Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

So the Jubilee review of the fleet at Spithead was really the most significant function of the whole celebration. It was arranged as a spectacular propaganda display, demonstrating to the Powers the Navy’s ability to assemble vast numbers of modern ships at any one place at any one time. It was claimed to be the largest assembly of warships ever gathered at one anchorage—173 ships, including more than fifty battleships, in lines seven miles long—and most of them had been designed, laid down and completed within the past eight years: yet no ships, it was repeatedly emphasized, had been withdrawn from foreign stations for the review. The Admiralty presented this lesson with style, and down the long lines of anchored warships the visiting grandees sailed in an elegant little convoy of inspecting vessels. The Prince of Wales led the way, in the royal yacht Victoria and Albert—a paddle-steamer, with two gracefully slanting funnels and a gold-enscrolled prow. The yacht Enchantress followed, carrying the Lords of Admiralty, the Wildfire with the colonial Premiers, the Eldorado full of foreign Ambassadors, the Danube loaded deep with the House of Lords, and finally the mighty Campania, largest and fastest of Cunarders, carrying both the House of Commons and the gentlemen of the Press—provision having been made on board, so The Times correspondent elaborately reported, ‘for those comforts which the enervating influences of civilization and the internal economy of the human frame have taught us to desire’.

  The fleet itself, supplemented by a respectful line of foreign warships, was dressed overall, and looked superb. It was that ornate period of naval architecture in which the influence of sail was still apparent in the design of warships, and the battleships of the Royal Navy were not yet painted in grey, but flaunted a rich combination of black and yellow. Rank upon rank they lay there, with funnels side by side or huge yellow airvents, catwalks at the stern, canopied look-outs on spindly masts, their hulls complicated with the booms of torpedo nets, their boats swung out on high davits—decks scrubbed to the raw grain of the wood, brasswork polished thin, the wheelhouse glass miraculously crystal, the sailors impeccably paraded at the rail and at the stern, high on a perpendicular staff, the huge White Ensign gracefully fluttering. There was nothing like a British battleship, for a show of pride, pomp and seamanlike skill. Multiplied by fifty on a single afternoon, the effect must have been dazzling: and as the royal yacht led its companions down the line, suddenly there shot out of nowhere, in a mad dash of Nelsonic impertinence, the fastest vessel in the world, Charles Parsons’s Turbinia, 2,000 horsepower driving nine screws, demonstrating with dramatic and altogether unofficial effrontery the superiority of British marine engineers. ‘Her speed was’, reported The Times man, a little unsteadily by now, ‘simply astonishing, but its manifestation was accompanied by a mighty rushing sound and by a stream of flame from her funnel at least as long as the funnel itself.’1

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  The Royal Navy did not lack self-esteem. It loved to show off its brilliance and its seamanship. There was nothing on the seas to equal the panache of a British warship, when she sailed into a foreign port all flags and fresh paint, the Marine band playing on the forecastle and the captain indescribably grand upon his bridge. This was a genial sort of conceit. The officers of the Navy did not think much about war and its horrors. ‘We looked on the Navy more as a World Police Force than as a warlike institution’, wrote one officer in retrospect. ‘We considered that our job was to safeguard law and order throughout the world—safeguard civilization, put out fires onshore, and act as guide, philosopher and friend to the merchant ships of all nations.’ The Navy’s discipline was strict, but there was to its spirit much of the breezy bonhomie of sail. Its sailors were recognizably the Jolly Jack Tars of the wooden walls, trained in all-round seamanship like sailing-ship men; padding around the decks in bare feet, moving generally at the run, often bearded and bronzed through service on tropical stations. Its executive officers were frequently men of private means—these were still the days of ‘half-pay’, on which an officer might be placed without notice at the end of a ship’s commission—and prided themselves on their self-reliance. Nothing in Nelson’s life appealed more to the British than his loyal disregard of orders, and in the 1890s the Royal Navy was rich in highly individual commanders. Algernon Charles Fiesché Heneage, ‘Pompo’ to the Navy, habitually carried a stock of twenty dozen piqué shirts in his ship, was alleged to break two eggs every morning to dress his hair, and took off his uniform coat when he said his prayers, because for a uniformed British officer to fall on his knees would be unthinkable. ‘Prothero the Bad’, Reginald Charles Prothero, was one of the most alarming persons ever to command a warship, with a black beard down to his waist, flaming eyes, huge shoulders, an enormous hook nose and a habit of addressing everyone as ‘boy’, even sometimes his eminent superiors. Arthur Wilson, ‘Old ’Ard ’Art’, when he commanded the Channel Squadron, used to ride out of Portsmouth Dockyard on a rattly old bicycle, gravely saluted by the sentries, and on June 6, 1884, laconically entered in his diary: ‘Docked ship. Received the V.C.’ Gerard Noel, greeted with a cheery good morning on the bridge of his ship in the small hours, turned with a snarl and replied: ‘This is no time for frivolous compliments.’ Robert Arbuthnot was so absolute a martinet that when, soon after he had handed over a ship to his successor, a seagull defecated with a plop upon the quarter- deck, the Chief Bosun’s Mate remarked without a smile: ‘That could never ’ave ’appened in Sir Robert’s day.’ ‘Tell these ugly bastards,’ William Packenham instructed his Turkish interpreter, when sent ashore to quell a rising in Asia Minor, and surrounded on all sides by angry brigands, ‘tell these ugly bastards that I am not going to tolerate any more of their bestial habits’: when an elderly lady at a civic luncheon asked him if he was married, he replied courteously: ‘No, madam, no. I keep a loose woman in Edinburgh.’1

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  These were the extravagances of a lost age, and the Navy still lived half in its glorious past. Earlier in the century it had probably been the most complex and advanced organization in Britain, but technology had overtaken it. It had no war plans, because for fifty years there had been no serious challenge to its supremacy. Its officers had little tactical or strategic training, but relied largely on seamanship and the Nelson touch, or on a rigid acceptance of inherited methods. Bold they might be in their private lives, but their professional drive was blunted by protocol and tradition. For all their fun and charm they were often fearfully ignorant of the world, and interested only in their beloved Navy: in those days naval officers began their careers at 12 or 13, when they joined the training ship Britannia, and spent their whole life insulated within the service. The ships of the Royal Navy were scattered across the world in ones and twos, a battleship here, an armoured cruiser there, with squadrons in the East Indies, the West Indies, the Pacific, the south Atlantic, with cruisers in Australian waters and battleships off China—a habit of dispersion inherited from the days of sail, when it took at least three months to sail to India. Sometimes ships went off on goodwill cruises for months at a time, with no prearranged course or instructions—‘Well, boys,’ the captain would say to his wardroom in the morning, ‘where shall we go today?’

  In materiel, too, the Royal Navy was deficient in some important respects—notably guns. An Admiral’s annual report on his squadron made no mention of gunnery, and this was almost the last Navy in the world to be equipped with muzzle-loading guns.1 Until the apparition of the Turbinia at Spithead, the Admiralty had persistently ignored Charles Parsons’s revolutionary inventions, and many of the Navy’s ships on distant stations were obsolete, ‘too weak to fight, too slow to run away’. It was true that numerically the Navy was overwhelming, but each ship’s company, or at least each squadron, tended to think of itself as a self-contained unit, trained to perfection in its own chosen specialities, but with no conception of how to combine in a fleet action, and only the haziest idea of what to do if war broke out. The Admiralty thought more in terms of land than of sea—of particular stations, rather than the grand whole of
the oceans, with the result that the Navy had forfeited its mobility, and was tied to fuelling bases, repair yards or traditional trouble-spots. Appearances counted most of all. The success of a commander was judged chiefly by the appearance of his ship, how white its paintwork, how burnished its brass, how smart its time-honoured drills. Swords were worn at sea, and officers sometimes spent their own money on extra brasswork or paint for their ships. On the battleship Duke of Edinburgh in the late eighties the nuts of all the bolts on the aft deck were gilded, the magazine keys were electro-plated, and statues of Mercury embellished the revolver racks. The guns were fired as seldom as possible, because the blast blistered the paintwork (ammunition was occasionally thrown overboard, to save shooting it off).

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  The social structure of the Navy, though not so archaic as the Army’s, was still based upon privilege. The executive branch of the service was very smart, and in 1897 its officers included two princes, two dukes, a viscount, a count, an earl, four lords by courtesy, eight baronets and thirty-five honourables. There were twelve titled captains (though they also included Captain John Locke Marx), and they lived very much like gentlemen. To get good stewards they often chipped in out of their own pocket, sometimes doubling a man’s official pay, if they thought he could add suavity to the hospitality. A senior officer’s servants became in effect his personal retainers: a captain’s coxswain would move with him from ship to ship, familiar with all his foibles, until in the end, very often, he retired ashore with him, to serve him as a salty kind of butler in his old age. An admiral, whose standard pay was £5 a day, was entitled to a personal establishment of a secretary, a flag lieutenant, a coxswain and ten domestic servants, and wherever he went on the Navy’s service he found awaiting him an exceedingly comfortable Admiralty House: tropically terraced on the bay at Trincomalee, demurely Georgian at English Harbour in Antigua, ecclesiastically Victorian, like a rectory, at Esquimalt in British Columbia, or tucked away up a solitary creek at Simon’s Bay in South Africa, where the Admiral Commanding used to anchor his flagship directly outside Admiralty House, and there were always live turtles tied to the end of his jetty, waiting to be turned into soup.

  The executive branch looked haughtily down at the engineering branch—‘mechanics’, ‘greasers’, ‘whose mammas’, as the radical Fisher once said, ‘were not asked to take tea with other mammas’. In the 1890s the engines of a ship were generally as distasteful to the executive officer as the tank was later to become to the disinherited cavalry, and there was still a nostalgic yearning for the great days of sail. (‘Great satisfaction was manifested at Portsmouth’, we read, when the brig Sealark, which had been delayed by gales, beat up from the eastward for the Jubilee review under a full head of sail.) Hardly a single officer of gentle birth was prepared to learn the messy mechanical trade, and the engineering branch was full of names like Samuel Rock, Elijah Tricker and Daniel Griffin, contrasting hornily with the Frederick W. Talbot Ponsonbys or the Honourable Henry A. Scudamore Stanhopes up on the bridge. As for the ratings, their pay could be as low as 7d a day, their quarters at sea were revoltingly cramped, and they had to eat their miserable victuals with their fingers, knives and forks being considered prejudicial to naval discipline and manliness. The Navy had no shore barracks—between commissions the seamen lived in old line-of-battle hulks. They were given no physical training,1 and half of them could not swim.

  The Royal Navy was an intensely conservative body, wrinkled with quaint anomalies. The Board of Admiralty was a gilded relic of earlier centuries, meeting in its beautiful eighteenth-century chambers in Whitehall, and acting as patron to several church livings, including that of Alston with Garrigill and Humshaugh. The Navy list included eight ancient functionaries called Vice-Admirals of the Coast of Great Britain, and four Vice-Admirals of Ireland. All in all, there was a marvellously humorous fascination to this force. For its officers life was often one long working holiday, full of high spirits and good company: and the ratings, too, for all their harsh conditions, were generally loyal to the service for life, and unshakeably proud of it—group photographs of ships’ companies emanate a delightful sense of cocky cheerfulness, very different from the moustachioed melancholy that seemed to hang around the crews of French or Russian ironclads.

  It was very much an imperial Navy. It was excellent at showing the flag, charming important guests, overawing recalcitrant natives, rescuing shipwrecked mariners, relieving the victims of natural disasters, looking splendid and behaving stylishly. Maltese boatmen were carried on flagships of the Mediterranean Fleet, together with their high-prowed gondola-like dgbaisas: and nothing was more colourfully imperial than the sight of one of these bright-painted craft, lowered from the deck of a British man-o’-war, gliding ashore with its swarthy Latin oarsman at the stern and a party of laughing English officers in its cushioned seats. Sometimes there were Navy scares in Britain, and alarmists made the flesh creep with talk of immense building programmes abroad, new kinds of Russian turret-ship, or much improved torpedoes in France. They always subsided after a month or two. The British had absolute confidence in their Navy. It was supreme. It had always won. It glittered, and was much loved.

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  British naval strategy, such as it was, had been distorted by the allure of Empire. The days of gunboat diplomacy were over, and the Fleet was dispersed to meet enemies that were never likely to arise, or to cope with situations that were not really relevant. What the country really needed was not far-flung magnificence, but modern strategic planning, concentrated force, and Admirals whose vision went farther than the good of the service, and glimpsed the world beyond the Sultan’s reception or the Ambassador’s ball for the Fleet. In the past, before imperialism glazed the British vision, the dangers of dispersal had often been more clearly seen. Sydney Smith once observed that the British maintained garrisons ‘on every rock in the ocean where a cormorant could perch’, and Sir William Molesworth told the Commons in the 1840s that ‘activated by an insane desire of worthless Empire, into every corner of our colonial empire we thrust an officer with a few soldiers; in every hole and corner we erect a fortification, build a barracks, or cram a storehouse full of perishable stores’.1

  The New Imperialists saw things differently. For them the Empire was itself the chief concern of British policy, and the BlueWater Policy, the thesis that Britain was best defended by the widely dispersed force of the Navy, was paramount. Seapower alone, Monypenny thought, had made Britain the supreme regulating power of the earth: it was the ubiquity of the British presence, in all five continents, that was the strength of the island kingdom. Other theorists believed that the cruces of British power were no longer in the United Kingdom at all. Some saw the Mediterranean as the centre of imperial gravity, others Canada, with its coasts on two oceans, its limitless resources and its new transcontinental railway line—the defence of Canada, wrote L. S. Amery,1 was the very touchstone of imperialism, to which every other consideration must give way.

  So the initiate of Empire, as he sailed proprietorially along the sea routes, looked out with complacent pride at the scattered seabastions of the Flag. They were like policemen on duty, ensuring all was well. As spectacles they could certainly be superb. Gibraltar from the deck of a passing ship was splendid and terrible enough to move even that lifelong opponent of imperialism, W. S. Blunt—‘God! to hear the sweet shrill treble of her fifes upon the breeze!’ With the semaphores on its ramparts, the battleships at its feet, the distant sound of bugles from its barracks beneath the Rock, Gibraltar was like a declaration of intent to the passing voyager: what we have, it seemed to say, we hold. Malta was terrific, too, with the warships steaming in and out of Grand Harbour beneath the fortifications of the Knights—‘I would rather see the British on the heights of Montmartre,’ Napoleon had said, ‘than in possession of Malta.’ Hong Kong, bustling on the rim of China, was like a great British dynamo pulsing away in the East, and at Trincomalee—‘Trinco’ to the Navy—the Royal Navy had b
uilt its base on one of the grandest of all harbours, big enough to shelter the entire Eastern Fleet: the dockyard lay in the lee of a palm-covered ridge, and a gigantic banyan tree, all knotted and gnarled, gave shade to the Admiral’s garden.

  Most hauntingly of all, the traveller might find his way to Ban try Bay, on the west coast of Ireland, at a time when the Channel Fleet was lying there on exercise. Not a glimpse or a hint of its presence would he discover, as he travelled through the bare Caha Mountains: but as he crossed the last ridge above Bantry, there in the long desolate fjord below him, hidden away among the hills, suddenly he would see the fleet, brilliantly alive. There the great ships lie, black, white and yellow, bow to stern in their anchorage, some with sails furled above their high funnels, some with barbette guns like forts upon their decks. Steam pinnaces chug officiously across the bay, with gigantic ensigns preposterously out of scale at their sterns, and bearded sailors swanky with their boat-hooks. There are jolly-boats rowing smartly down from Bere Haven, and flags flying everywhere, and a tremendous sense of disciplined agitation, painting, polishing, saluting, men swarming up steel ladders, officers alert on white scrubbed bridges and over all a drift of black smoke from fifty yellow smoke-stacks.

  Perhaps there is the thump of a band at practice, from the Admiral’s flagship down the bay, echoing over the water behind the hammering and the shouting of orders, the beat of machinery and the laughter. Or perhaps, as the traveller stands there marvelling, there is a sharp panting and scuffling out of sight, and over the ridge appears a landing-party of half a dozen sweating bluejackets, slung around with webbing equipment, wearing khaki gaiters and carrying rifles: stocky thicknecked fellows who talk to each other breathlessly and obscenely in West Country accents, and are led at a stumbling half-trot by a midshipman so pink, so white, so maddeningly sure of himself, so dapper in his white stiff collar and cording, that he might have stepped straight from a serial in the Boy’s Own Paper, ‘There she lies, men,’ he pipes as they pause for a moment on the grassy ridge, and look back to the ships below.