook’.78

  Even Lloyd George had warm words: ‘Although we had our differences during the war as to the best method of dealing with the submarine attack on our shipping, our personal relations were always of the very best. I never doubted that the view he took was prompted by the very highest sense of duty.’79

  Captain Henry Taprell Dorling’s eulogy was very human. He was the writer who wrote about the Jutland night actions under the pseudonym of ‘Taffrail.’

  The nation and the Empire regret the passing of a very great public servant. But the Navy mourns more than that – the death of a great seaman and leader who was a loved and respected friend and whose life and character are a pattern of integrity, industry, courage and devotion to duty to those who come after him. His heart was a heart of gold.80

  In his article was a wonderful image of the admiral. On Flotta, where the fleet had built an eighteen-hole golf course, John Jellicoe was the only man allowed to play through, but rather tha
n walk the holes, he ran between every stroke!

  Strangely, Beatty predicted his own death, which was only months away: ‘So Jellicoe is gone,’ he announced. ‘I feel I will be the next to be summoned. I don’t think the call will be long. I’m tired. Very tired.’81

  In the spring of 1936, just before midnight on 10 March, Earl Beatty died. He had been getting worse since the previous November, yet against doctor’s orders he had insisted in January on attending the funeral of George V, his friend and king. Onlookers said that he looked grey by then and one, a journalist, thought he looked so ill he offered him some brandy.82 Raeder did not want to send a deputation to Beatty’s funeral. There was still so much acrimony after the way in which the High Seas Fleet had been treated during the post-Armistice internment. Only the German naval attache in London represented Germany.

  In the month of Beatty’s death, Ernie Chatfield became embroiled in a squabble with the Office of Public Works when it suggested that there was no more room in central London for statues: those of Beatty and Jellicoe should be placed in Greenwich, rather than in the centre of the British capital. Chatfield wrote to the office saying that ‘Trafalgar Square should become a naval memorial’ – because, except for those of Nelson, John Franklin and Captain Scott, there were no other statues of naval heroes in the middle of London.* To my knowledge, there is not even a bust or statue of Jacky Fisher.83

  It was a shame that in Sir Edwin Lutyens’s final proposal of lining the square with the great names of Francis Drake, George Rodney and St Vincent, among others, never came to pass. Ten years later, in 1948, the two British Jutland admirals were finally honoured on Trafalgar Day (21 October), when their busts were unveiled by the Duke of Gloucester. They are there today on the northeastern side of Trafalgar Square.

  In the Pathé News archive there is also footage of my thirty-year-old father, dressed in the uniform of the Coldstream Guards, briefly meeting Churchill, my grandmother looking on from the side. I do not think, from the expression on her face, that there was any love lost between them, given what Churchill had written about her husband. Whenever I can, I walk through the square towards the National Portrait Gallery to share a few quiet moments with my grandfather.

  Over the next few years the undercurrent of the controversy continued to swirl. When two new King George V-class battleships were to have been named Jellicoe and Beatty, Churchill vetoed the names in February 1940, and they were launched instead as Anson and Howe. The closest that the navy got to honouring the admirals by name was to launch a destroyer, Jutland, in 1943. A small memento of her is now in my library: a copy of Bacon’s book dedicated to the ship by my paternal grandmother, Gwen Jellicoe.

  Fittingly, in 2014 Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope’s huge (17ft-wide) 1921 portrait of twenty-two of the great naval officers of the war had pride of place at the top of the stairs leading into the galleries of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Sadly, I have never come across a photo of David Beatty and John Jellicoe, fellow officers and commanders of the same Grand Fleet, together. Yet in this portrait the body language speaks loudly. Charles Madden, looking at Jellicoe, has his back to Beatty. Jellicoe, pushed off to the right of the canvas, is in thought – one of seven officers sitting. Beatty is centre stage. Some of the officers could not be there. They had been killed in action: at Jutland, Hood and Arbuthnot; at the Battle of Coronel, Cradock. Notably absent from the group was Jacky Fisher.

  Both Jutland’s admirals were soon after the Great War honoured nationally by the country that they served with valour. Beatty was elevated to the peerage and became Earl Beatty, Viscount Borodale of Wexford and Baron of the North Sea. On his return from New Zealand Jellicoe was also offered and accepted an earldom. In tribute to the men with whom he had spent so many lonely wintery months in Scapa Flow, he became the 1st Earl Jellicoe of Scapa.

  ‘Where are you going, my Johnny-o?’

  ‘I’m joining a ship in Scapa Flow,

  That’s where I’m going, my Nancy,

  I’m joining the Black Prince, Nancy-o,

  Joining the Black Prince, Nancy-o,

  She’s bristling with guns and ready to go,

  To sail to glory with Jellicoe!’

  But where is the Black Prince? Gone now!

  And where is the glory? Gone now!

  And six thousand sailors? Gone now!

  They have gone to the bottom at Jutland.

  Ob sturm uns bedroht hoch vom Norden,

  Ob Heimweh im Herzen auch glüht;

  Wir sind Kameraden geworden,

  Und wenn es zur Hölle auch geht.

  Matrosen die wissen zu sterben,

  Wie immer das Schicksal auch spielt,

  Und geht uns’re Trommel in Scherben,

  Dann singt uns der Nordwind ein Lied:

  Auf einem Seemansgrab,

  Da blühen keine Rosen,

  Auf eine Seemansgrab,

  Da blüht kein Blühelein,

  Der einz’ge Gruß, das sind die weißen Möwen

  Und eine Träne die ein kleines Mädel weint.†

  * Commander Carlyon Wilfroy Bellairs (1871–1955) was a very strong critic of Jellicoe. He had both a naval and parliamentary career. After leaving the Navy in 1902 he entered politics and served as the MP for King’s Lynn from 1906 to 1910 after having done a short stint as a lecturer for naval officers.

  † The First Lord, Walter Long was extremely perturbed about where the affair was heading. In his diary for 15 March 1920 he made the following entry: ‘(Harper) tells me the Jutland Report is held up because Beatty wants alterations made. I’m sorry. I wish Beatty would leave it alone. He has made Harper alter some things which did “injustice” to the battle-cruisers’ shooting, also a part of the track which H has put in from the evidence. But Beatty says he doesn’t care about all the evidence in the world … as it can’t alter “facts” … A pity this, as it will open the way to controversy afterwards’ (Temple Patterson, Jellicoe, p232, footnotes).

  * Kenneth Gilbert Balmain Dewar, later Admiral, CBE, RN (1879–1964]. He had served in the Operations Division of the Naval Staff under Jellicoe and then the Weymss Boards of the Admiralty. He had been a brilliant cadet and student. Later, in 1912 he wrote an essay entitled ‘What is the war value of oversea commerce? How did it affect our naval policy in the past and how does it in the present day?’ in which he quite correctly predicted the distant blockade. The relevant chapter was censored by the Admiralty. Jellicoe’s opinion of both Dewar brothers was not that complimentary; quoted in Roskill, The Last Naval Hero, p332, from the Evan-Thomas Papers.

  * Roskills copy is amongst his papers held at the Churchill Archives at the University of Cambridge and shown to the author by the very helpful staff.

  † Dr Innes McCartney, underwater archaeologist, helped sort out this mystery. I had hoped that the maps might have proved to have been as significant a find as the circumstances of their finding were.

  * Churchill, apparently, also took exception to Corbett. He worked against him in delaying the publication by insisting that other official documents should be published with the history.

  * Kenneth Dewar also worked as a naval adviser to Churchill, so Dewar’s work re-emerged in The World Crisis (see below for more on this). Many of the charts that Churchill used were found in the Staff Appreciation; Churchill’s idea of a deployment on the centre was directly influenced by Dewar’s thinking, even if the latter thought the manoeuvre was far too complicated.

  * ‘Later, the problem of memorials to Lord Jellicoe and to Lord Beatty arose for discussion; I felt strongly that they should have statues erected in London. The Office of Works, however, to my astonishment suggested that there was no room in London for more statues and asked if they could not be placed at Greenwich … Almost would it appear that we had had but a short naval history. Great soldiers’ monuments, fortunately, were everywhere … I claimed for the Navy that Trafalgar Square should become a naval memorial’ (Chatfield, p131).

  † ‘
The U-Boat Sailor’s Song’: Whether high storms threaten us from the north / Whether homesickness glows in the heart / We have become comrades / And when it also comes to hell / Sailors know how to die / As always fate also plays / And goes our drum in pieces / Then the north wind sings us a song / REFRAIN: On a seaman’s grave / No roses bloom / On a seaman’s grave / No flowers bloom / The single greeting is the white seagulls / And a tear which a small maiden cries.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Bennett, p236, quoting Captain Herbert (later Admiral Sir Herbert) Richmond.

  2 Dr Andrew Gordon, BBC Scotland, Scotland’s War at Sea, 2015.

  3 Jameson, The Most Formidable Thing, p207.

  1 The Emergence of German Economic and Naval Power

  1 Steinberg, Tirpitz, p131, quoting Marder.

  2 MacMillan, p67.

  3 Kelly, Tirpitz, p103.

  4 Ibid, p2.

  5 Kaiser Wilhelm II, My Early Life, p229.

  6 MacMillan, p72.

  7 Herwig, p23.

  8 Epkenhans, Tirpitz, p19.

  9 Ibid, p21.

  10 Rear Admiral Alfred Tirpitz was appointed on 18 June 1897 as Secretary of State to the Navy Office, the RMA.

  2 The Fleet Builders: Fisher and Tirpitz

  1 Jameson, p90.

  2 Wragg, p39.

  3 Ibid, p42.

  4 Mackay, quoted in Wragg, p44, and Hough, p38.

  5 Hough, First Sea Lord, p43.

  6 Wragg, p52.

  7 The six were Wilhelm Büchsel, Oscar Klausa, Iwan Oldekop, Otto von Diederichs, Richard Geißler and Oscar Boeters.

  8 Kelly, p25.

  9 Kelly, p33.