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MEMORIES

BY

ADMIRAL OF THE FLEET

LORD FISHER

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

MCMXIX

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• • •

» • •

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FSAO.

Readers of this hook will quickly observe that Admiral
of the Fleet Lord Fisher has small faith in the printed word ;
and those who have enjoyed the privilege of having '* his
fist shaken in their faces " will readily admit that the
printed word, though faithfully taken down from his dicta-
tion, must lack a large measure of the power — the '* aroma,''
as he calls it — which his personality lends to his spoken
word.

Had Lord Fisher been allowed his own way, there woidd
have been no Book. Not for the first time in his career,
the need of serving his country and his country's Navy has
over-ridden his persotial feeling. These " Memories," there-
fore, must be regarded as a compromise (" the beastliest
word in the English language " — see " The Times " of
September gth, 1919) between the No-Book of Lord
Fisher's inclination and the orderly, complete Autobiography
which the public wishes to possess.
^ The book consists in the main of the author's ipsissima
§ verba, dictated during the month of September, 1919.
oQ One or tzvo chapters have been put together from fugitive
^ writings which Lord Fisher had collected and printed {in
^ noble and eloquently various type) as a gift to his friends
^ after his death . The discreeter passages of the letters which
he wrote to Lord Esher between 1903 and 191 2 illustrate
some portions of the life's work which — caring little for
the past and much for the future,^ much for the idea and
little for the fact — Lord Fisher has successfully declined to
describe in his own words.

" This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and
reaching forth unto those things which are before, J press toward the
mark." — Phil, iii, 13, 14.

345538

Preambli

^^^|HERE is no planner
"j^^sequence ! Just as the
thoughts have arisen
^^^^^so have they been
written ordicta ted! Thespoken
word has not been amended —
better the fragrance of the
fresh picked flower than trying
to get more scent out of it by
adding hot water afterwards j
Also it is more life-like to
have the first impulse of the
heart than vainly to endeavour
after studied phrases! Perhaps
the only curiosity is that I
begin my life backwards and

leave my birth and being
weaned till the end !

''The last shall be first''

is good for Autobiography !

I think a text is a good thing!
So I adopt the following
(from R. L. Stevenson) as being
nice for the young ones to
read what follows : —

To be honest, to be kind, to earn
a little and to spend a little less, to
make upon the whole a family
happier for his presence, to renounce
when that shall be necessary, and not
be embittered, to keep a few friends
ha those withoict capitulation^ above
all on the same grim condition to
keep friends with himself, here is a
task for all that a man has of
fortitude and delicacy.

PREFACE

Not long ago a gentleman enclosed me the manuscript
of his book, and asked me for a preface. I had never
heard of him. He reminded me of Mark Twain in a
similar case — the gentleman in a postscript asked Mr.
Twain if he found fish good for the brain ; he had been
recommended it, he said. Twain replied. Yes ! and he
suggested his correspondent having whales for breakfast !

One gentleman sent me a cheque for two thousand
guineas, and asked me to let him have a short article,
on any subject. I returned the cheque — I had never
heard of him either. I have had some most generous
offers from publishers.

Sir George Reid said to me : " Never write an Auto-
biography. You only know one view of yourself — others
see you all round." But 1 don't see any harm in such
" Memories " as I now indite ! In regard to Sir G.
Reid's observation, there's one side no one else can see,
and that's " the inside ! "

Nothing in this Volume in the least approaches the
idea of a Biography. Facts illumined by letters, and
the life divided into sections, to be filled in with the
struggles of the ascent, seems the ideal sort of representa-
tion of a man's life. A friend once wrote me the requisites
of a biographer. Three qualifications were :

X PREFACE

(a) Plenty of time for the job.

(b) A keen appreciation of the work done.

(c) A devotion to the Hero.

And, as if it didn't so much matter, he added — the
biographer should possess a high standard of literary
ability.

But yet I beHeve that the vindication of a man's
lifework is almost an impossible task for even the most
intimate of friends or the most assiduous and talented
of Biographers, simply because they cannot possibly
appreciate how great deeds have been belittled and
ravaged by small contemporary men. These yelping
curs made the most noise, as the empty barrels do ! and
it's only long afterwards that the truth emerges out of
the mist of obloquy and becomes history.

Remember it's only in this century that Nelson has

come into his own.

FISHER.

" Sworn to no Party — Of no Sect am I !
I can't be silent and I will not lie ! "

" Time and the Ocean and some Guiding Star
In High Cabal have made us what we are ! "

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

lAGE

King Edward VII i

CHAPTER II

" The Moon Sways Oceans and Provokes the Hound " 22

CHAPTER III
Admiral Von Pohl and Admiral von Tirpitz . ■ . . 29

CHAPTER IV
Economy is Victory 4^

CHAPTER V
The Dardanelles • • 49

CHAPTER VI
Abdul Hamid and the Pope 9^

xi

xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER VII

J'AOE

A Jeu d'Esprit 9«

CHAPTER VIII
Naval War Staff and Admiralty Clerks . . . 102

CHAPTER IX
Recapitulation of Deeds and Ideas 113

CHAPTER X
Apologia pro Vita sua . . 134

CHAPTER XI
Nelson . 158

CHAPTER XII
Letters to Lord Esher 165

CHAPTER XIII
Americans . 221

CHAPTER XIV
Some Special Missions 229

CONTENTS xiii

CHAPTER XV

PAGB

Some Personalities 242

CHAPTER XVI

Things That Please Me 272

Epilogue 281

Index . ... 287

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Lord Fisher, 19 17 — Admiral of the Fleet . Frontispiece

Facing pagt

King Edward VII. and Lord Fisher .... 16

Sir John Fisher in " Renown," 1897 .... 33

Sir John Fisher and Lord Roberts, 1906 . . 48

The Kingfisher 65

The First Sea Lord. By William Nicholson . 80

Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, G.C.B., O.M.,

etc , 1917 97

Age 14. — ^Iidshipman 112

Age 19. — Lieutenant 129

1885. — Age 41. — Post-Captain 144

1904. — ^Age 63. — Admiral 161

The Funeral of King Edward VII 192

The Anniversary of Trafalgar 209

xv

xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing pa^e

America and the Blockade 224

Sir John Fisher at the Hague Peace Conference,
May, 1899 256

Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet,

1899-1902 273

MEMORIES

CHAPTER I

KING EDWARD VII

King Edward had faith in me, and so supported me
always that it is only natural I should begin this book
with the remarks about him which I privately printed
long since for use at my death ; but events have occurred
to alter that decision and induce me to publish this book.

There are more intimate touches than those related
here, which I forbear to publish. There is a limit to
those peculiar and pregnant little exhibitions of a kind
heart's purpose being put in print. They lose their
aroma.

In the Dictionary of National Biography there is a
Marginal Heading in the Life of King Edward as follows :

" HIS FAITH IN LORD FISHERY

It is the only personal marginal note ! I now descant
upon it, not to be egotistical, but to exemplify one of
the finest traits in King Edward's noble character —
without doubt I personally could not be of the very least
service to him in any way, and yet in his belief of my being
right in the vast and drastic reforms in the Navy he gave

I B

MEMORIES

me his unfaltering support right through unswervingly,
though every sycophantic effort was exhausted in the
endeavour to alienate him from his support of me. He
quite enjoyed the numberless communications he got,
and the more outrageous the calumnies the more he
revelled in my reputed wickedness ! I can't very well
put some of them on paper, but the Minotaur wasn't in
it with me ! Also I was a Malay ! I was the son of a
Cingalese Princess — hence my wicked cunning and
duplicity ! I had formed a syndicate and bought all
the land round Rosyth before the Government fixed on
it as a Naval Base — hence my wealth ! How the King
enjoyed my showing him my private income as given to
the Income Tax Commissioners was £382 6s. iid. after
the legal charges for income tax, annuities, etc., were
subtracted from the total private income of ,£750 !^

But King Edward's abiding characteristic was his
unfailing intuition in doing the right thing and saying
the right thing at the right time. I once heard him on
the spur of the moment make a quite impromptu and
totally unexpected speech to the notabilities of Malta
which was simply superb ! Elsewhere I have related his
visit to Russia when I accompanied him. As Prince
Orloff said to me, swept away by King Edward's elo-
quence, " Your King has changed the atmosphere ! "

1 Sir Julian Corbett, the author of the wonderful " Seven Years'
War," wrote to me in past vituperative years as follows :

" Yesterday I was asked if it were really true that you (Sir John Fisher)
had sold the country to Germany I I was able to assure the questioner
that the report was at least exaggerated. It is often my fortune to
be able to quiet minds that have been seriously disturbed by the
unprecedented slanders that have been the reward of your unpre-
cedented work."

KING EDWARD VII

King Edward, besides his wonderful likeness to King
Henry the Eighth, had that great King's remarkable
attributes of combining autocracy with almost a socialistic
tie with the masses. I said to His Majesty once : " Sir,
that was a real low form of cunning on your Majesty's
part sending to ask after Keir Hardie's stomach-ache ! "
By Jove, he went for me like a mad bull ! and replied :
** You don't understand me ! I am the King of ALL the
People ! No one has got me in their pockets, as some of
them think they have ! " and he proceeded with names I
can't quote !

Acting on Sir Francis Knollys's example and advice I
burnt all his letters to me, except one or two purely
personal in their delightful adherence to Right and
Justice ! but even these I won't publish ever — they were
not meant to be seen by others. What anointed cads are
those who sell Nelson's letters to Lady Hamilton ! letters
written out of the abundance of his heart and the thank-
fulness of an emotional nature full of heartfelt gratitude
to the sympathising woman who dressed his wounds,
his torn-off scalp after the Nile, and his never-ceasing
calamity of what is now called neuritis, which was
for ever wasting his frail body with pain and anguish of
spirit as it so unfitted him for exertion.

Here is a letter to King Edward, dated March 14th,
1908 :

" With Sir John Fisher's humble duty to your Majesty
and in accordance with your Majesty's orders, I saw
Mr. Blank as to the contents of the secret paper sent
your Majesty, but I did not disclose what makes it so

3 B 2

MEMORIES

valuable — that it came from a Minister of Foreign Affairs,
whose testimony is absolutely reliable.

'* I told Mr. Blank and asked him to forgive my
presumption in saying it, that we were making a hideous
mistake in our half measures, which pleased no one and
thus we perpetuate the fable of ' Perfidious Albion,'
and that we ought to have thrown in our lot with Russia
and completely allowed her to fortify the Aland Islands
as against Sweden and Germany.

'* For a Naval War against Germany we want Russia
with us, and we want the Aland Islands fortified.

*' Germany has got Sweden in her pocket, and they
will divide Denmark between them in a War against
Russia and England, and unless our Offensive is quick
and overwhelming Germany will close the Baltic just
as effectually as Turkey locks up the Black Sea with the
possession of the Dardanelles.

" Russia and Turkey are the two Poivers, and the only
two Powers, that matter to us as against Germany, and
that we have eventually to fight Germany is just as sure as
anything can be, solely because she canH expand com-
mercially without it.

" I humbly trust your Majesty will forgive my pre-
sumption in thus talking Politics, but I know I am right,
and I only look at it because if we fight we want Russia
and Turkey on our side against Germany.

*' With my grateful thanks for your Majesty's letter,
" I am your Majesty's humble servant,

''J. A. Fisher."

^^ March i\th, 1908.

Note. — -This letter to King Edward followed on a
previous long secret conversation with his Majesty in
which I urged that we should " Copenhagen " the German
Fleet at Kiel a la Nelson, and I lamented that we
possessed neither a Pitt nor a Bismarck to give the
order. I have alluded to this matter in my account of
Mr. Beit's interview with the German Emperor, and the

4

KING EDWARD VIT

German Emperor's indignation with Lord Esher as
signified in the German Emperor's letter to Lord Tweed-
mouth that Sir John Fisher was the most dreaded man
in Germany from the Emperor downwards.

It must be emphasized that at this moment we had a
mass of effective Submarines and Germany only had
three, and we had seven Dreadnoughts fit to fight and
Germany had none !

This proposal of mine having been discarded, all that
then remained for our inevitable war with Germany was
to continue the concentration of our whole Naval strength
in the Decisive Theatre of the War, in Northern Waters,
which was so unostentatiously carried out that it was
only Admiral Mahan's article in The Scientific
American that drew attention to the fact, when he
said that 88 per cent, of England's guns were pointed at
Germany.

I mention another excellent illustration of King
Edward's fine and magnanimous character though it's to
my own detriment. He used to say to me often at Big
Functions : " Have I missed out anyone, do you think ? "
for he would go round in a most careful way to speak to
all he should. Just then a certain Admiral approached
— perhaps the biggest ass I ever met. The King shook
hands with him and said something I thought quite
unnecessarily loving to him : when he had gone he
turned on me like a tiger and said : " You ought to be
ashamed of yourself ! " I humbly said, '' What
for?" "Why!" he replied, "when that man
came up to me your face was perfectly demoniacal !
Everyone saw it ! and the poor fellow couldn't kick you
back ! You're First Sea Lord and he's a ruined man !
You've no business to show your hate ! " and the lovely

5

MEMORIES

thing was that then a man came up I knew the King did
perfectly hate, and I'm blessed if he didn't smile on him
and cuddle him as if he was his long-lost brother, and
then he turned to me afterwards and said with joyful
revenge, " Well I did you see that ? " Isn't that a Great
Heart ? and is it to be wondered at that he was so
Popular ?

An Australian wrote a book of his first visit to England.
He was on a horse omnibus sitting alongside the 'Bus
Driver — suddenly he pulled up the horses with a jerk !
The Australian said to him, '' What's up ? " The
Driver said, " Don't you see ? " pointing to a single
mounted policeman riding in front of a one-horse
brougham. The Australian said, " What is it ? " The
'Bus Driver said, *' It's the King ! " The Australian
said, " Where's the escort ? " thinking of cavalry and
outriders and equerries that he had read of ! The 'Bus
Driver turned and looked on the Australian with a con-
temptuous regard and said : '' Hescourt ? 'e wants no
Hescourt ! Nobody will touch a 'air of 'is 'ead ! " The
Australian writes that fixed him up as regards King
Edward !

His astounding memory served King Edward beauti-
fully. Once he beckoned me up to him, having finished
his tour round the room, to talk about something and
I said : '* Sir, the new Japanese Ambassador is just
behind you and I don't believe your Majesty has spoken
to His Excellency." The King instantly turned round
and said these very words straight off. I remember them
exactly ; he took my breath away : *' My dear Am-

6

KING EDWARD VII

bassador, do let me shake you by the hand and con-
gratulate you warmly on the splendid achievement
yesterday of your wonderful country in launching a
* Dreadnought ' so completely home-produced in every
way, guns, armour engines, and steel, etc. Kindly convey
my admiration of this splendid achievement ! "

I remembered then that in the yesterday's paper there
had been an account of the great rejoicings in Japan on
the launch of this '* Dreadnought." The sequel is good.
The Japanese Ambassador sought me later in the evening
and said : "Sir John ! it was kind of you to remind the
King about the ' Dreadnought ' as it enables me to send a
much coveted recognition to Japan in the King's words ! "
I said : " My dear Ambassador, I never said a word to
the King, and I am truly and heartily ashamed that as
First Sea Lord it never occurred to me to congratulate
you on what the King has truly designated as a splendid
feat ! "

I expect the Ambassador spent a young fortune in
sending out a telegram to Japan, and do you wonder that
King Edward was a Cosmopolitan Idol ?

Another occasion to illustrate his saying out of his
heart always the right thing at the right time. I was
journeying with His Majesty from Biarritz to Toulon —
I was alone with him in his railway carriage, there was a
railway time table before him. The train began un-
expectedly to slow down, and he said " Hulloa ! why are
we stopping ? " I said, " Perhaps, your Majesty, the
engine wants a drink ! " so we stopped at a big station
we were to have passed through — the masses of people

7

MEMORIES

shouted not "Vive le Roi ! " but " EDOUARD ! "

(As the Governor of the Bank of France said to a friend
of mine, " If he stays in France much longer we shall
have him as our King ! When's he going ? "). Sir Stanley
Clarke I saw get out and fetch the Prefect and the General
in Command to the King — the King got out, said some-
thing sweet to the Prefect and then turned to the General
and said with quite unaffected delight, "Oh, Mon
General ! How delightful to meet you again ! how
glorious was that splendid regiment of yours, the — th
Regiment of Infantry, which I inspected 20 years ago ! "
If I ever saw Heaven in a man's face, that General had
it ! He was certainly a most splendid looking man and
not to be forgotten, but yet it was striking the King
coming out with his immediate remembrance of him.
Well ! that incident you may be sure went through the
French Army, and being a conscript nation, it went into
every village of France ! Do you wonder he was loved
in France ? And yet the King had the simplicity and
even the weaknesses of a child, and sometimes the petu-
lance thereof. He gave me a lovely box of all sizes of
rosettes of the Legion of Honour adapted to each kind of
uniform coat, and he added, " Always wear this in France
— I find it aids me very much in getting about ! " As if
he wasn't as well known in all France as the Town Pump !
These are the sweet incidents that illustrate his nature I
He went to a lunch at Marienbad with some great
swells who were there who had invited His Majesty to
meet a party of the King's friends from Carlsbad, where
I was — I wasn't asked — being an arranged snub ! A

8

KING EDWARD VII

looker-on described the scene to me. The King came
in and said " How d'ye do " all round and then said to
the Host, " Where's the Admiral ? " My absence was
apologised for — lunch was ready and announced. The
King said, " Excuse me a moment, I must write him a
letter to say how sorry I am at the oversight," so he left
them stewing in their own juice, and His Majesty's letter
to me was lovely — I've kept that one. He began by

d ing the pen and then the blotting paper ! — there

were big blots and smudges ! He came back and gave
the letter to my friend and said, " See he gets it directly
you get back to Carlsbad to-night."

Once at a very dull lunch party given in his honour I
sat next King Edward and said to His Majesty : " Pretty
dull, Sir, this — hadn't I better give them a song ? " He
was delighted ! (he always did enjoy everything !) so I
recited (but, of course, I can't repeat the delicious
Cockney tune in writing, so it loses all its aroma !).
Two tramps had been camping out (as was their usual
custom) in Trafalgar Square. They appear on the stage
leaning against each other for support ! — too much beer !
They look upwards at Nelson on his monument, and in
an inimitable and " beery " voice they each sing :

" We live in Trafalgar Square, with four Lions to guard us.

Fountains and statues all over the place !

The ' Metropole ' staring us right in the face !
We own it's a trifle draughty — but we don't want to make no fuss !
What's good e-nough for Nelson is good e-nough for us ! "

On another occasion I was driving with him alone, and
utterly carried away by my feelings, I suddenly stood up
in the carriage and waved to a very beautiful woman

9

MEMORIES

who I thought was in America ! The King was awfully
angry, but I made it much worse by saying I had forgotten
all about him ! But he added, " Well ! find out where
she lives and let me know," and he gave her little child a
sovereign and asked her to dinner, to my intense joy !

On a classic occasion at Balmoral, when staying with
King Edward, I unfolded a plan, much to his delight
(now that masts and sails are extinct), of fusing the Army
into the Navy — an " Army and Navy co-operative
society." And my favourite illustration has always
been the magnificent help of our splendid soldiers at
the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, where a Sergeant of the
69th Regiment was the first to board the Spanish three-
decker, " San Josef," and he turned then round to help
Lord Nelson,' who, with his one arm, found it difficult
to get through the stern port of the " San Josef " again.
In Lord Howe's victory two Regiments participated — -
the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment (formerly
the 2nd Foot) and the Worcestershire Regiment (formerly
the 29th and 36th Regiment). Let us hope that the
Future will bring us back to that good old practice !
This was the occasion when I was so carried away by the
subject that I found myself shaking my fist in the King's
face !

Lord Denbigh, in a lecture he gave at the Royal Colonial
Institute, related an incident which he quite correctly
stated had hitherto been a piece of diplomatic secret
history, and it is how I got the Grand Cordon of the
Legion of Honour, associated with a lovely episode with
King Edward of blessed memor}'.

10

KING EDWARD VII

In 1906, at Madeira, the Germans first took an hotel ;
then they wanted a Convalescent Home ; and finally
put forth the desire to establish certain vested interests.
They imperiously demanded certain concessions from
Portugal. The most significant of these amounted to a
coaling station isolated and fortified. The German
Ambassador at Lisbon called on the Portuguese Prime
Minister at 10 o'clock one Saturday night and said that
if he didn't get his answer by 10 o'clock the next night
he should leave. The Portuguese sent us a telegram.
That night we ordered the British Fleet to move. The
next morning the German Ambassador told the Portu-
guese Prime Minister that he had made a mistake in the
cipher, and he was awfully sorry but he wasn't going ;
it was all his fault, he said, and he had been reprimanded
by his Government. (As if any German had ever yet
made a mistake with a telegram !)

To resume about the Grand Cordon of the Legion of
Honour. The French Official statement when conveying
to me the felicitations of the President of the French
Republic was that I had the distinction of being at that
time the only living Englishman who had received this
honour, but the disaster that had been averted by the
timely action of the British Fleet deserved it. So that
evening, on meeting King Edward, I told His Majesty
of the quite unexpected honour that I had received, and
that I had been informed that I was the only Englishman
that had got it, on which the King said : " Excuse me
I've got it ! " Then, alas, I made a faux pas and said
*' Kings don't count ! " And no more do they ! He

II

MEMORIES

got it because certainly they all loved him in the first
place, and secondly, President Loubet couldn't help it,
while if it hadn't been for the British Fleet on this occasion
the Germans would have been in Paris in a week, and if
the Germans had known as much as they do now they
would have been !

I don't mean to urge that King Edward was in any
way a clever man. I'm not sure that he could do the rule
of three, but he had the Heavenly gift of Proportion and
Perspective ! Brains never yet moved the Masses — but
Emotion and Earnestness will not only move the Masses,
but they will remove Mountains ! As I told Queen
Alexandra on seeing his dear face (dead) for the last time,
his epitaph is the great words of Pascal in the " Pensees "
(Chapter ix, 19) :

" Le coeur a ses raisons
Que la raison ne connait point."

(" The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing

about " !)

He was a noble man and every inch a King ! God
Bless Him ! I don't either say he was a Saint ! I know
lots of cabbages that are saints !— they couldn't sin if
they wanted to !

Postscript.

It suddenly occurred to me to send these notes on
King Edward to Lord Esher as he had peculiar oppor-
tunities of realizing King Edward's special qualities as
a King, and realized how much there was in him of the

12

KING EDWARD VII

Tudor gift of being an autocrat and yet being loved of
the people !

Lord Esher to Lord Fisher

Roman Camp,

Callander, N.B.

July 30, 1918.

My dear Admiral,

The pages are wonderful, because they are you.

Not a square inch of pose about them.

Tears ! that was the result of reading what you have
to say about King Edward. But do you recollect our
talk with him on board the Royal Yacht about France
and Germany ? Surely that was worth recording.

■ I have kept many of his letters. They show him to
have been one of the '* cleverest " of men. He had
never depended upon book-learning — why should he ?

He read, not books — but men and women — and jolly
good reading too !

But he knew everything that it was requisite a King
should know — unless Learning prepares a man for
action, it is not of much value in this work-a-day world :
and no Sovereign since the Tudors was so brave and wise
in action as this King !

Your anecdotes of him are splendid. Add to them all
that you can remember.

It was a pleasure to be scolded by the King for the
sake of the smile you subsequently got.

The most awful time I ever had with him was at
Balmoral when I refused to be Secretary of State for
War. But I beat him on that, thank God !

Ever yours,

My beloved Admiral,

Esher.

13

MEMORIES

Letter from Lord Redesdale

I Kensington Court, W.

May 24, 1915.

My Dear Fisher,

Do me the favour of accepting this little attempt to
render justice to the best friend you ever had. (King
Edward the Seventh.)

You and he were worthy of one another. Your old
and very affectionate friend,

Redesdale.

The following letter, written in 1907, would never
have been penned but for the kindly intimacy and
confidence placed and reposed in me by King Edward ;
it therefore rightly comes in these remarks about him ;
and so does the subsequent explanatory note on " Nelson
and Copenhagen.'

)>

Extract from a Letter from Sir John Fisher to

King Edward

I have just received Reich's book. It is one unmiti-
gated mass of misrepresentations.

In March this year, 1907, it is an absolute fact that
Germany had not laid down a single " Dreadnought,"
nor had she commenced building a single Battleship or
Big Cruiser for eighteen months.

Germany has been paralysed by the '* Dreadnought ^

The more the German Admiralty looked into her
qualities the more convinced they became that they must

14

KING EDWARD VII

follow suit, and the more convinced they were that the
whole of their existing Battle Fleet was utterly useless
because utterly wanting in gun power ! For instance,
half of the whole German Battle Fleet is only about equal
to the English Armoured Cruisers.

The German Admiralty wrestled with the " Dread-
nought " problem for eighteen months, and did nothing.
Why } Because it meant their spending twelve and a
half million sterling on widening and deepening the Kiel
Canal, and in dredging all their harbours and all the
approaches to their harbours, because if they did not do
so it would be no use building German " Dreadnoughts "
because they could not float ! But there was another
reason never yet made public. It is this : Our Battle-
ships draw too much water to get close into the German
Coast and harbours (we have to build ours big to go all
over the world with great fuel endurance). But the
German Admiralty is going, is indeed obHged, to spend
twelve and a half million sterling in dredging so as to
allow these existing ships of ours to go and fight them in
their own waters when before they could not do so. It
was, indeed, a Machiavellian interference of Providence
on our behalf that brought about the evolution of the
'' Dreadnought."

To return to Mr. Reich. He makes the flesh of the
British pubHc creep at page 78 et seq., by saying what
the Germans are going to do. He does not say what
they have done and what we have done.

Now this is the truth : England has seven '* Dread-
noughts " and three *' Dreadnought " Battle Cruisers
(which last three ships are, in my opinion, far better
than '' Dreadnoughts ") ; total, ten " Dreadnoughts "
built and building, while Germany, in March last, had
not begun even one " Dreadnought." It is doubtful if,
even so late as May last, a German '* Dreadnought " had
been commenced. It will therefore be seen, from this
one fact, what a liar Mr. Reich is.

15

MEMORIES

Again, at page 86, he makes out the Germans are
stronger than we are in torpedo craft, and states
that England has only 24 fully commissioned
Destroyers.

Again, what are the real facts ? As stated in an
Admiralty official document, dated August 22nd, 1907 :
" We have 123 Destroyers and 40 Submarines. The
Germans have 48 Destroyers and i Submarine."

The whole of our Destroyers and Submarines are
absolutely efficient and ready for instant battle and are
fully manned, except a portion of the Destroyers, which
have four-fifths of their crew on board. Quite enough
for instant service, and can be filled up under an hour to
full crew. And they are all of them constantly being
exercised.

There is one more piece of information I have to give :
Admiral Tirpitz, the German Minister of Marine, has
just stated, in a secret official document, that the English
Navy is now four times stronger than the German Navy.
Yes, that is so, and we are going to keep the British Navy
at that strength, vide ten " Dreadnoughts " built and
building, and not one German " Dreadnought " corn-
menced last May. But we don't want to parade all this
to the world at large. Also we might have Parliamentary
trouble. A hundred and fifty members of the House of
Commons have just prepared one of the best papers I
have ever read, shewing convincingly that we don't
want to lay down any new ships at all because we are so
strong. My answer is : We can't be too strong. Sir
Charles Dilke, in the United Service Magazine for this
month, says : ''Sir George Clarke points out that the
Navy is now, in October, 1907, stronger than at any
previous time in all History," and he adds that Sir
George Clarke, in making this printed statement, makes
it with the full knowledge of all the secrets of the Govern-
ment, because, as Secretary of the Committee of Imperial
Defence, he, Sir George Clarke, has access to every bit

16

King Edward VII. (who died May 6th, iqio)

SAYING Good-bye to Lord Fisher, First Sea

Lord, igio.

(Lord Fisher 69, so also the King.)

N.B. — The King thought the 1S41 vintage very
gocd. Certainly good men were torn that year!

KING EDWARD VII

of information that exists in regard to our own and foreign
Naval strength.

In conclusion, a letter in The Times of September 17th,
1907, should be read. The writer of the letter under-
states the case, as the British Home Fleet is twenty per
cent, stronger than he puts it.

As regards Mr. Reich's Naval statements, they are a
rechauffe of the mendacious drivel of a certain English
newspaper. I got a letter last night from a trustworthy
person a propos of these virulent and persistent news-
paper attacks as to the weakness of the Navy, stating that
the recent inspection of the Fleet by Your Majesty has
knocked the bottom out of the case against the Admiralty.

I don't mean to say that we are not now menaced by
Germany. Her diplomacy is, and always has been, and
always will be, infinitely superior to ours. Observe our
treatment of the Sultan as compared with Germany.
The Sultan is the most important personage in the whole
world for England. He lifts his finger, and Egypt and
India are in a blaze of religious disaffection. That great
American, Mr. Choate, swore to me before going to the
Hague Conference that he would side with England over
submarine mines and other Naval matters, but Germany
has diplomatically collared the United States absolutely
at The Hague.

The only thing in the world that England has to fear is
Germany y and none else.

We have no idea, at the Foreign Office, of coping with
the German propaganda in America. Our Naval Attache
in the United States tells me that the German Emperor
is unceasing in his efforts to win over the American Official
authorities, and that the German Embassy at Washington
is far and away in the ascendant with the American
Government.

I hope I shall not be considered presumptuous in

17 G

MEMORIES

saying all this. I humbly confess I am neither a diploma-
tist nor a politician. I thank God I am neither. The
former are senile, and the latter are liars. But it all
does seem such simple common sense to me that for our
Army we require mobile troops as against sedentary
garrisons, and that our military intervention in any very
great Continental struggle is unwise, remembering what
Napoleon said on that point with such emphasis and such
sure conception of war, and that great combined Naval
and Military expeditions should be our role. In the
splendid words of Sir Edward Grey : *' The British Army
should be a projectile to be fired by the British Navy."
The foundation of our policy is that the communica-
tions of the Empire must be kept open by a predominant
Fleet, and ipso facto such a Fleet will suffice to allay the
fears of the " old women of both sexes " in regard to the
invasion of England or the invasion of her Colonies.

Nelson's Copenhagen

In May, 1907, England had seven " Dreadnoughts "
ready for battle, and Germany had not one. And
England had flotillas of submarines peculiarly adapted
to the shallower German waters when Germany had
none.

Even in 1908 Germany only had four submarines.
At that time, in the above letter I wrote to King Edward,
I approached His Majesty, and quoted certain apposite
sayings of Mr. Pitt about dealing with the probable enemy
before he got too strong. It is admitted that it was not
quite a gentlemanly sort of thing for Nelson to go and
destroy the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen without notice,
but " la raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure."

Therefore, in view of the known steadfast German

18

KING EDWARD VII

purpose, as always unmitigatedly set forth by the German
High Authority that it was Germany's set intention to
make even England's mighty Navy hesitate at sea, it
seemed to me simply a sagacious act on England's part
to seize the German Fleet when it was so very easy of
accomplishment in the manner I sketched out to His
Majesty, and probably without bloodshed. But, alas !
even the very whisper of it excited exasperation against
the supposed bellicose, but really peaceful. First Sea
Lord, and the project was damned. At that time,
Germany was peculiarly open to this " peaceful penetra-
tion." A new Kiel Canal, at the cost of many, many
millions, had been rendered necessary by the advent of
the " Dreadnought " ; but worse still for the Germans,
it was necessary for them to spend further vast millions
in deepening not only the approaches to the German
Harbours, but the Harbours themselves, to allow the
German " Dreadnoughts," when built, to be able to
float. In doing this, the Germans were thus forced to
arrange that thirty-three British pre-" Dreadnoughts "
should be capable of attacking their shores, which shallow
water had previously denied them. Such, therefore,
was the time of stress and unreadiness in Germany that
made it peculiarly timely to repeat Nelson's Copen-
hagen. Alas ! we had no Pitt, no Bismarck, no Gam-
betta ! And consequently came those terrible years of
War, with millions massacred and maimed and many
millions more of their kith and kin with pierced hearts
and bereft of all that was mortal for their joy.

19 c 2

MEMORIES

Queen Alexandra, Lord Knollys, and Sir Dighton

Probyn.

At the end of these short and much too scant memories
of him whom Lord Redesdale rightly calls in the letter I

printed above

" The best friend you ever had,"

I can't but allude to a Trio forming so great a part of his
Glory. Not to name them here would be " King Edward
— an Unreality." I could not ask Queen Alexandra for
permission either to print her Letters or her Words, but
I am justified in printing how her steadfast love, and faith,
and wonderful loyalty and fidelity to her husband have
proved how just is the judgment of Her Majesty by the
Common People — " the most loved Woman in the whole
Nation."

And then Lord Knollys and Sir Dighton Probyn, those
two Great Pillars of Wisdom and Judgment, who so
reminded me, as they used to sit side by side in the Royal
Chapel, of those two who on either side held up the arms
of Moses in fighting the Amalekites :

" And Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands,
The one on the one side, and the other on the other side ;
And his hands were steady until the going down of the sun."

Yes ! King Edward's hands were held steady till the
setting of his sun on May 6th, 19 lo, and so did he
discomfit his enemies by their aid."

20

<i

KING EDWARD VII

For over forty years Lord Knollys played that great
part in great affairs which will occupy his Biographer
with Admiration of his Self-Effacement and unerring
Judgment. Myself I owe him gratitude inexpressible.

For myself, those Great Three ever live in my heart
and ever will.

There are no such that I know of who are left to us to
rise in their place

21

CHAPTER II

" THE MOON SWAYS OCEANS AND PROVOKES THE HOUND.

>>

The hound keeps baying at the moon but gets no
answer from her, and she continues silently her mighty
influence in causing the tides of the earth, such a mighty
influence as I have seen in the Bay of Fundy, and on the
coast of Arcadia where the tide rises some 40 feet — ^you
see it like a high wall rolling in towards you on the beach !
It exalts one, and the base things of earth vanish from
one's thoughts. So also may the contents of this book be
like-minded by a mighty silence against baying hounds !
I hope to name no living name except for praise, and
even against envy I hope I may be silent. Envy caused
the first murder. It was the biggest and nastiest of all
Caesar's wounds :

" See what a rent the envious Casca made."

My impenetrable armour is Contempt and Fortitude.

Well, yesterday September 7th, 19 19, we completed
our conversations for the six articles in The Times , and
to-day we begin this book with similar talks.

My reluctance to this book being published before my
death is increasingly definite ; but I have put my hand

22

"THE MOON SWAYS OCEANS"

to the plough, because of the overbearing argument that
I cannot resist, that I shall be helping to
{a) Avoid national bankruptcy.

(b) Avert the insanity and wickedness of building a
Navy against the United States.

(c) Establish a union with America, as advocated by
John Bright and Mr. Roosevelt.

(d) Enable the United States and British Navies to say
to all other Navies " If you build more, we will fight you,
here and now. We'll ' Copenhagen ' you, without
remorse."

This is why I have consented, with such extreme
reluctance, to write letters to The Times and
dictate six articles ; and having thus entered into the
fight, I follow the advice of Polonius — Vestigia nulla
retrorsum. And so, to-day, I will begin this book — not
an autobiography, but a collection of memories of a life-
long war against limpets, parasites, sycophants, and jelly-
fish— at one time there were 19 J millions sterling of 'em.
At times they stung ; but that only made me more relent-
less, ruthless and remorseless.

Why I so hate a book, and those articles in The
Times, and even the letters, is that the printed word
never can convey the virtue of the soul. The aroma
is not there — it evaporates when printed — a scentless
product, flat and stale like a bad bottle of champagne.
It is like an embalmed corpse. Personality, which is the
soul of man, is absent from the reader. It is a man's
personality that is the living thing, and in the other world
that is the thing you will meet. I have often asked

23

MEMORIES

ecclesiastics — " What period of life will the resurrected
body represent ? " It has always been a poser for them !
There will not be any bodies, thank God ! we have had
quite enough trouble with them down below here.
St. Paul distinctly says that it is a spiritual body in the
Resurrection. It is our Personalities that will talk to
each other in Heaven. I don't care at what age of a
man's life, even when toothless and decrepit and in-
distinguishable as he may then be, yet like another Rip
Van Winkle, when he speaks you know him. However,
that's a digression.

What I want to rub in is this : The man who reads this
in his arm-chair in the Athenaeum Club would take it all
quite differently if I could walk up and down in front of
him and shake my fist in his face.

(It was a lovely episode this recalls to my mind. King
Edward — God bless him ! — said to me once in one of
my moments of wild enthusiasm : " Would you kindly
leave off shaking your fist in my face ? ")

I tried once, so as to make the dead print more lifelike,
using different kinds of type — big Roman block letters
for the " fist-shaking," large italics for the cajoling, small
italics for the facts, and ordinary print for the fool.
The printer's price was ruinous, and the effect ludicrous.
But I made this compromise and he agreed to it — when-
ever the following words occurred they were to be printed
in large capitals : " Fool," *' Ass," " Congenital Idiot."
Myself, I don't know that I am singular, but I seldom
read a book. I look at the pages as you look at a picture,
and grasp it that way. Of course, I know what the skunks

24

"THE MOON SWAYS OCEANS"

will say when they read this — " Didn't I tell you he was
superficial ? and here he is judged out of his own mouth."
I do confess to having only one idea at a time, and King
Edward found fault with me and said it would be my
ruin ; so I replied : *' Anyhow, I am stopping a fortnight
with you at Balmoral, and I never expected that when I
entered the Navy, penniless, friendless, and forlorn ! "
Besides, didn't Solomon and Mr. Disraeli both say that
whatever you did you were to do it with all your might ?
You can't do more than one thing at a time with all your
might — that's Euclid. Mr. Disraeli added something to
Solomon — he said " there was nothing you couldn't have
if only you wanted it enough." And such is my only
excuse for whatever success I have had. I have only
had one idea at a time. Longo intervallo, I have been a
humble, and I endeavoured to be an unostentatious,
follower of our Immortal Hero. Some venomous reptile
(his name has disappeared — I tried in vain to get hold of
it at Mr. Maggs's bookshop only the other day) called
Nelson " vain and egotistical." Good God ! if he
seemed so, how could he help it ? Some nip-cheese
clerk at the Admiralty wrote to him for a statement of
his services, to justify his being given a pension for his
wounds. His arm off, his eye out, his scalp torn off at
the Nile — that clerk must have known that quite well
but it elicited a gem. Let us thank God for that clerk !
How this shows one the wonderful working of the
Almighty Providence, and no doubt whatever that fools
are an essential feature in the great scheme of creation.
Why ! — didn't some geese cackling save Rome ? Nelson

25

MEMORIES

told this clerk he had been in a hundred fights and he
enumerated his wounds ; and his letter lives to illumine

his fame.

The Almighty has a place for nip-cheese clerks as
much as for the sweetest wild flower that perishes in a

day.

It is really astounding that Nelson's life has not
yet been properly written. All that has been
written is utterly unrepresentative of him. The
key-notes of his being were imagination, audacity,

tenderness.

He never flogged a man. (One of my first Captains
flogged every man in the ship and was tried for cruelty, but
being the scion of a noble house he was promoted to a
bigger ship instead of being shot.) It oozed out of Nelson
that he felt in himself the certainty of effecting what to
other men seemed rash and even maniacal rashness ; and
this involved his seeming vain and egotistical. Like
Napoleon's presence on the field of battle that meant
40,000 men, so did the advent of Nelson in a fleet (this
is a fact) make every common sailor in that fleet as sure
of victory as he was breathing. I have somewhere a
conversation of two sailors that was overheard and taken
down after the battle of Trafalgar, which illustrates what
I have been saying. Great odds against 'em— but going
into action the odds were not even thought of, they were
not dreamt of, by these common men. Nelson's presence
was victory. However, I must add here that he hated
the word Victory. What he wanted was Annihilation.
That Crowning Mercy (as Cromwell would have called

26

"THE MOON SWAYS OCEANS"

it), the battle of the Nile, deserves the wonderful pen of
Lord Rosebery, but he won't do it. Warburton in
" The Crescent and the Cross " gives a faint inkling of
what the glorious chronicle should be. For two years,
that frail body of his daily tormented with pain (he
was a martyr to what they now call neuritis — I believe
they called it then " tic douloureux "), he never put his
foot outside his ship, watching off Toulon. The Lord
Mayor and Citizens of London sent him a gold casket
for keeping the hostile fleet locked up in Toulon. He
wrote back to say he would take the casket, but he never
wanted to keep the French Fleet in harbour ; he wanted
them to come out. But he did keep close in to Toulon
for fear of missing them coming out in darkness or in
a fog.

In his two years off Toulon Nelson only made £6,000
of prize money, while it was a common thing for the
Captain of a single man-of-war off the Straits of Gibraltar
to make a haul of £20,000, and Prize-Money Admirals
in crowds basked in Bath enriched beyond the dreams
of avarice. Nelson practically died a pauper.

Now this is another big digression which I must
apologise for, but that's the damnable part of a book.
If one could walk up and down and talk to someone,
it never strikes them as incongruous having a
digression.

I wind up this chapter, as I began it, with the fervent
intention of avoiding any reference to those who have
assailed me. I will only print their affectionate letters
to me, for which I still retain the most affectionate

27

MEMORIES

feelings towards them. I regret now that on one occasion
I did so far lose my self-control as to tell a specific Judas
to take back his thirty pieces of silver and go and hang
himself. However, eventually he did get hanged, so
it was all right.

28

CHAPTER III

ADMIRAL VON POHL AND ADMIRAL VON TIRPITZ

Yesterday, September 8th, 1919 (I must put this
date down because yesterday in a telegram I called
von Tirpitz a liar) I got an enquiry whether it was
correct that in 1909, as stated by Admiral von Tirpitz,
I, as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, engineered a
German Naval Scare in England in order to get bigger
British Naval estimates — and that I had said this to the
German Naval Attache. I replied " Tell Tii-pitz —
using the immortal words of Dr. Johnson — * you lie
Sir, and you know it ! ' " Now, first of all, could I
possibly have told the German Naval Attache such a
thing if I possessed the Machiavellian nature which
is inferred by Tirpitz ?

Secondly, there was a vast multitude of acute domestic
enemies too closely watching me to permit any such
manoeuvre.

This affords an opportunity of telling you some very
interesting facts about Tirpitz. They came to be known
through the widow of Admiral von Pohl (who had been
at the German Admiralty and commanded the German

29

MEMORIES

High Sea Fleet) interviewing a man who had been a
prisoner at Ruhleben. He relates a conversation with
Frau von Pohl, and he mentions her being an intimate
friend of the German ex-Crown Princess, and as being
extremely intelligent. Frau von Pohl had been reading
Lord Jellicoe's book, and said to the ex-Ruhleben
prisoner : " How strange is the parallel between Germany
and Britain, that in both Navies the Admirals were in
a stew as to the failings of their respective fleets." So
much so on the German side, she said, that the German
Fleet did not consider itself ready to fight till two months
before the battle of Jutland, and the Germans till then
lived in a constant fever of trepidation. These were the
questions she heard. " ' Why do the English not attack ?
Will the English attack to-morrow ? ' ^ These questions
we asked ourselves hourly. We felt like crabs in the
process of changing their shells. Apparently our secret
never oozed out." She put the inefficiency of the
German Fleet all down to Tirpitz, and said that if any
man deserved hanging it was he. Admiral von Pohl
was supposed to have committed suicide through de-
jection. If all this be true, how it does once more
illuminate that great Nelsonic maxim of an immediate
Offensive in war ! Presumably Frau von Pohl had good
information ; and she added : " The only reason
Tirpitz was not dismissed sooner was lest the British
should suspect from his fall something serious was the
matter, and attack at once."- Part of her interview

^ See letters at end of this chapter.

* On hearing of von Tirpitz's dismissal I perpetrated the following
letter, which a newspaper contrived to print in one of its editions.

30

VON POHL AND VON TIRPITZ

is of special interest, as it so reminded me of my deciding
on Scapa Flow as the base for the fleet. For as Frau
von Pohl states, its speciality was that the German
Destroyers could not get to Scapa Flow and back at
full speed. Their fuel arrangements were inadequate
for such a distance. " My husband," she said, " was
called out by the Emperor to put things right, but was
in a constant state of trepidation." Alas ! trepidation
was on our side also, for in a book written by a Naval
Lieutenant he says how a German submarine was
supposed to have got inside Scapa. ^ As a matter of fact,
it was subsequently discovered that a torpedo had
rolled out of its tube aboard one ot our Destroyers and
passed close to H.M.S. " Leda," who quite properly
reported ** a torpedo has passed under my stern." This
caused all the excitement.

I can't say why, but it didn't appear any more, nor was it copied by
any other paper !

Dear Old Tirps,

We are both in the same boat 1 What a time we've been colleagues,
old boy I However, we did you in the eye over the Battle Cruisers
and I know you've said you'll never forgive me for it when bang went
the " Blucher " and von Spee and all his host 1

Cheer up, old chap 1 Say " Resurgam " ! You're the one German
sailor who understands War ! Kill your enemy without being kiUed
yourself. / don't blame you for the submarine business. I'd have done
the same myself, only our idiots in England wouldn't believe it when I
told 'em t

Well 1 So long 1

Yours till hell freezes,

Fisher.

29/3/16.

I say ! Are you sure if you had tripped out with your whole High
Sea Fleet before the Russian ice thawed and brought over those half-a-
miUion soldiers from Hamburg to frighten our old women that you
could have got back un-Jellicoed ?

R.S.V.P.

1 "A Naval Lieutenant, 1914-1918," by Etienne, 1919, pp. 48 et seq.

31

MEMORIES

Admiral von Pohl succeeded Admiral von Ingenohl
as Commander-in-Chief of the German High Sea Fleet.
It has not much bearing on what I have been saying,
but it is interesting that Frau von Pohl said that the
wife of the German Minister of the Interior had told
her that her husband, on November 6th, five days
before the Armistice, had talked to the Emperor of the
truth as to the German inferiority. The Emperor
listened, first with amazement, and then with incredulity,
and ultimately in a passion of rage called him a madman
and an arrogant fool, and turned him out in fury from
his presence. This is not quite on all fours with
Ludendorft', but Ludendorff may have been confining
himself strictly to the fighting condition of the Army ;
and without doubt he was right there, for General
Plumer told me himself he had the opportunity of
bearing personal testimony to the complete efficiency
of the German Army at the moment of the Armistice.
Plumer was, it may be observed, rightly accorded the
honour of leading the British Army into Cologne.

The man who contemplates all the things that may
be somewhat at fault and adds up his own war deficiencies
with that curious failure of judgment to realise that his
enemy has got as many if not more, has neither the
Napoleonic nor the Nelsonic gift of Imagination and
Audacity. We know, now, how very near — within
almost a few minutes of total destruction (at the time
the battle-cruiser" Blucher"was sunk) — was the loss to the
Germans of several even more powerful ships than the
" Blucher," more particularly the " Seydlitz." Alas! there

32

Sir John Fisher in "Renown,"' 1897.

VON POHL AND VON TIRPITZ

was a fatal doubt which prevented the continuance of
the onslaught, and it was indeed too grievous that we
missed by so little so great a " Might Have Been ! "
Well, anyhow, we won the war and it is all over. But
I for one simply abominate the saying " Let bygones be
bygones." I should shoot 'em now ! And seek another
Voltaire.

I get the following from Lord Esher : — " In January,
1906, King Edward sent me to see Mr. Beit, who had
been recently received by the German Emperor at
Potsdam. The Emperor said to Beit that ' England
wanted war : not the King — not, perhaps, the Govern-
ment ; but influential people like Sir John Fisher.'
He said Fisher held that because the British Fleet was
in perfect order, and the German Fleet was not ready^
England should provoke war. Beit said he had met
Fisher at Carlsbad, and had long talks with him, and that
what he said to him did not convey at all the impression
gathered by His Imperial Majesty. The Emperor
replied : ' He thinks it is the hour for an attack, and I
am not blaming him. I quite understand his point of
view ; but we, too, are prepared, and if it comes to war
the result will depend upon the weight you carry into
action — namely, a good conscience, and I have that. . . .
Fisher can, no doubt, land 100,000 men in Schleswig-
Holstein — it would not be difficult — and the British
Navy has reconnoitred the coast of Denmark with this
object during the cruise of the Fleet. But Fisher forgets
that it will be for me to deal with the 100,000 men when
they are landed.' "

33 D

MEMORIES

The German Emperor told another friend of mine
the real spot. It was not Schleswig-Holstein — that was
only a feint to be turned into a reality against the Kiel
Canal if things went well. No, the real spot was the
Pomeranian Coast, under a hundred miles from Berlin,
where the Russian Army landed in the time of Frederick
the Great. Frederick felt it was the end and sent for
a bottle of poison, but he didn't take it, as the Russian
Empress died that night and peace came.

Long before I heard from Lord Esher, I had written
the following note about Beit : —

A mutual friend at Carlsbad introduced me to Mr.
Beit, the great South African millionaire. He adored
Cecil Rhodes, and so did I. Beit, so I was told, had
got it into his head that I somewhat resembled his dead
friend, and he talked to me on one occasion about Rhodes
until 3 a.m. after dining together. Beit begged me to
come and see him on my return to London at his house
in Park Lane, just then finished, but I never did for I
was vastly busy then. I was troubled on all sides,
like St. Paul.

" Without were fightings, and within were fears."
Fighting outside the Admiralty, and fears inside it.

He really was a dear man, was Beit.

Of course I don't know anything about his business
character. Apparently there is a character a man puts
on in business, just as a man does in politics, and it may
be quite different from his character as a gentleman.

Beit every year made a pilgrimage to Hamburg, to see
his old mother, who lived there, and it much touched me,
his devotion to her. But our bond of affection was our
affection for Rhodes.

The German Emperor sent for Beit, for I gathered
that Beit saw how peace was threatened. I don't know

34

VON POHL AND VON TIRPITZ

if this was the reason of the interview. In this Imperial
conversation my name turned up as Lord Esher had
made a statement that by ail from the German Emperor
downwards I was the most hated man in Germany.
The German Emperor did say to Beit that I was
dangerous, and that he knew of my ideas as regards the
Baltic being Germany's vulnerable spot, and he had
heard of my idea for the " Copenhagening " of the
German Fleet. But this last I much doubt. He only
said it because he knew it was what we ought to have
done.

With regard to saying anything more of that interview
I prefer to keep silent. In an Italian book, printed at
Brescia in a.d. 1594, occur these words of Steven Guazzo ;

" They should know," says Anniball, " that it is no
lesse admirable to know how to holde one's peace than
to know how to speake. For, as wordes well uttered
shewe eloquance and learning, so silence well kept
sheweth prudence and gravitie ! "

I wish Beit could have read Stead's splendid appreci-
ation of Cecil Rhodes, who describes him as a Titan of
intrinsic nobility and sincerity, of innate excellence of
heart, and immense vitality of genius, and describes the
splendid impulsiveness of his generous nature. I am
told that Rhodes 's favourite quotation was from Marcus
Aurelius :

" Take care always to remember you are a Roman,
and let every action be done with perfect and unaffected
gravity, humanity, freedom and justice."

Stead's opinion was that Rhodes was a practical
mystic of the Cromwell type. Stead was right. Rhodes
was a Cromwell. He was Cromwellian in thoroughness,
he was Napoleonic in audactiy, and he was Nelsonic
in execution.

" Let us praise famous men."
{Ecdesiasticus, chapter 44, verse i).

35 i> 2

MEMORIES

From Lord Fisher to a Friend

36, Berkeley Square.
My Dear Friend,

I was asked yesterday : Could I end the War ?

I said : " Yes, by one decisive stroke ! "

" What's the stroke ? " I was asked.

I repUed : " Never prescribe till you are called in."

But I said this : '' Winston once told me, ' You can
see Visions ! That's why you should come back.' "

For instance, even Jellicoe was against me in sending
the Battle Cruisers to gobble up von Spec at the Falkland
Islands ! (All were against me !) Yes ! and all were
against me in 1904 ! when the Navy was turned inside out
—ships, officers and men. " A New Heaven and a
New Earth ! " 160 ships put on the scrap heap because
they could neither fight nor run away ! Vide Mr. Bal-
four's speech at Manchester about this " Courageous
stroke of the pen ! "

We now want another Courageous Stroke 1 And the
Stroke is ready ! It's the British Navy waiting to strike !
And it would end the War !

This project of mine sounds an impossibility ! but
so did von Spec's annihilation ! Pitt said " I walk on
Impossibilities." All the old women of both sexes
would squirm at it! They equally squirmed when I
did away with 19 J millions sterling of parasites in ships,
officers and men, between 1904 and 1910 ! They
squirmed when, at one big plunge, we introduced the
Turbine in the Dreadnought (the Turbine only before
having been in a penny steamboat). They squirmed at
my introduction of the water tube Boiler, when I put
the fire where the water used to be and the water where
the fire used to be ! And now 82 per cent, of the Horse
Power of the whole world is Turbine propulsion actuated
by water tube Boilers !

They squirmed when I concentrated 88 per cent, of

36

VON POHL AND VON TIRPITZ

the British Fleet in the North Sea, and this concentration
was only found out by accident, and so published to the
ignorant world, by Admiral Mahan in an article in
The Scientific American !

And they squirm now when I say at one stroke the
War could be ended. It could be !

Yours, etc.

(Signed) Fisher.

Lord Fisher to a Privy Councillor

36, Berkeley Square,
London,

Dec. 27, 1916.
My Dear Friend,

You've sent me a very charming letter, though I
begged you not to trouble yourself to write, but as
you have written and said things I am constrained to
reply, lest you should be under false impressions. I
have an immense regard for Jellicoe. . . . Callaghan
I got where he was — he was a great friend of mine —
but Jellicoe was better ; and Jellicoe, in spite of
mutinous threats, was appointed Admiralissimo on the
eve of war. I just mention all this to show what I've
done for Jellicoe because I knew him to be a born
Commander of a Fleet ! Like poets. Fleet Admirals are
born, not made ! Nascitur nan fit ! Jellicoe is incompar-
able as the Commander of a Fleet, but to prop up an
effete Administration he allowed himself to be cajoled
away from his great post of duty. I enclose my letter
to him.

I need hardly say how private all this is, but you are
so closely associated with all the wonders we effected
from October 21, 1904, onwards, that I feel bound to
take you into my inmost confidence. Jellicoe retorted
I had praised Beatty — so I had ! See my reply thereon.

37

34:5538

MEMORIES

I told the Dardanelles Commission (why they asked me
I don't know !) that Jellicoe had all the Nelsonic attributes
except one — he is totally wanting in the great gift of
Insubordination. Nelson's greatest achievements were
all solely due to his disobeying orders ! But that's
another story, as Mr. Kipling would say. Wait till we
meet, and I'll astonish you on this subject ! Any fool
can obey orders ! But it required a Nelson to disobey
Sir John Jervis at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, to
disregard the order to retire at Copenhagen, to go into
the Battle of the Nile by night with no charts against
orders, and, to crown all, to enter into the Battle of
Trafalgar in a battle formation contrary to all the Sea
orders of the time ! Bless him ! Alas ! Jellicoe is
saturated with Discipline ! He is the one man to
command the Fleet, but he is not the man to stand up
against a pack of lawyers clothed with Cabinet garments,
and possessed with tongues that have put them where
they are !

David was nodding when he said in the Psalms :
" A man full of words shall not prosper on the Earth."
They are the very ones that do prosper ! For War, my
dead Friend, you want a totally differently constituted
mind to that of a statesman and politician ! There are
great exemplars of immense minds being utter fools !
They weigh everything in the Balance ! I know great
men who never came to a prompt decision — men who
could talk a bird out of a tree !

War is Big Conceptions and Quick Decisions. Think
in Oceans. Shoot at Sight ! The essence of War is
Violence. Moderation in War is Imbecihty. All we
have done this war is to imitate the Germans ! We have
neither been Napoleonic in Audacity nor Cromwellian
in Thoroughness nor Nelsonic in execution. Always,
always, always " Too Late " !

I could finish this present German submarine menace
in a few weeks, but I must have power ! My plans

38

VON POHL AND VON TIRPITZ

would be emasculated if I handed them in. I must be
able to say to the men I employ : " If you don't do what
I tell you, ril make your zvife a widow and your house a
dunghill I ! ! {and they know I would !)

Don't prescribe till you're called in ! Someone else
might put something else in the pill !

Heaven bless you !

When people come and sympathise with me, I always
reply, with those old Romans 2,000 years ago expelled :

" Non fugimus :

Nos fugamur."
" We are not Deserters,

We are Outcasts."

Yours, etc.

(Signed) Fisher.

From a Privy Councillor to Lord Fisher

Jan. 8th, 1917.

My Dear Fisher,

I have always thought Jellicoe one of those rare
exceptions to the general rule that no great commander
is ever a good administrator. I knew you had picked
him out long ago to command the Grand Fleet if war
came, and it is in my mind that you had told me years
ago your opinion of him as a Sea Commander so that it
was what I was expecting and hoping for at the time,
though I was sorry for Jellicoe superseding Callaghan
when the war broke out, but I remembered your old
saying, " Some day the Empire will go down because it
is Buggins's turn " ! At the same time, I'm not sure
that any man can stand the strain of active command
under present conditions for more than 2| years. I
see no sign of tiredness about Jellicoe now, but it must
be almost impossible to keep at high tension so long
without losing some of the spring and dash, and it did

39

MEMORIES

look as if a stronger man than Jackson was wanted as
First Sea Lord at the Admirahy. Of course when you
were First Sea Lord and Jellicoe with the Grand Fleet
it was absolutely the right combination, but as they
haven't brought you back to the Admiralty I feel Jellicoe
is the man to be where he is, provided his successor is
the right man too. I don't know Beatty, so can only
go by what I hear of him. I can only pray that when
his day of trial comes he will come up to your high
standard.

I largely agree with all you say about the politicians.
No doubt our great handicap in this war is that nearly
all the party leaders get their positions through qualities
which serve them admirably in peace time, but are fatal
in war. The great art in politics in recent years has
always seemed to me to be to pretend to lead, when you
are really following the public bent of the moment.
All sense of right and wrong is blunted, and no one
stands up for what he honestly believes in but which
may not at the moment be popular. If he does, he is
regarded as a fool, and a '* waster," and may get out.
A habit of mind is thus formed which is wholly wanting
in initiative, and in war the initiative is everything. I
agree with you absolutely : — " Make up your mind,
and strike ! and strike hard and without mercy J" We have
thrown away chance upon chance, and nothing saves
us but the splendid fighting material at our disposal.
I doubt whether the recent changes will bring about any
great change. I trust they may, but, whatever happens,
neither side can go on indefinitely. Everything points
to Germany's economic condition being very bad, and
there may come a crash, but meantime the submarine
warfare is most serious ^ and no complete answer to it is yet
available.

Yours very sincerely,

40

CHAPTER IV

ECONOMY IS VICTORY

Mr. Gladstone stood by me last night. Mr.
McKenna was by his side. I am not inventing this
dream. It is a true story. (It is Godly sincerity that
wins — not fleshly v^sdom !)

A gentleman, such as you, was by way of interviewing
Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone was castigating me. I
was a Public Department. He said to you, who were
interviewing him, that he was helpless against all the
Public Departments, for he was fighting for Economy,
and he gave a case to you worse than either Chepstow
or Slough. I am sorry to say it was the War Office he
was illustrating, as I am devoted to Mr. Churchill and
would not hurt him for the world — even in a dream.
It is too puerile to describe in print, but what Mr.
Gladstone pointed to I have told you in conversation.

Now, the above is an Allegory.

Imagine ! nearly a year after the Armistice and yet
we are spending two millions sterling a day beyond an
absolutely fabulous income — beyond any income ever
yet produced by any Empire or any Nation !

Sweep them out !

41

MEMORIES

Dr. Macnamara, a few days since, in his apologia pro
vita sua excuses his Department to the public by saying
that on the very day of the Armistice the Board of Ad-
miralty sat on Economy ! So they did ! They sat on
it!

Economy ! To send Squadrons all over the globe
that were not there before ! The globe did without
them during the War — why not now ? " Oh my Sacred
Aunt ! " (as the French say when in an extremity).
** Showing the flag," I suppose, for that was the cry of
the " baying hounds " in 1905 when we brought home
some 160 vessels of war that could neither fight nor run
away — and whose Officers were shooting pheasants up
Chinese rivers and giving tea parties to British Consuls.
How those Consuls did write ! And how agitated was
the Foreign Office ! I must produce some of these
communications directly " DORA " is abolished. Well,
that's what " showing the flag " means.

Sweep 'em out !

Gladstone was hopeless against Departments — so is
now the Nation.

Dr. Macnamara may not know it, but Mr. Herbert
Samuel was to have had his place. I did not know
either of them, but I said to the Prime Minister " Let's
have the * Two Macs ' ! " Mind, I don't class him with
the Music Hall artist. {Temptis : Death of Campbell-
Bannerman) — that epoch — -I cannot forget Mr. Asquith's
kindness to me. He had telephoned to me from
Bordeaux after seeing the King at Biarritz, asking me
to meet him on his arrival home next night at 8.30 p.m.

42

ECONOMY IS VICTORY

at 40 Cavendish Square. His motor car was leaving
the door as I arrived. He told me he had seen the
King, and had proposed Mr. McKenna as First Lord
of the Admiralty. The King seemed to have some
suspicion that I should not think Mr. McKenna a con-
genial spirit. I made no objection — I thought to myself
that if Mr. McKenna were hostile then Tempus edax
rerum. I don't think Jonathan and David were " in
it," when Mr. McKenna and I parted on January 25th,
1 9 10 — my selected day to go and plant roses in Norfolk.
I blush to quote the Latin inscription on the beautiful
vase he gave me ;

Joanni Fisher

Baroni Kilverstonae

Navarchorum Principi, Ensis, Linguae,

Stili Valde Perito,
Vel in Concilio vel in Praelio insigni,

Nihil Timenti,

Inflexibili, Indomitabili, Invincibili/

Pignus Amicitiae Sempiternae,

Dederimt Reginaldus et Pamela McKenna.

To

John

Lord Fisher of Kilverstone

First of Admirals

Skilled of Sword, Tongue & Pen

Brilliant in Council and Battle

Dreading Nought

Inflexible, Indomitable, Invincible '

This Token of Enduring Friendship

a Gift from

Reginald & Pamela McKenna

And, even now, when time and absence might have
deadened those feelings of affection, he casts himself into

^ Note. — These are the names of the three first great Battle Cruisers
of the Dreadnought type.

43

MEMORIES

the burning fiery furnace, bound with me in a trusteeship
of a huge estate with only 3^. 4^. in the ^ left — all that
the spendthrifts leave us. " Showing the flag "
and presumably resuscitating the same old game
of multitudinous dockyards to minister to the ships
that are " showing the flag " ; and so more Chepstows
and more Sloughs ! And these multitudes of ship-
wrights superfluous in Government Dockyards who
ought to be in day and night shifts making good at
Private Yards the seven millions sterling of merchant
vessels that Dr. Macnamara's Government associates
supinely allowed to be sent to the bottom ! Those
political and professional associates, who, instead of
using the unparalleled British Navy of the moment
as a colossal weapon for landing Russian Armies in
Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein, aided by the calm
and tideless waters of the Baltic, were led astray to
follow the road that led to conscription and an army
of Four Million Soldiers, while the Navy was described
in the House of Commons as *' a subsidiary service."
How Napoleon must now be chortling at his prognostica-
tion coming true, that he put forth at St. Helena, as
described on page 177 of Lord Rosebery's " Last Phase,"
that the day we left the sea would be our downfall !

But this chapter is on " Economy " ; and I have to
tell a story here about my dear friend McKenna. He
was Secretary of the Treasury ; he, and an almost equal
friend of mine — Mr. Runciman — were, as we all know,
extremely cunning at figures. Lots of people were then
looking after me — Kind friends ! For instance, I re-

44

ECONOMY IS VICTORY

member my good friend John Burns at one Cabinet
Committee meeting instructing me on a piece of blotting
paper how to deal with a hostile fleet. I don't mean to
say that John Burns would not have been a first-class
Admiral. To be a good Admiral, a man does not need
to be a good sailor. That's a common mistake. He
wants good sailors under him. He is the Conceptionist.
However, to resume. At that time I was " Pooh-Bah "#"
at the Admiralty ; the First Lord was in a trance, and
the Financial Secretary had locomotor ataxy. I was
First Sea Lord, and I acted for both the Financial Secre-
tary and the First Lord in their absence. I wasn't
justified, but I did it. So I was the tria juncta in uno ;
and I referred, as First Sea Lord, a matter to the Financial
Secretary for his urgent and favourable consideration,
and he favourably commended it to the First Lord, who
invariably cordially approved. It was all over in about
a minute. Business buzzed!

(I'm doubtful whether this ought to come out before
Dora's abolished. That's why I wanted these papers
to be edited in the United States by some indiscreet
woman, where no action for libel lies. Colonel House
did ask me to go to America when I saw him in Paris
last May. There is a great temptation, for the climate
goes from the Equator to the Pole, and a dear American
Admiral friend of mine expatiated to me on the joy of
laying hold of the hand of the summer girl at Palm Beach
in Florida and never letting it go until you get to Bar
Harbour in the State of Maine. I have had endless
invitations and most hearty words from Florida to Maine,

45

MEMORIES

and from Passedena to Boston, and I have as many
American dear friends as I have English.)

Well ! the Treasury could not make out how all those
submarines were being built — where the devil the money
was coming from ; so these ferrets came over. I led a
dog's hfe, or rather a rabbit's Hfe, chased from hole to
hole. Nothing came of it ; and as an outcome of that
time I left the Admiralty with 6i good submarines
and 13 building. The Germans, thank God ! had
gone to the bottom with their first submarine, which
never came up again, and the few more they had at that
time were not much use.

I must tell a story now. Mind ! I don't want to run
down the Treasury. The Treasury is an absolutely
necessary affliction.

There was once a good Parsee ship-owner with a
good Captain. But this Captain would charge his
owner with the cost of his carriage from his ship to the
office. Not being far, the old Parsee thought the Captain
ought to walk, and if he didn't walk then he ought to
pay for the cab himself. They call the carriages
" buggies " at Bombay. However, when the old Parsee
had to pay the bill next month — there it was : " Buggy
— so many rupees." He told his Captain he would pay
that once but never again ; and not finding it in the items
of the bill presented the following month he gave the
Captain his cheque. As the Captain put it in his pocket
he said : '' Buggy's there ! " That's what happened to
the Treasury and the submarines.

I had a friend in the Accountant-General's Department

46

ECONOMY IS VICTORY

called *' The Mole." He taught me how to hide the
money. I may observe I was called a " Mole." It
wasn't a bad name. I was not seen or heard, but I was
recognised by upheavals — " There is that damned fellow
Fisher again, I will swear to it ! " But, as David said,
" Let us be abundantly satisfied " that we have such
among us as McKennas and Runcimans. I should like
to let those ferrets loose now. However, " Out of Evil
Good comes." Now comes a pardonable digression, I
think.

Here's a letter I got yesterday, September 9th, 1919,
coming from Russia. Now suppose we had not made
the very damnedest mess of Russia ever made in this
world — with Lord Milner first going there and then
Mr. Henderson, the head of the Labour Party, ambassa-
doring (as least, he says so) and this nation in every
possible conceivable way alienating the Russian people
— then I never could have had this magnificent letter
from Russia to give you. Just observing, before I quote
it : Supposing a French Army landed at Dover to help
us subjugate Ireland ? I guess we should all forget
whether we were Tories or Carsons or Smillies,and unite
to get this French army out of our Archangel, and
the Entente Cordial would be " in the cart," as the
vulgar say. Well, this is the letter which does my heart
good. It is from a young lad in an English man-of-war,
now off St. Petersburg. He is writing of the recent
defeat of the Russian fleet there : —

** There has been such a fight. I was only a looker-on.
I was furious. Kronstadt was attacked by our motor

47

MEMORIES

boats each carrying two torpedoes " [by the way, I was
viUfied for introducing motor boats] ** and seaplanes with
destroyers backing them up " [isn't it awful ! I introduced
destroyers also]. " Two Russian battleships, a Depot
ship and a Destroyer Leader were torpedoed.

"Our motor boats were MAGNIFICENT!

" I nearly cried with pride at belonging to the same
Race.

There has been nothing like it in the whole War.
I would rather take part in a thing like that than
be Prime Minister of England. You would have been
so proud if you could have seen them."

The letter is to the boy's mother. On it is written,
by him who sends it me, '* The Nelson touch, I think ! "

48

CHAPTER V

THE DARDANELLES

" UNTIL THIS DAY REMAINETH THE SAME VAIL UNTAKEN

AWAY '*

2 Corinthians, iii, 14.

I COMPARED this morning early what I had formerly
written on the subject of Personalities with what I said
to you yesterday on the same subject in my peripatetic
dictation — I can't recognise what is in type for the same
as what I spoke.

This morning I get a letter from Lord Rosebery.
Lord Rosebery is, I think, in a way attached to me.
In fact he must be, or I should not have drunk so much
of his splendid champagne ! Now you don't call me
" frisky " when I walk up and down talking to you ;
and although he reads the actual living words I say to
you, yet when he sees the beastly thing in print he calls
me " frisky " ! I keep on saying this ad nauseam, to
keep on hammering it not only into you but into the
public at large who happen to read these words — that
no printed effusion can ever represent what, when face
to face, cannot help conveying conviction to the hearer.
And so we come to the same old story, that the written

49 ^

MEMORIES

word is an inanimate corpse. You want to have the
Soul of the Man pouring out to you his personaUty.

And here again, when I contrasted the notes which
I spoke from with what I said, again I find I don't
recognise them — Well ! enough of that !

Now if anyone thinks that in this chapter they are
going to see Sport and that I am going to trounce Mr.
Winston Churchill and abuse Mr. Asquith and put it
all upon poor Kitchener they are woefully mistaken.
It was a Miasma that brought about the Dardanelles
Adventure. A Miasma like the invisible, scentless,
poisonous — deadly poisonous— gas with which my dear
friend Brock, of imperishable memory and Victoria
Cross bravery, wickedly massacred at Zeebrugge, was
going (in unison with a plan I had) to polish off not alone
every human soul in Heligoland and its surrounding
fleet sheltered under its guns from the Grand Fleet, but
every rabbit. It was much the same gas the German put
into the " Inflexible " (which I commanded), in 1882 to
light the engine-room. When it escaped it was scentless ;
instead of going up, as it ought to have done, it went
down, and permeated the double-bottom, and we kept
hauling up unconscious men like poisoned miners out
of a coalpit. Gas catastrophe — Yes ! Brock was lost
to us at the massacre of Zeebrugge — lost uselessly ;
for no such folly was ever devised by fools as such an
operation as that of Zeebrugge divorced from military
co-operation on land. What were the bravest of the
brave massacred for ? Was it glory ? Is the British
Navy a young Navy requiring glory ? When 25 per

50

THE DARDANELLES

cent, of our Officers were killed a few days since, sinking
two Bolshevik battleships, etc., and heroic on their own
element, the sea, we all thank God, as we should do,
that Nelson, looking down on us in Trafalgar Square,
feels his spirit is still with us. But for sailors to go on
shore and attack forts, which Nelson said no sailor but
a lunatic would do, without those on shore of the military
persuasion to keep what you have stormed, is not only
silly but it's murder and it's criminal. Also by the time
Zeebrugge was attacked, the German submarine had
got far beyond a fighting radius that required this base
near the English coast. As Dean Inge says : *' We
must hope that in the Paradise of brave men the know-
ledge is mercifully hid from them that they died in
vain."

Again, this is a digression — but such must be the nature
of this book when speaking ore rotimdo and from the
fulness of a disgusted heart, that such Lions should be
led by such Asses. The book can't convey my feelings,
however carefully my good friend the typewriter is taking
it down. All the quill drivers, the ink spillers, and the
Junius-aping journalists will jeer at you as the Editor,
and say, '* Why didn't you stop him ? Where's the
argument ? Where's the lucid exposition ? Where's
the subtle dialectician who will talk a bird out of a tree ?
Where is this wonderful personality I'm told of, who
fooled King Edward, and ravished virgins, and preached
the Gospel (so he says) ? Like Gaul, he is divided into
three parts ; we don't see one of them."

We'll get along with the Dardanelles now. All this

51 E2

MEMORIES

will make pulp for paper for the National

Review.

" Imperial Csesar dead and turned to clay
Now stops a hole to keep the wind away,"

Well, I left off at the " Miasma " that, imperceptibly
to each of them in the War Council, floated down on them
with rare subtle dialectical skill, and proved so incon-
testably to them that cutting off the enemy's big toe
in the East was better than stabbing him to the heart in
the West ; and that the Dardanelles was better than
the Baltic, and that Gallipoli knocked spots off the
Kiel Canal, or a Russian Army landed by the British
Fleet on the Baltic shore of Schleswig-Holstein.

Without any doubt, the '' beseechings " of the Grand
Duke Nicholas in the Caucasus on January 2nd, 1915,^
addressed to Kitchener in such soldierly terms, moved
that great man's heart ; tor say what you will. Kitchener
was a great man. But he was a great deception, all
the same, inasmuch as he couldn't do what a lot of people
thought he could do. Like Moses, he was a great
Commissariat Officer, but he was not a Napoleon or a
Moltke ; he was a Carnot in excelsis, and he was the
facile dupe of his own failings. But " Speak well of
those who treat you well." I went to him one evening
at 5 p.m., with Mr. Churchill's knowledge, and said to
him as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty that if his

1 On January 2, 1915, Russia asked for a demonstration against the
Turks in order to relieve the pressure they were putting on the Russian
forces in the Caucasus. Next day the War Office cabled a promise,
through the Foreign Office, that this should be done. Before he sent
the cable Lord Kitchener wrote to Mr. ChurchiU : " The only place
that a demonstration might have some efEect in stopping reinforcements
going East would be the Dardanelles."

52

THE DARDANELLES

myrmidons did not cease that same night from seducing
men from the private shipyards to become " Cannon-
fodder " I was going to resign at 6 p.m. I explained to
him the egregious folly of not pressing on our ship-
building to its utmost limits. He admitted the soft
impeachment as to the seduction ; and there, while I
waited, he wrote the telegram calling off the seducers.
If only that had been stuck to after I left the Admiralty,
we shouldn't be rationed now in sugar nearly a year
after the Armistice, nor should we be bidding fair to
become a second Carthage. We left our element, the
sea, to make ourselves into a conscript nation jfighting
on the Continent with four million soldiers out of a
population of forty millions. More than all the other
nations' was our Army.

The last words of Mr. A. G. Gardiner's article about
him who is now dictating are these : *' He is fighting
his last great battle. And his foe is the veteran of the
rival service. For in his struggle to establish con-
scription Lord Roberts's most formidable antagonist
is the author of the * Dreadnought.' "

Well, once more resuming the Dardanelles story.
These side-lights really illuminate the situation. These
Armies we were raising incited us to these wild-cat
expeditions. I haven't reckoned them up, but there
must have been a Baker's Dozen of 'em going on. Now,
do endeavour to get this vital fact into your mind. We
are an Island. Every soldier that wants to go anywhere
out of England — a sailor has got to carry him there on his
back.

53

MEMORIES

Consequently, every soldier that you raise or enlist,
or recruit, or whatever the proper word is, unless he is
absolutely part of a Lord Lieutenant's Army, never to
go out of England and only recruited, like the Militia —
that splendid force ! — to be called up only in case of
invasion — as I say, every soldier that is recruited on any
other basis means so much tonnage in shipping that has
to be provided, not only to take him to the Continent ;
but it's got to be kept ready to bring him back, in case of
his being wounded, and all the time to take him pro-
visions, ammunition, stores. Those vessels again have
to have other vessels to carry out coal for those vessels,
and those colliers have again to be supplemented by other
colliers to take the place of those removed from the
normal trade, and the coal mines themselves necessitate
more miners or the miners' working beyond the hours of
fatigue to bring forth the extra coal ; or else the
commercial work of the nation gets diminished and your
economic resources get crippled, and that of itself carried
in extremis means finishing the war. As a matter of fact^
it has nearly finished the English Nation— the crippling
of our economic resources by endeavouring to swell
ourselves out like the Frog in yEsop's Fables, and become
a great continental Power— forgetting the Heaven-sent
gift of an incomparable Navy dating from the time of
Alfred the Great, and God's providing a breakwater
600 miles long (the British Islands) in front of the German
Coast to stop the German access to the ocean, and thus
by easy blockade killing him from the sea as he was
killed eventually. Alas ! what happened ? In the House

54

THE DARDANELLES

of Commons the British Navy is called a subsidiary
Service. And then Lord Rosebery doesn't like my
'* frisking" ; and cartoons represent that I want a job ;
and fossil Admirals call me immodest !

Mr. Churchill was behind no one both in his enthusiasm
for the Baltic project, and also in his belief that the
decisive theatre of the war was beyond doubt in Northern
waters ; and both he and Mr. Lloyd George, the Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer, magnificently responded to the
idea of constructing a great Armada of 612 vessels,
to be rapidly built — mostly in a few weeks and only a few
extending over a few months — to carry out the great
purpose ; and I prepared my own self with my own
hands alone, to preserve secrecy, all the arrangements
for landing three great armies at different places — two
of them being feints that could be turned into a reality.
Also I made all the preparations, shortly before these
expeditions were to start, to practise them embarking
at Southampton and disembarking at Stokes Bay, so that
those who were going to work the Russian Armies would
be practised in the art, having seen the experiment con-
ducted on a scale of twelve inches to the foot with 50,000
men.

(We once embarked 8,000 soldiers on board the
Mediterranean Fleet in nineteen minutes, and the fleet
steamed out and landed them at similar speed. Old
Abdul Hamid, the Sultan, heard of it, and he compli-
mented me on there being such a Navy. That was the
occasion when a red-haired, short, fat Major, livid with
rage, complained to me on the beach that a bluejacket had

55

MEMORIES

shoved him into the boat and said to him " Hurry up,
you bloody lobster, or FU be 'ung ! " I explained to the
Major that the man would have been hanged ; he was
responsible for getting the boat filled and shoved off in
so many seconds.)

I remember that at the War Council held on January
28th, 1915, at 11.30 a.m., Mr. Churchill announced that
the real purpose of the Navy was to obtain access to the
Baltic, and he illustrated that there were three naval
phases. The first phase was the clearing of the outer
seas ; and that had been accomplished. The second
phase was the clearing of the North Sea. And the third
phase was the clearing of the Baltic. Mr. Churchill
laid stress on the importance of this latter operation,
because Germany always had been and still was very
much afraid of being attacked in the Baltic. For this
purpose special vessels were needed and the First Sea
Lord, Lord Fisher, had designed cruisers, etc., etc.,
meaning the Armada. Mr. Lloyd George said to me at
another meeting of the War Council, with all listening :
'* How many battleships shall we lose in the Dardanelles ? "
" A dozen ! " said I, " but I prefer to lose them else-
where." In dictating this account I can*t represent his
face when I said this.

Here I insert a letter on the subject which I wrote to

Lord Cromer in October, 1916 : —

36, Berkeley Square,

October nth, 1916.

Dear Lord Cromer,

To-day Sir F. Cawley asked me to to reconcile Kitch-
ener's statement of May 14th at the War Council that

56

THE DARDANELLES

the Admiralty proposed the Dardanelles enterprise with
my assertion that he (Kitchener) did it. Please see
question No. 1119. Mr. Churchill is speaking, and
Lord Kitchener said to him " could we not for instance
make a demonstration at the Dardanelles ? "

I repeat that before Kitchener's letter of Jan. 2nd
to Mr. Churchill there was no Dardanelles ! Mr. Churchill
had been rightly wrapped up in the splendid project of
the British Army sweeping along the sea in association
with the British Fleet. See Mr. Churchill at Question
No. 1 179.

'* The advance of the (British) Army along the Coast
was an attractive operation , but we could not get it settled.
Sir John French wanted very much to do it, but it fell
through."

See Lord Fisher, War Council of Jan. i^th / Sir John
French then present — (3 times he came over about it) —
" Lord Fisher demurred to any attempt to attack Zee-
brugge without the co-operation of the British Army
along the coast."

As to the Queen Elizabeth, Mr. Churchill is right in
saying there was great tension between Kitchener and
myself. He came over to the Admiralty and when I
said '* if the * Queen Elizabeth^ didnH leave the Dardanelles
that night I should f " he got up from the table and he
left ! and wrote an unpleasant letter about me to the
Prime Minister ! Lucky she did leave 1 1 The German
submarine prowling around for a fortnight looking for
her (and neglecting all the other battleships) blew up her
duplicate wooden image.

Yours, etc.,

(Signed) Fisher.

Mr. Churchill is quite correct. I backed him up till
I resigned. I would do the same again ! He had courage
and imagination ! He was a War Man !

If you doubt my dictum that the Cabinet Ministers

57

MEMORIES

only were members of the War Council and the rest of
us voice tubes to convey information and advice, ask
Hankey to come before you again and state the status !

Otherwise the experts would be the Government !
Kindly read what Mr. Asquith said on Nov. 2nd,
191 5, in Parliament. (See p. 70.)

(We had constructed a fleet of dummy battleships to
draw off the German submarines. This squadron ap-
peared with effect in the Atlantic and much confused the
enemy.)

Mr. Asquith also was miasma-ed ; and it's not allowable
to describe the discussion that he, I, and Mr. Churchill
had in the Prime Minister's private room, except so far
as to observe that Mr. Churchill had been strongly in
favour of military co-operation with the fleet on the
Belgian Coast, and Sir John French, on three different
visits to the War Council, had assented to carrying out
the operation, provided he had another Division added
to his Force. This project — so fruitful as it would have
been in its results at the early stage of the war — was, I
understand, prevented by three deterrents : (i) Lord
Kitchener's disinclination ; (2) The French didn't want
the British Army to get into Belgium ; (3) The Dardan-
elles came along.

I objected to any Naval action on the Belgian Coast
without such military co-operation. Those flat shores
of the Belgian coast, enfiladed by the guns of the accom-
panying British Fleet, rendered that enterprise feasible,
encouraging and, beyond doubt, deadly to the enemy's
sea flank. Besides preventing Zeebrugge from being

58

THE DARDANELLES

fortified and the Belgian Coast being made use of as a
jumping-off place for the air raids on London and else-
where, with guns capable of ranging such an enormous
distance as those mounted in the Monitors, we could
have enfiladed with great effect all attacks by the Germans.
When we got to the Council table — the members having
been kept waiting a considerable time — the Prime Min-
ister gave the decision that the Dardanelles project must
proceed ; and as I rose from the Council table Kitchener
followed me, and was so earnest and even emotional^
that I should return that I said to myself after some delay :
" Well, we can withdraw the ships at any moment, so
long as the Military don't land," and I succumbed. I
was mad on that Armada of 612 vessels, so generously
fostered by Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill and
sustained by the Prime Minister. They were of all
sorts and sizes — but alas ! as they reached completion
they began to be gradually perverted and diverted to
purposes for which they were unfitted and employed in
waters to which they were unsuited. Nevertheless they
made (some of them) the Germans flee for their lives,

1 " The dramatic scene which followed may one day furnish material
for the greatest historical picture of the war. Lord Fisher sat and
listened to the men who knew nothing about it and heard one after
another pass opinion in favour of a venture to which he was opposed.
He rose abruptly from the table and made as if to leave the room.

" The tall figure of Lord Kitchener rose and followed him. The two
stood by the window for some time in conversation and then both took
their seats again. In Lord Fisher's own words : ' I reluctantly gave
in to Lord Kitchener and resumed my seat.'

" Mr. Asquith saw that drama enacted, and Mr. Asquith knew that
it arose out of Lord Fisher's opposition to the scheme under discussion.
But he allowed his colleagues on the Council to reach their conclusions
without drawing from the expert his opinion for their guidance. The
monstrous decision wais therefore taken without it. But they all
knew it — such a scene could not occur without everyone knowing the
cause."

59

MEMORIES

and with such a one as the gallant Arbuthnot or the
splendid Hood, who gave their lives for nothing at
Jutland, we might have had another Quiberon.

To resume : I gave Lord Cromer, the Chairman of
the Dardanelles Commission a precis of the Dardanelles
case. It doesn't appear in the Report of the
Dardanelles Commission. I forgive him that, because,
when in his prime, he did me a good deed. It is
worth relating. I entreated him to cut a channel into
Alexandria Harbour deep enough for a Dreadnought ;
and he did it, though it cost a million sterling, and thus
gave us a base of incalculable advantage in certain con-
tingencies.

I will now shortly pass in review the Dardanelles state-
ment that I gave Lord Cromer. Those who will read this
book won't want to be fooled with figures. I give a
figurative synopsis. Of course, as I told the Dardanelles
Commission (Cromer thought it judicious to omit my
comment, I believe), the continuation of the Dardanelles
adventure beyond the first operations, confined solely
to the ships of the fleet which could be withdrawn at
any moment and the matter ended — the continuation, I
explained to the Dardanelles Commission, was largely
due to champion liars. It must ever be so in these
matters. I presume that's how it came about that
two Cabinet Ministers — no doubt so fully fed up with
the voice tube, as it has been described — told the nation
that we were within a few yards of victory at the Darda-
nelles, and so justified and encouraged a continuance of
that deplorable massacre. However, no politician re-

60

THE DARDANELLES

gards truth from the same point of view as a gentleman.
He puts on the spectacles of his Party. The suppressio
veri and the suggestio falsi flourish in politics like the
green baize tree.

Sworn to no Party — of no Sect am I :
I can't be silent and I will not lie.

Before the insertion of the following narrative pre-
pared by me at the time of the Dardanelles Commission
I wish to interject this remark : When sailors get round
a Council Board they are almost invariably mute. The
Politicians who are round that Board are not mute ;
they never would have got there if they had been mute.
That's why for the life of me I can't understand what
on earth made David say in the Psalms " A man full
of words shall not prosper on the Earth." They are the
very ones who do prosper ! It shows what a wonderful
fellow St. Paul was ; he was a bad talker and yet he got
on. He gives a bit of autobiography, and tells us that
his bodily presence was weak and his speech contemptible,
though his letters were weighty and powerful. However,
in that case, another Gospel was being preached, where
the worldly wise were confounded by the worldly
foolish.

While my evidence was being taken before the
Dardanelles Commission, the Secretary (Mears) was
splendid in his kindness to me, and my everlasting
gratitude is with the " Dauntless Three " who broke
away from their colleagues and made an independent
report. They were Mr. Fisher — formerly Prime
Minister of Australia, (a fellow labourer), Sir Thomas

6i

MEMORIES

Mackenzie (High Commissioner for New Zealand), and
Mr. Roch, M.P. Their Report was my life-buoy; a
precis of their Report, so far as it affects me and which
I consider unanswerable, establishes that it is the
duty of any Officer, however highly placed, to subor-
dinate his views to that of the Government, unless he
considers such a course so vitally antagonistic to his
Country's interests as to compel him to resign. I
know of no line of action so criminally outrageous and
subversive of all discipline as that of public wrangling
between a subordinate and his superior, or the Board
of Admiralty and an Admiral afloat, or the War Office
and their Commander-in-Chief in the Field.

This Dardanelles Commission reminds me of another
*' cloudy and dark day," as Ezekiel would describe it,
when five Cabinet Ministers, at the instigation of an
Admiral recently serving, held an enquiry absolutely
technical and professional on matters about which not
one of them could give an authoritative opinion but only
an opinion which regarded political opportunism — an
enquiry neither more nor less than of my professional
capacity as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty. The
trained mind of Mr. McKenna only just succeeded in
saving me from being thrown to the wolves of the
hustings. But it has inflicted a mortal wound on the
discipline of the Navy. Hereafter no mutinous Admiral
need despair (only provided he has political and social
influence) of obtaining countenance for an onslaught
against his superiors ; and we may yet lose the decisive
battle of the world in consequence.

62

THE DARDANELLES

The following is my narrative of my connexion with
the Dardanelles Operations.

" The position will not be clear and, indeed, will be
incomprehensible, if it be not first explained how very
close an official intimacy existed between Mr. Winston
Churchill and Lord Fisher for very many years previous
to the Dardanelles episode, and how Lord Fisher thus
formed the conviction that Mr. Churchill's audacity^
courage, and imagination specially fitted him to be a
War Minister.

" When, in the autumn of 191 1 , Mr. Winston Churchill
became First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Fisher had
retired from the position of First Sea Lord which he
had occupied from October 21st, 1904, to January 25th,
1910, amidst great turmoil all the time. During Lord
Fisher's tenure of office as First Lord, vast Naval reforms
were carried out, including the scrapping of some 160
ships of no fighting value, and great naval economies
were effected, and all this time (except for one unhappy
lapse when Mr. Churchill resisted the additional ' Dread-
nought ' building programme) Mr. Winston Churchill
was in close association with these drastic reforms, and
gave Lord Fisher all his sympathy when hostile criticism
was both malignant and perilous. For this reason, on
Mr. Churchill's advent as First Lord of the Admiralty
in the autumn of 191 1, Lord Fisher most gladly complied
with his request to return home from Italy to help
him to proceed with that great task that had previously
occupied Lord Fisher for six years as First Sea Lord,
namely, the preparation for a German War which Lord

63

MEMORIES

Fisher had predicted in 1905 would certainly occur in
August, 1 9 14, in a written memorandum, and afterwards
also personally to Sir M. Hankey, the Secretary of the
Committee of Imperial Defence, necessitating that drastic
revolution in all things Naval which brought 88 per
cent, of the British Fleet into close proximity with
Germany and made its future battle ground in the
North Sea its drill ground, weeding out of the
Navy inefficiency in ships, officers, and men, and
obtaining absolute fighting sea supremacy by an un-
paralleled advance in types of fighting vessels.

" Mr. Churchill then at Lord Fisher's request did a fine
thing in so disposing his patronage as First Lord as to
develop Sir John Jellicoe into his Nelsonic position.
So that when the day of war came Sir John Jellicoe
became admiralissimo in spite of great professional
opposition. . . .

" This increased Lord Fisher's regard for Mr. Churchill,
and on July 30th, 1914, at his request, Lord Fisher
spent hours with him on that fifth day before war was
declared and by his wish saw Mr. Balfour to explain to
him the Naval situation. This is just mentioned to
show the close official intimacy existing between Mr.
Churchill and Lord Fisher, and when, on October 20th,
1914, Mr. Churchill asked Lord Fisher to become First
Sea Lord he gladly assented to co-operating with him in
using the great weapon Lord Fisher had helped to
forge.

** Mr. Churchill and Lord Fisher worked in absolute
accord until it came to the question of the Dardanelles,

64

[5y kind permission of- The Pall Mall Gazette.

The Kingfisher.

" This bird has a somewhat long bill and is equipped with a brilliant
blue back and tail ; the latter not of sufficient length to be in the
way. Its usual cry is much like the typical cry of the family, but
besides this it gives a low, hoarse croak from time to time when
seated in the shadows. Although exclusively a water bird, it is not
unfrequently found at some distance from any water. It is very
wary, keeping a good look-out, and defends its breeding place with
great courage and daring." — Zoologica! Studies.

THE DARDANELLES

when Lord Fisher's instinct absolutely forbade him to
give it any welcome. But finding himself the one solitary
person dissenting from the project in the War Council,
and knowing it to be of vital importance that he should
personally see to the completion of the great shipbuild-
ing programme of 612 vessels initiated on his recent
advent to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord, also being
confident that all these vessels could only be finished
rapidly if he remained. Lord Fisher allowed himself to
be persuaded by Lord Kitchener on January 28th, 191 5,
to continue as First Sea Lord. That point now remains
to be related in somewhat greater detail.

'* To begin with : — When exactly 10 years previously
Lord Fisher became First Sea Lord, on October 20th,
1904, that very day occurred the Dogger Bank incident
with Russia, and the Prime Minister made a speech at
Southampton that seemed to make war with Russia a
certainty ; so Lord Fisher, as First Sea Lord, immedi-
ately looked into the Forcing of the Dardanelles in the
event of Russia's movements necessitating British action
in the Dardanelles. He then satisfied himself that, even
with military co-operation, it was mighty hazardous,
and he so represented it at that time. The proceedings
of the Committee of Imperial Defence, however, will
furnish full details respecting the Dardanelles, especially
Field-Marshal Lord Nicholson's remarks when Director
of Military Operations, and also those of Sir N. Lyttelton
when Chief of the General Staff.

" But Lord Fisher had had the great advantage of com-
manding a battleship under Admiral Sir Geoffrey Phipps

65 F

MEMORIES

Hornby when, during the Russo-Turkish War, that
celebrated Flag Officer lay with the British Fleet near
Constantinople, and Lord Fisher listened at the feet of
that Naval Gamaliel when he supported Nelson's dictum
that no sailor but a fool would ever attack a fort ! Never-
theless, Nelson did attack Copenhagen—was really
beaten, but he bluffed the Danish Crown Prince and
came out ostensibly as victor. Nelson's Commander-in-
Chief, Sir Hyde Parker, knew Nelson was beaten and
signalled to him to retreat, but Nelson disobeyed orders
as he did at St. Vincent and the Nile, and with equal
judgment.

*' We might have done the same bluff with the Turks,
had promptitude and decision directed us, but pro-
crastination, indecision, and vacillation dogged us instead.
The 29th Division oscillated for weeks between France
and Turkey. {See below my notes of the War Council
Meetings of February 19th and 24th.)

''Note. — See Mr. Churchill's statement at the 19th
Meeting of the War Council on May 14th, 191 5, that
had it been known three months previously that an
English army of 100,000 men would have been available
for the attack on the Dardanelles, the naval attack would
never have been undertaken.

*' The War Council met on May 14th, 1915, and certain
steps proposed to be taken by Mr. Churchill immedi-
ately afterwards, decided Lord Fisher that he could no
longer support the Dardanelles operations. He could
not go further in this project with Mr. Churchill, and was
himself convinced that we should seize that moment to

66

THE DARDANELLES

give up the Dardanelles operations. So Lord Fisher
went.

"Lord Fisher's parting with Mr. Churchill was pathetic,
but it was the only way out. When the Prime Minister
read to Lord Fisher Lord Kitchener's letter to the Prime
Minister attacking Lord Fisher for withdrawing the
' Queen Elizabeth ' from certain destruction at the
Dardanelles, Lord Fisher then realised how splendid
had been Mr. Churchill's support of him as to her
withdrawal. A few days afterwards the German sub-
marine that had been hovering round the British Fleet
for a fortnight blew up the wooden image of the super-
Dreadnought we had sent out there as a bait for the
German submarines, showing how the Germans realised
the ' Queen Elizabeth's ' value in letting all the other
older battleships alone for about a fortnight till they
thought they really had the ' Queen Elizabeth ' in this
wooden prototype !

" It must be emphasised on Mr. Churchill's behalf that
he had the whole Naval opinion at the Admiralty as well
as the Naval opinion at the Dardanelles with him — Lord
Fisher was the only dissentient.

" It must be again repeated that though Lord Fisher
was so decidedly against the Dardanelles operations from
the very first, yet he was very largely influenced to remain
because he was convinced it was of vital importance to
the nation to carry out the large building programme
initiated by him, which was to enable the Navy to deal
such a decisive blow in the decisive theatre (in Northern
Waters) as would shorten the war — by the great projects

67 F 2

MEMORIES

alluded to by Mr. Churchill at the 9th meeting of the
War Council on January 28th, 191 5, when he described
the Three Naval phases of the War, leading to our occupa-
tion of the Baltic as being the supreme end to be attained.
" Had Lord Fisher maintained his resignation on 28th
January, 1915, the Dardanelles enterprise would certainly
still have gone on, because it was considered a matter of
vital political expediency (see Mr. Balfour's memorandum
of 24th February, 1915), but those 612 new vessels would
not have been built, or they would have been so delayed
as to be useless. As it was, by Lord Fisher's leaving the
Admiralty even so late as May 22nd, 1915, there was
great delay in the completion of the five fast Battle
Cruisers and in the laying down of further Destroyers
and Submarines, and, in fact, four large Monitors
(some of which had been advanced one thousand tons)
that had been considerably advanced were stopped
altogether for a time and the further building of fast
Battle Cruisers was given up. Lord Fisher had prepared
a design for a very fast Battle Cruiser carrying six 20-inch
guns, and the model was completed. She was of excep-
tionally light draught of water and of exceptionally high
speed. He had arranged for the manufacture of these
20-inch guns.

" It has also to be emphasised that that programme of
new vessels owed its inception to a great plan, sketched
out in secret memoranda, which it can be confidently
asserted would have produced such great military results
as would certainly have ended the war in 191 5.

" These plans were in addition to that concurred in by

68

THE DARDANELLES

Sir John French in his three visits to the War Council

in November, 19 14, for joint action of the British Army

and the British Fleet on the Belgian Coast.

''Note. — See Note to 8th meeting of the War Council
on January 13th, 19 15, where Lord Fisher demurs to
any Naval action without the co-operation of the British
Army along the coast."

I quote here a report of the opinion of Mr. Andrew

Fisher, the High Commissioner of Australia, and

formerly Prime Minister of Australia ; a member of the

Dardanelles Commission, on the duty of departmental

advisers : —

" I am of opinion it would seal the fate of responsible
government if servants of the State were to share the
responsibility of Ministers to Parliament and to the people
on matters of public policy. The Minister has command
of the opinions and views of all officers of the department
he administers on matters of public policy. Good
stewardship demands from Ministers of the Crown frank,
fair, full statements of all opinions of trusted experienced
officials to colleagues when they have direct reference
to matters of high policy." / give prominence to this
because Ministers, and Ministers only, must be responsible
to the democracy.

If they find themselves in conffict with their expert
advisers they shoidd sack the advisers or themselves resign.
An official, whether a Sea Lord or a junior clerk — having
been asked a question by his immediate chief and
given his answer and the chief acts contrary to advice —
should not be subjected to reprimand for not stating to
the board of directors that he disagrees with his chief
or that he has given a reluctant consent. If there is blame
it rests with the Minister and not with his subordinates.

" / dissent in the strongest terms^^ says Mr. Fisher in
his Minority Report, " from any suggestion that the Depart-

69

MEMORIES

mental Adviser of a Minister in his company at a Council
meeting should express any views at all other than to the
Minister and through him unless specifically invited to do so. ^^

Sir Thomas Mackenzie expresses exactly the same view.
Mr. Asquith, in the House of Commons on November 2,
1915, said : —

"It is the duty of the Government — of any Govern-
ment— to rely very largely upon the advice of its military
and naval counsellors ; but in the long run, a Govern-
ment which is w^orthy of the name, which is adequate
in the discharge of the trust which the nation reposes in
it, must bring all these things into some kind of propor-
tion one to the other, and sometimes it is not only
expedient, but necessary, to run risks and to encounter
dangers which pure naval or military policy would warn
you against."

The Government and the War Council knew my
opinion — as I told the Dardanelles Commission, it was
known to all. It was known even to the charwomen at
the Admiralty. It was my duty to acquiesce cheerfully
and do my best, but when the moment came that there
was jeopardy to the Nation I resigned.

Such is the stupidity of the General Public — and such
was the stupidity of Lord Cromer — that it was not realized
there would be an end of Parliamentary Government
and of the People's will, therefore, being followed, if
experts were able to override a Government Policy.
Sea Lords are the servants of the Government. Having
given their advice, then it's their duty to carry out the
conmiands of the political party in power until the moment
comes when they feel they can no longer support a policy
which they are convinced is disastrous.

70
s

THE DARDANELLES

Here follows a summary for the Chairman of the Dar-
danelles Commission of my evidence (handed to Lord
Cromer, but not circulated by him or printed in the
Report of the Commission) : —

*' Mr. Churchill and I worked in absolute accord at
the Admiralty until it came to the question of the
Dardanelles.

"I was absolutely unable to give the Dardanelles
proposal any welcome, for there was the Nelsonic dictum
that ' any sailor who attacked a fort was a fool.'

"My direct personal knowledge of the Dardanelles
problem dates back many years. I had had the great
advantage of commanding a battleship under Admiral
Sir Geoffrey Phipps Hornby when, during the Russo-
Turkish War, that celebrated flag officer took the Fleet
through the Dardanelles.

" I had again knowledge of the subject as Commander-
in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet for three years
during the Boer War, when for a long period the Fleet
under my command lay at Lemnos oflt the mouth of the
Dardanelles, thus affording me means of close study
of the feasibility of forcing the Straits.

" When I became First Sea Lord on October 20th,
1904, there arrived that very day the news of the Dogger
Bank incident with Russia.

" In my official capacity, in view of the possibility of a
war with Russia, I immediately examined the question
of the forcing of the Dardanelles, and I satisfied myself
at that time that even with military co-operation the
operation was mighty hazardous.

" Basing myself on the experience gained over so many
years, when the project was mooted in the present War
my opinion was that the attempt to force the Dardanelles
would not succeed.

" I was the only member of the War Council who
dissented from the project, but I did not carry my

71

MEMORIES

dissent to the point of resignation because I understood
that there were overwhelming poHtical reasons why the
attempt at least should be made.

" Moreover, I felt it to be of vital importance that I
should personally see to the completion of the great
shipbuilding programme which was then under construc-
tion, which had been initiated by me on my advent to
the Admiralty, and which included no less than 612
vessels.

" The change in my opinion as to the relative importance
of the probable failure in the Dardanelles began when
the ever-increasing drain upon the Fleet, as the result
of the prosecution of the Dardanelles undertaking,
reached a point at which in my opinion it destroyed the
possibility of other naval operations which I had in
view, and even approached to jeopardising our naval
supremacy in the decisive theatre of the War.

" I may be pressed with the question why did I not
carry my objections to the point of resignation when the
decision was first reached to attack the Dardanelles with
naval forces.

" In my judgment it is not the business of the chief
technical advisers of the Government to resign because
their advice is not accepted, unless they are of opinion
that the operation proposed must lead to disastrous
results.

'* The attempt to force the Dardanelles, though a
failure, would not have been disastrous so long as the
ships employed could be withdrawn at any moment, and
only such vessels were engaged, as in the beginning of
the operations was in fact the case, as could be spared
without detriment to the general service of the Fleet.

*' I may next be asked whether I made any protest at
the War Council when the First Lord proposed the
Dardanelles enterprise, or at any later date.

** Mr. Churchill knew my opinion. I did not think it
would tend towards good relations between the First
Lord and myself nor to the smooth working of the Board

72

THE DARDANELLES

of Admiralty to raise objections in the War Council's
discussions. My opinion being known to Mr. Churchill
in what I regarded as the proper constitutional way, I
preferred thereafter to remain silent.

" When the operation was undertaken my duty from
that time onwards was confined to seeing that the Govern-
ment plan was carried out as successfully as possible with
the available means.

"I did everything I could to secure its success, and I
only resigned when the drain it was making on the
resources of the Navy became so great as to jeopardise
the major operations of the Fleet.

"On May 14th, 191 5, the War Council made it clear
to me that the great projects in Northern waters which I
had in view in laying down the Armada of new vessels
were at an end, and the further drain on our naval
resources foreshadowed that evening convinced me that
I could no longer countenance the Dardanelles opera-
tions, and the next day I resigned.

" It seemed to me that I was faced at last by a pro-
gressive frustration of my main scheme of naval strategy.

" Gradually the crowning work of war construction was
being diverted and perverted from its original aim.
The Monitors, for instance, planned for the banks and
shallows of Northern waters, were sent off to the
Mediterranean where they had never been meant to

operate.

" I felt I was right in remaining in office until this
situation, never contemplated at first by anyone, was
accepted by the War Council. I felt right in resigning
on this decision.

" My conduct and the interpretation of my responsi-
bility I respectfully submit to the judgment of the
Committee. Perhaps I may be allowed to say that as
regards the opinion I held I was right.

Fisher,

October ythj 19 16."

73

MEMORIES

This is a letter which I wrote to Colonel Sir Maurice
Hankey, Secretary of the War Council : —

September ist, 1916.

Dear Hankey,

In reply to your letter in which you propose to
give only one extract concerning my hostility to the
Dardanelles enterprise, do you not think that the following
words in the official Print of Proceedings of War Council
should be inserted in your report in justice to me ?

" igth Meeting of the War Council, May i^th, 1915. —
Lord Fisher reminded the War Council that he had
been no party to the Dardanelles operations. When
the matter was first under consideration he had stated
his opinion to the Prime Minister at a private interview."

The reason I abstained from any further pronounce-
ment was stated.

Yours, etc.,

(Signed) Fisher.

I note you will kindly testify to the accuracy of my
statement that I left the Council table with the intention
of resigning, but yielded to Kitchener's entreaty to
return.

Have you the letter I wrote on January 28th, 19 15,
to Mr. Asquith, beginning : —

" I am giving this note to Colonel Hankey to hand

to you ," because in it occur these following

words : — *' At any moment the great crisis may occur
in the North Sea, for the German High Sea Fleet may
be driven to fight by the German Military Headquarters,
as part of some great German military operation."

It looks as if Hindenburg might try such a coup now.

I heard from Jellicoe a few days since that the Zeppelins
now made the German submarines very formidable, and
by way of example he pointed out that the '* Falmouth "

74

THE DARDANELLES

was torpedoed even when at a speed of 25 knots and
zigzagging every five minutes.

In some notes compiled on this matter I find it
recorded that I was present at the meeting on the
13th January, when the plan was first proposed and
approved in principle, and was also present at the
meeting on the evening of the 28th January, when
Mr. Churchill announced that the Admiralty had decided
to push on with the project. On the morning of the
28th January I said that I had understood that this
question would not be raised to-day, and that the
Prime Minister was well aware of my own views in
regard to it.

After the failure of the naval attack on the Narrows
on the 1 8th March, I remarked at the meeting
on the 19th March that I had always said that a
loss of 12 battleships must be expected before the
Dardanelles could be forced by the Navy alone, and
that I still adhered to this view.

Also, at the meeting held on the 14th May, I reminded
the War Council that I had been no party to the
Dardanelles operations. When the matter was under
consideration I had stated my opinion to the Prime
Minister at a private interview.

Some light is perhaps thrown on my general attitude
towards naval attacks by the following remark, made at
the meeting held on the 13th January, which related, not
to the Dardanelles project, but to a proposed naval attack
on Zeebrugge : —

I said that the Navy had only a limited number of
battleships to lose, and would probably sustain losses in
an attack on Zeebrugge. I demurred to any attempt to
attack Zeebrugge without the co-operation of the Army
along the coast.

This note is here inserted because the Dardanelles

operation interfered with the project of certain action

75

MEMORIES

in the Decisive Theatre of the War explained in a Memo-
randum given to the Prime Minister on January 25th,
19 1 5, but it has been decided to be too secret for publica-
tion even now, so it is not included in these papers.

A Memorandum was also submitted by me on
General Naval Policy, deprecating the use of Naval
Force in Coast Operations unsupported by Military
Force and emphasising the supreme importance of main-
taining the unchallengeable strength of the Grand Fleet
in the Decisive Theatre.

Lord Fisher to Colonel Sir Maurice Hankey

September 6th, 1916.

Dear Hankey,

I HAVE only just this very moment received your
letter, dated September 4th, and its enclosure, for I had
suddenly to leave the address you wrote to on important
official business. . . .

The Prime Minister and Kitchener knew from me on
January yth or January 8th that I objected to the
Dardanelles enterprise, but I admit this does not come
under your official cognisance as Secretary of the War
Council, consequently I cannot press you in the matter.

If I ever am allowed hereafter to see what you have
prepared for Lord Cromer's Committee of Inquiry I
shall be better able to judge of its personal application
to myself.

I was told yesterday by an influential Parliamentary
friend that the likelihood was that all would emerge
from the Dardanelles Inquiry as free from blame, except
one person only — Lord Fisher ! That really would be
comic ! considering that I was the only sufferer by it,
by loss of office and of an immense certainty in my mind
of Big Things in the North Sea and Baltic by the

76

THE DARDANELLES

unparalleled Armada we were building so marvellously
quickly, e.g.^ submarines in five months instead of 14,
and destroyers in nine months instead of 18 ! and
immense fast Battle Cruisers with 18-inch and 15-inch
guns in II months instead of two years ! PF/zj, it was
the desolation of rny life to leave the Admiralty at that
momefit ! Knowing that once out I should never get
back ! The *' wherefore " you know !

Yours, etc.,
(Signed) Fisher,

6th September, 19 16.

Lord Fisher to the Right Hon. Winston Churchill.

'* The Baltic a German LakeJ'^
My Dear Winston,

I AM here for a few days longer before rejoining my
" Wise men " at Victory House —

" The World forgetting,
By the World forgot ! "

but some Headlines in the newspapers have utterly upset
me ! Terrible ! !

" The German Fleet to assist the Land operations in
the Baltic."

" Landing the German Army South of Reval."

We are five times stronger at Sea than our enemies and
here is a small Fleet that we could gobble up in a few
minutes playing the great vital Sea part of landing an
Army in the enemies' rear and probably capturing the
Russian Capital by Sea !

This is *' Holding the ring " with a vengeance !

Are we really incapable of a big Enterprise ?

I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis

77

MEMORIES

— O.M.G. (Oh ! My God !)— Shower it on the
Admirahy ! !

Yours,

Fisher.

9/9/17-
P.S.— In War, you want—" SURPRISE."
To beget " SURPRISE " you want
" IMAGINATION " to go to bed with
" AUDACITY."

Admiral von Spec's first words at the Falkland Islands
when he saw the British Battle Cruisers were

" Oh, what a surprise " !

And he went to the bottom with 3,000 men and 11 ships,
and not one man killed or wounded on board the
" Invincible."

Lord Fisher's Notes of his own Special Interven-
tions AT War Council Meetings

Notes.— The first two meetings of the War Committee
took place on August ^th and August 6th, 19 14.

Lord Fisher was appointed First Sea Lord on October
20th, 1914.

The third meeting of the War Council {being the first
after Lord Fisher's appointment) took place on November
2$th, 1914.

'T^rd Meeting of the War Council, November 2$th, 1914.

Lord Fisher asked whether Greece might not attack
Gallipoli in conjunction with Bulgaria.

It was pointed out Bulgaria blocked the way.

{Note. — From his experience of three years as Com-
mander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Lord
Fisher had formed the conviction that Bulgaria was the

78

THE DARDANELLES

key of the situation, and this he had pointed out to Lord
Kitchener personally at the War Office.)

/^th Meeting of War Council^ December ist, 1914-

Lord Fisher pressed for the adoption of the Offensive.

The Defensive attitude of the Fleet was bad for its
morale, and was no real protection from enemy sub-
marines.

The suggestion of seizing an island off the German
coast was adjourned.

yth Meeting of IVar Council , Jafiuary Sthy 1915.

Zeebrugge.

Asked whether the bombardment of Zeebrugge would
materially lessen the risks to transports and other ships
in the English Channel, Lord Fisher replied that he
thought not. In his opinion the danger involved in the
operation (in loss of ships) would outweigh the results.

Sth Meeting of War Council j January i^th, 19 15.

Zeebrugge.

Lord Fisher said that the Navy had not unlimited
battleships to lose, and there would probably be losses in
any attack on Zeebrugge. He objected to any attack on
Zeebrugge without the co-operation of the Army along the
coast.

The Dardanelles was mentioned, Mr. Churchill
stating that he had exchanged telegrams with Admiral
Carden as to the possibilities of a naval attack on the
Dardanelles. He had taken this step because Lord
Kitchener, in a letter to him, dated January 3rd, had urged
instant naval action at the Dardanelles to relieve the
pressure on the Grand Duke Nicholas in the Caucasus.

79

MEMORIES

i)th Meeting of War Council^ January 2Sth, 1915,

11.30 a.m.

(Note. — Before this meeting the Prime Minister dis-
cussed with Mr. Churchill and Lord Fisher the proposed
Dardanelles operations and decided in favour of con-
sidering the project in opposition to Lord Fisher's
opinion.)

The Dardanelles.

Mr. Churchill asked if the War Council attached
importance to the proposed Dardanelles operations, which
undoubtedly involved risks.

Lord Fisher said that he had understood that this
question was not to be raised at this meeting. The
Prime Minister knew his (Lord Fisher's) views on the
subject.

The Prime Minister said that, in view of what had
already been done, the question could not be left in
abeyance.

(Note. — Thereupon Lord Fisher left the Council table.
He was followed by Lord Kitchener, who asked him
what he intended to do. Lord Fisher replied to Lord
Kitchener that he would not return to the Council table,
and would resign his office as First Sea Lord. Lord
Kitchener then pointed out to Lord Fisher that he (Lord
Fisher) was the only dissentient, and that the Dardanelles
operations had been decided upon by the Prime Minister ;
and he urged on Lord Fisher that his duty to his country
was to go on carrying out the duties of First Sea Lord.
After further talk Lord Fisher reluctantly gave in to Lord
Kitchener and went back to the Council table. ^)

^ It must be emphasised here, as well as iu regard to Lord Kitchener's
statement to the War Council dated May 14th, 1915, that Lord Fisher
considered that it would be both improper and unseemly for him to
enter into an altercation either at the War Council or elsewhere with
his chief Mr. Churchill, the First Lord. Silence or resignation was the
right course.

80

The First Sea Lord. By William Nicholson.

THE DARDANELLES

Mr. Churchill stated that the ultimate object of the
Navy was to obtain access to the Baltic. There were, he
said, three Naval phases : —

I St phase. — The clearing of the outer seas (this

had been accomplished).
2nd phase. — -The clearing of the North Sea.
yd phase. — The clearing of the Baltic.

Mr. Churchill laid stress on the importance of the third
phase and said this latter operation was of great importance,
as Germany always had been, and still was, very nervous
of an attack from the Baltic. For this purpose special
vessels were required, and the First Sea Lord (Lord
Fisher) had designed cruisers, &c., &c.^ The meeting
was adjourned to 6.30 the same evening.

loth Meeting of War Council {same day), January zSth,

1915, at 6.2,0 p.m.

The plan of a naval attack on Zeebrugge was abandoned
and the Dardanelles operations were decided upon.

nth Meeting of War Council, February gth, 191 5.

Mr. Churchill reported that the Naval attack on the
Dardanelles would take place on February 15th. (This
was afterwards postponed until February 19th.)

i2th Meeting of War Council, February i6th, 1915.

Agreed that the 29th Division should be sent to the
Dardanelles and other arrangements made to support the
Naval attack on the Dardanelles.

The Admiralty were authorised and pressed to build
or obtain special craft for landing 50,000 men wherever
a landing might be required.

1 This was the Armada of 612 vessels authorised by Mr. Lloyd
George as Chancellor of the Exchequer,

SX G

MEMORIES

13//? Meeti?ig of War Council, February igth, 1915.

Transports ordered to be got ready : — •

1. To convey troops from Egypt to the Dardanelles ;

2. To convey the 29th Division from England to the
Dardanelles,

but no final decision to be taken as to 2gth Division.

i\th Meeting of War Council, February z^th, 191 5.

General Birdwood selected to join Admiral Garden
before the Dardanelles.

The decision as to sending 2gth Division postponed.

i^th Meeting of War Council, February 26th , 19 15.

Mr. Ghurchill said he could not offer any assurance
of success in the Dardanelles attack.

i6th Meeting of War Council, March yd, 191 5.

The future of Gonstantinople was discussed, and what
should be the next step after the Dardanelles. Lord
Lansdowne and Mr. Bonar Law, besides Mr. Balfour,
were present.

I'^th Meeting of War Council, March 10th, 191 5.

The War Office was directed to prepare a memorandum
on the strategical advantages of Alexandretta.

iSth Meeting of War Council, March igth, 191 5.

The sinking of the battleships '* Irresistible," *' Ocean,"
and " Bouvet," the running ashore of " Gaulois " and the
disablement of " Inflexible," were discussed.

The continuance of naval operations against Darda-

82

THE DARDANELLES

nelles was authorised if the Admiral at the Dardanelles
agreed.

Lord Fisher said that it was impossible to explain
away the sinking of four battleships. He had always
said that a loss of 12 battleships must be expected before
the Dardanelles could be forced by the Navy alone. He
still adhered to this view.

Note. — There was no meeting of the War Council
from March 19th to May 14th.

i()th Meeting of War Council, May 14th, 1915.

Mr. Churchill reported that one, or perhaps two,
German submarines had arrived in the Eastern Mediter-
ranean, and that the attack on the Dardanelles had now
become primarily a military rather than a naval operation.
It had been decided to recall the " Queen Elizabeth."
Mr. Churchill stated that if it had been known three
months ago that an army of from 80,000 to 100,000 men
would now be available for the attack on the Dardanelles
the naval attack would never have been undertaken.

Lord Fisher reminded the War Council that he had
been no party to the Dardanelles operations. When the
matter was first under consideration he had stated his
opinion to the Prime Minister at a private interview.

Conclusion.— Lord Kitchener to send a telegram to
Sir Ian Hamilton asking what military force he would
require in order to ensure success at the Dardanelles.

Note.— On the evening of this day Mr. Churchill
drafted orders for further naval reinforcements for the
Dardanelles, a course to which Lord Fisher could not
assent.

(This led to Lord Fisher leaving the Admiralty.)

A Note on the Dardanelles Operations.

Major-General Sir Chas. Caldwell, K.C.B., was
Director of Military Operations at the War Office during

83 G 2

MEMORIES

the whole period of the inception, incubation and execu-
tion of the Dardanelles adventure, and in an article in
the "Nineteenth Century" for March, 1919, he com-
pletely disposes of the criticisms of Mr. G. A. Schreiner in
his book " From Berlin to Bagdad," and of those of Mr.
H. Morgenthau, the late United States Ambassador at
Constantinople, in his recent book, '* The Secrets of
the Bosphorus." Both these works convey the impres-
sion that the general attack by the Fleet upon the Defences
of the Narrows on March i8th, 191 5, very nearly
succeeded. This verdict is not justified by the facts as
certified by Sir C. Caldwell. He proves incontestably
that, even in the very unlikely case of indirect bombard-
ment really effecting its object in putting the batteries
out of action, there would still be the movable armament
of the Turks left to worry and defeat the mine-sweepers,
and there would still be the drifting mines and possibly
the torpedoes fired from the shore to imperil the battle-
ships. When peace did come it occupied the British
Admiral a very long time to sweep up the mines. The
damaging effect of Naval Bombardment was over-esti-
mated— the extent to which the enemy's niovable arma-
ment would interfere with mine-sw^eeping was not
realised, and the extent and efficiency of the minefields
were unknown and unheeded. Sir Charles Caldwell
says :

'* The whole thing was a mistake, quite apart from
the disastrous influence which the premature and
unsuccessful operation exerted over the subsequent land
campaign."

It is also most true what Sir C. Caldwell says that
"the idea at the back of the sailors' minds (who so
reluctantly assented to the political desire of getting
possession of the Straits) was that it was an experiment
which could always be instantly stopped if the under-
taking were to be found too difficult." But alas ! ''the

84

THE DARDANELLES

view of the War Council came to he that they could not now
abandon the adventureJ'^

Marshal Liman von Sanders, who had charge of the
defence of the Dardanelles, said :

" The attack on the Straits by the Navy alone I don't
think could ever have succeeded. I proposed to flood the
Straits broadcast with mines, and it was my view that
these were the main defences of the Dardanelles, and
that the function of the guns of the forts was simply to
protect the minefields from interference."

The evidence given by Captain (now Rear-Admiral
Sir) William Reginald Hall, R.N., Director of Naval
Intelligence, at the Dardanelles Inquiry, conflicts with
the facts as afterwards made known to us ; and no
doubt this led to such official speeches as were made of
our being so near victory at the Dardanelles — speeches
which caused the further great sacrifice of life which took
place after General Sir Charles Munro, the present
Commander-in-Chief in India, had definitely and
without any equivocation officially reported that the
Evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula should immediately
take place.

Field Marshal Lord Nicholson asked Captain Hall,
R.N., how far the Gallipoli Peninsula was under
German control ; and his answer was that it was known
that the defences had been inspected by a German and
that many Germans were arriving there, whereas it is a
matter of fact stated by General Liman von Sanders
and confirmed from other sources that the Germans
were in complete control ; and it took the British Admiral
many weeks after the Armistice, helped by the Turks, to
clear a way through the mines for his Flagship to take
him to Constantinople. At question 4930 Captain Hall
stated his spies made him convinced that he could have
pushed through with only the loss of one or more ships
and got to Constantinople on March i8th.

85

MEMORIES

An Episode of the War.

A friend asking me yesterday (this was written in
19 17) about the replacement of Tonnage destroyed by
the German Submarines, and telHng me how quite
ineffectual had been the course pursued up to the present
when really we are in measurable distance of starvation
or else an ignoble peace, I ventured to send him the
enclosed account {written at the time) of how 612 Vessels
were hustled ! As in all other War matters, it is Person-
ality that is required, even more than Brains !

Statement of new Shipbuilding Inaugurated by Lord

Fisher.

Note.— T]\Q following Memoranda are inserted as
vital to the explanation of Lord Fisher's reluctance to
resign on the Dardanelles question. It will be seen that
Mr. Churchill had given him sole charge of the creation
of this armada of new ships, intended for great projects
in the Baltic and North Sea,

Tuesday, November yd, 19 14.

(^o/^._Lord Fisher had joined the Admiralty as
First Sea Lord four davs before this meeting.)

The First Sea Lord (Lord Fisher) presided at a Con-
ference this day at the Admiralty.

Present :

Second Sea Lord.

Third Sea Lord.

Additional Civil Lord.

Parliamentary and Financial Secretary.

Secretary.

86

THE DARDANELLES

Naval Secretary to First Lord.
Engineer-in-Chief.

Assistant Director of Torpedoes and another repre-
sentative of the Director of Naval Ordnance.
Commodore (S) and Assistant.
Naval Assistant to First Sea Lord.
Director of Naval Construction and an Assistant.
Superintendent of Contract Work.
Superintending Electrical Engineer.
Director of Dockyard Work.
Director of Naval Contracts and an Assistant.

Lord Fisher explained to those present that this Con-
ference had been summoned with the approval of Mr.
Churchill, primarily with the object of expediting the
delivery of 20 submarines which were to be at once
commenced,

but in the second place a big further building programme
for a special purpose had been decided on.

The question of placing orders for submarines had been
under consideration for some time past. The First Lord,
however, had assented to the cancellation of all existing
papers on this subject, and a fresh start zvas to be made
immediately on the lines of a special war routine. All red-
tape methods — very proper in time of peace — were now
to be abandoned, and everything must be entirely sub-
ordinated to rapidity of construction. It was desired to
impress upon all present the necessity of avoiding " paper"
work, and of proceeding in the manner indicated in the
secret memorandum which would be circulated next
day in regard to the matter. Arrangements would be
made in due course to obtain additional vessels of other
types in a similar manner.

Note. — After this, a meeting of all the shipbuilding
firms of the United Kingdom took place at the Admiralty
under the presidency of Lord Fisher, and the

87

MEMORIES

programme mentioned above in italics was parcelled out
there and then.

Building Programme.

Meeting on November yd^ 19 14, four days after Lord
Fisher became First Sea Lord.

5 Battle Cruisers of 33 knots speed of light draught.

2 Light Cruisers.

5 Flotilla Leaders.
56 Destroyers.
64 Submarines.
37 Monitors.

24 River Light Gunboats.
19 Whaling Steamers.
24 Submarine Destroyers.
50 Seagoing Patrol Boats.
200 Motor Barges, oil engines.
90 Smaller Barges.
36 Sloops.

612 Total.

Memorandum by Lord Fisher, dated November 3RD,
1 9 14, on laying down further numbers of

Submarines.

There is no doubt that at this moment the supply of
additional submarine boats in the shortest time possible
is a matter of urgent national importance. They will not
be obtained unless the whole engineering and ship-
building resources of the country are enlisted in the
effort, and the whole of the peace paraphernalia of red-
tape routine and consequent delay are brushed on one
side. I have carefully studied the submarine question

88

THE DARDANELLES

during my retirement and have had many opportunities
of keeping in touch with the present position and future
possibilities, and am convinced that 20 submarines can
be commenced at once, and that the first batch of these
should be delivered in nine months, and the remainder
at short intervals, completing the lot in 11 or 12 months.

j<[0TE. — A dozen more were actually delivered in five
months, and made the voyage alone from America to the
Dardanelles.

To do this, however, cheapness must be entirely sub-
ordinated to rapidity of construction, and the technical
departments must have a free hand to take whatever
steps are necessary to secure this end without any paper
work whatever. Apparently this matter has been under
consideration at the Admiralty already for a considerable
time, but

nothing has yet been ordered,

and the First Lord has concurred that a fresh start
be made independently of former papers,

and the matter placed under my sole supervision, without
any other officers or departments intervening between me
and the professional officers.

I will give instructions as to the work, and direct that

if any difficulties are met with, they be brought to me
instantly to be overcome.

The professional officers' reports as to acceptances of
tenders or allocation of work must be immediately
carried out by the branches.

Only in this way can we get the boats we require. To
ensure the completion of the 20 boats, steps to be
immediately taken to order the parts for the engines for
25 boats. We know from experience that it is in the
machinery parts that defects and failures occur in manu-

89

MEMORIES

facture of castings, forgings, etc., causing great delay.
The parts for the extra five sets of engines will be available
for these replacements, and eventually the five extra sets
can be fitted in five further hulls. I propose to review
the progress being made once a fortnight in the hope
that it may be feasible to order still further submarines
beyond these 20 now to be commenced at once.

The training of sufficient officers and men for manning
these extra boats must obviously be proceeded with forth-
with, and those responsible must see to it that the officers
and crews are ready.

Fisher.
November 2^d, 19 14.

NOTE by Lord Fisher. — I gave personal orders on this
day to the Director of Mobilization to enter officers,
men, and boys to the utmost limit regardless of present
or supposed prospective wants, so when he left the
Admiralty last week to be Captain of the Renowii he
wrote me we wanted for nothing in the way of
personnel !

Fisher.

August i$th, 1916.

90

CHAPTER VI

ABDUL HAMID AND THE POPE

Be to my virtues very kind,
Be to my faults a little blind.

Two great Personalities came across my path when
I commanded the Mediterranean Fleet for three years
—the Sultan Abdul Hamid and Pope Leo XIII. They
each greatly admired the astuteness of the other.
Wily as Abdul was, the Pope was the subtler of the two.
I did not have the interviews with the Pope which I
might have had. There was no real occasion for it,
as was the case with Abdul Hamid ; and also, though by
the accident of birth I was of the Church of England
(nearly everybody's religion is the accident of his birth),
yet by taste and conviction I was a Covenanter, and
therefore dead against the Pope. I would have loved
to participate in the fight against Claverhouse at the
battle of Drumclog.

I happen to be looking at the battlefield of Drumclog
now, and I hope to be buried in Drumclog Church —
that is, if I die here ; or in the nearest Church to my
death bed. I am particular to say this, as it avoids so
much trouble ; and I don't have any more feeling for a

91

MEMORIES

cast-off body than for a cast-off suit of clothes. The
body, after he's left it at death, is not the man himself,
any more than his cast-off clothes. The only thing I
ask for is a white marble tablet made by Mr. Bridgman of
Lichfield (if he's still alive), with the inscription on it
to be found in Croxall Church as written of herself by
my sainted Godmother, of whom Byron wrote so beauti-
fully : " She walks in beauty like the night." She
deserved his poem.

That was a big digression ; but being dictated, as it
is, this is a conversation book and not a classic. Classics
are dry. Conversation, taking no account of grammar
or sequence, is more interesting. However, that's a
matter of opinion. To talk is easy, but to write is
terrific. Even Job thought so, that patient man.

To resume Abdul Hamid and the Pope.

Neither rats nor Jews can exist at Malta. The Maltese
are too much for either. A Maltese can't get a living
in the Levant. The Levantine is too much for the
Maltese. No Levantine has ever been seen in Armenia.
His late Majesty, Abdul Hamid, was an Armenian. He
massacred more Armenians than had ever been massacred
before. I've no doubt that can be explained. It is
supposed that the Armenian coachman of the previous
Sultan was his father. He certainly was not a bit like
his presumed father, the Sultan. When I dined several
times with the Sultan, his father's picture hung behind
him and he used to ask people if they traced the Hkeness
— there wasn't even a resemblance.

The Sultan paid me a very special honour in sending

92

ABDUL HAMID AND THE POPE

his most distinguished Admiral with his Staff down to
the British Fleet lying at Lemnos, to escort me up to
Constantinople. This Admiral was known to me ;
and it afforded me an opportunity, in the passage up the
Dardanelles, of making a thorough inspection of the
Forts and all the particulars connected with the defence
of the Dardanelles. Nothing was kept back from me ;
and incidentally it was through this inspection I became
on such terms with the Pashas that a most amicable
arrangement was reached between us as to our ever
having to work in common. A very striking incident
occurred illustrating Kiamil Pasha's remark to me of how
every Turk in the Turkish Empire trusted the English
when they trusted no one else. Kiamil's argument was
that such trust was only natural after the Crimean War,
and after the war with Russia^ — when Russia was at the
gates of Constantinople, and the British Fleet, coming
up under Admiral Hornby in a blinding snowstorm,
encountering great risks and not knowing but what
the Forts, bribed by Russia, might open fire — that
British Fleet, by its opportune arrival, hardly a minute
too soon, effectually banged, barred and bolted the
gates of Constantinople against the Russians and pro-
duced peace. And Kiamil's emphasis was that, not-
withstanding all these wonderful things that England
had done for Turkey, England never asked for the very
smallest favour or concession in return, whereas other
nations were all of them notoriously always grabbing ;
and I told Kiamil Pasha that I felt very proud indeed,
as a British Admiral, that England had this noble

93

MEMORIES

character and deserved it. The incident I referred to
was this : Upon an observation being made to the
Turkish Commander-in-Chief in the Dardanelles as to
whether some written document wouldn't be satisfactory
to him, he replied he wanted no such document — if a
British Midshipman brought him a message, the word of
a British Midshipman was enough for him.

The views I formed at that period of the impregna-
bility of the Dardanelles stood me in good stead when
the Dogger Bank incident became known on Trafalgar Day,
1904 — the very day I assumed the position of First Sea
Lord of the Admiralty. We were within an ace of war
with Russia ; the Prime Minister's speech at South-
ampton, if consulted, will show that to be the case ;
and I then drew up a secret memorandum with respect
to the Dardanelles, which I alluded to at the War Council
when the attack on the Dardanelles was being discussed,
also in my official memorandum to Lord Cromer, the
Chairman of the Dardanelles Commission, and in my
evidence before the Commission.

Personally I had a great regard for Abdul Hamid.
Our Ambassadors had not. One who knew of these
matters considered Abdul Hamid the greatest diplomat
in Europe. I have mentioned elsewhere how greatly
he resented Lord Salisbury throwing over the traditional
English Alliance with Turkey and Lord Salisbury
saying in a memorable speech that in making that alliance
in past years we had backed the wrong horse. For
were not (was Abdul Hamid's argument) England and
Turkey the two greatest Mahomedan nations on Earth —

94

ABDUL HAMID AND THE POPE

England being somewhat the greater ? Kiamil — the
Grand Old Man of Turkey — told me the same. He had
been many times Grand Vizier, and I went especially
with the Mediterranean Fleet to Smyrna to do him honour.
He was the Vali there. His nickname in Turkey was
** The Englishman " ; he was so devoted to us. He
lamented to me that England had had only one diplo-
matist of ability at Constantinople since the days of Sir
Stratford Canning, whom he knew. His exception was
a Sir William White, who had been a Consul somewhere
in the Balkan States. No other English Ambassador
had ever been able to cope with the Germans. I remon-
strated with Kiamil by saying that Ambassadors now
were only telegraph instruments — they only conveyed
messages, and quite probably from some quite young
man at the Foreign Office who had charge of that
Department. I venture to remark here in passing what
I have very frequently urged to those in authority^ —
that the United States system is infinitely better than
ours. Their diplomatic representatives are all fresh
from home, with each change of President ; ours live
all their lives abroad and practically cease to be English-
men, and very often, like Solomon, marry foreign wives.
Another thing I've urged on Authority is that some
Great Personage should annually make a tour of in-
spection of all the Diplomatic and Consular Agents
(exactly as the big Banks have a travelling Inspector),
who would ask how much he had increased the trade
of the great British Commonwealth of Nations ; and
if it weren't more than five per cent, would give him the

95

MEMORIES

sack. This Great Travelling Personage must be a man
independent in means and station of any Government
connexion and undertake the duty as Sir Edward (now
Lord) Grey goes to Washington. The German Am-
bassador at Constantinople used to go round selling
beetroot sugar by the pound ! The English Ambassador
said to me at a Garden Party he gave by those lovely
sweet waters of the Bosphorus : " You see that
fellow there with a white hat on ? He's the President
of the British Chamber of Commerce ; he's an awful
nuisance. He's always bothering me about some ped-
dling commercial business ! "

Abdul Hamid was exceeding kind to me and invited
me to Constantinople, and he descanted (the Boer War
then being on) what a risk there was of a big coalition
against England. Curiously enough, his colleague the
Pope had the same feeling. It is very deplorable, not
only in the late War but also in the Boer War especially,
how utterly our spies and our Intelligence Departments
failed us. I was so impressed with what the Sultan told
me that I set to work on my own account ; and through
the patriotism of several magnificent Englishmen who
occupied high commercial positions on the shores of the
Mediterranean, I got a central forwarding station for
information fixed up privately in Switzerland ; and it
so happened, through a most Providential state of
circumstances, that I was thus able to obtain all the cypher
messages passing from the various Foreign Embassies,
Consulates and Legations through a certain central
focus, and I also obtained a key to their respective cyphers.

96

{Fhoto Fiess For trait Bureau

Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, G.C.B., O.M., etc., 1917-

ABDUL HAMID AND THE POPE

The Chief man who did it for me was not in Government
employ ; and I'm glad to think that he is now in a great
position — though not rewarded as he should have been.
No one is. But as to any information from an official
source reaching me, who was so vastly interested in the
matter, in the event of war where the Fleet should
strike first — all our Diplomats and Consuls and Intelli-
gence Departments might have been dead and buried.
And how striking the case in the late War— the Prime
Minister not knowing at the Guildhall Banquet on
November 9th, 19 18, that the most humiliating armistice
ever known would be accepted by the Germans within
thirty-six hours, and one of our principal Cabinet
Ministers saying the Sunday before that the Allies were
at their last gasp. And read now Ludendorff, Tirpitz,
Falkenhayn, Liman von Sanders, and others — ^they
knew exactly what the Allies' condition was and what
their own was. And if the Dardanelles evidence is ever
published, it will be found absolutely ludicrous how the
official spokesmen gravely give evidence that the Turks
had come to their last round of ammunition and that
the roofs of the houses in Constantinople were crowded
with people looking for the advent of the approaching
British Fleet. Why ! it took our Admiral, on the con-
clusion of the Armistice, with the help of the Turks
and all his own Fleet, several weeks to clear a passage
through the mines, on which Marshal Liman von
Sanders so accurately based his reliance against any
likelihood of the Dardanelles being forced.

97 H

CHAPTER VII

A JEU d'eSPRIT

BOWS AND ARROWS— SNAILS AND TORTOISES-
FACILE DUPES AND SERVILE COPYISTS

" Not the wise find salvation." — St. Paul.

One of the charms of the Christian religion is that the
Foolish confound the Wise. The Atheists are all brainy
men. Myself, I hate a brainy man. All the brainy
men said it was impossible to have aeroplanes. No
brainy man ever sees that speed is armour. Directly the
brainy men got a chance they clapped masses of armour
on the " Hush-Hush " ships. They couldn't under-
stand speed being armour, and said to themselves :
" Didn't she draw so Httle water she could stand having
weight put on her ? Shove on armour ! " and so bang
went the speed, and the " Hush-Hush " ships, whose
fabulous beauty was their forty shoregoing miles an
hour, were slowed down by these brainy men. Don't
jockeys have to carry weights ? Isn't it called handi-
capping ? Isn't it the object to beat the favourite— the
real winner ? There really is comfort in the 27th verse
of the I St chapter of i Corinthians, where the Foolish

are wiser than the Wise.

98

A JEU D'ESPRIT

What ! — A battle cruiser called the " Furious " going
40 shore-going miles an hour with 18-inch guns reaching
26 miles ! " Take the damn guns out and make it
into an aeroplane ship ! " (And I'm not sure they could
ever get the aeroplanes to land on her, owing to the
heat of the funnels causing what they call " Air pockets "
above the stern of the ship.)

Yes ! and we still have ancient Admirals who believe
in bows and arrows. There's a good deal to be said for
bows and arrows. Our ancestors insisted on all church-
yards being planted with yew trees to make bows. There
you are ! It's a home product ! Not like those damn
fools who get their oil from abroad ! And I have now
the Memorandum with me delivered to me when I was
Controller of the Navy by a member of the Board of
Admiralty desiring to build 16 sailing ships ! Again,
didn't the Board of Admiralty issue a solemn Board
Minute that wood floated and iron sank ? So what a
damnable thing to build iron ships ! Wasn't there
another solemn Board Minute that steam was damnable
and fatal to the supremacy of the British Navy ? Haven't
we had Admirals writing very brainy articles in magazines
to prove that there was nothing like a tortoise ? You
could stand on the tortoise's back ; you weren't rushed
by the tortoise, whereas these " Hush-Hush " ships,
they were flimsy, and speed was worshipped as a god.
One mighty man of valour (only " he was a leper " as
regards sea fighting) told me at his luncheon table that
when one of these " Hush-Hush " ships encountered at
her full strength of nearly a hundred thousand horse power

99 H 2

MEMORIES

a gale of wind in a mountainous sea she was actually
strained ! It's all really too lovely ; but of course the
humour of it can't be properly appreciated by the
ordinary shore-going person. Yes, the brainy men,
as I said before, crabbed the " Hush-Hush " ships ;
they couldn't understand that speed was armour when
associated with big guns because the speed enabled
you to put your ship at such a distance that she couldn't
be hit by the enemy, so it was the equivalent of im-
penetrable armour although you had none of it, and you
hit the enemy every round for the simple reason that
your guns reached him when his could not reach you.
Q.E.D. as Euclid says. What these splendid armour
bearers say is " Give me a strong ship which no silly
ass of a Captain can hurt." Of course this implies that
if it's Buggins's turn to be Captain of a ship he gets it ;
it's his turn, even if he is a silly ass. The phase of
mind they have is this : " None of your highly strung
racehorses for me, give me a good old cart-horse ! "
So we build huge costly warships which will last a
hundred years, but become obsolete in five.

It all really is very funny — if it wasn't disastrous and
ruinous ! And they are such a motley crew, these
discontented ones who come together in John
Bright's cave of AduUam ; and the Poor Dear Pubhc
read an interview in a newspaper with some Com-
mander Knowall ; and then a magazine article by
Admiral Retrograde ; and some old *' cup of tea "
writes to The Times (wonderful paper The Times
— ' Equal Opportunity for All ") and there you are 1

100

A JEU D'ESPRIT

Lord Fisher is a damned fool ; and if he isn't a damned
fool he's a maniac. Oh ! very well then, if he isn't a
maniac, then he's a traitor. Wasn't Sir Julian Corbett
very seriously asked if he (Sir John Fisher) hadn't sold
his country to Germany ? Sir Julian thought the report
was exaggerated, and that satisfied the Searcher after
Truth. But I ask my listeners, however should we get
on without these people ? How dull life would be with-
out their dialectical subtleties and " reasoned statements "
(I think they call them) and " considered judgments " !
My splendid dear old friend, who could hardly write
his name, the Chief Engineer of the first ironclad, the
" Warrior," told me, when I was Gunnery Lieutenant of
her in 1861, that he had arranged for his monument
at death being of " malleable " iron. No cast iron for
him, he said ! It played you such pranks. So it is
with these carbonised cranks who wield the pen, actuated
by the wrong kind of grey matter of their brain, and,
their tongues acidulated with lies, sway listening Senates
and control our wars. It requires a Mr. Disraeli to deal
with these victims of their own verbosity, who are the
facile dupes of their vacuous imaginations and the
servile copyists of the Billingsgatean line of argument !

10 1

CHAPTER VIII

NAVAL WAR STAFF AND ADMIRALTY CLERKS

" A wise old owl lived in an oak ;
The more he heard, the less he spoke ;
The less he spoke, the more he heard ;
Why can't we be like that wise old bird ? "

Lord Haldane with his " art of clear thinking "
elaborated the Imperial War Staff to its present mag-
nificent dimensions. If any man wants a thing adver-
tised, let him take it over there to the Secret Depart-
ment. Only Sir Arthur Wilson and myself, when I
was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, knew the Naval
plan of war. He was the man, so head-and-shoulders
above all his fellows, who in his time was our undoubted,
indeed our incomparable. Sea Leader. No one touched
him ; and I am not sure that even now, though getting
on for Dandolo's age, he would not still achieve old
Dandolo's great deeds. What splendid lines they are
from Byron :

" Oh for one hour of blind old Dandolo,
Th' Octogenarian Chief, Byzantium's Conquering Foe ! "

I loved Sir Arthur Wilson's reported reply to the maniacs
who think the Navy is the same as the Army. If it is
not true it is hen trovalo. He said the Naval War Staff

102

NAVAL WAR STAFF

at the Admiralty consisted of himself — assisted by every
soul inside the Admiralty, and he added, " including
the charwomen " — they emptied the waste-paper baskets
full of the plans of the amateur strategists — Cabinet and
otherwise.

No such rubbish has ever been talked as about the
Navy War Staff and also, in connexion therewith, the
Admiralty clerks who are supposed to have wrecked its
first inception in the period long ago when my great
friend the late Admiral W. H. Hall was introduced into
the Admiralty to form a Department of Naval Intelli-
gence. I give my experience. I have been fifteen or
more years in the Admiralty — Director of Ordnance and
Torpedoes, Controller of the Navy, Second Sea Lord
and First Sea Lord. Inside the Admiralty, for conducting
administrative work, the Civil Service clerk is incom-
parably superior to the Naval Officer. The Naval
Officer makes a very bad clerk. He hasn't been brought
up to it. He can't write a letter, and, as you can see
from my dictation, he is both verbose and diffuse. The
Clerk is terse and incisive.

I'll go to instances. My Secretary, W. F. Nicholson,
C.B., was really just as capable of being First Sea Lord
as I was, when associated with my Naval Assistant. I
often used to say that the First Sea Lord was in com-
mission, and that I was the facile dupe of these two ;
and I was blessed with a succession of Naval Assistants
who knew so exactly their limitations as regards Admiralty
work as allowed the Admiralty machine to be, as was
officially stated, the best, most efficient, and most effective

103

MEMORIES

of all the Government Departments of the State. I
have a note of this, made by the highest authority in the
Civil Service. I would like here to name my Naval
Assistants, because they were out and away without
precedent the most able men in the Navy : Admirals
Sir Reginald Bacon, Sir Charles Madden, Sir Henry
Oliver, Sir Horace Hood, Sir Charles de Bartolome,
Captain Richmond and Captain Crease — I'll back that
set of names against the world.

I was the originator of the Naval War College at
Portsmouth — that's quite a different thing from an
Imperial General Staff at the War Office. The vulgar
error of Lord Haldane and others, who are always
talking about ** Clear thinking " and such-like twaddle,
is that they do not realise that the Army is so absolutely
different from the Navy. Every condition in them both
is different. The Navy is always at war, because
it is always fighting winds and waves and fog. The
Navy is ready for an absolute instant blow ; it has
nothing to do with strategic railways, lines of com-
munication, or bridging rivers, or crossing mountains,
or the time of the year, when the Balkans may be
snowed under, and mountain passes may be impassable.
No ! the ocean is limitless and unobstructed ; and the
fleet, each ship manned, gunned, provisioned and
fuelled, ready to fight within five minutes. The Army
not only has to mobilize, but — thank God ! this being
an island — it has to be carried somewhere by the Navy,
no matter where it acts. I observe here that when Lord
Kitchener went to Australia to inaugurate the scheme of

104

NAVAL WAR STAFF

Defence, he forgot Australia was an island. What
Australia wants to make it impregnable is not Conscrip-
tion— it's Submarines. However, I fancy Kitchener
was sent there to get him out of the way. They wanted
me to go to Australia, but I didn't.^ Jellicoe has gone
there. But then, Jellicoe hasn't always sufficient fore-
sight ; exempli gratia^ he was persuaded to take the
deplorable step of giving up command of the Grand
Fleet and going as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty.
Never was anything so regrettable. I told the War
Council that I am very glad Nelson never went to the
Admiralty, and that Nelson would have made an awful
hash of it. Nelson was a fighter, not an administrator
and a snake charmer — that's what a First Sea Lord
has to be.

Gross von Schwartzhoff told me on the sands of
Scheveningen : —

*' Your Navy can strike in thirteen hours ;
Our Army can't under thirteen days."

Frau von Pohl tells us the Germans did expect us so to
strike, but Nelson was in heaven (Dear Reader, look
again at what Frau von Pohl said, you'll find it in
Chapter IIL). On one occasion I got into a most
unpleasant atmosphere. I arrived at a country house late
at night, and at breakfast in the morning, I not knowing
who the guests were, a Cabinet Minister enunciated the
proposition that sea and land war were both in principle
and practice alike. At once getting up from the breakfast

1 At my entreaty a far better man went. Admiral Sir Reginald
Henderson, G.C.B. He is a splendid seaman and he devised a splendid
scheme.

105

MEMORIES

table, in the heat of the moment, and not knowing that
distinguished miUtary officers were there, I said, " Any
silly ass could be a General." I graphically illus-
trated my meaning. I gave the contrast between a sea
and a land battle. The General is somewhere behind the
fighting line, or he ought to be. The Admiral has got
to be in the fighting line, or he ought to be. The Admiral
is indeed like the young Subaltern, he is often the first
*' Over the top." The General, at a telescopic distance
from the battle scene and surrounded by his Kitcheners,
and his Ludendorffs, and his Gross von Schwartzhoffs,
has plenty of time for the " Clear thinking " a /a Lord
Haldane ; and then, acting on the advice of those sur-
rounding him, he takes his measures. So far as I can
make out from the Ludendorff extracts in The Times^
Hindenburg, the Generalissimo, was clearly not in it.
He was " the silly ass " ! Ludendorft' did it all as
Chief of the Staff.

Now what's the corresponding case at sea ? The
smoke of the enemy, not even the tops of his funnels,
can be seen on the horizon. (I proved this myself with
the great Mediterranean fleet divided into two portions.)
Within twenty minutes the action is decided ! Realise
this — it takes some minutes for the Admiral to get his
breeches on, to get on deck and take in the situation ;
and it takes a good many more minutes to deploy the
Fleet from its Cruising Disposition into its Fighting
Disposition. In the Cruising Disposition his guns are
masked, one ship interfering with the fire of another.
The Fleet for Battle has to be so disposed that all the

io6

NAVAL WAR STAFF

guns, or as many as possible, can concentrate on one or
a portion of the enemy's fleet. Each fleet pushes on at
its utmost speed to meet the other, hoping to catch the
other undeployed. Every telescope in the fleet (and
there are myriads) is looking at the Admiral as he goes to
the topmost and best vantage spot on board his flag ship
to see the enemy, and sees him alone outlined against
the sky — neither time nor room for a staff around him,
and if there were they'd say, " It's not the Admiral who is
doing it," and be demoralized accordingly — fatal to
victory. In the fleet the Admiral's got to be like Nelson
— " the personal touch " so that " any silly ass can't
be an Admiral " ; and the people of the Fleet watch him
with unutterable suspense to see what signal goes up
to alter the formation of the fleet — a formation on which
depends Victory or Defeat. So it was that Togo won
that second Trafalgar ; he did what is technically known
as '* crossing the T," which means he got the guns of
his fleet all to bear, all free to fire, while those of the enemy
were masked by his own ships. One by one Rozhdest-
vensky's ships went to the bottom, under the concerted
action of concentrated fire. What does it ? Speed.
And what actuates it ? One mind, and one mind only.
Goschen was right (when First Lord of the Admiralty) ;
he quoted that old Athenian Admiral who, when asked
what governed a sea battle, replied, " Providence," and
then with emphasis he added : " and a good Admiral.''
Which reminds me too of Cromwell — a pious man, we
all know ; when asked a somewhat similar question as
to what ruled the world, he replied " The Fear of the

107

MEMORIES

Lord," and he added with an emphasis equal to that of
the Athenian Admiral — ** And a broomstick." No one
votes more for the Sermon on the Mount than I do ;
but I say to a blithering fool " Begone ! "

A Naval War Staff at the Admiralty is a very excellent
organisation for cutting out and arranging foreign news-
paper clippings in such an intelligent disposition as will
enable the First Sea Lord to take in at a glance who is
likely amongst the foreigners to be the biggest fool or
the greatest poltroon, who will be opposed to his own
trusted and personally selected Nelson who commands
the British Fleet. The First Sea Lord and the Chief
Admiral afloat have got to be Siamese twins. And
when the war comes, the Naval War Staff at the
Admiralty, listening every moment to the enemy's wireless
messages (if he dare use it), enables the First Sea Lord
to let his twin at sea know exactly what is going on. He
takes in the wireless, and not necessarily the Admiral
afloat, on account of the far greater power of reception
in a land installation as compared with that on a ship.
When you see that spider's web of lines of wire on the
top of the Admiralty, then thank God this is more or less
a free country, as it got put up by a cloud of bluejackets
before a rat was smelt ! An intercepted German Naval
letter at the time gave me personally great delight, for
it truly divined that wireless was the weapon of the
strong Navy. For the development of the wireless has
been such that now you can get the direction of one who
speaks and go for him ; so the German daren't open
his mouth. But if he does, of course the message is in

io8

NAVAL WAR STAFF

cypher ; and it's the elucidation of that cypher which is
one of the crowning glories of the Admiralty work in the
late war. In my time they never failed once in that
elucidation. Yes, wireless is the weapon of the strong.
So also is the Submarine — that is if they are sufficiently
developed and diversified and properly appHed, but you
must have quantities and multiplicity of species.

What you want to do is to fight the enemy's fleet,
make him come out from under the shelter of his forts,
where his ships are hiding like rabbits in a hole — put in the
ferrets and out come the rabbits, or they kill 'em where
they are. Nelson blockading Toulon, as he told the
Lord Mayor of London in one of his most characteristic
letters, didn't want to keep the French fleet in ; he
wanted them to come out and fight. But he kept close
in for fear they should evade him in darkness or in fog.

But the mischief of a Naval War Staff is peculiar to
the Navy. I understand it is quite different in the
Army — I don't know. The mischief to the Navy is that
the very ablest of our Officers, both young and old, get
attracted by the brainy work and by the shore-going
appointment. I asked a splendid specimen once what-
ever made him go in for being a Marine Officer. He
said he wanted to be with his wife ! Well, it's natural.
I know a case of a Sea Officer whose long absence caused
his children not to recognise him when he came home
from China and, indeed, they were frightened of him.
The land is a shocking bad training ground for the sea.
I once heard one bluejacket say to another the reason he
believed in the Bible was that in heaven there is " no more

109

MEMORIES

sea." I didn't realise it at the time, but I looked up
*' Revelations " and found it was so. A shallower spirit
observed : " Britannia rules the waves, but the mistake
was she didn't rule them straight." A very distinguished
soldier who came to see me when I was Port Admiral at
Portsmouth said that the Army, as compared with the
Navy, was at a great disadvantage. In the Army, or
even in the country, he said, anyone who had handled a
rifle laid down the law as if he were a General ; but the
Navy, he said, was " A huge mystery hedged in by sea-
sickness."

So far as the Navy is concerned, the tendency of these
*' Thinking Establishments " on shore is to convert
splendid Sea Officers into very indifferent Clerks. The
Admiralty is filled with Sea Officers now who ought to
be afloat ; and the splendid civilian element — incom-
parable in its talent and in its efliiciency — is swamped.
Before the war, when I was First Sea Lord, when I left
the Admiralty at 8 p.m., prior to some approaching
Grand Manoeuvres, I left it to my friend Flint, one of
the Higher Division Clerks, to mobilize the fleet by a
wireless message from the roof of the Admiralty ; and
the deciding circumstances having arisen, he did it off
his own bat at 2 a.m. A weaker vessel, knowing of the
telephone at my bedside, might have rung me up ; but
Flint didn't. Good old Flint ! Always one of the
Clerks was on watch, all the year round, night and day ;
and that obtained in the Admiralty long before any other
Department adopted it.

Now for such work as I have described you don't want

no

NAVAL WAR STAFF

sea art ; you want the Craven scholar, and I had him.
A Sea Officer can never be an efficient clerk —
his life unfits him. He can't be an orator ; he's always
had to hold his tongue. He can't argue ; he's never
been allowed. Only a few great spirits like Nelson are
gifted with the splendid idiosyncrasy of insubordination ;
but it's given to a few great souls. I assure you that long
study has convinced me that Nelson was nothing if not
insubordinate. This is hardly the place to describe his
magnificent lapses from discipline, which ever led to
Victory. It's only due on my part, who have had more
experience than anyone living of the civilian clerks at
the Admiralty, to vouch for the fact that Sir Evan
Macgregor, the ablest Secretary of the Admiralty since
Samuel Pepys, Sir Graham Greene, Sir Oswyn Murray,
Sir Charles Walker and my friends V. W. Baddeley, C.B.,
and J. W. S. Anderson, C.B., W. G. Perrin, J. F.
Phillips, and many others have done work which has
never been exceeded as regards its incomparable efficiency.
I can't recall a single lapse.

The outcome of this expanded Naval War Staff beyond
its real requirements, such as I have indicated, and which
were provided for while I was First Sea Lord, was that a
Chief of the Staff, in imitation of him at the War Office,
was planked into the Admiralty and indirectly supplanted
the First Sea Lord. I won't enlarge on this further.
It's many years before another war can possibly take
place, and it's now a waste of educated labour to discuss
it further. All I would ask is for anyone to take up the
last issue of the Navy List and see the endless pages of

III

MEMORIES

Naval Officers at the Admiralty or holding shore appoint-
ments. There has never been anything approaching
these numbers in all our Sea History ! It is deplorable !
The Naval War College, which I established at Ports-
mouth, is absolutely a different affair. There it can be
arranged that all the Officers go to sea daily and work as
if with the fleet, with flotillas of Destroyers that are
there available in quantities. These Destroyers would
represent all the items of the fleet ; and the formations
of war and the meetings of hostile fleets could be practised
and so constitute the Naval War College a real gem in
war efficiency.

112

Aged 14. Midshipman.
H.M.S. "Highflyer," China.

CHAPTER IX

RECAPITULATION OF DEEDS AND IDEAS

" Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears ! "

We have arranged that in this book you (to whom I
am dictating) are to insert a rechauffe of my fugitive
writings and certain extracts from the three bulky
volumes of my letters to Lord Esher, which he has so
very kindly sent me.

All, then, that I have to say in this chapter will be a
summing up of all that is in my opinion worth saying,
and you are going to be responsible for the rest. My
judgment is that the British Public will be sick of it all
long before you come to the end of your part. One can
have too much jam. Nor do you seem inclined to put in
all the ** bites." For instance, it was told King Edward,
who warned me of what was being said, that my moral
character was shocking. No woman will ever appear
against me at the Day of Judgment. One dear friend of
mine attributed all his life's disasters to kissing the wrong
girl. I never even did that. However, there is no credit
in my morality and early piety. For I ever had to work
from 12 years old for my daily bread, and work hard, so

. 113 I

MEMORIES

the Devil never had a " look in." I love Dr. Watts, he
is so practical.

" And Satan finds some mischief still.
For idle hands to do."

Bishop Jeremy Taylor, who wrote that Classic, " Holy
Living and Dying," who had a nagging wife who made him
flee from home and youthful lusts, said *' That no idle
rich healthy man could possibly go to Heaven." No
doubt it is difficult for such a one. You will remember
the Saviour told us that the Camel getting through the
eye of a needle is more likely. Usually, earthly judgments
on heavenly subjects are wrong. Observe Mary
Magdalene, and the most beautiful Collect for her
Saint's Day which was in our First Prayer Book of
1540. This was later expunged by the sacerdotal,
pharisaic, self-righteous mandarins of that period.
The judgments of this world are worse than the
judgments of God. When David was offered three
forms of punishment — Famine or the Sword or Pestilence
— he chose the pestilence, saying, " Let us now fall into
the hands of the Lord ; for his mercies are great ; and
let me not fall into the hand of man." At the moment
of making this note of which I am speaking I am looking
at two very beautiful old engravings I rescued from the
room here allotted to the Presbyterian Minister ! One
of them is the *' Woman Taken in Adulterv " and the
other is " Potiphar's Wife " ! My host tells me it was
a pure accident that these pictures came to be in the
Minister's room ; but such events happen to Saints.

114

RECAPITULATIONS

Wasn^t there " The Scarlet Letter "—that wonderful
book by Hawthorne ?

I observe in passing how wonderfully well these
Presbyterians do preach. Our hosts have a beautiful
Chapel in the house, and they have got a delightful
custom of selecting one from the Divines of Scotland to
spend the week-end here. Their sermons so exemplify
what I keep on impressing on you — that the printed word
is a lifeless corpse. Can you compare the man who
reads a sermon to the man who listens to one saturated
with holiness and enthusiasm speaking out of the abun-
dance of the heart ? No doubt there is tautology, but
there's conviction. Two qualities rule the world —
emotion and earnestness. I have said elsewhere, with
them you can move far more than mountains ; you can
move multitudes. It's the personality of the soul of
man that has this immortal influence. Printed and
written stuff is but an inanimate picture — a very fine
picture sometimes, no doubt, but you get no aroma out
of a picture. Fancy seeing the Queen of Sheba herself,
instead of only reading of her in Solomon's print ! And
those Almug trees — " And there came no such Almug
trees, nor were seen until this day."

To a friend I was once adoring St. Peter (I love his
impetuosity) — I am illustrating how earthly judgments
are so inferior to heavenly wisdom. St. John, who was
a very much younger man, out-ran Peter. Up comes
Peter, and dashes at once into the Sepulchre. Those
men in war who get there and then don't do anything —
Cui bono ? A fleet magnificent, five times bigger

115 I 2

MEMORIES

than the enemy, and takes no risks ! A man I heard of —
his wife, separated from him, died at Florence. He was
on the Stock Exchange. They telegraphed, " Shall
we cremate, embalm, or bury ? " " Do all three," he
replied, ** take no risks ! " Some of our great warriors
want the bird so arranged as to be able to put the salt
on its tail. But I was speaking of my praising St. Peter.
What did my friend retort (the judgment of this world,
mind you !) ? *' Peter, Sir ! he would be turned out of
every Club in London ! " So he would ! Thank God,
we have a God, so that when our turn comes we shall be
forgiven nmch because we loved much.

From this Christian homily I return to what I rather
vainly hope is my concluding interview.

Before beginning — one of my critics writes to The
Times saying I am not modest— I never said I was.
However, next day. Sir Alfred Yarrow mentions perhaps
the most momentous thing I ever did — that is the
introduction of the Destroyer ; and the day following
Sir Marcus Samuel writes that I am the God-father of
Oil — and Oil is going to be the fuel of the world. Sir
George Beilby is going to turn coal into Oil. He has
done it. Thank God ! we are going to have a smokeless
England in consequence, and no more fortified coaling
stations and peripatetic coal mines, or what coal mines
were. And then, I was going to give some more instances,
but that's enough " to point the moral and adorn the tale,'*

ii6

RECAPITULATIONS

" Seekest Thou Great Things for Thyself ? Seek
THEM NOT ! " (The Prophet Jeremiah.)

You have given me a list of subjects which you think
require elucidation in regard to my past years — a resume
especially of the incidents which claim peculiar notice
between 1902 and 1910 ; and you ask me to add thereto
such episodes from the past as will enlighten the reader
as to how it came about that those big events between
1902 and 19 10 were put in motion.

It's a big order, in a life of some sixty years on actual
service — with but three weeks only unemployed, from the
time of entry into the Navy to the time of Admiral of
the Fleet.

I begin by being heartfelt in my thankfulness to a benign
Providence for being capable yesterday, September 13th,
1919, of enjoying suet pudding and treacle with a pleasure
equal to that which I quite well remember, of having
suet pudding and treacle on July 4th, 1854, when I went
on board H.M.S. "Victory," loi guns, the flagship at
Trafalgar of Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson. Yes !
my thankfulness, I hope, is equal to but hardly as
wonderful as that of the almost toothless old woman who,
being commiserated with, replied : '* Yes, I only 'as
two left ; but thank God they meet I " So I say, to
express the same thankfulness with all my heart for the
years that remain to me, though I have all my teeth — or
nearly all — notwithstanding that I have not had even one
single *' thank you " for anything that I have done since
King Edward died. Nevertheless, I thank that same God

117

MEMORIES

as the old woman thanked, Who don't let a sparrow fall
without a purpose and without knowledge.

I have no doubt the slight has done me a lot of good !

I thought at the age of nineteen, when I was Acting
Captain of H.M.S. " Coromandel," that I never could
again be so great. Please look at my picture then. It's a
very excellent one — rather pulled down at the corners of
the mouth even then. (The child is father to the man.)
And though now nearly as old as Dandolo I don't feel
any greater than at 19. Dandolo after an escapade at
the Dardanelles similar to mine, became conqueror of
Byzantium at 80 years of age. And Justinian's two
Generals, Belisarius and Narses, were over 70. Dolts
don't realise that the brain improves while the body
decays — provided of course that the original brain is not
that of a congenital idiot, or of an effete poltroon who
never will run risks.

'* Risks and strife " are the bread of Life to a growing
brain.

I beg the reader of this dictation to believe that, what-
ever he may hear to the contrary (and he probably will),
though swaggering as I did just now at suet-puddening
at 79 as efficiently as at nineteen, yet I do daily realise
what that ancient monk wrote in the year 800, when he
studied the words of Job — that " Man that is born of a
woman hath but a short time " compared to eternity,
and death may be always near the door ; and no words
are more beautiful in connection therewith than when a
parting friend at the moment of departure makes us say :
'* Teach us who survive in this and other like daily

118

RECAPITULATIONS

spectacles of mortality to see how frail and uncertain our
own condition is."

First of all in this Recapitulation comes back to me a
prophecy I ventured at that age of 19 I have just men-
tioned— that the next great war that we should have at
sea would be a war of young men. And how beautifully
this is illustrated by the letter received only a few days
ago from that boy in Russia (see Chapter IV) where two
battleships were sent to the bottom and the British
sailors in command were only Lieutenants. And in
passing one cannot help paying a tribute to the Subal-
terns on shore. General Sir Henry Rawlinson said
lately : *' Those who really won the war were the young
Company Leaders and the Subalterns," and pathetic was
the usual Gazette notice of those killed :

** Second Lieutenants unless otherwise mentioned ^
There was little " otherwise ! " So has it been in the
Navy, at Zeebrugge and elsewhere.

There is, however, a very splendid exception — when
all hands, old and young, went to the bottom ; and that
is in the magnificent Merchant Navy of the British Nation.
Seven million tons sank under these men, and the record
of so many I've seen who were saved was : " Three times
torpedoed." And remember ! for them no Peerage or
Westminster Abbey. They didn't even get paid for the
clothes they lost, and their pay stopped the day the ship
was sunk. Except in the rare cases where the shipowner
was the soul of generosity, like my friend Mr. Petersen,
who paid his men six months or a year to do nothing after
such a catastrophe. But we go with Mr. Havelock

119

MEMORIES

Wilson : " We hope to change all that." For who is
going to deny, when we all stand up for them, that the
Merchant Navy shall be incorporated in the Navy of the
Nation and with all the rights and money and rank and
uniform and widows' pensions and pensions in old age ?
All this has to come ; and I am Mr. Havelock Wilson's
colleague in that matter, as he was mine in that wonderful
feeding and clothing of our thousands of British Merchant
sailor prisoners, who didn't, for some damned red tape
reason, come within the scope of the millions of money
in that enormous Prince of Wales's Fund, and the Red
Cross.

Somebody will have to be a martyr, perhaps it's me.
And I expect I am going to be burnt at the stake for
saying these things ; but in those immortal words of the
past *' I shall light the candle ! " Isn't it just too lovely
— when Bishop Latimer, as the flames shot up around
him at the stake in Oxford in a.d. 1555, cried to his
brother Bishop, equally burning :

*' Play the man, Master Ridley ! We shall this day
light such a candle by God's Grace in England as I
trust shall never be put out."

So may it be in our being burnt for the sake of the
great Merchant Navy that saved our country !

As regards the years 1902 to 19 10, the first conceptions
of these great changes stole upon me when I perceived
in that great Fleet in the Mediterranean how vague were

120

RECAPITULATIONS

the views as to fighting essentials. For instance, in one
of the lectures to the Mediterranean Fleet Officers I set
forth a case of so dealing with a hostile fleet that we should
ourselves first of all deliberately and in cold blood
sacrifice several of our fastest cruisers. Why ?

To delay the flying enemy by the wounding of his
hindermost ships. Possibly a ruthless German Admiral
might leave a " Bliicher " to her fate ; but not so our then
probable and chivalrous foe ! The most shocking des-
cription I have ever read of the horrors of war was that
detailed by one of the crew of the " Blucher " as he
describes Beatty's salvoes gradually approaching the
" Blucher" and falling near in the water, and then the
hell when these salvoes arrived, immediately extinguishing
the electric light installation, till all below between decks
was pitchy darkness only lighted up by the bursting shells
as they penetrated and massacred the crew literally by
hundreds, who, huddled up together in the " Blucher 's "
last moments, were hoping behind the thickest armour
to escape destruction.

I saw that the plan of sacrificing vessels in the pursuit
of an enemy seemed a new feature to my hearers ; and
yet it was as old as the hills. And another '' eye-opener "
I had — in the inability to realise so obvious a fact as,
alas ! was somewhat the case in the North Sea recently —
that you need not be afraid of a mine field ; for where
the enemy goes you can go, if you keep in his wake,
that is. In close regard with this matter, I am an
apostle of '* End-on Fire," for to my mind broadside fire
is peculiarly stupid. To be obliged to delay your pursuit

121

MEMORIES

by turning even one atom from your straight course on
to a flying enemy is to me being the acme of an ass. And,
strange to say, in connection with this I, only yesterday,
September 13th, 1919, got a letter from Admiral Weymouth
— a most excellent letter, delightfully elaborating with
exceptional acuteness this very idea, which came along
so long ago as 1900, when the first thought of the
" Dreadnought " came into my brain, when I was
discussing with my excellent friend, Mr. Gard, Chief
Constructor of Malta Dockyard, the vision of the
" Dreadnought."

I greatly enjoyed years ago overhearing a lady describe
to another lady, when crossing over to Ryde, a passing
Ryde passenger steamer (just built and differing very
greatly from the one we were on board of) as a Battleship.
And she wasn't far out as to what a battleship should be.
The enterprise of the Ryde Steam Packet Company had
just produced that vessel, which went just as fast astern
as she did ahead. In fact, she had no stern. There was
a bow at each end and a rudder at each end and screws
at each end ; so they never had any bother to turn round.
Now when you go to Boulogne or Folkestone, I don't
know how much time you don't waste fooling around to
go in stern first, so as to be able to come out the right way ;
and having escaped sea-sickness so far, I myself have
found that the last straw. Let us hope every ship
now built after this Chapter will be a *' Double-
Ender." But in this world you are a lunatic if you go
too fast.

Take now the submarines. They began by diving

122

RECAPITULATIONS

head first to get below water ; and in the beginning some
stuck their noses in the mud and never came up again,
and in the shallow waters of the North Sea this limited
the dimension of the submarine. But now there's no
more diving. A lunatic hit by accident on the idea of
sinking the ship horizontally ; so there is no more bother
about the metricentric problems, and all the vagaries of
Stabilities. No limit to size !

This sort of consideration brought into one's mind
that a great " Education " was wanted ; and that we
wanted " Machinery Education," both with officers and
men ; and also that the education should be the education
of common sense. My full idea of Osborne was, alas !
emasculated by the schoolmasters of the Nation ; but it
is yet going to spread. As sure as I am now dictating to
you, the practical way of teaching is " Explanation^
followed by Execution.^' Have a lecture on Optics in the
morning : make a telescope in the afternoon. Tell the
boys in the morning about the mariner's compass and the
use of the chart ; and in the afternoon go out and navigate
a Ship.

Similarly, with the selection of boys for the Navy, I
didn't want any examination whatsoever, except the boy
and his parents being *' vetted," and then an interview
with the boy to examine his personality (his soul, in fact) ;
and not to have an article in the Navy stuffed by patent
cramming schoolmasters like a Strasburg goose. A
goose's liver is not the desideratum in the candidate.
The desideratum was : could we put into him the four
attributes of Nelson : —

123

MEMORIES

I. Self reliance.

(If you don't believe in yourself, nobody else
will.)
II. Fearlessness of Responsibility.

(If you shiver on the brink you'll catch cold, and
possibly not take the plunge.)

III. Fertility of Resource.

(If the traces break, don't give it up, get some
string.)

IV. Power of initiative.

(Disobey orders.)

Aircraft.

Somewhere about January 15th, 191 5, I submitted my
resignation as First Sea Lord to Mr. Churchill because
of the supineness manifested by the High Authorities
as regards Aircraft ; and I then prophesied the raids over
London in particular and all over England, that by and
by caused several millions sterling of damage and an
infinite fright.

I refer to my resignation on the aircraft question
with some fear and trembling of denials ; however, I
have a copy of my letter, so it's all right. I withdrew
my resignation at the request of Authority, because
Authority said that the War Office and not the Admiralty
were responsible and would be held responsible. The
aircraft belonged to the War Office ; why on earth
couldn't I mind my own business ? I didn't want the
Admiralty building and our wireless on the roof of it
to be bombed ; so it was my business (the War Office was

124

RECAPITULATIONS

as safe as a church, the Germans would never bomb that
estabHshment !).

Recently I fortuned to meet Mr. Holt Thomas, and he
brought to my recollection what was quite a famous
meeting at the Admiralty. Soon after I became First
Sea Lord on October 31st, 1914, I had called together
at the Admiralty a Great Company of all interested in
the air ; for at that moment I had fully satisfied myself
that small airships with a speed of fifty miles an hour
would be of inestimable value against submarines and
also for scouting purposes near the coast. So they proved.

Mr. Holt Thomas was a valued witness before the
Royal Commission on Oil and Oil Engines, of which I
was Chairman (a sad business for me financially^ — I only
possessed a few hundred pounds and I put it into Oil —
I had to sell them out, of course, on becoming Chairman
of the Oil Commission, and what I put those few hundreds
into caused a disappearance of most of those hundreds,
and when I emerged from the Royal Commission the oil
shares had more than quintupled in value and gone up
to twenty times what they were when I first put in).

Through Mr. Holt Thomas we obtained the very
important evidence of the French inventor of the Gnome
engine — ^that wonderful engine that really made aeroplanes
what they now are. His evidence was of peculiar value ;
and so also was that of Mr. Holt Thomas's experience ;
and the result of the Admiralty meeting on aircraft was
that we obtained from Mr. Holt Thomas an airship in
a few weeks, when the experience hitherto had been that
it took years ; and a great number of this type of aircraft

125

MEMORIES

were used with immense advantage in the war. I
remember so well that the very least time that could be
promised with every effort and unstinted money, was
three months (but Mr. Holt Thomas gave a shorter time).
In three weeks an airship was flying over the Admiralty
at 50 miles an hour (" there's nothing you can't have if
you want it enough "), and now we've reached the
Epoch — prodigious in its advent^ — when positively the
Air commands and dominates both Land and Sea ;
and we shall witness quite shortly a combination in one
Structure of the Aeroplane, the Airship, the parachute,
the common balloon, and an Aerial Torpedo, which will
both astound people by its simplicity and by its extra-
ordinary possibilities, both in War and Commerce (the
torpedo will become cargo in Commerce). The
aeroplane has now to keep moving to live — but why
should it ? The aerial gyroscopic locomotive torpedo
suspended by a parachute has a tremendous significance.
And let no one think like the ostrich that buiying one's
head in the sand will make Invention desist. At the first
Hague Peace Conference in 1899, when I was one of the
British Delegates, huge nonsense was talked about the
amenities of war. War has no amenities, although Mr.
Norman Angell attacked me in print for saying so.
It's like two Innocents playing singlestick ; they agree,
when they begin, not to hit hard, but it don't last long !
Like fighting using only one fist against the other man
with two ; the other fist damn soon comes out ! The
Ancient who formulated that '* All's fair in love and war "
enunciated a great natural principle

126

RECAPITULATIONS

War is the essence of violence. ''
Moderation in War is imbecility."
''HIT FIRST. HIT HARD. KEEP ON HITTING:'

The following Reports and letter will illustrate this
history of my efforts in this direction : —

Lord Fisher returned to the Admiralty on October 30th, 1914. _
38 S.S. airships were at once ordered— single engine type. Six
improved type.

Before Lord Fisher left the Admiralty, a design of a double-
engine type was got out, and subsequently another 32 airships were
ordered.

Circular Letter issued by Lord Fisher in 19 14 when
First Sea Lord : —

Lord Fisher desires to express to all concerned his
high appreciation of the service rendered by those who
carried out the recent daring raid on Lake Constance.

He considers that the flight mentioned, made over
250 miles of enemy country of the worst description, is
a fine feat of endurance, courage, and skill, and reflects
great credit on all who took part in the raid, and through
them on the Air Service to which they belong.

The following precis of correspondence is inserted because
contributory to Lord Fisher's resignation. He had pre-
viously written to Mr. Churchill, resigning on the ground
of the disregard of his warnings respecting the Aircraft

menace : —

An Official Secret German Dispatch, obtained from a
German Source, dated December 26th, 1914 :—

The General Staff of the German Army are sending
aircraft to attack French fortified places. Full use to be

127

MEMORIES

made of favourable weather conditions for attack of
Naval Zeppelins against the East Coast of England with
the exception of London. The attack on London will
follow later combined with the German Army Airships.

Precis of History of Rigid Airships of Zeppelin
Type .—

Lord Fisher, when First Sea Lord, in December, 1908,
instructed Admiral Bacon to press for the construction of
rigid airships for naval purposes at the meetings of a
Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence,
which held its first meeting in December, 1908, after
many meetings at which Admiral Bacon presented the
naval point of view with much lucidity. The Committee
recommended on January 28th, 1909, the following : —

(a) The Committee are of opinion that the dangers to
which we might be exposed by developments in aerial
navigation cannot be definitely ascertained until we
ourselves possess airships.

(b) There are good grounds for assuming that airships
will prove of great value to the Navy for scouting and possibly
for destructive purposes ^ From a military point of view
they are also important.

{c) A sum of £35,000 should be included in the Naval
Estimates for the purpose of building an airship of a
rigid type. The sum alluded to should include the cost
of all preliminary and incidental expenses.

(d) A sum of £10,000 should be included in Army

^ This was written in December, 1908, and our Fleet and ships were
always dogged in the war by them.

128

Aged 19. Lieutenant.
In temporary command of " Coromandel " in China.

RECAPITULATIONS

Estimates tor continuing experiments with navigable
balloons of a non-rigid type, and for the purchase of
complete non-rigid airships and their component parts.

January zSth, 1909.

Approved by Committee of Imperial Defence, Feb-
ruary 25th, 1909.

And nothing more was done till I came back to Admiralty
on October 30th, 1914 !

Letter from Admiral Sir S. Eardley Wilmot, formerly
Superintendent of Ordnance Stores, Admiralty : —

The Old Malt House,
Marlow,

August i-^th, 1916.

Dear Lord Fisher,

Having given us splendid craft to fight on and under
the sea, I wish you would take up the provision of an air
fleet. There is going to be a great development of air
navigation in the future and all nations will be at it.
With our resources and wealth we can take and keep the
lead if we like.

As a modest programme to start with we might aim at
100 air battleships and 400 air cruisers : all on the

lighter than air " principle.

I met a young fellow who had been in the Jutland
action and asked him how the 15-inch guns did.
" Splendidly," he said — " They did nearly all the real
execution." I hear the Germans have got 17-inch guns
which is what I anticipated, but they won't get ahead of
us in that time tho' we can't yet snuff out their Zepps,
thanks to you know who.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed) S. Eardley Wilmot.

Note. — More than a year before 1 got this letter I had

129 K

((

MEMORIES

got a 20-inch gun ready to be built for a new type ot
Battle Cruiser !

The Submarine Mine

As quite a young Lieutenant, with extraordinary
impudence I told the then First Sea Lord of the Admiralty
that the Hertz German Submarine Mine, which I had
seen a few days before in Kiel Harbour, would so far
revolutionise sea warfare as possibly to prevent one fleet
pursuing another, by the Fleet that was flying dropping
submarine mines in its wake ; and certainly that sudden
sea operations of the old Nelsonic type would seriously
be interfered with. He very good humouredly sent me
away as a young desperado, as he remembered that I had
been a lunatic in prophesying the doom of masts and
sails, which were still then magnificently supreme, and
the despised engineer yet hiding his diminished head had
to keep the smell of oily oakum away from the noses of
the Lords of the ship.

That same Hertz mine in all its essentials lemains still
" The King of Mines," and if only in those years imme-
diately preceding the war we had manufactured none
else, instead of trying to improve on it, we should have
bagged no end of big game. But as it was, our mines
were squibs ; the enemy's ship always steamed away and
got into harbour, while ours always went down plump.

The Policy of the Submarine Mine favoured us, but
our authorities couldn't see it. I printed in three kinds
of type :

(i) Huge capitals ; (2) Italics ; (3) big Roman block

130

RECAPITULATIONS

letters the following words, submitted to the authorities

very early in the war —

" Sow the North Sea with Mines on such a huge scale
that Naval Operations in it become utterly impossible."

So you nip into the Baltic with the British Fleet.

That British Mining Policy blocked the North Sea
entrance to the Kiel Canal— that British Mining Policy
dished the neutrals. When the neutrals got blown up
you swore it was a German mine — it was the Germans
who began laying mines ; and a mine, when it blows you
up, don't hand you a ticket like a passport, saying what
nationality it is. In fact, our mines were so damned bad
they couldn't help believing it was a German mine.
But I might add I think they would have sunk any Mer-
chant ship, squibs though they were ; and I may add in
a parenthesis this British policy of submarine mines for
the North Sea would have played hell with the German
submarines, not so much blowing them up but entangling
their screws.

Well, at the last — longo intervallo — towards the close of
the war, being the fifteenth " Too Late " of Mr. Lloyd
George's ever memorable and absolutely true speech,
the British Foreign Office did allow this policy, and the
United States sent over mines in thousands upon thou-
sands, and we're still trying to pick 'em up, in such vast
numbers were they laid down !

We really are a very peculiar people.
Lions led by Asses I

I bought a number of magnificent and fast vessels for

131 K 2

MEMORIES

laying down these mines in masses — no sooner had
I left the Admiralty in May, 191 5, they were so
choice that they were diverted and perverted to other
uses.

But perhaps the most sickening of all the events of the
war was the neglect of the Humber as the jumping-off
place for our great fast Battle Cruiser force, with all its
attendant vessels — light Cruisers, Destroyers, and Sub-
marines, and mine-layers, and mine-sweepers — for offen-
sive action at any desired moment, and as a mighty and
absolute deterrent to the humiliating bombardment of
our coasts by that same fast German Battle Cruiser force.
The Humber is the nearest spot to Heligoland ; and at
enormous cost and greatly redounding to the credit of the
present Hydrographer of the Navy, Admiral Learmonth
(then Director of Fixed Defences), the Humber was made
submarine-proof, and batteries were placed in the sea
protecting the obstructions, and moorings laid down
behind triple lines of defence against all possibility of
hostile successful attack.

However, I had to leave the Admiralty before it was
completed and the ships sent there ; and then the mot
d'ordre was Passivity ; and when the Germans bom-
barded Scarborough and Yarmouth and so on, we said to
them a la Chinois, making great grimaces and beating
tom-toms ; " If you come again, look out ! " But the
Germans weren't Chinese, and they came ; and the
soothing words spoken to the Mayors of the bombarded
East Coast towns were what Mark Twain specified as
being " spoke ironical."

132

RECAPITULATIONS

I conclude this Chapter with the following words,
printed in the early autumn of 19 14 : —

'* By the half- measures we have adopted hitherto in
regard to Open- Sea Mines we are enjoying neither the
one advantage nor the other."

That is to say, when the Germans at the very first
outbreak of war departed from the rules of the Hague
Conference against the type of mine they used, we had
two courses open to us : there was the moral advantage of
refusing to follow the bad lead, or we could seek a physical
advantage by forcing the enemies' crime to its utmost
consequences. We were effete. We were pusillanimous,
and we were like Jelly-fish.

And we " Waited and See'd.

)>

133

CHAPTER X

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

We Started out on the compilation of this book on the
understanding that it was not to be an Autobiography,
nor a Diary, nor Meditations (a la Marcus AureUus), but
simply " Memories." And now you drive me to give
you a Synopsis of my life (which is an artful periphrasis),
and request me to account for my past life being one
continuous series of fightings — Love and Hate alternating
and Strife the thread running through this mortal coil
of mine. (When a coil of rope is made in a Government
Dockyard a coloured worsted thread is introduced ; it
runs through the centre of the rope : if the rope breaks
and sends a man to " Kingdom Come," you know the
Dockyard that made it and you ask questions ; if it's
purloined the Detective bowls out the purloiner.) So
far my rope of life has not broken and the thread is there
— Strife.

Greatly daring, and " storms of obloquy " having been
my portion, I produce now an apologia pro vita mea^
though it may not pulverise as that great Cardinal pul-
verised with his famous Apologia (" He looked like
Heaven and he fought like Hell ").

134

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

Here I would insert a note which I discovered this
very afternoon sent me by an unknown friend when
Admiral von Spee and all his host went to the bottom.
Before that event there had been a series of disasters at
sea, and a grave uneasy feeling about our Navy was
spreading over the land. The three great Cruisers —
"Hogue," " Cressy " and "Aboukir" — had been sunk
near the German coast. What were they doing there ? Did
they think they were Nelson blockading Toulon ? The
" Goeben "' and " Breslau " had escaped from our magnifi-
cent Battle Cruisers, then in the Mediterranean, which
had actually boxed them up in the Harbour of Messina ;
and they had gone unharmed to Constantinople, and
like highwaymen had held a pistol at the head of the
Sultan with the threat of bombarding Constantinople
and his Palace and thus converted Turkey, our ancient
ally, into the most formidable foe we had. For is not
England the greatest Mahomedan Power in the world ?
The escape of the " Goeben " and " Breslau '* was an irre-
parable disaster almost equalled by our effete handling
of Bulgaria, the key State of the Balkans ; and we didn't
give her what she asked. When we offered it and more
next year, she told us to go to hell. Then there was the
" Pegasus," that could neither fight nor run away, mas-
sacred in cold blood at Zanzibar by a German Cruiser
as superior to her as our Battle Cruisers were to von Spee.
And last of all, as a climax, that sent the hearts of the
British people into their boots, poor Cradock and his
brave ships were sunk by Admiral von Spee. I became
First Sea Lord within 24 hours of that event, and without

135

MEMORIES

delay the Dreadnought Battle Cruisers, *' Inflexible "
and "Invincible," went 7,000 miles without a hitch in
their water tube boilers or their turbine machinery, and
arrived at the Falkland Islands almost simultaneously
with Admiral von Spee and his eleven ships. That
night von Spee, like another Casabianca with his son on
board, had gone to the bottom and all his ships save one
— and that one also soon after — were sunk. I have to
reiterate about von Spee, as to this day the veil is upon
the faces of our people, and they do not realise the Salva-
tion that came to them.

1. We should have had no munitions — our nitrate
came from Chili.

2. We should have lost the Pacific — the Falkland
Islands would have been another Heligoland and a
submarine base.

3. Von Spee had German reservists, picked up on the
Pacific Coast, on board, to man the fortifications to be
erected on the Falkland Islands.

4. He would have proceeded to the Cape of Good
Hope and massacred our Squadron there, as he had
massacred Cradock and his Squadron.

5. General Botha and his vast fleet of transports
proceeding to the conquest of German South-West
Africa would have been destroyed.

6. Africa under Hertzog would have become German.

7. Von Spee, distributing his Squadron on every
Ocean, would have exterminated British Trade.

That's not a bad resume !

Now I give the note, for it really is first-rate. Who

136

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

wrote it I don't know, and I don't know the paper that
it came from : —

** It is amusing to read the eulogies now showered on
Lord Fisher. He is the same man with the same methods,
the same ideas, and the same theories and practice which
he had in 1905 when he was generally abused as an un-
scrupulous rascal for whom the gallows were too good.
Lord Fisher's silence under storms of obloquy while he
was building up Sea Power was a striking evidence of
his title to fame."

The writer of the paragraph quotes the above words
from some other paper ; then he goes on with the fol-
lowing remark : —

" We cordially endorse these observations. At the
same time, not all of those who raised the * storms of
obloquy ' in 1905 and for some years subsequently are
now indulging in eulogy. Many of them just maintain
a more or less discreet silence, varied by an occasional
insinuation either in public or in private that everything
is not quite as it should be at the Admiralty, or that
Lord Fisher is too old for his job, etc., etc., etc. As we
have often remarked, many of the vituperators of Lord
Fisher hated him for this one simple reason, that he had
weighed them up and found them wanting. They had
imposed on the public, but they couldn't impose on him.
Some of these vituperators are now discreetly silent, but
we know for a fact that their sentiments towards the First
Sea Lord are not in the slightest degree changed."

To proceed with this synopsis : —

I entered the Nav}^ July 12th, 1854, on board Her
Majesty's Ship " Victory," after being medically examined
by the Doctor on board of her, and writing out from
dictation The Lord's Prayer ; and I rather think I did a

137

MEMORIES

Rule of Three sum. Before that time, for seven years I
had a hard life. My paternal grandfather — a splendid
old parson of the fox-hunting type — with whom I was
to live, had died just before I reached England ; and no
one else but my maternal grandfather was in a position
to give me a home. He was a simple-minded man and
had been fleeced out of a fortune by a foreign scoundrel
— I remember him well, as also I remember the
Chartist Riots of 1848 when I saw a policeman even
to my little mind behaving, as I thought, brutally to
passing individuals. I remember seeing a tottering old
man having his two sticks taken away from him and
broken across their knees by the police. On the other
hand, I have to bear witness to a little phalanx of 40
splendid police (who then wore tall hats and tail coats)
charging a multitude of what seemed to me to be thousands
and sending them flying for their lives. They only had
their truncheons— but they knew how to use them cer-
tainly. They seized the band and smashed the instru-
ments and tore up their flags.

I share Lord Rosebery's delightful distaste ; and wild
horses won't make me say more about those early years.
These are Lord Rosebery's delicious words : —

" There is one initial part of a biography which is
skipped by every judicious reader ; that in which the
pedigree of the hero is set forth, often with warm fancy
and sometimes at intolerable length."

How can it possibly interest anyone to know that my
simple-minded maternal grandfather was driven through
the artifices of a rogue to take in lodgers, who of their

138

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

charity gave me bread thickly spread with butter — ^butter
was a thing I otherwise never saw — and my staple food
was boiled rice with brown sugar — very brown ?

Other vicissitudes of my early years — 'Until I became
Gunnery Lieutenant of the first English Ironclad, the
''Warrior," at an extraordinarily early age — may be
told some day ; and all that your desired synopsis
demands is a filling in of dates and a few details, till
I became the Captain of the '' Inflexible" — the " Dread-
nought " of her day. I was promoted from Commander
to Captain largely through a Lord of the Admiralty by
chance hearing me hold forth in a Lecture to a bevy of
Admirals.

H.M.S. "Vigilant," Portsmouth.
October yd, 1873,

Mr. Goschen and Milne left at 10 a.m. I stayed and went on
board " Vernon," Torpedo School Ship, at 11. Had a most interesting
lecture from Commander Fisher, a promising young ofhcer, and
witnessed several experiments. The result of my observations
was that in my opinion the Torpedo has a great future before it
and that mechanical training will in the near future he essential for
officers. Made a note to speak to Goschen about young Fisher.

That was in 1873. More than thirty years after,
" Young Fisher " was instrumental in making this
principle the basis of the new system of education of all
naval cadets at Osborne.

I remember so well taking a " rise " out of my exalted
company of Admirals and others. The voltaic element,
which all lecturers then produced with gusto as the
elementary galvanic cell, was known as the *' Daniell
Cell." A bit of zinc, and a bit of copper stuck in sawdust
saturated with diluted sulphuric acid, and there you were !

139

MEMORIES

A bit of wire from the zinc to one side of a galvanometer
and a bit of wire from the copper to the other side and
round went the needle as if pursued by the devil.

There were endless varieties of this " Daniell Cell,"
which it was always considered right and proper to
describe. " Now," I said, " Sirs, I will give you without
any doubt whatsoever the original Daniell Cell " — at that
moment disclosing to their rapt and enquiring gaze a
huge drawing (occupying the whole side of the lecture
room and previously shrouded by a table cloth) — the
Lions with their mouths firmly shut and Daniel appar-
ently biting his nails waiting for daylight ! Anyhow,
that's how Rubens represents him.

I very nearly got into trouble over that " Sell." Ad-
mirals don't like being " sold."

I should have mentioned that antecedent to this I had
been Commander of the China Flagship. I wished very
much for the Mediterranean Flagship ; but my life-long
and good friend Lord Walter Kerr was justly preferred
before me. The Pacific Flagship was also vacant ; and
I think the Admiral wanted me there, but I had a wonder-
ful good friend at the Admiralty, Sir Beauchamp Seymour,
afterwards Lord Alcester, who was determined I should
go to China. So to China I went ; and, as it happened,
it turned out trumps, for the Admiral got softening of
the brain, and I was told that when he got home and
attended at the Admiralty I was the only thing in his
mind ; the only thing he could say was " Fisher ! " And
this luckily helped me in my promotion to Post Captain.

After starting the " Vernon " as Torpedo School of

140

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

the Navy and partaking in a mission to Fiume to arrange
for -ns purchase of the Whitehead Torpedo, I was sent
at an hour's notice overland to Malta, where on entering
the harbour I noticed an old tramp picking up her
anchor, and on enquiry found she was going to Con-
stantinople, where the ship I was to command was with
the Fleet under Sir Geoffrey Hornby. I went alongside,
got up a rope ladder that was hanging over the side and
pulled up my luggage with a rope's end, when the Captain
of the Tramp came up to me and said : " Hullo ! " I
said " Hullo ! " He said " What is it you want ? " He
didn't know who I was, and I was in plain clothes, just
as I had travelled over the Continent, and I replied :
" I'm going with you to Constantinople to join my
ship " ; and he said '* There ain't room ; there's only one
bunk, and when I ain't in it the mate is." I said " All
right, I don't want a bunk." And he said " Well, we
ain't got no cook." And I said " That don't matter
either." That man and I till he died were like Jonathan
and David. He was a magnificent specimen of those
splendid men who command our merchant ships — I
wort^jipped the ground he trod on. His mate was just
as g-^od. They kept watch and watch, and it was a
hard life. I said to him one day " Captain, I never see
you take sights." " Well," he said, *' Why should I ?
When I leaves one lamp-post I steers for the other "
(meaning lighthouses) ; " and," he says, ** I trusts my
iingineer. He gives me the revolutions what the engine
has made, and I know exactly where I am. And," he
says, " when you have been going twenty years on the

141

MEMORIES

same road and no other road, you gets to know exactly
how to do it." *' Well," I said, " what do you do about
your compass ? are you sure it's correct ? In the Navy,
you know, we're constantly looking at the sun when it
sets, and that's an easy way of seeing that the compass
is right." " Well," he said, " what I does is this. I
throws a cask overboard, and when it's as far off as ever
I can see it, I turns the ship round on her axis. I takes
the bearing of the cask at every point of the compass, I
adds 'em all up, divides the total by the number of bear-
ings, which gives me the average, and then I subtracts
each point of the compass from it, and that's what the
compass is wrong on each point. But," he says, " I
seldom does it, because provided I make the lamp-post
all right I think the compass is all right."

I found Admiral Hornby's fleet at Ismid near Con-
stantinople, and Admiral Hornby sent a vessel to meet
me at Constantinople. He had heard from Malta that I
was on board the tramp. That great man was the finest
Admiral afloat since Nelson. At the Admiralty he was a
failure. So would Nelson have been ! With both of
them their Perfection was on the Sea, not at an office
desk. Admiral Hornby I simply adored. I had known
him many years ; and while my cabins on board my ship
were being painted, he asked me to come and live with
him aboard his Flagship, which I did, and I was next
ship to him always when at sea. He was astounding.
He would tell you what you were going to do wrong
before you did it ; and you couldn't say you weren't
going to do it because you had put your helm over and

142

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

the ship had begun to move the wrong way. Many
years afterwards, when he was the Port Admiral at
Portsmouth, I was head of the Gunnery School at
Portsmouth, and, some war scare arising, he was ordered
to take command of the whole Fleet at home collected
at Portland. He took me with him as a sort of Captain
of the Fleet, and we went to Bantry Bay, where we had
exercises of inestimable value. He couldn't bear a fool,
so of course he had many enemies. There never lived
a more noble character or a greater seaman. He was
incomparable.

After commanding the " Pallas " in the Mediterranean
under Sir Geoffrey Hornby, I was selected by Admiral
Sir Cooper Key as his Flag Captain in North America
in command of the " Bellerophon " ; and I again fol-
lowed Sir Cooper Key as his Flag Captain in the " Her-
cules " when he also was put in command of a large fleet
on another war scare arising. It was in that year I began
the agitation for the introduction of Lord Kelvin's
compass into the Navy, and I continued that agitation
with the utmost vehemence till the compass was adopted
After that I was chosen by Admiral Sir Leopold McClin-
tock, the great Arctic Explorer, to be his Flag Captain
on the North American Station, in the " Northampton,"
then a brand new ship. He again was a splendid man
and his kindness to me is unforgettable. He had gone
through great hardships in the Arctic — once he hadn't
washed for 179 days. He was like a rare old bit of
mahogany ; and I was told by an admirer of his that

143

MEMORIES

when the thermometer was 70 degrees below zero he
found the ship so stuffy that he slept outside on the ice
in his sleeping bag.

I was suddenly recalled to England and left him with
very deep regret in the West Indies to become Captain
of the " Inflexible." I had the most trying parting from
that ship's company of the " Northampton " ; and not
being able to stand the good-bye, I crept unseen into a
shore boat and got on board the mail steamer before the
crew found out that the Captain had left the ship. And
the fine old Captain of the Mail Steamer — Robert
Woolward by name — caught the microbe and steamed
me round and round my late ship. He was a great
character. Every Captain of a merchant ship I meet I
seem to think better than the last (I hope I shan't forget
later on to describe Commodore Haddock of the White
Star Line, for if ever there was a Nelson of the Merchant
Serv^ice he was). But I return to Woolward. He had
been all his life in the same line of steamers, and he showed
me some of his correspondence, which was lovely. He
was invariably in the right and his Board of Directors
were invariably in the wrong. I saw a lovely letter he
had written that very day that I went on board, to his
Board of Directors. He signed himself in the letter as
follows : — •

" Gentlemen, I am your obedient humble servant "
(he was neither), *' Robert Woolward— Forty years in
your employ and never did right yet."

I must, while I have the chance, say a few words about
my friend Haddock. It was a splendid Captain in the

144

18S5. Aged 41. Post Captain.
In command of Gunnery'School at Portsmouth.

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

White Star steamer in which I crossed to America in
1910, and I remarked this to my Cabin Steward, as a
matter of conversation. ** Ah ! " he said, " you should
see 'addick." Then he added " We knows him as
'addick of the ' Oceanic' Yes," he said, *' and Mr.
Ismay (the Head of the White Star Line) knows him too ! "
The " Oceanic " was Mr. Ismay 's last feat in narrowness
and length and consequent speed for crossing the Atlantic.
I have heard that when he was dying he went to see her.
This conversation never left my mind, although it was
only the cabin steward that told me ; but he was an
uncommon good steward. So when I came back to the
Admiralty as First Sea Lord on October 31st, 1914, I
at once got hold of Haddock, made him into a Commodore,
and he commanded the finest fleet of dummy wooden
*' Dreadnoughts " and Battle Cruisers the world had ever
looked on, and they agitated the Atlantic, and the '* Queen
Elizabeth " in wood got blown up by the Germans at
the Dardanelles instead of the real one. The Germans
left the other battleships alone chasing the "Elizabeth."
If this should meet the eye of Haddock, I want to tell
him that, had I remained, he would have been Sir Herbert
Haddock, K.C.B., or I'd have died in the attempt.

Now you have got perhaps not all you want, but
sufficient for the Notes to follow here.

The " Warrior "

I was appointed Gunnery Lieutenant of the " Warrior "
our First Ironclad in 1863, when I was a little over 22

145 L

MEMORIES

years old. I had just won the Beaufort Testimonial
(Senior Wrangler), and that, with a transcendental Cer-
tificate from Commodore Oliver Jones, who was at that
time the demon of the Navy, gave me a " leg up."

The " Warrior " was then, like the " Inflexible " in
1882 and the "Dreadnought" in 1905, the cynosure of
all eyes. She had a very famous Captain, the son of
that great seaman Lord Dundonald, and a still more
famous Commander, Sir George Tryon, who afterwards
went down in the " Victoria." She had a picked crew
of officers and men, so I was wonderfully fortunate to be
the Gunnery Lieutenant, and at so young an age I got
on very well, except for sky-larking in the ward-room,
for which I got into trouble. There was a dear old
grey-headed Paymaster, and a mature Doctor, and a still
more mature Chaplain, quite a dear old Saint. These,
with other willing spirits, of a younger phase, I organised
into a peripatetic band. The Parson used to play the
coal scuttle, the Doctor the tongs and shovel, the dear
old Paymaster used to do the cymbals with an old tin
kettle. The other instruments we made ourselves out
of brown paper, and we perambulated, doing our best.
The Captain came out of his cabin door and asked the
sentry what that noise was } We were all struck dumb
by his voice, the skylight being open, and we were silent.
The Sentry said : *' It's only Mr. Fisher, Sir ! " so he
shut the door ! The Commander, Sir George Tryon,
wasn't so nice ! He sent down a message to say the
Gunnery Lieutenant was " to stop that fooling ! "
(However, this only drove us into another kind of sport !)

146

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

We were all very happy messmates ; they kindly spoilt
me as if I was the Baby. I never went ashore by any
chance, so all the other Lieutenants liked me because I
took their duty for them. One of them was like Nelson's
signal — he expected every man to do his duty ! I was his
bosom friend, which reminds me of another messmate I
had who, the witty First Lieutenant said, always reminded
him of Nelson ! Not seeing the faintest resemblance, I
asked him why. "Well," he said, "the last thing
Nelson did was to die for his country, and that is the
last thing this fellow would do ! " It may be an old joke,
but I'd never heard it before, and it was true.

I got on very well with the sailors, and our gunnery
was supposed to be A i. They certainly did rush the
guns about, so I was sent in charge of the bluejackets to
a banquet given them ashore. I imagined that on our
return they might have had a good lot of beer, so I
appealed to their honour and affection, when we marched
back to the ship in fours, to take each other's arms. They
nobly did it ! And I got highly complimented for the
magnificent way they marched back through the streets ! !
And this is the episode ! The galleries at the banquet
were a mass of ladies, and very nice-looking ones. When
the banquet was over, the Captain of the Maintop
of the ''Warrior," John Kiernan by name, unsoHcited,
stood up in his chair and said : " On behalf of his top-
mates he wished to thank the Mayor and Corporation
for a jolly good dinner and the best beer he'd ever tasted,"
He stopped there and said : " Bill, hand me up that beer
again." Bill said there was no more ! A pledge had been

147 L 2

MEMORIES

given by the Mayor that they should have only two
bottles of beer each. But this episode was too much
for the Mayor, and instantly in came beer by the dozen,
and my beloved friend, the Captain of the Maintop, had
another glass. This is how he went on (and it was a very
eloquent speech in my opinion. I remember every word
of it to this day) He said : " This is joy," and he looked
round the galleries crowded with the lovely ladies, and
said : " Here we are, British Sailors entirely surrounded
by females ! ! " They waved their handkerchiefs and
kissed their hands, and that urged the Captain of the
Maintop into a fresh flight of eloquence. '' Now," he
said, " Shipmates, what was it like now coming into this
'ere harbour of Liverpool " (we had come in under sail) ;
*' why," he said, *' this is what it was like, sailing into a
haven of joy before a gale of pleasure." I then told him
to shut up, because he would spoil it by anything more,
and Abraham Johnson, Chief Gunner's Mate, my First
Lieutenant, gave him more beer ! and so we returned.

Abraham Johnson was a wonder ! When the Admiral
inspected the "Warrior," Abraham Johnson came to me
and said he knew his Admiral, and would I let him have
a free hand ? I said : *' All right ! " When the ship was
prepared for battle, the Admiral suddenly said : " Fll go
down in the Magazine," and began going down the steps
of the Magazine with his sword on ! Abraham was just
underneath down below, and called up to the Admiral :
*' Beg pardon. Sir ! you can't come down here ! " '' D— n
the fellow ! what does he mean ? " Abraham reiterated :
*' You can't come down here." The Admiral said :

148

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

"Why not ? " ** Because no iron instrument is allowed
in the Magazine," said Abraham. *' Ah ! " said the
Admiral, unbuckling his sword, " that fellow knows his
duty. This is a properly organised ship ! "

It is seldom appreciated — ^it certainly was not then
appreciated on board the " Warrior " when I was her
Gunnery Lieutenant — that this, our first armour-clad
ship-of-war, the "Warrior," would cause a fundamental
change in what had been in vogue for something like a
thousand years ! For the Navy that had been founded
by Alfred the Great had lasted till then without any
fundamental change till came this first Ironclad Battle-
ship. There is absolutely nothing in common between
the fleets of Nelson and the Jutland Battle ! Sails have
given way to steam. Oak to steel. Lofty four-decked
ships with 144 guns like the " Santissima Trinidad," to
low-lying hulls like that of the first "Dreadnought."
Guns of one hundred tons instead of one ton ! And
Torpedoes, Mines, Submarines, Aircraft. And then even
coal being obsolete ! And, unlike Nelson's day, no human
valour can now compensate for mechanical inferiority.

I rescue these few words by a survivor of the German
Battle Cruiser " Bliicher," sunk on January 24th, 1915, by
the British Battle Cruisers " Lion " and " Tiger." The
German Officer says :

*' The British ships started to fire at us at 15 kilometres
distant " (as a matter of fact it was about 11 to 12 miles).
" The deadly water spouts came nearer and nearer ! The
men on deck watched them with a strange fascination 1

" Soon one pitched close to the ship, and a vast watery
billow, a hundred yards high, fell lashing on the deck !

149

MEMORIES

" The range had been found !

" The shells came thick and fast. The electric plant
was destroyed, and the ship plunged into a darkness that
could be felt ! You could not see your hand before your
nose ! Below decks were horror and confusion, mingled
with gasping shouts and moans ! At first the shells came
dropping from the sky, and they bored their way even
to the stokeholds !

" The coal in the bunkers was set on fire, and as the
bunkers were half empty the fire burnt fiercely. In the
engine-room a shell licked up the oil and sprayed it
around in flames of blue and green, scarring its victims
and blazing where it fell. Men huddled together in dark
compartments, but the shells sought them out, and there
Death had a rich harvest."

I forgot to say we had a surprise visit from Garibaldi
on board the " Warrior " — Garibaldi, then at the zenith of
his glory. The whole crew marched past him singing
the Garibaldi Hymn. He was greatly affected. It was
very fine indeed ; for we had a picked stalwart crew, and
their sword bayonets glistening in the sun, and in their
white hats and gaiters they looked, as they were, real
fighting men ! And then, in a moment, they stripped
themselves of their accoutrements and swarmed up
aloft and spread every sail on the ship, including studding
sails, in a few minutes. It was a dead calm, and so was
feasible.

From the " Warrior " I went to the gunnery school ship,
the " Excellent '* ; and it was during these years that some
of my '' manias " began to display themselves, the result
being that three times I lost my promotion through
them.

150

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

It had fortuned that in 1868, when starting the Science
of Under- Water Warfare as appHed to the Ocean, I met
a humble-minded armourer whose name was Isaac Tall,
and for many years we worked together. He devised,
amongst other inventions, an electrically-steered steam
vessel that could tow barges laden with 500 lb. mines
which were dropped automatically at such a distance
apart as absolutely to destroy all hostile mines in a
sufficient area to give a passage for Battleships. Small
buoys were automatically dropped as the countermines
were dropped to mark the cleared passage. That inven-
tion, simplicity itself, still holds the field for clearing a
passage, say, into the Baltic. Not one single man was on
board the steam vessel of the Barges carrying the counter
mines.

Before leaving the Admiralty, in January, 19 10, I
introduced the use of Trawlers, and we employed them
in experimental trials, clearing away hostile mines. Our
mines in those days were very inferior to the Hertz Ger-
man Mine, which really remains still the efficient German
Mine we have to contend with. In 1868 I took out a
provisional patent for a Sympathetic Exploder, and,
strange to say, it is now coming into play in a peculiar
form as a most effective weapon for our use.

I have remarked elsewhere how the First Lord of that
date did not believe in mines or torpedoes, and I left for
China as Commander of the China flagship.

Archbishop Magee, that wonderful Prelate who asked
some laym^an to interpret his feelings when the footman
spilt the onion sauce over him, said of '* Exaggerations "

151

MEMORIES

that they were needful ! He said you wanted a big brush
to produce scenic effects ! A camel's-hair brush was, no
doubt, the inestimable weapon of Memling in those
masterpieces of his minute detail that were at Bruges
when I was a young Post Captain, and that so entranced
me there. Ah ! that wonderful Madame Polsonare
where we lodged ! How she did so well care for us !
The peas I used to watch her shelling ! The three
repositories :

First — the old ones to be stewed.
Second — those for the Polsonare Family.
Thirdly — the youngest and sweetest of the peas for us
— her lodgers !

And how most delicious they were ! And how delightful
was old '* Papa " Polsonare ! and the daughters so plump
and opulent in their charm !

And their only son the " brave Beige ! " He was a
soldier ! What has become of them now ? They cared
for us as their very own, and charged us the very minimum
for our board and lodging ! And having nothing but my
pay then I was grateful ! And the Kindergarten so
delightful ! The little children all tied together by a rope
when they went out walking. Pamela was my youngest
daughter. " The last straw " was her nickname ! And it
was written up over the mantelpiece that it was " defendu "
to kiss Pamela ! She was about three years old, I think,
and went to school with a bun and her books strapped to
her back, and when the Burgomaster gave away the prizes
she was put on a Throne to hand them out (dressed as

152

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

a Ballet Dancer !). But alas ! when the moment came
she was found to be fast asleep !

I am always so surprised that so little notice is taken
of Satan's dramatic appearance before the Almighty with
reference to the Patriarch Job. It's so seldom that
Satan in person comes before us. He usually uses
someone else, and in this case of Job it's quite the most
subtle innuendo I ever came across ! It so accentuates
what occurs in common life !

'' Doth Job fear God for nought?'* Well may one be
thankful and prayerful when prosperity is showered on
one ! Can you be so in adversity and affliction — un-
deserved and unexplainable ? However, Job got through
all right I But Prayer is as much misunderstood as
Charity. A splendid Parson in Norfolk replied to his
congregation who asked him to pray for rain that really
it was useless while the wind was east ! Also it appears
to me that one farmer, wanting rain for his turnips,
doesn't have any feeling for the other man who is against
rain because of carrying his crop of something else.
Indeed the pith and marrow of prayer is that it must be
absolutely unselfish, and so Dr. Chalmers accordingly
acutely said the finest prayer he knew was : " Almighty
God, the Fountain of all Wisdom, who knowest our
necessities," etc. {see Collects at end of Communion
Service).

Coming home from the China Station in 1872, I was
Commander of the old Battleship " Ocean." She was an
old wooden I^ine of Battleship that had armour bolted
on her sides. When we got into heavy weather, the

153

MEMORIES

timbers of the ship would open when she heeled over
one way, and shut together when she heeled the other,
and squirted the water inboard ! And always we had
many fountains playing in the bottom of the ship from
leaks, some quite high. At Singapore the Chaplain left
us ; he couldn't face it, as we were going home round the
Cape of Good Hope at the stormy season. So I did
chaplain ! When we put into Zanzibar on the East Coast
of Africa, I heard there was a sick Bishop ashore from
Central Africa who had been carried down on a shutter
with fever. I went to see him, to ask whether he could
take on next day, Sunday, and give the crew a change !
He turned out to be a splendid specimen, and had given
up a fat living in Lincolnshire to be a Missionary. I
found him eating boiled rice and a hard boiled egg on a
broken plate— we gave him a good feed when he came
on board — but I am telling the story because his Sermon
was on Prayer. He gave us no text, but began by saying
he had been wondering for the last half-hour what on
earth that thing was overhead between the beams on the
main deck where we were assembled ! Of course we
knew it was one of the long pump handles for pumping
the ship out with the chain pumps (a thing of past ages)
— all the crew had to take continually to the pumps, she
was leaking so badly — and " There ! " he said, " I'm a
Bishop, and instead of saying my prayers I've been letting
my thoughts wander," and he gave us a beautiful ex-
tempore sermon on wandering thoughts on Prayer that
hit everyone in the eye !

I believe he died there in Central Africa, a polished

154

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

English gentleman, with refined tastes and delighting in
the delicacies of a cultured life ! A missionary had come
preaching at his Country Church and had made him
ashamed of his life of ease, so he told me !

We got into a fierce gale off the Cape, and I began to
envy the Chaplain we had left behind at Singapore,
especially when the Captain said he thought there was
nothing for it but for me, the Commander, to go aloft
about the close reefed fore topsail as the men would
follow no one of lower rank. My monkey jacket was
literally " blown into ribbons ! " I had heard the ex-
pression before, but never had realised it could be exact !

Sir Thomas Troubridge foundered with all hands in
the exact place in an old two-decker — I think it was the
" Blenheim." He was Nelson's favourite, and got ashore
in the " Culloden " at the Nile ; but that's another story
as Mr. Kipling says !

How I BECAME Captain of the *' Inflexible "

The " Inflexible " in 1882 was a wonder. She had the
thickest armour, the biggest guns, and the largest of
everything beyond any ship in the world. A man could
crawl up inside the bore of one of her guns. Controversy
had raged round her. The greatest Naval Architects of
the time quarrelled with each other. Endless inventions
were on board her, accumulated there by cranks in the
long years she took building. A German put a new type
of gas into the engine room, which was lovely, and no
smell, so bright, so simple ! But when it chanced to
escape from a leaky joint, it descended and did not rise,

155

MEMORIES

so it got into all the double bottoms and nearly polished
off a goodly number of the crew. There were whistles
in my cabin that yelled when the boiler was going to
burst, or the ship was not properly steered, and so on. So
to be Captain of the " Inflexible " was much sought after.
As each name was discussed by the Board of Admiralty
it got " butted," that is to say, it would be remarked :

'' Yes, he's a splendid officer and quite fit for it, but "

and then some reason was adduced why he should not
be selected (he had murdered his father, or he had kissed
the wrong girl !). Lord Northbrook, who was First Lord,
got sick of these interminable discussions as to who should
be Captain of the " Inflexible," so he unexpectedly said
one morning : " Do any of you know a young Captain
called Fisher ? " And they all— 'having no notion of what
was in Lord Northbrook's mind, and I being well known
to each of them — had no " buts " ! So he got up and said :
" Well, that settles it. I'll appoint him Captain of the
" Inflexible." I was about the Junior Captain in the
biggest ship !

However, the " Inflexible " brought me to death's door,
as I was suddenly struck down by dysentery when ashore
in charge of Alexandria after the bombardment. I had
arranged an armoured train, with which we used to
reconnoitre the enemy, who were in great strength and
only a few miles off. The Officer who took my place
in the armoured train the day after I was disabled by
dysentery was knocked over by one of the enemy shells,
and so it was telegraphed home that I was killed, and
Queen Victoria telegraphed back for details, and very

X56

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

interesting leading articles appeared as to what I might
have been had I lived. Lord Northbrook telegraphed
for me to be sent home immediately, kindly adding that
the Admiralty could build another " Inflexible " but not
another Fisher.

As I was being carried on board, in a brief moment's
consciousness I heard the Doctor say : " He'll never
reach Gibraltar ! " and then and there I determined I
would live. When I got home, Lord Northbrook
appointed me Head of the Gunnery School of the Navy.
Queen Victoria asked me to stay at Osborne, and did so
every year till she died ; and this in spite of the fact that
she hated the Admiralty, and didn't much care for the
Navy.

I kept on being ill from the effects of the dysentery
for a long time, but Lord Northbrook never let go my
hand. When all the doctors failed to cure me, I accident-
ally came across a lovely partner I used to waltz with,
who begged me to go to Marienbad, in Bohemia. I did
so, and in three weeks I was in robust health. It was
the Pool of Bethesda, and this waltzing angel put me into
it, for it really was a miracle, and I never again had a
recurrence of my illness.

^57

CHAPTER XI

NELSON

Lord Rosebery may have forgotten it, but in one of our
perigrinations round and round Berkeley Square (I lived
next door to him) he made a remark to me which made
a deep and ineffaceable impression on me — that he felt
sure one of the great reasons of Nelson being so in the
hearts of his countrymen was the conviction that he had
been slighted by Authority and even so after his death.
Unquestionably his brother Admirals were envious.
He was kept kicking his heels at Merton on half pay in
momentous times, and so poor as to necessitate his
getting advances from his Banker. He was cavalierly
treated when he was told to haul down his flag and come
home after the Battle of the Nile. I know all about the
Queen of Naples and Lady Hamilton ; but what was that
in comparison with his astounding genius for war and
his hold on the Fleet } And I want to draw attention to
this delightful trait in his glorious character. Supposing
(what I don't admit) that there was any irregularity in his
attachment to Lady Hamilton, he never disguised his
feeling for her, or his gratitude to her for all she did for

158

NELSON

his grievously wounded and frail body after the Nile
and her splendid conduct in getting his Fleet revictualled
and stored by the Neapolitans through her influence with
the King and Queen, when all the Authorities were
against it. He used to ask his Captains to drink her
health, and said (in my opinion quite truly), that if there
were more Emmas there would be more Nelsons.

Then look at the Battle of the Nile! It was an
incomparable battle— but it only made Nelson into a
Common or Garden Lord; when the Battle of Cape
St. Vincent, which was practically won by Nelson, made
Sir John Jervis into an Earl. History is so written that
no end of literary gentlemen will endeavour to confute
all I am saying by extracts (or, as they will call them, facts)
from Contemporary Documents and Newspapers. Well
now, to-day, read the Morning Post and Daily
News on the same incident ! (For myself I prefer
the Daily Nezvs.) Again, Nelson died poor. That
appeals. What Prize Money might he not have accumu-
lated, had he chased dollars as he chased the enemy !
Then with his dying breath, mortally wounded in the
hour of the greatest of sea victories, he asks his country
to provide for his friend as he could do nothing for her
himself ; and, whatever may have been her fauUs, she had
nursed and tended him, not only when sorely wounded
after the Nile, but afterwards when his frail body was
almost continuously racked with pain. She died in
penury and found a pauper's grave in a foreign land. A
passing Englishman paid her funeral expenses. It makes
one rise up and say " Damn I "

159

MEMORIES

That vivid immortal spirit, whose life was his country's,
who never flogged a man ; whose heart was tender and
" worn on his sleeve for daws to peck at," has to suffer
even now for miscreants who published his letters to
this friend of his that only her eye was meant to see.
Also, Prudes nowadays forget how very different was the
standard of morals at that time. Does not history tell
us that Dukes were the honoured results of illicit rela-
tionships ? And we don't think any the worse of Abraham
because he was the husband of more than one wife. But
let that pass. I heard yesterday that a distinguished
Bishop said he loved my sentiments but not my words.
But fancy ! Nelson left on half-pay in War ! It's un-
believable, but yet it so happened. It was envy ; and he
was no sycophant, so he couldn't be a courtier. It was
so with him as with our great Exemplar : '' The Common
People heard him gladly." And what a " Send-off " it
was on Southsea beach at Portsmouth when he
embarked for Trafalgar ! What a scene it was, with
these Common People surging round him — none else
were there, and neither the King nor the Admiralty sent
a dummy, as is customary, to represent them. But isn't
it always the way } General Booth and Doctor Barnardo
weren't buried in Westminster Abbey ; but they had a
more glorious funeral— millions of the *' Common People"
followed them to their graves, unmarshalled and un-
solicited. Give me the Common People, and a fig for
your State ceremonial !

Perhaps in this cursory view of Nelson one may be

i6o

1904. Aged 63. Admiral.
Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth.

NELSON

permitted to seize on what appears to me the central
incident of his Hfe, which so peculiarly illustrates his
extraordinary genius for War. His audacity ! His
imagination ! His considered rashness ! I think myself
the Battle of the Nile is that incident — for this reason :
that it has been recorded in writing what actually occurred
to Lord Nelson and to the French Admiral at the very
same instant of time — each having at his side the very
same officer in each Fleet. It was sunset. Nelson was
walking the deck with the Navigating Officer of the Fleet
— the " Master of the Fleet " was his technical title.
The look-out man at the mast-head reports seeing on the
horizon the mast-heads of a mass of ships at anchor — it
was the French Fleet in Aboukir Bay. Nelson instantly
stops in his walk and orders the signal to the Fleet to
make all possible sail and steer for the enemy. He is
remonstrated with, both by his own officers on board
and by his favourite Captain of the Fleet at going in to
fight the French Fleet without any charts. If he waited
till the sun rose, they would be able to see from aloft
the shoal water and so steer with safety alongside the
enemy. Nelson answers his favourite Captain that if
that Captain's ship does get on shore, as he fears, then
she'll be a buoy to show him where anyhow one shoal
is. Troubridge did get on shore, and he was 2. buoy.
Nelson went in. The French Admiral blew up at
midnight in his flagship the " Orient " and Casabianca,
his Captain, and his son are the theme of a great poem :
*' The boy stood on the burning deck."

161 M

MEMORIES

The French Admiral was walking up and down the
deck with his Master of the Fleet, when his look-out man
at the mast-head reported on the horizon the topmast
sails of a number of ships. The French Admiral stopped
in his walk as abruptly as Nelson and at the very same
instant that Nelson stopped in his walk ; but he said
*' It's the English Fleet, but they won't come in to-night.
They have no charts ! " So he did not recall his men from
the shore — and in the result his fleet was destroyed,
and the one or two ships that did escape under Admiral
Dumanoir were captured. And Napoleon wrote, *' But
for Nelson at the Nile I would have been Conqueror of
the World " — or words to that effect. And yet Nelson
was only made a common or garden Lord for this great
battle, and spent two years on the Continent kicking his
heels about to pass the time before returning to England.
Imagine ! he wasn't wanted ! I think Lord Rosebery was
right — Nelson being slighted has led to his greater
appreciation.

Again — even a greater slight, a slight he feels more —
when he looks down from his monument in Trafalgar
Square, does he see anywhere those splendid Captains
of his ? But let alone those Captains of his— does he
see anywhere a single Admiral ? Not one. And yet who
made England what she is ? Those splendid Sea Heroes
are in very deed " England's forgotten worthies " ! Yes !
Nelson looks down from his isolated column, and looks
in vain for Hawke, Dundonald, Howe, Hood, Rodney,
Cornwallis, Benbow, " and a great multitude which no
man can number " — all Seamen of Deathless Fame,

162

NELSON

fighting single frigate actions, cutting out the enemy's
ships from under the guns of forts, sending in fire ships
and burning the enemy's vessels thought to be safe in
harbour under the guns of their forts — Doers of Im-
perishable Deeds ! ^ Death found them fighting. We
have heaps of statues to everybody else. Indeed such a
lot of them that they reach down as far off as Knights-
bridge. But who knows about Quiberon — one of the
greatest of sea fights ? And if you mention Hawke, your
friend probably thinks only of his worthy descendant —
the cricketer.

An old woman eating a penny bun asked a friend of
mine called Buggins, when she was passing through
Trafalgar Square, " What are them lions a-guarding of? "
Buggins told her that her penny bun would have cost her
threepence if it hadn't been for the man them lions were
a-guarding of.

When I see the Duke of York's Column still allowed
to rear its futile head, and scores of other fifth-rate
nonentities glorified by statues, I thank God I'm a sailor
— we don't want to be in that galley !

I began my sea life with the last of Nelson's Captains,
through Nelson's own niece; and I fitly, I think, among my
last words may ask the Nation to do justice to Nelson's
Trade ! This country owes all she has to the sea, it was
the sea that won the late war, and if we'd stuck to the

1 There are statues of Franklin and of Robert Falconer Scott in
Waterloo Place ; but neither of these displayed his heroism in naval
action. They were each peaceable seekers — but what on earth good
accrues from going to the North and South Poles I never could under-
stand— no one is going there when they can go to Monte Carlo 1

163 M 2

MEMORIES

sea we should not now be thinking of bankruptcy and
some of us imagining Carthage ! We were led away by
MiHtarist folly to be a conscript Nation and it will take
us all we know to recover from it. We shall recover,
for England never succumbs !

164

CHAPTER XII

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

Lord Esher has kindly sent me three bulky volumes
of letters I wrote him from 1903 onwards — I have others
also. Many of them are unquotable, so blasting are they
in their truth to existing reputations. It's not my
business to blast reputations — so the real gems are missing.

Somebody felt in 1903 that the War Office was wrong,
and so a Committee was set up with Lord Esher as
President, Sir George Clarke and myself the other two
members ; and that very able and not sufficiently recog-
nised man, now General Sir C. Ellison, was Secretary.
How I got there is still a mystery ; but it was a great en-
joyment as Generals came to stay with me at Admiralty
House, Portsmouth — I was the Port Admiral. I always
explained to them I was Lord Esher's facile dupe and
Sir George Clarke's servile copyist, and thereby avoided
odium personally (I was getting all the odium I wanted
from the Admirals !).

As usual, when we reported, the Government didn't
appreciate those inestimable words *' Totus Porcus "
(No Government — anyhow no English Government—

165

MEMORIES

ever yet went ** the whole hog " — ** Compromise " is
the British God !).i

1903 [Sir John Fisher^ Commander-in-Chief at

Portsmouth].

. . . My humble idea is that " men are everything
and material nothing " whether it's working the War
Office or fighting a fleet ! So some day I am going to
try and entice you to read my lectures to the Officers of
the Mediterranean Fleet because the spirit intended to
be diffused by them is what I think is the one great want
in the British Army, and without it 50,000 Lord Eshers
would be no good in producing " Angel Gabriel " organ-
isations ! The Military system is rotten to the very core !
You want to begin ab ovo ! The best of the Generals
are even worse than the subalterns because they are more
hardened sinners ! I fear I shocked Ellison, but
he is simply first class and I most heartily congratulate
you on your selection. ... I really begin ^o feel I never
ought to have joined you as I have some very big jobs
on now which require incessant personal attention and
this must be my excuse for not coming up to see Girouard
this week. I have the new Civil Lord staying with me
and I have got to prevent him joining with a lot of asses
at the Admiralty, who want to throw half a million of
money in the gutter.

Nov. 19th, 1903.

On my return I found the first proofs of your three
papers. I have studied them with close care and interest.
There are some points of detail which puzzle me, but it
seems you are absolutely convincing on the main lines.
What I venture to emphasise is this : — We cannot reform
the Army Administration until it is laid down what it is
the Administration is going to Administer ! For instance,

' In the following selections, words between square brackets are not
part of the original letters.

166

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

the Citizen Army for Home Defence ! Are we going to
have it ? If so, then you will certainly want a Member of
the Board or Council to superintend it ! Again, I say,
the Regular Army (as distinguished from the Home Army
and the Indian Army) should be regarded as a projectile
to be fired by the Navy ! The Navy embarks it and lands
it where it can do most mischief ! — Thus, the Germans
are ready to land a large Military Force on the Cotentin
Peninsula in case of War with France and my German
Military Colleague at the Hague Conference told me this
comparatively small Military Force would have the effect
of demobilising half a million of men who would thus be
taken away from the German Frontier — they never know
where the devil the brutes are going to land ! Conse-
quently instead of our Military Manoeuvres being on
Salisbury Plain and its vicinity (ineffectually aping the
vast Continental Armies !) we should be employing
ourselves in joint Naval and Military Manoeuvres em-
barking 50,000 men at Portsmouth and landing them at
Milford Haven or Bantry Bay ! — This would make the
Foreigners sit up ! Fancy ! in the Mediterranean Fleet
we disembarked 12,000 men with guns in 19 minutes!
What do you think of that ! and we should hurry up the
soldiers ! No doubt there would be good-natured chaff !
Once we embarked 7,000 soldiers at Malta and took
them round and landed them elsewhere for practice, and
I remember having a complaint that the Bluejackets
said " Come on, you bloody lobsters ! Wake up ! "
However all the above en passant. I expect the
Prime Minister must have pretty good ideas now crys-
tallised as to how the Army should be constituted — let
us ask him for this at once — if he hasn't got it, let us
tell him we must have it, because as I said at starting,
you can't organise an administration without clearly
knowing what you are going to administer. This is a
hasty bit of writing but not a hasty thought.

167

MEMORIES

1903.

Nov. 2$th.

I send you two books — a more portly volume I hesitate
to send ! — Also I fear without some verbal explanation
you may not see the application to Military matters of
these purely Naval Notes, but they do apply in the
spirit if not in the letter ! For instance I had an over-
whelming confidence that every Officer and man in the
Mediterranean Fleet had also an overwhelming confidence
that we thoroughly knew all we had to do in case of war
in every conceivable eventuality ! Well ! that is the
confidence you also want in an Army ! Have you got it !

Dec. 2nd.

Here is a letter just come from Prince Louis of Bat-
tenberg illustrating what I was saying to you this morning
as to a Member of the Board of Admiralty however
junior in rank being accepted as a superior controlling
authority by all in rank above him. An Officer actually
at the moment serving under Prince Louis in the Admir-
alty itself being put over Prince Louis in the Admiralty
itself, and sending for him and giving him orders ! I
don't know that it would be possible to have a stronger
case to quote when by and by we have to defend or
rather have to lay down and define the status of the
Members of the New War Office Board. Inglefield, the
new Naval Lord, being a Junior Captain, will be sending
for Admiral Boys, Director of Transports, who is speci-
ally under him and who I rather think entered the service
before Inglefield was born.

Dec. 4th.

.... You are right about the Submarines !

** We strain at the gnat of perfection and swallow the
camel of unreadiness ^^^ and that permeates every branch
of Naval and Military Administration, forgetting the
homely proverb that " half a loaf is better than no

j68

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

bread ! " but please God ! ^^ the dauntless three " [Sir
Geo. Clarke, Lord Esher and Sir John Fisher] (as I see
we are now called) will change all that ! " We'll stagger
humanity " as old Kruger said !

Dec. 'jth.

Arnold- Forster [Secretary for War] has been here three
days and he is most cordially with us. I wish you had
been here with him. He places implicit trust in us. He
has shown me an outline of an excellent memorandum
proposing an immediate reduction of 300,000 men and
he will let me have a copy as soon as printed, also a
memorandum of his difficulties in the War Office. . . .
This is another proof of the value of the advice of my
Military Nicodemus (he is one of the Sanhedrin !) that
there must be an active '* clear-out " of the present
military gang, root and branch, lock, stock, and gunbarrel !
Sir John French and General Smith-Dorrien (lately
Adjutant-General in India) are names I have suggested
to Arnold-Forster as members of his new Board.

Dec. 11th.

.... Don't forget your phrase " the hieniiial fort-
nightly picnic " ! ifs splendid I That will fetch the mothers
of families and reconcile them to the Swiss system ! I
hope you won't lose any time in talking to the Prime
Minister and showing him the immense advantages that
will accrue from his turning over further matters to us
instead of dear Arnold-Forster " raising Cain " as he
surely will do ! It would be so easy to associate Sir
John French, Hildyard and Smith-Dorrien (very curious
that all these three Generals were first in the Navy and
got their early education there) with us for the further
matters.

Dec. lyth.

Another Military Nicodemus came to see me yesterday.
I had never met him before ! He occupies a high official

169

MEMORIES

position. He highly approved of you and me, " but he
had never heard of the third member of the Committee.
What a pity they had not put a soldier on the Committee !"
(How these Christians hate one another !) But the point
of his remarks was the present system of Army Promo-
tions, which he said was as iniquitous and baleful in its
influence as could be possibly conceived, and then he
illustrated by cases of certain officers made Generals.
My only object in writing this to you is Selborne having
spoken of the Admiralty method where the first Lord
has the Naval Members of the Board in consultation,
but he and his Private Secretary (who is always a Naval
Officer of note) have the real responsibility.

Dec. 2oth.

is and always has been drastic in his ideas of

military reform, and I cordially agree with him and
Stead agrees with me that the British Public loves a
root and branch reform. One remnant left of the old
gang or the organisations and you taint the whole new
scheme !

Don't fear about Arnold-Forster. He will come with
us all right — you are absolutely sound on the Patronage
question, but I would have the soldiers precisely on the
same footing as Tyrwhitt at the Admiralty [Private
Secretary. He was my Flag Captain] for detailed
reasons I will give you when we meet. It is an ideal
arrangement (the Private Secretary at Admiralty). He
has the power, he pulls the strings, he has no position,
he causes no jealousy, he talks to all the Lords as their
servant, and he manipulates them all and oils the machine
for his special master, the First Lord, to perpetrate a
job when necessary ! Make him a big-wig like an Official
Military Secretary, and all this goes — he becomes too
big for his boots !

170

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

Dec. 21 St.

... I've been bombarded by Stead. I tried to
boom him off but the scoundrel said if I didn't see him,
he would have to invent ! I pointed out to him my
metier was that of the mole ! Trace me by upheavals !
When you see the Admirals rise it's that d — d fellow Jack
Fisher taking the rise out of them ! So I implored Stead
to keep me out of the Magazine Rifle [this was my
name for The Reviezo of Reviezvs] or he will interfere
with my professional career of crime. So please use
your influence with him in the same direction. You and
Clarke are the two legitimate members of the Committee
to be trotted out, as you are both so well known. No
sailor is ever known. The King was awfully good about
this. He said " Sailors went all round the world but
never went in it " ! Stead is a very keen observer, as
you know. He said our Committee could do anything,
and that neither the Press nor Parliament nor the Public
would tolerate any Military opposition to us because the
whole Military hierarchy was utterly discredited from
top to bottom ; but he doubted The Times — / don't.
Further he expressed his firm belief there would be a
change of Government possibly at Easter but certainly
soon — if so we ought on that ground alone to '* dig out "
with our Report.

1903.
(No date.)

KnoUys was very much impressed by the possibilities
of the Submarine when he was down here. He saw them
to better advantage than you did as it was blowing half
a gale of wind with a good sea on when he saw the
evolutionising ! and it was very striking. I am working
subterraneously about the Submarines and there are
already " upheavals " in consequence.

171

MEMORIES

1904.

Jan. $th.

... I yesterday sent all my plans to French for
embarking the whole of his First Army Corps on Monday,
June 27th (Full Moon) at Portsmouth, and he is coming
here with his Chief Staff Officer, Sir F. Stopford, next
week, and we'll land him like Hoche's Army in Bantry
Bay ! [Sir John French commanded at Aldershot. The
War Office stopped this.l

1904.
Jan. lyth.

.... For the reason I have given you at length in
another letter I am convinced that French should be
I St Military Member and under him there should be
3 Directors (not Hieroglyphics such as A.Q.M.G.,
D.A.Q.M.G., A.Q.M.G. 2, etc., etc.).

Sir F. Stopford — Director of Intelligence and Mobilisa-
tion.

Gen. Grierson — Director of Training.
Gen. Maxwell — Director of Home Defence.

Also I still maintain that Smith-Dorrien and Plumer
should be the 2nd and 3rd Military Members, and
perhaps one young distinguished Indian Officer as 4th
Military Lord. Haig, Inspector-General of Cavalry in
India, should be brought home as the principal Director
under 2nd Military Lord. We must have youth and
enthusiasm, because it is only by the agency of young
and enthusiastic believers in the immense revolution
which must be carried out, that our scheme can bear
fruit. The first thing of all is that every one of the
" old gang " must be cleared out ! " lock, stock, and
gunbarrel, bob and sinker ! " The next is that everyone
of the new men inust be successful men, and must be young
and enthusiastic and cordial supporters of the new policy

172

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

— over every fellow's door at the War Office under the
new regime has got to be written in large letters : —
" No looking back. Remember Lot's wife ! "

1904.
(No date.)

The next pressing and important matter we have to
deal with is to get the right men as Members of the new
Army Council. Either you or Clarke have made a
splendid observation that a rotten system may be run
effectively by good men but duffers would spoil the
work of the Angel Gabriel \ ... If we don't get in men
who will enthusiastically adopt our scheme and work with
us, LET us THROW UP AT ONCE ! as wc shall only have an
awful fiasco and I (for one) don't want to go down with
my grey hairs to the grave sorrowing and discredited !
Therefore I suggest to you that we should agree on our
men and run them at once ! Like fighting the French
Fleet ! it's half the battle gained to take the offensive,
propose our men, give their advantages and ask them
(our enemies) what they have to say against them and
suggest every beastly thing we can against any likely
competitors — Selection by Disparagement ! I put for-
ward names in enclosed paper simply as a basis.

ist Military Member — Sir John French, because he
never failed in Africa (the grave of Military Reputations).
He is young and energetic, has commanded the ist Army
Corps so far with conspicuous success and has the
splendid gift of choosing the right men to work with him
{vide his Staft' in S. Africa, the best Staff out there) and
as ist Military Lord it would be his special function to
prepare the Army in the Field for fighting, and who
therefore better to command it when war breaks out,
as his functions then at the War Office would disappear
and be transferred to the Commander-in-Chief at the
seat of war — Further, he is an enthusiastic and out-and-
out believer in joint Naval and Military operations as the
proper species of manoeuvres for this Nation. In this

173

MEMORIES

belief he is almost solitary amongst all the Generals, who
all want to play at the German Army. " Plump for
French and Efficiency ! " Any vote given against Fretich
is a vote given for Kelly-Ke?iny instead I

2nd Military Member. — Smith-Dorrien. Has been
with great success in every campaign for the last 20
years, has been Adjutant-General in India (a much bigger
billet than Adjutaftt-General in London !). He is young
and energetic and is an extremely conciliatory and accom-
pHshed gentleman and would work the personnel of the
Army (which would be his chief function as the Second
Military Member) far better than some " safe " old man
because he is in touch with the young generation. He
took a Marine Officer of the Mediterranean Fleet as his
A.D.C. when appointed a Brigadier in South Africa,
because he considered him the ablest young officer in the
Malta Garrison ! Utterly shocking all the Military
Mandarins. " Vote for Smith-Dorrien and Progress ! "

" Every vote given against Smith-Dorrien is a vote for
\A lady who then " ran " the War Office !]

3rd Military Member. Supplies and Transport. —
General Plumer. The only man besides French that
never failed in anything he undertook in Africa ! They
say he has " the luck of the Devil," but the fact is that
*' the luck of the Devil " is wholly attributable to a
minute attention to anything that will ensure the success
of his (Satanic Majesty's) designs, and he leaves nothing
to chance ! Such is Plumer ! He also is young, energetic
and enthusiastic.

" Vote for Plumer and a full belly ! "

" Every vote given against Plumer is a vote given for
paper boots and no ammunition ! "

4th Military Member — General F. G. Slade, now
Inspector General of Garrison Artillery — has served in
six campaigns and always come out top : has been in the
Horse, Field and Garrison Artillery and commanded at
Gibraltar. He is young and energetic and enthusiastic

174

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

and will blow the trumpet of the Board (as well as his

own /).

" Vote for Slade and hitting the Target ! "

*' Every vote given against Slade will be a vote given in

favour of some d — d old woman.'' . . .

1904.
Jan. 31s/.

Post Office Telegraphs. Government Despatch No. . . .
" Await Arrival."

Lord Esher Windsor Castle.

In reply to your telegram just received our committee
manoeuvres commenced at Portsmouth on December 30
beating Moses by nine days as he took 40 days before he
got down from the Mount with his report but if you refer
to submarine manoeuvres I have last night put them off
to February twenty third to last three weeks from that
date stop I see we are accused of not giving credit to the
good motives that have always actuated the War Office
stop Why is the War Office like hell answer because it
is paved with good intentions Sir John Fisher Ports-
mouth.

[Not bad for an official telegram !]

1904.
Feb. ist.

... I really think it is of extreme importance that
you should be on the spot daily just now as without
doubt " wire-pulling " of the " Eve " order will be going
on. When the other day I met those three ladies on the
back stairs of the War Office all in picture hats and smell-
ing of White Rose or some other beastly thing, I thought
to myself *' How about Capua } " for really they were
very nice looking indeed. You know the story about
them having the entree to the War Office !

175

MEMORIES

1904.

Feb. 28th.

Best of Chairmen ! Snatch a moment to look through
enclosed ... as I am dead gone on starting the idea
of a general list of officers, and general uniform and early
entry and they will all go to sea, but I don't want to
mention that yet awhile ; it will come of itself when
3/5ths of every man-of-war's crew are soldiers ; that's
not many years hence and will bring the income tax
down to 3 pence in the pound ! Mark my words ! this
will come, but it's no use giving people premature shocks,
so let me keep it quiet now. My idea is to accHmatise
the chosen few to it first of all and then gradually spread
it about, and when Kitchener comes home he will see it
through. (He shares my view, I know.)

1904.

(?) March.

. . . Campbell-Bannerman told me last night he
intended to make a special point of the Secretary of
State's responsibility and power being unduly lessened,
and he would not admit that the new order of things
makes him the same as the First Lord of the Admiralty !
. . . To avoid the slightest misconception that may
arise as to the lessening of the parliamentary responsi-
bility of the Secretary of State for War by the formation
of the Army Council or of his supreme authority as the
Cabinet Minister responsible for the Army, it's only
necessary to reiterate and emphasise the statement that
he is absolutely in the same position as the First Lord
of the Admiralty, the patent constituting the Army
Council being absolutely similar to the Admiralty Patent
and no question has ever been raised nor is there any
doubt whatever of the reform and present responsibility
of the First Lord of the Admiralty as the Cabinet Minister
responsible for the Navy.

176

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

1904.

March 10th.

Just back from the English Channel with the Sub-
marines and am very enthusiastic ! . . . We really must
arrange to get the British Army to Sea somehow or other !
Yesterday all the mice died in their cages and two of the
crew fainted, but the young Lieutenant of the Submarine
didn't seem to care a d — n whether they all died so long
as he bagged the Battleship he was after, and he practically
got her and then he came up in his Submarine to breathe !
Depend on it we shall have more " Niles " and " Trafal-
gars " so long as we continue to propagate such " young
bloods " as this ! But see how splendid if we could shove
the same " ginger " into the young Military aspirants,
and they all came from the same schools ! but the whole
secret is to catch them very young and mould them while
they are then so plastic and receptive to be just what you
want them. Another submarine had an explosion which
made the interior " Hell " for some seconds (as the
Submarine was bottled up and diving to evade a De-
stroyer who had caught her with a hook) but the Sub-
marine Lieutenant saw them all d — d first before he
would rise up and be caught. Another young fire-eater
had his periscope smashed but bagged a battleship
nevertheless by coming up stealthily to blow just like a
beaver, and look round. It really is all lovely ! but what
I am writing about is — you must embark an Army Corps
every year and give them sea training.

[**The Army and Navy Co-operative Society."

I must here interpose a few words to explain that I
had submitted an elaborate method of increasing the
military efficiency of officers — first by very early entry
as in the Navy — having free or State education for them
— hence " Equal opportunity for all" : Officers' pay of

177 N

MEMORIES

all ranks to be sufficient for them to live on — and the
regimental system abolished — and the same system as in
the Navy by which military officers would serve in all
arms — ^Engineers, Artillery, Cavalry and Infantry, instead
of being familiar with but one part of their profession.
When the Sea Lords sit round the Board of Admiralty
they can talk about anything, because they've been in
every type of vessel and every branch of their Profession.
Again, in a good regiment the promotion is slow because
the officers stick to it. In a bad regiment the promotion
is rapid because everyone wants to leave it. Then,
finally, I submitted the idea of the Army and Navy being
incorporated in one great Service. There is no going
aloft now — a ship can be manned by soldiers with equal
efficiency as by sailors. You want nucleus crews thor-
oughly used to the ship and always in her, knowing all
her foibles. Brains — the Beef needn't be equally clever !
The military officers in the Peninsular War only i6
years old were splendid and they were numerous.]

1904.

March 20th. Telegram.

Suggest if Prime Minister takes no immediate action he
may be asked that the Committee in self-defence be
allowed to make correspondence public as already I am
hearing from influential friends that we are discredited
by having made exaggerated and unjustifiable statements
and that besides the scandalous and disparaging words
of the Secretary of State in the House of Commons that
the Prime Minister has more or less disavowed us by
the tenour of his remarks. ... I venture to suggest to
you that it is a great mistake for our Committee to be
made a catspaw to suit Cabinet susceptibilities or parlia-

178

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

mentary wirepulling and that we press for a full and
complete publication.

1904.
May 26th.

. . . Arnold-Forster spent several hours here with
me yesterday and he is coming again to-day discussing
his difficulties. I tell him he can't expect his Council
all at once to possess the attributes of the Board of
Admiralty (which he so intensely admires) which began
in 1619 ! They want to be educated. The individual
Members are far too subservient now and do not realise
they are administrative members and not Army Officers.
They must go about in plain clothes and a tall hat, and
order Field Marshals about like schoolboys ! . . .

1904.
June lyth.

... It would have been simply disastrous to have
had an increased Army Vote. Has Clarke ever come to
close quarters with you as to his project for getting the
Army Estimates down to 23 millions ? for that is really
the figure which represents the proportionate part of the
total sum which I make out to be available for the fighting'*
services, and unless some such figure can be arrived at
for the Army, I do not think the British PubHc will face
the reduction in the Navy Estimates which I see to he
possible with the increased efficiency ; because they will
rightly argue that the Navy is the ist, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
ad infinitum line of defence, and it is simply monstrous
therefore that the bloated Army should starve the essential
Navy. ... It is this Army Vote that absolutely blocks
me, because I am perfectly certain it will wreck us unless
it can be brought down to some such figure as 23 millions
at the outside. That N.-W. Frontier of India is the
bug-bear which has possessed the whole lot of our present
rulers ! and there is no " advocate of the devil " to plead
the other side. So I hope you will put that mind of

179 N 2

MEMORIES

yours to work to make the Prime Minister see his mission
to cut down the Army Vote to 23 milHons and then we
can go ahead and get that threepenny income tax we all
so long for and which we can get if we like !

1904.

I was with the Prime Minister from 12.30 to 4 p.m.
He was most pleasant and delightful but evidently didn't
see his way to making the reduction in the Army Vote
which is imperative. ... He and all the rest appear
stupefied by the Indian Frontier Bogey and the 100,000
men wanted. I gave him figures to show the Army had
been increased 60,000 odd men in 10 years. If he would
reduce them at once he would get nearly threepence off
the income tax and get rid of his recruiting difficulties.
The Auxiliary Forces 4I millions — absurd — the Volun-
teers 2 millions — still more absurd !

1904.
July 16th.

A.-F.'s scheme rotten ! You have hit the nail on the
head about expense. He had the remedy in the palm of
his hand ! He simply had to reduce what the Army had
unnecessarily increased in 10 years — the 60,000 officers
and men — and he got 6 millions sterling (including the
accessories) and solved the recruiting question ! . . .
3,700 Royal Engineers put on in 10 years and only 1/3
of them went to the war in S.A. ! the rest enjoying
themselves in civilian work ! and was there ever such
ineptitude as trying to make them into railway men,
electric engineers and sailors for submarine mines when
you have the real thing in abundance in the railway and
telegraph workmen of the country and fishermen for any
water work ? This is only one sample. Every blessed
item of the military organisation is similarly rotten !
Why ? Because the military system of entry and educa-
tion is rotten.

180

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

1904.

July 28th.

. . . We have a new scheme for a reorganisation of
the whole Admiralty and have got the Order in Council
for it ! The new scheme gives the First Sea Lord nothing
to do, except think and send for Idlers ! It also resuscitates
the old titles of Sea Lords dating from a.d. 1613, but
which some silly ass 100 years ago altered to Naval
Lords.

1904.
August lyih.

... I have got 60 sheets of foolscap written with all
the new Naval proposals and am pretty well prepared for
the fray on October 21st.

[Sir John Fisher became First Sea Lord of the Admir-
alty on October 21st (Trafalgar Day), 1904 ; and the
correspondence is scanty between that date and the
autumn of 1907.]

1907.
Sept 12th.

... I really can't understand Mr. Buckle giving

his head in this way in the columns of The Times \
but I suppose it " catches on " and makes the flesh creep
of the " old women of both sexes " (as Lord St. Vincent
called the " Invasion lot " in his day !) and his memorable
saying so infinitely more true now than then. When
asked his opinion of the possibility of an invasion, he
replied *' that if considered as a purely military operation
he was loth to offer an opinion but he certainly could
positively state it could never take place by sea ! "

1907.

Oct, yth. MOLVENO,

. . . My unalterable conviction is that the Committee
of Imperial Defence is tending rapidly to become a sort

181

MEMORIES

of Aulic Council and the man who talks glibly, utterly
irresponsible, will usurp the functions of the two men
who must be the *' Masters of the War " — the First Sea
Lord and the Chief of the General Staff. Make no
mistake — I don't mean those two men are to be Dic-
tators, but the Government says : " Do so and so ! "
These are the two executive Officers. ... In regard to
the ** Invasion Bogey " about which I am now writing
to you, how curious it is that from the German Emperor
downwards their hearts were stricken with fear that we
were going to attack them. . . . Here is an interview
between Beit and the German Emperor given me at
first hand, immediately on Beit's return from Berlin.

Beit : " Your Majesty is very greatly mistaken in
supposing that any feeling exists in England for war
with Germany. I know both Mr. Balfour and Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman are absolutely averse to any
such action. I know this of my own personal knowledge.

The Emperor : *' Yes, yes, but it doesn't matter whether
either of them is Prime Minister or what party is in
power. Fisher remains ! thafs the vital fact ! I admire
Fisher. I say nothing against him. If I were in his
place I should do all that he has done (in concentrating
the British Navy against Germany) and I should do all
that / kiiozo he has it in his mind to do. Isvolsky, the
Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, holds the same
opinion."

And yet Mr. Leo Maxse gibbets Sir John Fisher every
month in the National Review as a traitor to his
country and a panderer to Germany, who " ought to be
hung at his own yard arm ! "

1907.
Nov. 28th.

Can you manage to be at my room at Admiralty at
11.30 sharp to-day (Saturday) to see arrangements for
swallowing the German Mercantile Marine, and other
War Apparatus ? [i.e. *' The Spider's Web "].

182

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

1907.
Dec. 12th.

... I hope the Admiralty memorandum is to your
satisfaction — of course it is only the first instalment.
What fascinates me is that the Committee as a whole
don't seem to take the point that the whole case of
Roberts rests on an absolute Naval surprise, which is
really a sheer impossibility in view of our organised
information.

1908.
Jan. 1st.

... I had a tete-a-tete lunch with Winston Churchill ;
he unexpectedly came to the Admiralty and I was
whirled off with him to the Ritz. I had two hours with
him. He is very keen to fight on my behalf and is

simply kicking with fury at & Co., but I've told him

the watchword is *' Silence." He is an enthusiastic
friend certainly ! He told me he would get six men on
both sides to join in con amore, F. E. Smith, &c., &c.
I forget the other names. It was rather sweet : he said
his penchant for me was that I painted with a big brush !
and was violent ! — I reminded him that even " The
Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent
take it by force " — vide yesterday's Second Lesson.

1908.
Jan. lyih.

Secret. ... I rather want to keep clear of Defence
Committee till Morocco is settled, as I don't want to
disclose my plan of campaign to anyone^ not even C.-B.
himself. The only man who knows is Sir Arthur Wilson,
and he's as close as wax ! The whole success will depend
upon suddenness and unexpectedness, and the moment I
tell anyone there's an end of both ! ! ! So just please
keep me clear of any Conference and personally I would
sooner the Defence Committee kept still. I m seeing

183

MEMORIES

about the Transports. I started it about 7 weeks ago
and got 3 of my best satellites on it. . . . So you'll
think me a villain of the deepest dye !

1908.

(?) Feh. gth.

. . . We want both a re-distribution as well as a
re-organisation of the Army — and the (comparatively)
small Regular Army should be based on the system of
" Nucleus Crews " — that is to say the whole body of
Officers are provided and 2/5ths (or the expert) part of
the crew, and the other 3/5ths of the Army you get
from the outside Army by whatever name you like to
call it — National Army, or Citizen Army, or Lord
Lieutenant's Army.

1908.
Feb. 21st.

... Secret. Tirpitz asked a mutual civilian friend
living in Berlin to enquire very privately of me whether
I would agree to limiting size of guns and size of ships,
as this is vital to the Germans, who can't go bigger than
the Dreadnought in guns or size. I wrote back by
return of post yesterday morning '* Tell him I'll see him
d — d first ! " (Them's the very words /) I wonder what
Wilhelm will say to that if Tirpitz shows him the letter !

1908.
Apr. igth.

... I got a note to say the King wanted to see me
this afternoon at 3 p.m. ... Private. I got 3
letters from the King at Biarritz, all extremely cordial
and communicative and unsought by me. I mention
this to prove to you his kindly feelings and support. . . .
When I met the King on arrival he said I was to be sure
and see him as he had something serious to say to me.
I suppose I was with him more than an hour, and he was
as cordial and friendly as ever ; and this was the serious

184

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

thing—" that I was Jekyll and Hyde ! Jekyll in being
successful at my work at the Admirahy — but Hyde as a
failure in Society ! That I talked too freely and was
reported to say (which of course is a lie) that the King
would see me through anything ! That it was bad for
me and bad for him as being a Constitutional Monarch ;
if the Prime Minister gave me my conge, he couldn't
resist it, &c.,&c." . . . I told the King that if I had never
mentioned His Majesty's name in my life, precisely the
same thing would be said out of sheer envy of His Majesty
being kindly disposed, and it could not be hid that the
King had backed up the First Sea Lord against all kinds
of opposition — As a matter of fact I never do go into
Society, and only dine out when I'm worried to meet
the King, and I'm not such a born idiot as to have said
any such thing as has been reported to the King (it is
quite likely someone else has said it I). Well he left that
(having unburdened his mind) and smoked a cigar as
big as a capstan bar for really a good hour afterwards,
talking of everything from China to Peru, not excluding
The Times article on himself. ... Oh ! he said
something of how I worked the Press, but I didn't follow
that up. No one knows, except perhaps yourself, that
unless I had arranged to get the whole force of pubUc
opinion to back up the Naval Revolution it would have
been simply impossible to have carried it through suc-
cessfully, for the vested interests against me were enor-
mous and the whole force of Naval opinion was dead
against me. But I did venture one humble remark to
the King : " Has anyone ever been able to mention to
Your Majesty one single little item that has failed in the
whole multitude of reforms introduced in the last 3J
years ? " No ! he said. No one had ! So I left it there.
... If the Angel Gabriel were in my place he would be
falsely accused. I'm only surprised that the King hasn't
been told worse things — perhaps he has ! " Let him that
thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.'' I always

185

MEMORIES

have that thought, and hope the King will have a cottage
somewhere in Windsor Forest or elsewhere which he
will kindly give me when it happens, so that I can come
over and have a yarn with you !

1908.
May $th.

4.15 a.m. The Early Bird ! ! . . . Yesterday, with all
Sea Lords present, McKenna formally agreed to 4
Dreadnoughts and if necessary 6 Dreadnoughts next
year (perhaps the greatest triumph ever known !) . . .
He tells me Harcourt for certain will resign on it . . .
and he is paring down the money with a view to Supple-
mentary Estimates. . . . This is what I suggest to you
to impress on Lloyd George : Let there be no mistake
about the two Keels to one in Dreadnoughts ! Let Lloyd
George reassure McKenna and tell him to have no fear
— it doesn't affect next year, as McKenna consents to
4 or even 6 ; but it does affect the year after, and the
Admiralty Finance should be arranged accordingly and
not deplete next year at expense of year after. I wonder
if this is all clear to you — ^that McKenna is going to give
us the numbers for next year all right. Shove in again
the great fact — The Navy and Army Estimates not far
different in magnitude, and yet the Army not big enough
to fight Bulgaria, and the Navy can take on all the Navies
of the world put together. — " Ut veniant omnes ! ! ! " —
** Let 'em all come ! " You might tell Lloyd George he
can rely on my parsimony.

1908.
Sept. 8th.

..." The heart untravelled fondly turns to home."
— We have no poets nowadays like Pope, Goldsmith and
Gay — only damned mystical idiots like Browning and
Tennyson that want a dictionary and the Differential-
Calculus sort of mind to understand what they are
driving at !

186

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

. . . I sat several times [on a recent visit abroad] between
Stolypin, the Russian Prime Minister, and Isvolsky, the
Foreign Secretary. I didn't begin it, but Stolypin said
to me *' What do you think we want most ? " He fancied
I should answer " So many battleships, so many cruisers,
&c., &c.," but instead I said : " Your Western Frontier
is denuded of troops and your magazines are depleted.
Fill them up, and then talk of Fleets ! " Please see en-
closure from Kuropatkin's secret report : " The foundation
of Russia's safety is her Western boundary ! ! ! '^ . . .
Have you seen Monsieur Rousseau (I think is his name)
in Le Temps ? I had an extract of it, and put it
aside to send you, but alas ! it has gone. " Procrastina-
tion is the thief of good intentions " — which is not so
good as '' Punctuality is the curse of comfort." But the
good Frenchman (like Monsieur Hanotaux before him)
is lost in admiration of what moved Mahan to his pungent
saying that Garvin seized on with the inspiration of
genius — " that 88 per cent, of the English guns were
trained on Germany ! "... By the way, I've got Sir
Phihp Watts into a new Indomitable that will make
your mouth water when you see it I (and the Germans
gnash their teeth !)

1908.
Dec.

The King has sent me a dear letter, and adds '* Don't
print this ! " Isn't he a sweet ? What wonderful friends
I have ! It's a marvel ! All I do is to kick their shins.

1908.
(No date.)

... I am going to ask you to reconsider your sup-
plementary paper herewith. I can't find that the
Admiralty have admitted that 24,000 men would ever
start off together as two raids of 1 2 ,000 each . I personally
have expressed my decided opinion (I think at the
7th meeting) [of the Committee of Imperial Defence] to

187

MEMORIES

the contrary. Indeed, I am emphatically of opinion
that no raid of any kind [that is, landing of troops] is feasible
with all our late developments, which are developing
further every day {e.g. we have our wireless on top of
Admiralty Building and are communicating with the
Scilly Islands now and shortly I hope Gibraltar and so
certainly to every point of the German coast where we
shall have Wireless Cruisers all over the place. {Not a
dog will wag its tail without being reported.) So don't let
us get a scare over 24,000 men coming unobserved.
One lot of 12,000 can be put in as the Hmit ; but my
suggestion is — leave out numbers ^ and simply say as a
precautionary measure for the confidence of the country,
ifs a good safe arbitrary standard to lay down that two
Divisions of Regular Troops are always to be left in the
Country just in the same way as laid down at the Ad-
miralty that the Home Fleet is not for Service abroad.

1909.
Jan. 26th.

. . . The Admiralty hear (by wireless every moment)
what all the Admirals and Captains are saying to each
other anywhere in Europe and even over to the coasts
of America.

1909.
March i$th.

Private & Secret & Personal. I have just finished in
these early hours a careful re-study of your paper E. 5
(which I love) and the criticisms thereon by French and
the General Staff. I dismiss French's criticism as being
that of a pure correct Cavalry expert and not dealing with
the big questions. The General Staff criticism is on the
other hand the thin end of the insidious wedge of our
taking part in Continental War as apart absolutely from
Coastal Military Expeditions in pure concert with the
Navy — expeditions involving hell to the enemy because
backed by an invincible Navy (the citadel of the Military

188

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

force). I don't desire to mention these expeditions and
never will, as our military organisation is so damnably
leaky ! but it so happens for two solid hours this morning
I have been studying one of these of inestimable value
only involving 5,000 men, and some guns, and horses
about 500 — a mere fleabite ! but a collection of these
fleabites would make Wilhelm scratch himself with fury !
However, the point of my letter is this — Ain't we d — d
fools to go on wasting our very precious moments in
these abstruse disquisitions on this line and that or the
passage of the Dutch German Frontier River and whether
the bloody fight is to be at Rheims or Amiens, until the
Cabinet have decided the great big question raised in
your E. 5 : Are we or are we not going to send a British
Army to fight on the Continent as quite distinct and apart
from Coastal Raids and seizures of Islands, etcetera, which
the Navy dominate ? Had not the Prime Minister better
get this fixed up before we have any more discussions
such as foreshadowed to-morrow ?

1909.
March 21st.

... It won't do to resign on a hypothesis but on a
fact ! All is in train for the 8 Dreadnoughts ! and as
Grey says when the day is reached to sign the contracts
and then a veto — then is the day to go in a great company
and not one alone ! ... I am vehemently urged to squash
my " malignant stabbers-in-the-back " by making a
speech somewhere and saying as follows — but I won't —
it would be an effectual cold douche to the 8 Dreadnoughts
a year ! I might say

" The unswerving intention of 4 years has now cul-
minated in two complete Fleets in Home Waters, each
of which is incomparably superior to the whole German
Fleet mobilised for war. Don't take my word ! Count
them, see them for yourselves ! You will see them next
June. This can't alter for years, even were we supinely

189

MEMORIES

passive in our building ; but it won't alter because we
will have 8 Dreadnoughts a year. So sleep quiet in your
beds ! "

And I might also add : —

*' The Germans are not building in this feverish haste
to fight you 1 No ! it's the daily dread they have of a
second Copenhagen, which they know a Pitt or a Bis-
marck would execute on them !

" Cease building or I strike ! "

1909.

March 20th.

. . . Grey rubbed in two great points yesterday : —
(i) Lack of information as to German acceleration

will be acted on as if acceleration were a fact,
(ii) The S this year won't affect next year.

1909.

June i$th.

. . . Yes, we made a good job of Saturday ; but the
two most noticeable things of all were never noticed : —

(i) The swarm of Destroyers going 20 knots past the
Dreadnought found themselves suddenly confronted by
a lot of passenger steamers and yachts, which at the last
moment got right in their way — the accidents might have
been intense — but the young Destroyer commanders
kept their nerve and their speed and scootled through
the eye of the needle just grazing them all. It was
splendid to see and made my heart warm ! (N.B. — A
Press delegate — the Toronto Globe y I think, seized
me by the arm and said, " Sir^ I see the glint of battle in
your eye .' ")

(ii) I saw the Speaker of the House of Commons being
bundled into a " char-a-banc " holding 24 other pro-
miscuous persons by a bluejacket. Truly a democratic
sight !

190

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

1909.

July yd.

. . . The latest development is that somebody has a pile
of my private letters to various people — not printed or
typewritten but the original letters, so he says, which he
is going to produce unless I agree to resign in October !
Some of the letters stolen and some given (so I am told !).
However " hot " they may be I don't regret a word I
ever wrote, and I believe my countrymen will forgive me.
Anyhow I won't be blackmailed ! There was murder in
the King's eye when I told him (but I didn't tell him
all !) ... 7 am going to fight to the finish ! Heaven bless
you for your help.

1909.
August yd.

. . . The Mouse was able to help the Lion yesterday
as the King got on to you in regard to vile attempts of
jealousy as to your being on the Defence Committee.
The King is certainly A i in sticking to his friends ! but
you have always said this yourself to me when I have
been down on my luck ! AH has gone most splendidly
in all ways and the King is enormously gratified at the
magnificent show of the Fleet to put before the Emperor
of Russia. I told the Emperor it was a fine avenue ! —
18 miles of ships — the most powerful in the world and
none of them more than 10 years old !

1909.
August 2yth.

[A letter on the Beresford Report speaks of two ** base
innuendoes," of which the second is]

(ii) The " suggest io falsi " that the Admiralty had been
wanting in Strategical Thought — whereas we had effected
the immense advance of establishing the Naval War

191

MEMORIES

College and gave evidence of practical strategy in effecting
the concentration of our Fleets instead of the previous
state of dispersion. No such redistribution of strategical
force since the days of Noah !

But worse still — Not one word of commendation for
the Admiralty for its unparalleled work in gaining fighting
efficiency and instant readiness for war by the institution
of the Nucleus Crew system — the introduction of Battle
practice — the unexampled advance in Gunnery (the
" Invincible " with her 12-inch guns hitting the target
I /14th her own size 15 times out of iS at 5 miles, she
herself going 20 knots and the target also moving at an
unknown speed and unknown course) and getting rid of
160 vessels that could neither fight nor run away — Not
one word of appreciation of all this by the Committee I
and yet they had the practical result before them in the
manoeuvres of 374 vessels manoeuvring in fogs and shoals
without a single mishap or a single defect and 96 Sub-
marines and Torpedo Craft on the East Coast making
Invasion ridiculous ! No — it has been a bitter disappoint-
ment— more bitter because each of the five members of
the Committee so expressive to me and to others of the
complete victory of the Admiralty. Cowards all I It
is the one redeeming feature that The Times came
down decidedly on the right side of the fence ! the one
and only paper that got at the kernel of the matter.
Discipline ! where art thou now after this Report ?

1909.
Sept. i^th.

. . . What pleases me most is the King having sent
for you, and your ij hours' breakfast and afterwards
driving with him, because as no doubt you know,

(and some others) started a propaganda against

you which fell absolutely flat and it's a rattHng
good thing the King making much of you in this way
as it gets about and without any question the King now
largely moulds the public will ! As to your letter in regard

192

I •

The Funeral of King Edward VII.
Lord Fisher as Principal Aide-de-Camp.

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

to myself, it of course gives me great joy that the King
gives me his blessing and also dear Knollys's wonderful
fidelity to me is a miracle ! (I always think of an incident
long ago when he calmly ignored a furious effusion of
mine to the King and put the letter in the fire without
saying a word to me till long afterwards ! I all the time
joyful — thinking I had done splendidly !)

[After a forecast of a coming change in the Government
the letter goes on]

You will at once say : What is the First Sea Lord
going to do ? Answer — Nothing ! It is the only course
to follow ! I have thought it all out most carefully and
decided to keep absolutely dumb. When a new Admiralty
patent appears in the London Gazette without my name
in it, I pack up and walk out and settle down in the
Tyrol. Temperature 70° in the shade and figs ten a
penny and wear out all my white tunics and white
trowsers ! McKenna, to whom I am absolutely
devoted, may force my hand to help him. In view of
all he has risked for me (he was practically out of the
Cabinet for 24 hours at one time ! This is a fact) I am
ready to go to the stake for him ; but if he is well advised
he also will be dumb. . . . I am so surprised how utterly
both the Cabinet and the Press have failed to see the
" inwardness " of the new " Pacific Fleet " ! I had a
few momentous words in private with Sir Joseph Ward
(the Prime Minister of New Zealand). He saw it I It
means eventually Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the
Cape (that is South Africa) and India running a complete
Navy ! We manage the job in Europe. They'll manage
the job ... as occasion requires out there ! The very
wonderful thing is that only dear old Lord Kelvin and the
First Sea Lord at the first wanted the Battle Cruiser
type alone and not " Dreadnoughts " ; but we had a
compromise, as you know, and got 3 Indomitables with

193 o

MEMORIES

the Dreadnoughts ; and all the world now has got
" Indomitables " on the brain ! Hip ! Hip ! Hurrah !

1909.
Dec. 2$th.

. . . Wilson and 1 have talked a lot about our War
plan for the Navy. You know he told the Defence Com-
mittee that only he and I knew of the War Plan, which
is quite true and it was the same when his fleet was joined
with mine when South African War was in progress.
He would sooner die than disclose it. (God bless Sir
Arthur Wilson !)

1910.
Jan. 2^rd,

Of course no question as to strategic merits of a Canal,
and it ought originally to have been the scheme instead
of Rosyth, but now is it possible to make the zolte-
face ? / fear not ! I got Rosyth delayed 4 years as
NOT being the right thing or the right place and hoping
for our Kiel Canal ; but though I succeeded in the delay,
alas ! I did not in the substitution. However, I will see
Hankey as you suggest. Yes, I'm quite happy, and my
cry is NOT *' a Berlin ! " . . . I've got some war charts
that would make your mouth water !

[Sir John Fisher left the Admiralty on his birthday,
Jan. 25th, 1910, and was raised to the Peerage.]

igiO. KiLVERSTONE HaLL,

February 2nd. Thetford.

... I've just got here from Cheshire, where for days
running I've had Paradise. 3 lovely girls in the house, a
splendid ball room and music always on hand ! 3 young
Guardsmen there, but I held my own !

Dancing till 4 a.m. took it out of me a bit, but it
revivified me and I renewed my strength like the Eagle !
... I hope the King talked politics with McKenna,

194

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

who is very acute and would sacrifice himself for the
King. Didn't you think McKenna excellent, the night
he dined with me, as to the course the King should pur-
sue ? You see he knows so exactly how the Cabinet
will be actuated. . . .

There are great risks. Both poUtical sides unscrupu-
lous. ...

P.S. — Wasn't it the Emperor Diocletian who doffed
the Imperial Purple to plant cabbages ? and d — d fine
cabbages, no doubt ! So don't blackguard me for leaving
the Admiralty of my own free will, to plant roses !

1910.
Feb. iSih.

. . . Things look ugly. . . . However, I'm a pure
outsider ! There will be desperate efforts to sup-
plant Wilson, so I hear from trustworthy quarters.
But McKenna will be the real loss to the Navy.
The sacred fire of efficiency burns brightly in him !
and he's a born fighter and a good hater, which I love
(as Dr. Johnson did) with all my heart. You really
must come here when the weather is nicer — it's lovely !
I've never known till now what joy there is in Nature.
Even beauteous woman fades in the comparison ! I've
just seen the wild swans flying over the Lake ! " The
world forgetting — By the world forgot ! " is appropriate
to me now ! ... I've just thought of a lovely Preamble
for my approaching'* Midshipman's Vade-Mecum " . . .
I rather think it's Blackie, though perhaps not his words :

** Four Things for a Big Life
I. A great Inspiration
II. A great Cause

III. A great Battle

IV. A great Victory

Having got those 4 things then you can preach the
Gospel of Rest and Build an Altar to Repose."

195 ^ 2

MEMORIES

1910.

March 14th.

... I lunched with Asquith, he was more than cordial !
How funny it is that I did infinitely more for the Con-
servatives than for the Radicals, and yet the Radicals
have given me all I have got and the Conservatives have
only given me abuse and calumny !

The Radicals gave me my Pension and a Peerage,
and yet I increased the Radical estimates nearly ten
millions ! I decreased the estimates 9 millions and
reduced prospective charges by nineteen millions sterling
for the Conservatives, and they never lifted even a little
finger to help me, but on the contrary have heaped dung-
hill abuse on me ! How do you explain this ?

McKenna, whose life has been a burden on my account,
gives me a thing that would do for an Ascot Gold Cup
with the inscription I enclose — luckily it's in Latin or I
dare not let it be seen ! (The Craven Scholar writes
to me it's the best Latin he ever read in his life !) I
wouldn't write all this to anyone else, but is it not all
of it phenomenally curious ? Well, longo intervallo I took
your advice and seized an opportunity which called for
my communicating with Winston, and he sent me by
return of post a most affectionate letter and says I am
the one man in the world he really loves ! (Well ! I
really love him because he's a great Fighter.) What a
joke if you, I and George Clarke were put on to reform
the House of Lords !

1910.
March 24th.

I sent you a telegram from Ely on my way down (I
caught my train by J a minute !) as my cogitations im-
pelled me to suggest to you that Asquith obviously does

not see the fallacy of 's reasoning, which as you very

acutely observed would kill the Defence Committee as
a whole in its guiding, but not its administrative or
executive power, which are non-existent and inimical

196

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

to its existence. But its " guiding " power is England's
all-in-all, if only its sufficiency and efficiency could be
digested.

I had an immense talk with McKenna. . . . He was
'* dead on " for your Committee. Of course the Ideal
was your being President, but I suppose the *' Shifting
Man " as President, according to the subject and the
Department concerned, has its merits and advantages.

1910.
April 8th.

Old Stead's letter in Standard on 2 keels to i is
unsurpassable ! It ought to be circulated in millions as
a leaflet ! . . . What d — d fools the Tories are not to
swallow it whole — the 2 keels to i ! ... I told " the
Islanders " secretly I could do more as the " mole,"
so not to put my name down — (The Mole is my metier !
only to be traced by upheavals !) Get Stead's letter
sent all over the Nation as a leaflet.

I am to meet you on April 19th, Suez Canal.

I don't know Wilson's views. These are mine : —

General principle : The Admiralty should never engage
itself to lock up a single vessel even — not even a torpedo-
boat, or submarine — anywhere on any consideration what-
ever. The whole principle of Sea fighting is to be free to
go anywhere with every d — d thing the Navy possesses.
The Admiralty should engage to do their best but to
reserve entire freedom of action. The responsibility of
the Suez Canal therefore cannot be theirs. If this
clashes with your views you had better cancel me on
Committee, for I'll fight like Hell for the above vital
War Principle !

1910.
April 2Sth.

I congratulate you on the latest by *' Historicus " ;
but do you sufficiently intensify the intolerable tyranny

197

MEMORIES

of the permanent Tory majority in the Lords that has
meant a real single chamber government for so many
years ? The Radicals are on the win and no one can
stop it. We exaggerate the consequences. The silly
thing is to have a General Election. Who gains ? Every-
body loses ! Certainly the Tories won't win. Tariff
Reform dead. Winston's last speeches have been very
high class, especially where he shows how far greater
issues are settled by the Government than anything
appertaining to legislation without the House of Lords
having a voice and we have always taken those risks in
the past without a thought !

What is this about Kitchener hoisting out French as
Inspector General ? Anything to get Kitchener out of
England !

[King Edward VII. died on May 6th, 19 lo.]

1910.
May.
{Saturday.)

What an inexpressible sorrow ! . How we both know
the loss ! What a great National Calamity ! And
personally what can I say ? What a splendid and stead-
fast friend ! No use saying any more to each other — is
it } I really feel heart broken !

1910.

May 24th. KiLVERSTONE Hall.

... I really can't get over the irreparable
loss. / thijik of nothing else I Treves gave me a
wonderful account of the King's last day. I rather
think the King was coming to see me here, had he
remained at Sandringham. The Queen [Queen Alexandra]
has been very sweet to me. She stopped to notice me
going up the steps of St. George's Chapel and so did her
Sister [the Empress Marie]. I appreciated it very much
— but most of all my interview with her. . . . She told
me she would come here to see me and how the King

198

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

had told her about me being disappointed at her not
having been to Kilverstone before. You'll think me
morbid writing like this.

I dined with Asquith, McKenna and George Murray
last week in London. If the Tories weren't such
d_d stupid idiots I should rejoice at things being certain
to go well. ... My day is past. I have no illusions.
You will enjoy the roses I've planted when you come
here. How one's life does change !

1910.
May 2'jth.

. . . The Commonwealth Government [of Australia]
have just sent a confidential telegram to Sir George Reid
to ask me to go as their Guest to advise on the Navy.
I've declined. I'd go as Dictator but not as Adviser.
Also they have commenced all wrong and it would
involve me in a campaign I intend to keep clear of with
the soldiers. By the wording of the telegram I expect
further pressure. Besides what a d— d fine thing to
get me planted in the Antipodes ! [Kitchener and the
Australians, in drawing up their scheme of defence,
forgot that Australia was an island. So do we here m
England.]

1910.
June yih.

... I can't shake off my sense of loss in the King's
death. Though personally it practically makes no differ-
ence of course — yet I feel so curious a sense of isolation
— which I can't get over — and no longer seem to care a
d — n for anything ! . . .

As you told me, it was miraculous I left the Admiralty
when I did ! It was the nick of time ! A. K. Wilson
is doing splendidly and is unassailable. I had much
pressure to emerge the other day, but I won't, nor have
I the heart now.

199

MEMORIES

1910.

August 5th. KiLVERSTONE HaLL.

McKenna has just been here on his second visit (so
he Hked the first, I suppose ! I mention this as an
inducement to you to come !) He has shewn me various
secret papers. He is a real fighter ^ and the Navy Haters
will pass over his dead body ! If our late Blessed Master
was alive I should know what to do ; but I feel my hands
tied now. Perhaps a kindly Providence put us both on
the Beach at the right moment ! Who knows ?

" The lights begin to twinkle on the rocks " .' I've told
and others that the 2 keels to i policy is of in-
estimable value because it eliminates the United States
Navy, which never ought to he mentioned — criminal folly
to do so — Also it gives us such an ample margin as to
allow for discount !

The insidious game is to have an enquiry into
Ship Designs, which means delay and no money !

Two immense episodes are doing Damocles over the
Navy just now. I had settled to shove my colleagues
over the precipice about both of them, but as you know I
left hurriedly to get in Wilson — so incomparably good !
We pushed them over the precipice about Water Tube
Boilers, the Turbine, the Dreadnought, the Scrapping
[of ships that could neither fight nor run away], the
Nucleus Crews — the Redistribution of the Fleet, &c., &c.
In each and all it was Athanasius contra mundum,
but each and all a magnificent success ; so also these
two waiting portents full of immense developments.

I. Oil Engines and internal combustion, about which
I so dilated at our dinner and bored you. Since that
night (July nth) Bloom & Voss in Germany have received
an order to build a Motor Liner for the Atlantic Trade.
No engineers, no stokers, and no funnels, no boilers ! Only
a d — d chauffeur ! The economy prodigious ! as the
Germans say " Kolossal billig " ! But what will it be
for War ? Why ! all the past pales before the prospect ! ! I

200

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

I say to McKenna : ** Shove 'em over the precipice !
Shove ! " But he's all alone, poor devil !

The Second is that this Democratic Country won't
stand 99 per cent, at least of her Naval Officers being
drawn from the " Upper Ten." It's amazing to me that
anyone should persuade himself that an aristocratic
Service can be maintained in a Democratic State. The
true democratic principle is Napoleon's : '* La carrier e
ouverte aux talents ! " The Democracy will shortly
realise this, and there will be a dangerous and mischievous
agitation. The secret of successful administration is the
intelligent anticipation of agitation. Again I say to
McKenna ** Shove ! II " Shove them over the preci-
pice ^ I have the plan all cut and dried.

The pressure won't come from inside the Navy but
from outside — an avalanche like a.d. 1788 (the French
Revolution) — and will sweep away a lot more than
desirable ! It is essentially a political question rather
than a Naval question proper. It is all so easy, only
the d — d Tory prejudices stand in the way ! But I
gave you a paper about all this printed at Portsmouth,
so won't bore you with more. I am greatly inclined to
leave the Defence Committee and move out in the open
on these two vital questions on the Navy. The one
affects its fighting efficiency as much as the other. I
am doing the mole, and certain upheavals will appear
shortly, but it wants a Leader in the open !

1911.
May 1st.

... I want you to think over getting the Prime
Minister to originate an enquiry for a great British
Governmental Wireless Monopoly, or rather I would say
" English Speaking " Monopoly ! No one at the
Admiralty or elsewhere has as yet any the least idea of
the immense revolution both for Peace and War purposes
which will be brought about by the future development
of wireless! . . . The point is that this scheme wants to be

201

MEMORIES

engineered by the Biggest Boss, i.e. the Prime Minister.
. . . Believe me the wireless in the future is the soul and
spirit of Peace and War, and therefore must be in the
hands of the Committee of Defence ! Yoii can't cut
the air I You can cut a telegraph cable !

1911.

June 2^th. ^ Bad Nauheim.

. . . You will see in the Standard of May 29th the
London Correspondent of the Irish Times lets out
about Lord Fisher and war arrangements, but as the
Standard in the very same issue makes this announce-
ment in big type : " We (Great Britain) are in the satis-
factory position of having twice as maiiy Dreadnoughts
in commission as Germany and a number greater by one
unit than the whole of the rest of the world put together ! "
I don't think there is the very faintest fear of war ! How
wonderfully Providence guides England ! Just when
there is a quite natural tendency to ease down our Naval
endeavours comes Agadir !

" Time and the Ocean and some Guiding Star
In High Cabal have made us what we are ! "

" The Greatest Power on ' Airth,' " as Mr. Champ
Clarke would say ! (You ought to meet Champ Clarke.)
He is likely to succeed Taft as President, but I put my
money on Woodrow Wilson. He is Bismarck and Moltke
rolled into one ! . . . I need not say that I remain in
the closest bonds with the Admiralty. I never did a
wiser thing than coming abroad and remaining abroad
and working like a mole. / shall ?iot return till July, 19 12.
Most damnable efforts against me continue in full swing :
nevertheless like Gideon — ** Faint yet pursuing " is my
motto. . . . And yet because in 1909 at the Guildhall
when our Naval supremacy had been arranged for in
the Navy Estimates of the year I said to my countrymen
** Sleep quiet in your beds ! " I was vehemently vilified
with malignant truculence, and only yesterday I got a

202

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER *

letter from an Aristocrat of the Aristocrats, saying he had
heard it stated by a Man of Eminence the day before
that I was in the pay of Germany ! It is curious that I
can't get over the personal great blank I feel in the death
of our late blessed Friend King Edward ! There was
something in the charm of his heart that still chains one
to his memory — some magnetic touch !

1911.

Sept 20th. Lucerne.

Through dancing with a sweet American (and indeed
they are truly delightful, especially if you have the same
partner all the evening!) I hear via a Bremen multi-million-
aire that though the most optimistic official assurances of
peace emanate from Berlin yet there is the most extreme
nervousness amongst the German business men because
of the revelation to them of the French power both
financially and fightingly, so unexpected by them. I
suppose if a Pitt or a Palmerston had now been guiding
our destinies we should have war. They would say any
Peace would be a bad Peace because of the latent damnable
feeling in Germany against England. It won't be France
any more, it will be England that will be the red rag for
the German Bull ! And as we never were so strong as
at present, then Pitt & Co. would say the present is the
time to fight. Personally I am confident of Peace. I
happen to know in a curious way (but quite certainly)
that the Germans are in a blue funk of the British Navy
and are quite assured that 942 German merchant steamers
would be *' gobbled up " in the first 48 hours of war,
and also the d — 'd uncertainty of whe7i and zvhere a hundred
thousand troops embarked in transports and kept " in
the air " might land ! N.B. — There's a lovely spot only
90 miles from Berlin ! Anyhow they would demobilize
about a million German soldiers ! But I am getting
" off the line " now ! I really sat down to write and tell
you of a two days' visit paid to me here by the new

203

MEMORIES

American Ambassador to Berlin. He is a faithful friend.
He is very^ very pro- English (he has such a lovely daughter
whom I have been dancing with, a perfect gem ! if she
don't turn Wilhelm's head I'll eat my hat !). My friend
was American Ambassador at Constantinople when I was
Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet — ^you
know it was a ticklish time then, at the worst of the Boer
War and the British Navy kept the Peace ! That old
Sultan [Abdul Hamid] told me so, and gave me a
500-guinea diamond star, bless him ! and he called Lord
Salisbury a d — d fool for having left him in the lurch
and for having said that '* England had put her money
on the wrong horse " in backing Turkey. The Turks
being the one people in the whole world to be England's
fast (and if put to it) only friend ! Well, my dear Friend !
Leishman saw this then in 1899, and sees it now^ and hence
we were locked up for hours in a secret room here ! It
all bears immensely on the present Franco- German
Crisis ! That " greater-than-Bismarck " who is now
German Ambassador at Constantinople (Marschall von
Bieberstein), and who is the real director of German
policy (Waechter is only his factotum ! as I will prove
to you presently !) sees his rear and flanks quite safe by
having the Turks in the palm of his hand (as Leishman
describes it !) and so has been led to bluflF at Agadir —
but those choice words of Lloyd George upset the German
apple-cart in a way it was never upset before ! (I
suppose they were " written out " words and Cabinet
words, and they were d — d fine words !) Before I go on
with the next bit of my letter I must explain to you that
Leishman is a very great friend and admirer of Marschall
von Bieberstein and also of Kiderlen- Waechter, the
present German Foreign Minister. When Marschall
went on his annual 4 months' leave from Constantinople
he always had Waechter to take his place while away,
who was then the German Minister at Bucharest !
Leishman is also an ardent admirer of the German

204

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

Emperor, and he is also the most intimate friend possessed
by Mr. Philander Knox, the American Secretary of State,
who has forced Leishman to Berlin when he was in
Paradise at Rome (at all events his family were !) Well !
dear Friend, it's a good thing that Leishman loves
England. I couldn't possibly write to Sir E. Grey
what I am writing to you (I shouldn't write to you except
that this letter goes through France only !) and it would
be simply fatal to Leishman if it ever leaked out about his
conversations with me, but his heart is with us. I knew
this when I spent many weeks at Constantinople (and we
had no friends then, 1899 and 1900 !). He says our
Turkish policy is the laughing stock of Diplomacy I * ' Every
schoolboy knows " that we have a Mahomedan Existence

and the Turks love us, but all we do is to kick their !

As Leishman truly says, the Germans were in the dust
by the deposition of Abdul Hamid and England was
" all " to the New Turks, but slowly Marschall has worked
his way up again, and the Germans again possess the
Turks, instead of England. The Turkish Army, the
very finest fighting army in the world, was ours for the
asking, and " Peace— perfect Peace " in India, Egypt and
Persia ; but we've chucked it all away because we have
had d — d fools as our Ambassadors ! But how can it
be otherwise unless you put in men from outside, like
for instance Bryce at Washington ? Our strength is
Mahomedan, but we are too d — d Christian to see it !
and fool about Armenian atrocities and Bulgarian horrors !
Tories and Radicals are both the same. Isn't it wonderful
how we get along ! I repeat again to you my copyright
lines : —

" Time and the Ocean and some Guiding Star
In High Cabal have made us what we are ! "

Look at Delagoa Bay, that might have been ours—
indeed was ours only we '* fooled " it away ! Look at
Lord Granville and the Cameroons ! Well ! I haven't
given Leishman away, I don't think ! The real German

205

MEMORIES

bonne boiiche was the complete belt across Africa,
but this only if the right of pre-emption as regards the
Belgian Congo could have been acquired. I simply
tremble at the consequences if the British Redcoats are
to be planted on the Vosges Frontier [meaning the dread
of Conscription and a huge Army for Continental War-
fare].

1911.

October 10th. Lucerne.

... I yesterday had a long letter from McKenna
begging me to return and '* put the gloves on again," and
in view of his arguments I am going to do so when
A. K. Wilson vanishes early next year ! It is, however,
distasteful to me. I've had a lovely time here.

1911.

October 2gth, Reigate Priory, Surrey.

... I am here 3 days with Winston and many of the
Cabinet. I got a very urgent letter to come here, and I
think my advice has been fully and completely digested,
but don't say a word, please, to a soul ! I am returning
direct to Lucerne on Wednesday, after Tuesday at
Kilverstone.

1911.

November gth. Lucerne.

These are very ticklish times indeed ! I have got to
be extremely careful. I must not get between Winston
and A. K. W. in any way — it would not only be very
wrong but fatal to any smooth working. So I begged
Winston not to write to me. With extreme reluctance
I went to Reigate as I did, but McKenna urged me on
the grounds of the good of the Navy, and from what
Winston has since said to a friend of mine I think I did
right in going.

206

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

1911.

December. Lucerne.

... I shouldn't have written again so soon except for
just now seeing in a Paris paper that Sir John French,
accompanied by four Officers, had landed at Calais en
route to the French Head Quarters, and expatiating on
the evident intention of joint military action ! Do you
remember the classic interview we had with the late
King in his Cabin ? If this is on the tapis again then we
have another deep regret for the loss of that sagacious
intuition ! King Edward may not have been clever, but
he never failed in his judgment on whose opinion to
rely. ... Of course there may be nothing in it ! Nor
do I think there is the least likelihood of war.
England is far too strong ! Yet I daily get letters
anticipating my early return. . . .

I enclose you a letter from , received a little time

ago. He is a very eminent Civil Engineer. There is a
" dead set " being made to get the Midshipmen under

the new scheme to rebel against " engineering " ! ,

& Co. are persistently at it through their friends

in the Fleet, and calling those Midshipmen who go in
for engineering — " Greasers." The inevitable result of
the present young officers of the Navy disparaging and
slighting this chief necessary qualification of engineering
in these engineering days will be to force the throwing
open of entry as officers in the Navy to all classes of the
population and adopting State paid Education and sup-
port till the pay is sufficient to support !

1911.

December 24th.

... I have had a hectic time with four hurricanes
crossing the Channel and balancing on the tight-rope
with one end held by Winston and the other by McKenna,
but they both held tight and I am all right. Without
doubt McKenna is a patriot to have encouraged ME to
help Winston as he has done ! I have not heard what

207

MEMORIES

the War Staff is doing. It does not trouble me. My
sole object was to ensure Jellicoe being Commander-in-
Chief of the Home Fleet on December 19th, 19 13, and that
is being done by his being appointed Second-in-Command
of the Home Fleet, and he will automatically be C.-in-C.
in two years from that date. All the recent changes
revolved round Jellicoe, and No one sees it !

1912.

Jan. yd. Naples.

... I fully agree with you about the Navy want of
first-class Intellects. Concentration and Discipline com-
bine to cramp the Sea Officer. . . . Great views don't
get grasped. Winston urges me to come back, but he
forgets the greatest of all the great Napoleonic sayings :
^^ J^ordonne, ou je me tats.*' Besides, you see, I was the
First Violin. However, Winston is splendidly receptive.
I can't possibly write what has happened, but he is a
brave man. And as 16 Admirals have been scrapped I
am more popular than ever ! ! ! A lovely woman two
days ago sent me this riddle : " Why are you like
Holland ? " " Because you lie low and are dammed all
round." But there it is. Jellicoe will be Admiralissimo
when Armageddon comes along, and everything that was
done revolved round that, and no one has seen it. He has
all the attributes of Nelson, and his age.

1912.

March yth. Naples.

You nearly saw me to-day, as a King's Messenger
roused me out the day before yesterday with papers I
really thought I could not cope with by letter ; but as
obviously the object was to avoid the gossip my appearance
in London would cause I did my best with my pen. But
I see clearly I am in the middle of the whirlpool again
and must force what I feel a great disinclination for and
participate once more in the fight. I have had strangely
intimate opportunities of learning the very inside of

208

!. IJ

[/>y khitl />cyiiiission p/ " The Daily Express.'

The Anniversary of Trafalgar.

Nelson [in Trafalgar Square) : — "I was on my wav down to lend

them a hand myself, but if Jacky Fisher's taking on the job there's

no need for me to be nervous, I'll get back on my pedestal."

Nelson looking up Sir John Fisher on his first day as First Sea
Lord, Trafalgar Day, 1904.

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

German feeling towards England. It is Utterly intense
and widespread. Without any doubt whatever the
Germans thought they were going to squeeze France out
of Morocco. You can take that as a fact, no matter what
lies are told by the German Foreign Minister ; and
Clemenceau's unpublished speech would have proved it.
but he said enough. And how treacherous to England
was M. Caillaux. — What a dirty business ! Anyhow, as
a German Admiral of high repute wrote confidentially
and privately a few days since : " German public opinion
is roused in a way I had not before thought possible."
And as far as I can make out, the very worst possible
thing was Haldane's visit — a British Cabinet Minister
crawling up the back stairs of the German Foreign Office
in carpet slippers ! and judging from all that is told me,
it has made the Germans worse than ever, and for a
variety of quite opposite reasons, all producing the same
result. Any more Heligolands would mean certain war.
It's very peculiar how we have left our impregnable
position we occupied before Haldane's visit, to take up
a most humiliating, weak and dangerous one.

1912.
April 2nd.

. . . Asyousay, Winston has done Splendidly. He and
I last November discussed every brick of his speech in
Devonport Dockyard while visiting the 33-knot Lion-
Dreadnought by night alone together, and don't accuse
me of too much egotism, but he stopped dramatically on
the Dockyard stones and said to me " You're a Great
Man ! " . . . We are lagging behind in out-Dread-
noughting the Dreadnought ! A plunge of course — a
huge plunge — but so was the Dreadnought — so was the
Turbine — so was the water-tube boiler, and last of all
so was the i3|-inch gun which now holds the field, and
the whole Board of Admiralty (bar Jellicoe) and all the
experts dead against it — but we plunged ! So it is now

209 p

MEMORIES

— we want more speed — less armour — a 15-inch gun —
more sub-division — oil only — and chauffeurs instead of
Engineers and Stokers, and a Dreadnought that will go
round the world without requiring to replenish fuel !
The Non-Pareil ! Winston says he'll call her the
" Fisher ! " / owe more than I can say to McKenna.
I owe nearly as much to Winston for scrapping a dozen
Admirals on December 5th last so as to get Jellicoe 2nd in
Command of the Home Fleet. If war comes before 1914,
then Jellicoe will be Nelson at the Battle of St. Vincent :
if it comes in 19 14 then he'll be Nelson at Trafalgar ! . . .

Again, I've had quite affectionate letters from three
important Admirals. Why should I come home and
filch their credit } All this is to explain to you why I
keep abroad, as you ask me what are my future plans.
Your letter in The Times on the German Book quite
excellent. Bernstorff's book is even more popular in
Germany : '* The War Between England and Germany "
— with the picture of the " Dreadnought " with all her
guns trained for action ! Ever^^ little petty German
newspaper is dead-on for war with England ! that I can
assure you of ! So anything would kindle a war ! . . .
The banner unfurled on October 21st, 1904, by the d — d
scoundrel who on that dav became First Sea Lord had
inscribed on it :

" The fighting efficiency of the Fleet "

and
" Its instant readiness for War."

and, as Winston bravely said, that is now the case and
no credit to himself, but he ought to have gone further
back than McKenna for the credit. It was Balfour I
He saw me through — no one else would allow 160 ships
to be scrapped, &c., &c., &c. But you've had enough !

1912.
April 25th.

. . . When I was a Delegate at the Hague Conference

210

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

of 1899 — the first Conference — I had very animated
conversations, which, however, to my lasting regret it
was deemed inexpedient to place on record (on account
of their violence, I believe I), regarding ** Trading with
the Enemy." I stated the primordial fact that " The
Essence of War is Violence ; Moderation in War is
Imbecility y And then in my remarks I went on to
observe, as is stated by Mr. Norman Angell in the
** Great Illusion," where he holds me up as a Terror !
and as misguided — ^perhaps I went a little too far when I
said I would boil the prisoners in oil and murder the
innocent in cold blood, &c., &c., &c. . . . but it's quite
silly not to make War damnable to the whole mass of
your enemy's population, which of course is the secret
of maintaining the right of Capture of Private Property
at Sea. As you say, it must be proclaimed in the most
public and most authoritative manner that direct and
indirect trade between Great Britain, including every
part of the British Empire, and Germany must cease in
time of war. . . . When war does come ** Might is
Right ! " and the Admiralty will know what to do !
Nevertheless, it is a most serious drawback not making
public to the world beforehand what we mean by War !
It is astounding how even very great men don't under-
stand War ! You must go to the Foreigner to appreciate
our Surpassing Predominance as a Nation. I was
closeted for two hours lately — in a locked room — with
a great Foreign Ambassador, who quoted great names to
me as being in agreement with him that never in the
History of the World was the British Nation (as at the
present moment) surpassed in power ! And therefore we
could do what we liked ! . . . I fully agree with you
that the schemes of the General Staif of the British Army
are grotesque. Their projects last August, had we gone
to war, were wild in the extreme. You will remember a
famous interview we two had with King Edward in his
Cabin on board the Royal Yacht — how he stamped on

211 p 2

MEMORIES

the idea (that then enthused the War Office mind) of
England once more engaged in a great Continental War !
" Marlboroughs Cheap To-day ! " was the kettle of
fish advertised by the Militarists !

I walked the sands of Scheveningen with General
Gross von Schwartzhoff in June, 1899. The German
Emperor said he (Schwartzhoff) was a greater than Moltke.
He was the Military German Delegate at the Hague
Conference ; he was designated as Chief of the General
Staff at Berlin, but he was burnt to death in China
instead. I had done him a very good turn indeed, so he
opened his heart to me. There was no German Navy
then. We were doing Fashoda ; and he expatiated on
the role of the British Army — how the absolute supremacy
of the British Navy gave it such inordinate power far
beyond its numerical strength, because 200,000 men
embarked in transports, and God only knowing where
they might be put ashore, was a weapon of enormous
influence, and capable of deadly blows — occupying
perhaps Antwerp, Flushing, &c. (but, of course, he only
was thinking of the Cotentin Peninsula), or landing
90 miles from Berlin on that 14 miles of sandy beach
[in Pomerania], impossible of defence against a battle
fleet sweeping with devastating shells the flat country
for miles, like a mower's scythe — no fortifications able to
withstand projectiles of 1,450 lb.

Yes ! you are so right ! the average man is incapable
of a wide survey ! he looks through a pinhole and only
sees just a little bit much magnified ! Napoleon and
Cromwell ! Where are they ?

1912.

April 2gth. Naples.

. . . You say to me — *' Come home ! " — ^you remind
me of ''personal influence,*' I know it! Three days
ago I was invited to name one of three week-ends in
June to meet two very great men at a country house— no
one else. Day before yesterday Winston Churchill

212

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

asks me. Hardly a week passes without such similar
pressure from most influential quarters — " Why don't I
come home and smash and pulverize ? " Of course, they
one and all exaggerate — that in ten minutes I could
" sweep the board " and so on ! I know exactly what I
can do. I've been fighting 50 years ! But I don't want
a personal victory !

... I am going to take my body and what little money
I have ... to the United States in the near future. It
would be no use my coming home. The mischief is
done ! . . . From patriotic motives IVe given Winston
of my very best in the replies going to him this day from
Brindisi by King's Messenger, as regards designs and
policy and fighting measures.

1912.
May iSth,

. . . Well ! as you say, every blessed thing at Weymouth
[the Fleet Inspection] absolutely dates from 1909, except
the aviation, and even that I pressed to its present condi-
tion dead against great opposition, but I wrote so strongly

that took the bit between his teeth on that subject !

And you ask me the question " How goes it for the
future ! "

Well ! Lloyd George is the real man, and so far judging
from his most intimate conversation with me, all is
well I ... A propos of all this I've been specially
invited to meet four people of importance at a week-end
meeting — no others. I was asked twice before — and
again now repeated ; but I think it best to abstain. I
think you will approve of my not going. I have declined
to go with W. C. in the Admiralty Yacht.

1912.

May igth. Naples.

I have a letter from W. C. this morning that he and
the Prime Minister have decided to come direct here to

213

MEMORIES

Naples to spend a few days, and a telegram has just
come saying they arrive on May 23rd .... I suppose the
coming Supplementary Estimates and also types of new
ships about which I am in deadly antagonism with every
living soul at the Admiralty, and one of the consequences
has been that a great Admiralty official has got the
boot ! ! ! So Winston is right when he writes to me
this morning that in all vital points I have had my way !
He adds : " The Future of the Navy rests in the hands of
men in whom your confidence is as strong as mine . . .
and no change of Government would carry with it any
change of policy in this respect."

igi2. KiLVERSTONE HaLL,

June soth. Thetford.

My plot is working exactly as forecast. By and by
you'll say it's the best thing I ever did. The Prime
Minister and Winston would not listen at Naples to my
urgent cry " Increase your margin ! " They have got
to recruit without stint and build 8 " Mastodons "
instead of 4. Wait and see !

The recruiting HAS begun. The 8 will follow.

We want 8
We won't wait.

No other course but that now in progress would have
done it. I don't mind personal obloquy, but it's a bit
hard to undergo my friends' doubts of me ; but the
clouds will roll by. . . . I've got all rny " working bees "
round me here of the Royal Commission [on Oil and the
Internal Combustion engine] . We shall stagger humanity !

1912.

July 6th. Kilverstone Hall.

. . . Really all my thoughts are with my Royal Com-
mission. I expect you will see that the course of action

214

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

will inevitably result in what I ventured to indicate if
only the Admiralty will keep their backs to the wall of
the irreducible margin required in Home Waters. The

only pity was that dear old said we were sufficiently

strong for two years or more, which of course is quite
true, but his saying so may prevent Lloyd George being
hustled {as he otherwise would have been). Luckily I

prevented saying even more of our present great

preponderance — but let us hope " All's well that ends
well." Ian Hamilton came in most effectively with his
witnessing the armoured Cruiser " Suffolk " laden with a
Battalion of the Malta Garrison being twice torpedoed
by a submarine.

1912.
July 15/A.

. . . This instant the news has come to me that there
are 750 eligible and selected candidates for 60 vacancies
for Boy- Artificers in the Navy at the approaching examina-
tion ! When I introduced this scheme 8 years ago every
man's hand was against me, and the whole weight of
Trades Unionism inside the House of Commons and out
of it was organised against me. . . . We were dominated by
the Engineers ! We had to accept Engine Room artificers
for the Navy who had been brought up on making
bicycles ! NoWy these boys are suckled on the marine
engine ! and they have knocked out the old lot com-
pletely. Our very best Engine Room artificers now in
the Navy are these boys ! Not one of my colleagues or
anyone else supported me ! Do you wonder that I don't
care a d—n what anyone says ? The man you are going
to see on Wednesday — how has he recognised that we
are at this moment stronger than the Triple Alliance ?
The leaders of both political parties— how have they
recognised that 19 millions sterling of public money
actually allocated was saved and the re-arrangement of
British Sea Power so stealthily carried out that not a

215

MEMORIES

sign appeared of any remark by either our own or by
any Foreign Diplomatists, until an obscure article in
the Scientific American by Admiral Mahan stated that
of a sudden he (Mahan) had discovered that 88 per
cent, of the Sea Power of England was concentrated
on Germany ? But the most ludicrous thing of all
is that up to this very moment no one has really
recognised that the Dreadnought caused such a
deepening and dredging of German harbours and
their approaches, and a new Kiel Canal, as to cripple
Germany up to a.d. 191 5, and make their coasts
accessible, which were previously denied to our ships
because of their heavy draught for service in all the
world !

1912.
August 2nd.

At the Defence Committee yesterday ... we had a
regular set-to with Lloyd George (supported by Harcourt
and Morley chiefly) against the provision of defence for
Cromarty as a shelter anchorage for the Fleet, and the
Prime Minister adjourned the discussion to the Cabinet
as the temperature got hot ! As you know, I've always
been " dead on " for Cromarty and hated Rosyth, which
is an unsafe anchorage — ^the whole Fleet in jeopardy
the other day— and there's that beastly bridge which, if
blown up, makes the egress very risky without examina-
tion. . . . Also Cromarty is strategically better than
Rosyth. . . . Also Lloyd George had a row about the
airships — Seely's Sub-Committee. We must have air-
ships.

1912.

August yth.

I still hate Rosyth and fortifications and East Coast
Docks and said so the other day ! but what we devise at

216

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

Cromarty is for another purpose — to fend off German
Cruisers possibly by an accident of fog or stupidity
getting loose on our small craft taking their ease or
re-fuelling in Cromarty (Oil will change all this in time,
but as yet we have for years coal-fed vessels to deal
with). ... I've got enthusiastic colleagues on the oil
business ! They're all bitten ! Internal Combustion
Engine Rabies !

1912.
September.

, . . What an ass I was to come home ! but it was next
door to impossible to resist the pressure put on me,
and then can you think it was wise of me to plunge once
more into so vast a business as future motor Battleships ?
Changing the face of the Navy, and, as Lloyd George
said to me last Friday, getting the Coal of England as my
mortal enemy !

1912.

Sept. 14th.

This Royal Commission [on oil] is a wonder ! We have
our first meeting on September 24th, and practically it is
finished though it will go on for years and years and
never submit a Report ! You will love the modus
operandi when some day I expound it to you ! ... In
the second week of December we have an illustration on
the scale of 12 inches to a foot of producing oil from coal.
Twenty-five tons a day will be produced as an example.
All that is required is to treble the retorting jjlant of all
gas works in the United Kingdom where there is a Mayor
and Corporation, and to treble their " through put " of
coal ! We get two million tons of oil that way ! We
only want one million.

I addressed the Directors of the S.E. & Chatham Rail-
way last Tuesday, and hope I persuaded them to build a

217

MEMORIES

motor vessel of 24 knots between Calais and Dover,
and proved to them they could save an hour between
Paris and London — the whole side of the vessel falls down
and makes a gangway on to a huge pontoon at Calais
and Dover and all the passengers march straight out
(** Every man straight before him," like the Israelites did
at Jericho, and the walls fell down before them !) No
more climbing up Mont Blanc up a narrow precipitous
gangway from the steamer to the jetty in the rain, and an
old woman blocking you with her parcels and umbrella
jammed by the stanchions, and they ask her for her
ticket and she don't know which pocket it's in ! and the
rain going down your neck all the time ! A glass roof
goes over the motor vessel — she has no funnels, and her
telescopic wireless masts wind down by a 2 h.p. motor
so as not to go through the glass roof. But all this is
nothing to H.M.S. " Incomparable " — a 25 knot battleship
that will go round the whole earth without refuelling ! . . .
The plans of her will be finished next Monday, and I
wrote last night to say I proposed in my capacity as a
private British Citizen to go over in three weeks' time
in the White Star " Adriatic " to get Borden [the Canadian
Prime Minister] to build her at Quebec. The Building Yard
put up there by Vickers is under a guarantee to build
a Dreadnought in Canada in May and the great Dread-
nought Dock left Barrow for Quebec on August 31st.
No English Government would ever make this plunge,
which is why I propose going to Canada — to that great
man, Borden— and take the Vickers people to make their
bargain for building.

1912.
Sept. 20th.

. . . My idea now is to raise a syndicate to build the
*' Non-Pareil " ! A few millionaires would suffice, and I
know sufficient of them to do it. All the drawings and
designs quite ready. The one all pervading, all absorbing

218

LETTERS TO LORD ESHER

thought is to get in first with motor ships before the
Germans I Owing to our apathy during the last two years
they are ahead with internal combustion engines ! They
have killed 15 men in experiments with oil engines and we
have not killed one ! And a d — d fool of an English
politician told me the other day that he thinks this credit-
able to us !

Without any doubt (I have it from an eye-witness of
part of the machinery for her at Nuremberg) a big
German oil engine Cruiser is under weigh ! We must
press forward. . . . These d — ^d politics are barring the
way. ..." What ! " (say these trembling idiots)
'* Another Dreadnought Revolution ! " and these boneless
fools chatter with fear like apes when they see an elephant I
The imagination cannot picture that ^^ a greater than the
Dreadnought is here ! " Imagine a silhouette presenting
a target 33 per cent, less than any living or projected
Battleship ! No funnels — no masts — no smoke — she
carries over 5,000 tons of oil, enough to take her round
the world without refuelling ! Imagine what that means !
Ten motor boats carried on board in an armoured pit
in the middle of her, where the funnels and the boilers
used to be. Two of these motor boats are over 60 feet
long and go 45 knots ! and carry 21 -inch Torpedoes that
go five miles ! Imagine these let loose in a sea fight 1^
Imagine projectiles far over a ton weight ! going over a
mile or more further than even the i3j-inch gun can
carry, and that gun has rightly staggered humanity ! —
Yes ! that i3j-inch gun that all my colleagues (bar one !
and he is our future Nelson ! [Jellicoe]) thought me mad
to force through against unanimous disapproval ! and
see where we are now in consequence ! We shall have
16 British Dreadnoughts with the i3j-inch gun
before the Germans have one ! ! ! So it will be with
the " Non-Pareil " ! WE HAVE GOT TO HAVE HER

' N.B. — These very motor boats here described sank two battleships
of the Bolshevists only the other day. See Chapter IV. — F. 21/9/ig.

219

MEMORIES

. . . Fve worked harder over this job than in all my life
before !^

1912.
Dec, 2gth.

... I'm getting sick of England and want to get back
to Naples and the sun ! and the " dolce far niente ! "
What fools we all are to work like we do ! Till we drop !

- Then after this came the i^-inchgun ; then the iS-inch
gun J actually used at sea in the War ; and then the 20-inch
giuiy ready to be built and go into the " Incomparable " of
40,000 tons and 40 knots speedy on May 22nd y 19 15
— F. 21/9/19.

220

CHAPTER XIII

AMERICANS.

My very best friends are Americans. I was the
Admiral in North America, and saw " American
Beauties " at Bermuda. (Those American roses and
the American women are equal !) And without question
they are the very best dancers in the world ! (I suppose
it's from so much skating !) My only son married an
American lady (which rejoiced me), and an American
gentleman on the steamer complimented me that she had
come over and vanquished him instead of his going, as
the usual way is, to America to capture her ! I had
such a time in America when I went over to the wedding !
I never can forget the hospitality so boundless and
sincere ! I really might have spent three years in America
(so I calculated) in paying visits earnestly desired. The
Reporters (25 of them) asked me when I left what I
thought of their country (I tried to dodge them, but
found them all in my cabin when I went on board !) I
summed it up in the one word I greatly admire —
*' HUSTLE ! " and I got an adhesive label in America

221

MEMORIES

which I also loved ! Great Black Block letters on a
crimson ground—

RUSH

You stick it on a letter or the back of a slow fool. Mr.
McCrea, the President of the Pennsylvania Railway, had
his private car to take me to Philadelphia from New
York. We went 90 miles in 90 minutes, and such a
dinner ! Two black gentlemen did it all. And I found
my luggage in my room when I arrived labelled :

"MR. LORD FISHER"

(How it got there so quick I can't imagine.) I was bombed
by a photographer as we arrived late at night, and an
excellent photograph he took, but it gave me a shock !
I had never been done like that ! I had the great pleasure
of dining with Mr. Woodrow Wilson. I predicted to the
reporters he would be the next President for sure ! I was
told I was about the first to say so — anyhow, the 25
reporters put it down as my news !

I met several great Americans during my visit ; but
the loveliest meeting I ever had was when, long
before, a charming company of American gentlemen
came on July 4th to Admiralty House at Bermuda
to celebrate " Independence Day ! " I got my speech

222

AMERICANS

in before theirs ! I said George Washington was
the greatest Englishman who ever lived ! England
had never been so prosperous, thanks solely to him,
as since his time and now I because he taught us
how to associate with our fellow countrymen when they
went abroad and set up house for themselves ! And
that George Washington was the precursor of that
magnificent conception of John Bright in his speech of
the ages when he foretold a great Commonwealth — yes
a great Federation — of all those speaking the same tongue
— that tongue which is the " business " tongue of the
world — as it expresses in fewer words than any other
language what one desires to convey ! And I suppose
now we have got Palestine that this Federal House of
Commons of the future will meet at Jerusalem, the
capital of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel, whom we are
without doubt, for how otherwise could ever we have so
prospered when we have had such idiots to guide us and
rule us as those who gave up Heligoland, Tangier,
Cura^oa, Corfu, Delagoa Bay, Java, Sumatra, Minorca,
etc., etc. ? I have been at all the places named, so am
able to state from personal knowledge that only con-
genital idiots could have been guilty of such inconceivable
folly as the surrender of them, and again I say : " Let
us thank God that we are the lost ten tribes of Israel ! "
Mr. Lloyd George, in a famous speech long ago in the
War, showed how we had been 14 times " too late ! "
How many more " too lates " since he made that
memorable speech ? Especially what about our ship-
building and the German submarine menace and Ration -

223

MEMORIES

ing ? (The only favoured trades seem to be Brewing
and Racing ! Both so flourishing !)

The American barber on board the " Baltic " told me a
good story. He was a quaint man, clean shaved and wore
black alpaca throughout. Halfway across the Atlantic I
was waiting to have my hair cut, when a gentleman
bounced in on him, kicking up a devil of a fuss about
wanting something at once ! The barber, without moving
a muscle, calmed him by saying : " Are you leaving to-day,
Sir ? " But this was his story. He was barber in the
train from Chicago to New York that never stops *' even
for a death " (so he told me) when the train suddenly
stopped at a small village and a lady got out. Mr.
Thompson, the President of the Railway, was in the
train, and asked why ? The conductor showed an order
signed by a great man of the Railway to stop there.
When Mr. Thompson got to New York he asked this
great man " What excuse ? " and added : ''I wouldn't
have done it for my wife ! " and the answer he got was :
" No more would II"

But the sequel of the story is that I told this tale at an
international cosmopolitan lunch party at Lucerne and
said : " The curious thing is I knew the man ! " when
Mr. Chauncey Depew wiped me out by saying that
" he knew the woman ! "

This American Barber quaintly praised the Engine
Driver of this Chicago train by telling me that " he was
always looking for what he didfi't zvant I " and so had
avoided the train going into a River by noticing some-
thing wrong with the points !

224

\ Bj' khui teTinissicii of " London Opinion.'

America and the Blockade.

" Why Mr. Wilson should expect this country to refrain from exercising
a right in return for Germany's refraining from committing wrongs is
not very clear to the ordinary intelhgence." — Daily Paper.

Dame Wilson {to P. C. Fisher) : — "Oh, Constable ! Don't hurt him.
I'm sure he won't murder anyone else i "

AMERICANS

Admiral Sampson brought his Squadron of the United
States Navy to visit me at Bermuda. I was then the
Admiral in North America. At the banquet I gave in
his honour I proposed his health, and that of the United
States. He never said a word. Presently one of his
Officers went up and whispered something in his ear.
I sent the wine round, and the Admiral then got up, and
made the best speech I ever heard. All he said was :
" It was a d — d fine old hen that hatched the American
Eagle ! " His chaplain, after dinner, complimented me
on the Officers of my Flagship, the " Renown." He said :
" He had not heard a single ' swear ' from ' Soup to
Pea-nuts ' " !

Lord Fisher on John Bright

(From " Bright's House Journal ")

At a dinner held in London the other day to Mr.
Josephus Daniels, Secretary to the United States Navy,
Lord Fisher made the following speech in which he
referred to a speech by Mr. John Bright ; —

" Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, who was called
upon also to respond, was received with cheers, the whole
company standing up and drinking his health. He said
he had no doubt it would be pleasing to them if he spoke
about America. He was there one week. Mr. Daniels
had been here about one week. He was in America one
week because his only son was married there to the only
daughter of a great Philadelphian.

flp •ir •jP tP w ^F

" ' King Edward who was a kind friend to me — in fact
he was my only friend at one time ' — remarked Lord

225 Q

MEMORIES

Fisher, ' said to me, " You are the best hated man in the
British Empire/' and I repHed, " Yes, perhaps I am."
The King then said, '' Do you know I am the only friend
you have ? " I said, '' Perhaps your Majesty is right, but
you have backed the winner." Afterwards I came out on
top when I said, '' Do you remember you backed the
winner and now everyone is saying what a sagacious
King you are ? The betting was a thousand to one." '

" But he was going to tell them about America, and
some of them would hear things they had never before
heard about their own country. When he was at Bermuda
a deputation of American citizens waited upon him on
July 4th. To tell the honest truth he had forgotten about
it. He told the deputation he knew what they had
come there for. ' You know,' he said to them, * the
greatest Englishman that ever lived was George
Washington. He taught us how to rule our Colonies.
He told us that freedom was the thing to give them.
Why, if it had not been for George Washington America
might have been Ireland.' * I shook hands with them,'
continued Lord Fisher, ' and they went away and said
nothing they had come to say. ...

" ' Now I will talk about the League of Nations. In
A.D. 1910 an American citizen wished to see me ; and
he said to me, taking a paper out of his pocket, " Have
you read that ? " I looked at it and saw it was a speech
by John Bright, mostly in words of one syllable — sim-
plicity is, of course, the great thing. That speech is
really very little known on this side of the Atlantic or
on the other, but it so impressed me at the time that I
have been thinking of it ever since. John Bright said he
looked forward to the time when there would be a com-
pulsory peace — when those who spoke with the same
tongue would form a great federation of free nations
joined together.' "

226

AMERICANS

The following is an extract from the speech by Mr.
John Bright. It was delivered at Edinburgh in 1868 : —

" I do not know whether it is a dream or a vision, or
the foresight of a future realitj^ that sometimes passes
across my mind— I like to dwell upon it — but I frequently
think the time may come when the maritime nations of
Europe — this renowned country of which we are citizens,
France, Prussia, resuscitated Spain, Italy, and the
United States of America — may see that vast fleets are
of no use ; that they are merely menaces offered from
one country to another ; and that they may come to this
wise conclusion — that they will combine at their joint
expense, and under some joint management, to supply
the sea with a sufficient sailing and armed police which
may be necessary to keep the peace on all parts of the
watery surface of the globe, and that those great instru-
ments of war and oppression shall no longer be upheld.
This, of course, by many will be thought to be a dream
or a vision, not the foresight of what they call a states-
man."

Sir Hiram Maxim

When Sir Hiram Maxim — that great American — was
very little known, he came to see me when I was Captain
of the Gunnery ship at Portsmouth, bringing with him
his ever-famous Maxim gun, to be tried by me. So we
went to Whale Island to practise with the gun ; and when
he was ready to fire I adopted the usual practice in trying
all new guns and ordered the experimental party to get
under cover ; and at that order they were supposed to
go into a sort of dug-out. Evidently old Maxim con-
sidered this an insult to his gun, and he roared out at
the top of his voice : " Britishers under cover, Yankees

227 Q 2

MEMORIES

out in the open ! " The gun didn't burst and it was all
right ; but it might have, all the same.

Admiral Hornby the bravest of the brave, was one of
the Britishers ; and he came to lunch with me, being
extremely fascinated with Hiram's quaintness. Hiram
was a delightful man in my opinion, and I remember
his telling me that if I wanted to live long and see good
days the thing was to eat Pork and Beans. I never had
the chance, till 1 910, of eating them cooked a VAmeri-
caine ; and I then agreed with Hiram Maxim — no more
delicious dish in the world, but you can't get it in England 1
After lunch there were some oranges on the table ; and
to my dying day I shall never forget the extraordinary
look on Sir Geoffrey Hornby's beautiful, refined face as
Hiram reached out and grasped an orange from the centre
of the table — tore it apart, and buried his face sucking
out the contents, emerging all orange. He told us that
was the way to enjoy an orange. We neither of us were
up to it !

228

CHAPTER XIV

SOME SPECIAL MISSIONS

I WAS sent as a very young Lieutenant to a little fishing
village called Heppens in Oldenburg. It is now Wilhelms-
haven, chief Naval Port of Germany. Its river, the Jahde,
was then a shallow stream. The occasion for my visit
was the cession to King V/illiam of Prussia, as he was
then, of this place, Heppens, by the Grand Duke of
Oldenburg ; and there I met King William, to whom I
sat next but one at lunch, and Bismarck and von Moltke
and von Roon were there. We had a very long-winded
speech from the Burgomaster, and Bismarck, whom I was
standing next to, said to me in the middle of it : " I didn't
know this was going to happen, or I would have cut him
short." The King asked me at lunch why I had been
sent, and if there was no one else who knew about
torpedoes. Well, I don't think there was. It was an
imposing and never-to-be-forgotten sight, that lunch.
They all wore their helmets and great-coats at lunch —
so mediaeval — and telegrams kept coming to Bismarck,
who would get up and draw the King aside, and then
they would sit down again. Von Roon I thought very

229

MEMORIES

debonnairey and Moltke was like an old image, taciturn
and inscrutable, but he talked English as well as I did.

Years after this, Prince Adalbert's Naval Aide-de-camp,
who was a great friend of mine, told me that on the day
of mobilization in the war with France he was sent to
von Moltke with a message from Prince Adalbert, who
was King William's brother and Head of the Navy,
to ask him whether he could see Prince Adalbert for a
few moments. To his astonishment, my friend found
Moltke lying on a sofa reading " Lady Audley's Secret,"
by Miss Braddon, and he told him he could see the
Prince for as long as he liked and whenever he liked.
The word " Mobilize " had finished all his work for the
present.

On the occasion of my visit I imagined and reported
what Heppens would become, and so it did. I never
can make out why I didn't get a German decoration. I
think perhaps they thought me too young. However,
I had the honour of an empty sentry-box placed outside
the little inn where I was staying ; and if I had been of
higher rank there would have been a sentry in it. The
little inn was very unpretentious, and when the landlord
had carved for us he came and sat down at table with us.
Some days after, at a very exclusive Military Club in
Berlin, I met the King's two illegitimate brothers. They
were exactly like him ; also I breakfasted with the Head
of the German Mining School. I remember it, because
we only had raw herring and black bread for breakfast.
He was very poor, although he was exceeding clever,
and had as his right-hand man a wonderful chemist.

230

SOME SPECIAL MISSIONS

So far as I know, the present German mine is nearly
what it was then, and the sea-gulls rested on the pro-
tuberances as they do now, for I went to Kiel Bay to
see them. There was a lovely hotel at Kiel, where they
treated me royally. I recommended the adoption of these
German mines, and it's a pity we didn't. They hold the
field to this very day. However, the First Sea Lord of
that date didn't believe in mines or torpedoes or sub-
marines, and I was packed off to China in the old two-
decker *' Donegal," as Commander of the China Flagship.
Long afterwards Sir Hastings Yelverton, who became
First Sea Lord, unburied my Memorandum headed
" Ocean Warfare," and supported the views in it. It
enunciated the principle of " Hit first, hit hard, and keep
on hitting," and discoursed on Submarines and Mines.

Reval

You are remarking to me of a charming letter written
to me by the late Emperor of Russia's youngest sister—
the Grand Duchess Olga. She is a peculiarly - sweet
creature. Her nickname amongst the Russians was
" Sunshine." Stolypin, the Prime Minister, told me
that, and he also said to me that she was a kind of life-
buoy because if you walked about with her you would
not get bombed by an anarchist. All loved her.

I made her acquaintance first at Carlsbad. On my
arrival at the hotel I found King Edward's Equerry
waiting in the hall. I had written to tell the King, who
was at Marienbad, in answer to his enquiry, as to the day

231

MEMORIES

I should arrive and what time ; and he came over to
Marienbad from Carlsbad. I went then and there and
found him just finishing lunch with a peculiarly charming
looking young lady, who turned out to be the Grand
Duchess Olga, and her husband, the Grand Duke of
Oldenburg, from whom happily she is now divorced (I
didn't like the look of him at all). The King, having
satisfied himself that I had had lunch, and he then
smoking a cigar as big as a capstan bar, after talking of
various things which interested him, told me that his
niece, the Grand Duchess Olga, did not know anyone
in Carlsbad, and he relied on me to make her time there
pleasant, so I promptly asked her if she could waltz.
She said she loved it, but she somehow never got the
step properly, whereupon I asked the King if he had
any objection to getting into the corner of the room while
I moved the table and took the rugs up to give her
Imperial Highness a lesson. He made some httle
difficulty at first, but eventually went into the corner ;
and when the lesson began he was quite pleased and
clapped his hands and called out " Bravo ! " The best
waltz tune in the world is one of Moody and Sankey's
hymns. I don't know whether Sankey originated the
saying that he didn't see why the Devil should have all
the good music. I don't by that implicate that the
waltz was the devil's ; but, without any doubt, there is
a good deal of temptation in it, and when you get a
good partner you cleave to her all the evening.

This dancing lesson was an unalloyed success, so I
asked her to a dance the next night at the Savoy Hotel ;

232

SOME SPECIAL MISSIONS

and after some more words with the King I left, and
walking down the stairs to go to my hotel, I thought to
myself : " How on earth are you going to get up a dance
when you don't know a soul in the place ? " when who
should I meet but a friend of mine — a Spanish Grandee,
the Marquis de Villa Vieja, and he arranged what really
turned out to be a ball, as he knew everybody, and I
having some dear American friends at Marienbad I
telegraphed them to come over and dine with the Grand
Duchess and stay the night for the ball, and they did.
When the dance had begun, and the Grand Duchess was
proving quite equal to her lesson of the day before,
suddenly an apparition of extraordinary grace and loveli-
ness appeared at the door. Villa Vieja took on the Grand
Duchess and I welcomed the beautiful Polish Countess
and danced with her many waltzes running in spite of a
hint I received that her husband was very jealous and a
renowned duellist. Next day, by telegram from the
King, I was told by His Majesty that Isvolsky, the Russian
Minister of Foreign Affairs, was to be asked by me to
lunch on his arrival that day from St. Petersburg. I
invited him ; and just as we sat down to lunch the Polish
angel of the night before came through the door and
petrified Isvolsky, and the more so as she kissed her hand
to me. He never took his eyes off her, and as she walked
to her table I heard him breathe a sigh, and say sotto voce^
*' Alas, in heaven no woman ! " I said to him : "Monsieur
Isvolsky, pray pardon me ; perhaps you did not intend it
to be heard, but if it be true what you say, it takes away
much of the charm which I had anticipated finding there."

, 233 *

MEMORIES

He turned to me and said — quoting chapter and verse in
the Revelations, *' There was silence in heaven."

So when I met the Grand Duchess Olga again, when I
accompanied King Edward on that memorable visit to
Reval — when, as Prince Orloff, the Emperor's principal
aide-de-camp, said to me. King Edward changed the
atmosphere of Russian feelings towards England from
suspicion to cordial trust — there was quite an affectionate
meeting, and we danced the " Merry Widow " wahz—
a then famous stage performance — with such effect as
to make the Empress of Russia laugh. They told me
she had not laughed for two years. At the banquet
preceding the dance the Grand Duchess and I, I regret
to say, made such a disturbance in our mutual jokes that
King Edward called out to me that I must try to remember
that it was not the Midshipmen's Mess ; and my dear
Grand Duchess thought I should be sent to Siberia or
somewhere. We sailed at daylight, and I got a letter
from her when I arrived in England saying she had made a
point of seeing Uncle Bertie and that it was all right, I
was not going to be punished. Then she went on to
describe that she had had a very happy day (being her
birthday) picnicking in the woods ; the only drawback
was, she told me, that the gnats would bite her ankles.
Being, at that period, both a courtier and a sycophant, I
telegraphed to her at some Palace she was at in Russia
to say " I wished to God I had been one of the gnats."
It was weeks before she got the telegram, as the Russian
Secret Department believed it was from some anarchist,
and was a cypher for bombing the Emperor or something

234

SOME SPECIAL MISSIONS

of the sort, and there was a lot of bother to trace out who
had sent it.

I find among my papers another charming letter which
I received from the Grand Duchess Olga. It runs :

Peterhof.
11/25 July, 1909.
Dear Admiral,

I have been going to write to you for ever so long
and now is a chance to send you a few lines.

How are you getting on ? We speak of you very often.
I suppose you'll be going to Carlsbad this automn — and
I am very sorry that we are not going — so as to meet you
there !

I have a great favour to ask you — but as I believe and

think you can grant it — I shall ask : Lieutenant

of your Royal Navy — ^whom we got to like very
much two years ago at Sorrento — is willing to come
this automn and spend a month with us at our
country place — if he gets leaves of course ; I write all
this to you as I don't know who else can help and give
him leave.

We should like to have him about the middle of your
September (the very beginning of ours). If you think
he can get leave just then would you kindly telegraph
to me — then I could write and ask him (I suppose he will
be at Cowes ?). Today is my namesday, and having
received any amounts of presents — we are going to
Church — as one always does — on such occasions and then
there will be a rather big lunch and the band will play —
All this glorious occasion is not only for me — but also for
my niece Olga.

My sister Xenia — who does not know you — says she is
sorry not to have that honour and pleasure !

My husband sends his best love (or whatever one says).
Goodbye dear Admiral. I wish I was going to see you

235

MEMORIES

soon it would be awfully amusing. Write to me later
on when you will be free please !
Much love and good wishes.

Olga.

P.S. Mrs. Francklin sends lots of kind messages and
love. Mama sends her best love too.

That visit of King Edward to Russia was really quite
remarkable for the really eloquent speech the King
made, without a note of any sort. I said to him at
breakfast the next morning, when they brought in a
copy of what they thought he had said, that I wondered
on such a momentous occasion he didn't have it written
out. *' Well ! " he said to me, " I did try that once,
when the French President Loubet came to visit me, and
I learnt the speech off by heart in the garden of Bucking-
ham Palace. When I got up to say it, I could not
remember it, and had to keep on beginning again at the
beginning. So I said to myself, ' Never again ' ! " And
I must say I share his conviction that there is no such
eloquence as when out of the abundance of the heart
the mouth speaketh. Emotion and earnestness will do
much more than move mountains ; they will move multi-
tudes— and that was what King Edward was able to do.

I have spoken elsewhere of what I deemed was a
suitable epitaph for him — those great words of Pascal :
" le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point."
The heart has reasons that the mind knows nothing
about.

God bless him !

Stolypin, when we met him at Reval on King Edward's

236

SOME SPECIAL MISSIONS

visit to the Czar, was described to us as the greatest,
the bravest and most single-minded Prime Minister that
Russia had ever possessed. He spoke English fluently,
and certainly was very pro-English. He was beyond
deception. His only daughter, he told me, had been
killed by a bomb while he was walking with her in the
garden, and one of his hands was greatly mutilated by
the same explosion. He was murdered at the theatre
at Moscow not very long afterwards. We had many
conversations together. He said it was criminal folly
having the capital of Russia elsewhere than inland, as at
Moscow, for that Petersburg was open to German attack
by sea. He seemed to have a prophetic view of England's
imbecility as regards using her enormous sea supremacy
to prevent the Baltic becoming a German lake, as it
became in the war, though we were five times stronger
than the German Fleet. So it passed by as an idle
dream, any idea of England's interference, and alas ! he
remembered our betrayal of Denmark when the Germans
took Kiel and Schleswig-Holstein.

Stolypin repeatedly said to me the Germ.an frontier
was his one and only thought, and he was devoting all his
life to make that frontier impregnable against Germany,
both in men and munitions, and strategic arrangements.
But he did not live long enough to carry out his scheme.

Cartagena

I also went with King Edward to Cartagena, when he
returned the King of Spain's visit. King Alfonso, whom

237

MEMORIES

I had previously met in England, was very cordial to
me because we had seven ** Dreadnoughts " ready before
the Germans had one. In fact, when I told him this
piece of news, as we were walking up and down the deck,
with King Edward and Queen Alexandra watching us
from two deck-chairs, King Alfonso was so delighted
that he threw his arms round my neck, cried " You
darling ! " and kissed me. Then he put his hand in his
waistcoat pocket, took out a chocolate and popped it
into my mouth. He gave me the highest Spanish Order
he could. But when the box came on board containing
it, it turned out to be the Order of Isabella the Catholic,
which is only given to Roman Catholics; but the interesting
thing is that when I was a little Midshipman I had been
reading " Ferdinand and Isabella," and I remember saying
to my messmates that I intended some day to have the
Order of Isabella the Catholic. And when, some years
after, as a Lieutenant it was the fashion to wear medal
ribbons in a rosette, upon some supercilious ojfficer
asking me what " that thing " was in my button-hole, I
quite remember saying, by way of pulling his leg, that
it was the Spanish Order of Isabella the Catholic. How-
ever, I got the proper Order in time to wear at the
banquet.

The banquet was a very fine sight, as King Alfonso had
brought down the tapestries, pictures and other ornaments
from the Escurial. The Spanish Admirals were a grand
sight. They wore the ancient uniform, and each had a
great Malacca cane with a big gold top. They all came
on board to call on King Edward in an old-fashioned

238

SOME SPECIAL MISSIONS

pulling barge, and the sailors wore crimson and gold

sashes. That rowing barge and the splendid uniforms

lay at the root of one occasion when King Edward was

really angry with me. I had been arranging for him the

details of the great Naval Review and was summoned to

Buckingham Palace to discuss them with him. I found

no Equerries in attendance, no one about, and the King

white with anger. " So ! " he cried out to me, "I'm

to go by such and such a train, am I ? And I'm to

embark at such and such a time, am I ? And I'm to use

your barge because it's a better barge than mine, is it ?

Look here, am I the King or are you ? " The upshot of

the interview was that he threw the papers on the floor,

with '* Have it your own way 1 " But the secret cause

of his anger was that he had made up his mind to go off in

a rowing-boat like the Spanish Admirals, forgetting that

there is no tide at Cartagena, whereas the tide at Cowes

runs many knots, and it would have taken a rowing-boat

hours to do what the barge could do in a few minutes.

KiAMiL Pasha

One of the most pleasurable incidents of my holding
the appointment of Commander-in-Chief of the Mediter-
ranean Fleet was going to Smyrna to do honour to that
splendid old Turk, Kiamil Pasha. He was then Vali, or
Governor, of the Province of Smyrna. He was most
hale and vigorous. He so delighted me with his conver-
sations and experiences that it's a sincere joy to me now
to recall, even in this humble way, what a magnificent

239

MEMORIES

old man he was, and how he had so often placed his
life in jeopardy for the sake of right and for the good of
his country, which last, he said (he spoke most fluent
Enghsh), had been " imperishably bound up with
England's righteous work in the East." He had been
many times Grand Vizier, and he knew all the secret
incidents following and preceding the Crimean War.
And he said fervidly that England was the only nation
that never asked and never schemed to get anything out
of Turkey. And he said it was only the insensate folly
of the English Authorities that could ever have dislodged
England from her wonderful supremacy over the minds
of the whole Turkish people. I told him, in return,
that the English treatment of Turkey was only on a par
with the EngHsh folly of giving up Heligoland, Corfu,
Tangier, Minorca, Java, Sumatra, Cura9oa (the key
of the Panama Canal), Delagoa Bay (the only harbour
in Africa), and so on, and so on, and explained, to his
delighted amusement, that we were a nation of Lions
led by Asses. He pretty well foretold all that has hap-
pened since 1902.

With respect to Tangier, which was the dowry of
Henrietta Maria, I diverge a moment to mention that a
great Spaniard in high office once said to me that it was
a curious fact that whenever Spain had left the side of
England she had inevitably come to grief.

Following on Kiamil's wonderful prescience, I found
on my visit to the Sultan, who had invited me to Con-
stantinople, that all I had heard from him about Bulgaria
was confirmed at Constantinople. One and all said that

240

SOME SPECIAL MISSIONS

Bulgaria was the fighting nation, and that Bulgaria was
the Kev of the East. I was so saturated with the im-
portance of this fact that I spoke to Kitchener about it
when the War commenced, but we did not give Bulgaria
what she wanted, and when, a year afterwards, she was
offered the same terms it was too late.

A great Bank always, I believe, has a travelling inspector
who visits all the branches. We want such a personage
to visit all our representatives in foreign lands, and see
what they have done for England in the previous year.

24T

CHAPTER XV

SOME PERSONALITIES

Amongst the 13 First Lords ot the Admiralty I
have had to deal with (and with nine of them I was
very intimately associated) I should like to record that
in my opinion Lord George Hamilton and Lord Spencer
had the toughest jobs, because of the constitution of
their respective Boards of Admiralty ; and yet neither of
them received the credit each of them deserved for his
most successful administration. With both of them their
tact was unsurpassable. They had to deal with ex-
tremely able colleagues, and my experience is that it is
not a good thing to have a lot of able men associated
together. If you take a little of the best Port Wine, the
best Champagne, the best Claret, and the best Hock and
mix them together, the result is disastrous. So often is
it with a Board of Admiralty. That's why I have suffered
fools gladly ! But Lord George Hamilton and Lord
Spencer had an awful time of it. To both of these (I
consider) great men I am very specially beholden. Lord
George Hamilton more particularly endured much on my
behalf when I was Director of Naval Ordnance, fighting
the War Office. It was his own decision that sent me to

242

SOME PERSONALITIES

Portsmouth as Admiral Superintendent of the Dockyard,
and thus enabled me practically to prove the wisdom and
the economy of concentrating workmen on one ship like
a hive of bees and adopting piece-work to the utmost
limit. Cannot anyone realise that if you have your men
spread over many ships building, your capital is pro-
ducing no dividend as compared with getting a ship
rushed and sent to sea ready to fight ? I was held up as
a drsLUisitic poseur because the " Dreadnought " was built in
a year and a day. Yes ! She was ready to fight in a year
and a day. She did fire her guns. The '' Inflexible," her
famous prototype in former years, which I commanded,
was four or five years building. I took up the battleship
" Royal Sovereign " when I went as Superintendent of
Portsmouth Dockyard and got her completed within two
years, and thereby saw my way to doing it in a year.
And so would I have done the famous *' Hush Hush "
ships, as I said I would ; only circumstances brought
about my departure from the Admiralty, and apathy
came back, and those '' Hush Hush " ships consequently
took more than a year to build. And some armchair
quill-drivers still sling ink at 'em. And when I heard
from an eye-witness how the whole lot of German cruisers
did flee when they appeared and ought to have been
gobbled up I rubbed my hands with malignant glee at
the devastation of my pen-and-ink enemies. As usual in
the war, on that occasion the business wasn't pushed home.
To revert to my theme — I owe also a great debt to
Lord George Hamilton, when at a previous stage of my
career he dissuaded me from accepting an offer from

243 R 2

MEMORIES

Lord Rothschild, really beyond the dreams of avarice, of
becoming the head of a great armament and shipbuilding
combine, which accordingly fell through on my refusal.
Had I gone, I'd have been a millionaire instead of a
pauper as I am now ; but I wouldn't have been First
Sea Lord from 1904 to 19 10 and then '' Sacking the
Lot ! " Lord George also selected me to be Controller
of the Navy.

Lord Spencer called a horse after me — almost as great
an honour. Lord Spencer was really a very magnificent
man, and he had the attributes of his great ancestor, who
selected Nelson over a great many of his seniors to go
and win the Battle of the Nile. There was no one else
who would have done it ; and when Sir John Orde, one
of the aggrieved Admirals, told the King that the selected
Nelson was mad, he replied, " I wish to God he would
bite you all ! " My Lord Spencer had the same gift of
selection— it's the biggest gift that a man in such a
position can have, and the life, the fate of his country
may depend upon him. Only war finds out poltroons.
Lord Spencer turned out his master, to whom he was
faithfully devoted, when he saw the Navy was in danger
and that Mr. Gladstone would not agree to strengthen
it. His manners were superb. He satisfied that great
description of what constitutes a gentleman : " He never
hurt any man's feelings."

There's another First Lord I have too faintly alluded
to — Lord Northbrook. He also was a great man, but he
was not considered so by the populace. He was a victim
to his political associates — they let him in. His finance

244

SOME PERSONALITIES

at the Admiralty was bad through no fault of his, and he
was persuaded to go to Egypt, which I think was a
mistake. I stayed with him, and the microscope of home
revealed him to me. His conceptions were magnificent
and his decisions were like those of the Medes and
Persians. Of all the awful people in the world nothing
is so terrible as a vacillator. I am not sure the Devil
isn't right when he says, " Tell a lie and stick to it."
Lord Northbrook also in spite of intense opposition laid
hold of my hand and led me forth in the paths I glory m,
of Reform and Revolution. Stagnation, in my opinion,
is the curse of life. I have no fellow-feeling with those
placid souls who, like a duck-pond, torpid and quiescent,
live the life of cabbages. I don't believe anybody can
say, " Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven," because it is
immortally shown that strife is the secret of a good life.

As with Lord Spencer, so was it with Lord Selborne.
He again, as First Lord of the Admiralty, took the unusual
course of kindly coming to Malta to see me when I
commanded the Mediterranean fleet (the Boer War
placed England in a very critical position at that time) ;
and though there was a great strife with the Admiralty
he chose me after my three years as Commander-in-Chief
to be Second Sea Lord of the Admiralty and permitted
me to unfold a scheme of education which came into
being on the following Christmas Day without the
alteration of a comma. More than that, he benevolently
spared me from the Admiralty to become Commander-
in-Chief at Portsmouth, to see that scheme carried out.
Many letters have I that that step indicated the end of

245

MEMORIES

my naval career. I believe to that date it always has
been so, but within a year I was First Sea Lord, and
never did any First Lord hold more warmly the hand of
his principal adviser than Lord Selborne held mine.

There are few people living to whom I am under a
greater obligation than Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman,
G.C.B. This distinguished sailor aided me in the gradual
building up of the Grand Fleet. As I have said before,
it had to be done unostentatiously and by slow degrees,
for fear of exciting the attention of the German Admiralty
and too much embroiling myself with the Admirals whose
fleets had to be denuded till they disappeared, so as to
come under Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman's command,
with whom the Grand Fleet originated under the humble
designation of the Home Fleet — a gathering and per-
petuation of the old more or less stationary coast-guard
ships scattered all round the United Kingdom and, as
the old phrase was, " Grounding on their beef bones "
as they swung with the tide at their anchors. In the
Providence of God the animosities of the Admirals thus
engendered caused the real success of the whole scheme
— and what should have been as clear as crystal to the
least observant onlooker was obscured by the fumes of
anger exuding from these scandalized Admirals. I look
back with astonishment at my Job-like conduct, but it
had its compensations. I hope Sir Francis Bridgeman
will forgive me for hauling him into this book — I have
no other way of showing him my eternal gratitude ; and
it was with intense delight that I congratulated Mr.
Churchill on obtaining his services to succeed Sir Arthur

246

SOME PERSONALITIES

Wilson, the First Sea Lord, who had so magnificently
adhered to the scheme I left.

Sir Arthur refused a Peerage, and he was a faithful
and self-effacing friend in his room at the Admiralty
those seven fateful months I was First Sea Lord during
the war. It was peculiarly fortunate and providential
that the two immediately succeeding First Sea Lords
after my departure on January 25th, 19 10, should have
been the two great sailors they were— otherwise there
would have been no Grand Fleet — they altered nothing,
and the glacier moved along, resistless and crushing all
the obstacles in its path, and now, after the war, it has
passed on ; the dead corpses of the foes of the scheme
are disclosed, and we'll bury them without comment.

I began these talks by solemnly declaring that I would
not mention a single living name — please let it stand —
it shows what one's intention was ; but one is really
forced to stand up to such outstanding personalities as
Sir Arthur Wilson and Sir Francis Bridgeman, and I
again repeat with all the emphasis at my command that
it would have been impossible to have conducted those
eight great years of ceaseless reform, culminating in the
production of the most incomparable fleet that ever
existed, had not the two Political Administrations, four
First Lords, and every member of the several Boards of
Admiralty been, as I described them in public, united,
determined, and progressive. Never for one instant did
a single Board of Admiralty during that time lay on
its oars. For to rest on our oars would not have been
standing still ; the malignant tide was fierce against us,

247

MEMORIES

and the younger Officers of the fleet responded
splendidly.

On January 3rd, 1903, I wrote as follows in reply to
some criticism of me as First Sea Lord : —

** Our Fleets are 50 per cent, more at sea, and we hit
the target 50 per cent, more than we did two years ago.

*' In the first year there were 2,000 more misses than
hits !

** In the second year there were 2,000 more hits than
misses ! "

The very first thing I did when I returned to the
Admiralty as First Sea Lord for those seven months in
the first year of the war was instantly to get back Sir
Percy Scott into the Fighting Arena. I had but one
answer to all his detractors and to the opposition to his
return : —

*' He hits the target ! "

He also was maliciously maligned. I don't mean to
say that Sir Percy Scott indulges in soft soap towards
his superiors. I don't think he ever poured hot water
down anybody's back. Let us thank God he didn't !

I have repeatedly said (and I reiterate it whenever I
get the chance) that Nelson was nothing if he was not
insubordinate. Nelson's four immortal Big Fights are
brilliant and everlasting testimonies to the virtues of
Self- Assertion, Self-Reliance, and Contempt of Authority.
But of Nelson and the Nelsonic attributes 1 treat in
another place. (Ah ! Lord Rosebery, if only you had
written " Nelson's Last Phase " ! I entreated you, but
without avail !) (Again a repetition !) Nelson's Life

248

SOME PERSONALITIES

not yet written ! Southey's Life, meant only for school-
boys, still holds the field. W. T. Stead might have done
it, for the sacred fire of Great Emotions was the calorific
of Stead's Internal Combustion Engine. Suffice it to
say of Sir Percy Scott that it was he and he alone who
made the first start of the Fleet's hitting the enemy and
not missing him. Why hasn't he been made a Viscount ?
But that is reserved for those in another sphere !

" The Tides — and Sir Frederick Treves." — One of my
greatest benefactors (he saved my life. Six doctors
wanted to operate on me — he wouldn't have it ; the conse-
quence— I'm better now than ever I was in my life) is
Sir Frederick Treves, Surgeon, Orator, Writer, " De-
veloper of the Powers of Observation." He, this
morning, September i6th, 1919, gives me something
to think about. It has relation to my dear and splendid
friend Sir Charles Parsons, President of the British
Association and inventor of the Turbine, who said the
other day at Bournemouth that our coal bids fair to fail
and we must seek other sources of power. Considering
that Sir Charles invented the Turbine — derided by
everyone as a box of tricks, and it now monopolises
80 per cent, of the horse-power of the world — we ought
to listen to him. His idea is to dig a twelve-mile hole
into the earth to get hold of power. Now Sir Frederick
in his letter this morning uses these words :

'* England is an Island. We are surrounded on all
sides with the greatest source of power in the world —
the Tides.

"' There is enough force in the Tides to light and heat

249

MEMORIES

the whole country, and to run all its railways. It is
running to waste while we are bellowing for coal."

I know exactly what the Royal Society will say to Sir
Frederick Treves. The Royal Society, not so many
years ago, said through one of its most distinguished
members that the aeroplane was a physical impossibility.
When I said this to Sir Hiram Maxim he placed his
thumb to his nose and extended his fingers ; and, as I
have remarked elsewhere, aeroplanes are now as plentiful
as sparrows. So do not let us put Sir Frederick Treves
in the waste paper basket. He's a great man. When
Lord Lister and my dear friend Sir Thomas Smith were
beholding him operating on King Edward at the time
when his illness stopped his Coronation — even those two
wonderful surgeons held their breath at Treves's astound-
ing skill and confidence. He kept on, and saved King
Edward's life. There was no *' Not running risks "
with him. He snatched his King from death. The
others both thought Death had won, and they both
exclaimed !

Sir Frederick won't see this until he reads it in his
presentation copy of this book, or he wouldn't have it.

And then he is so choice in his educational ideas.
Here's a lovely morsel, which I commend to School-
masters (Curse 'em ! they ruined Osborne). Sir Frederick
says : —

"Our present system of education is on a par with
the Training of Performing Dogs, they're merely taught
tricks ! and Trick antics do not help a boy much in the
serious business of life. There is no attempt to get at

250

SOME PERSONALITIES

the mind of a boy, and still less any attempt to find out
his particular abilities. The only thing is, Is he good at
Mental Acrobatics ? A very fine book on ' The New
Education '^ was published in the Autumn of last year,
19 1 8. It shows up the wasteful absurdities of the present
Educational System. Of course, no attention has been
paid to it, because it is so simple, so evident, and so
human. . . . Years are spent in teaching a boy Latin
Verses, but never a moment to teach him ' How to
develop powers of Observation.' "

I could tell my readers instances of Sir Frederick's
powers in this last regard ; and the medical students
during the many years he was their Lecturer could all
of them do Sir Frederick greater justice than I can.

" God bless Sir Frederick Treves I "

Of all the famous men I have known. Lord Kelvin had

the greatest brain. He went to sea with me in many new

ships that I commanded. Once, in a bleak March east

wind at Sheerness I found him on deck on a high pedestal

exposed to the piercing blast watching his wonderful

compass, and he had only a very thin coat on. I said :

" For goodness sake, Sir William, come down and put on

a great coat." He said : " No, thank you, I am quite

warm. I've got several vests on." His theory was that

it was much warmer wearing many thin vests than one

thick one, as the interstices of one were filled up by the

next one, and so on. I explained this afterwards, as I

sat one day at lunch next to the Emperor of Russia, when

he asked me to explain my youth and good health, and

I hoped that he would follow Lord Kelvin's example, as

1 "The New Teaching," edited by John Adams. Hodder and
Stoughton

251

MEMORIES

I did. Lord Kelvin got this idea of a number of thin
vests instead of one thick one from the Chinese, who, in
many ways, are our superiors.

For instance, a Chinaman, Hke an ancient Greek or
Roman, maintains that the liver is the seat of the human
affections. We believe that the heart is. So a Chinese
always offers his hand and his liver to the young lady of
his choice. Neither do they ever kiss each other in China.
Confucius stopped it because the lips are the most
susceptible portion of the human body to infection.
When two Chinese meet, they rub their knees with their
hands, and say *' Ah " with a deep breath. A dear friend
of mine went to the Viceroy of Nankin to enquire how
his newly-raised Army was getting on with the huge
consignment of magnificent rifles sent out from England
for its use. The Chinese Viceroy told my friend he was
immensely pleased with these rifles, and the reports
made to him showed extraordinary accuracy, as the troops
hit the target every time. The Viceroy sent my friend
up in a Chinese gunboat to see the Army. When my
friend landed he was received by the Inspector-General
of Musketry, who was a peacock feather Mandarin, and
taken to see the soldiers firing. To my friend's amaze-
ment the soldiers were firing at the targets placed only a
few hundred yards off, and he explained to the Mandarin
that these wonderful rifles fitted with telescopic sights
were meant for long ranges, and their accuracy was
wonderful. The Mandarin replied to him : *' Look
here ! my orders from the Viceroy are that every man in
the army should hit the target, because these rifles are

252

SOME PERSONALITIES

so wonderfully good, and so they do, and the Viceroy is
very pleased at my reports." And he added : " You
know, we go back 2,000 years before your people in our
knowledge of the world."

Lord Kelvin had a wonderful gift of being able to
pursue abstruse investigations in the hubbub of a drawing
room full of visitors. He would produce a large green
book out of a gamekeeper's pocket he had at the back
of his coat, and suddenly go ahead with figures. I had
an interesting episode once. Sir William Thomson, as
he then was, had come with me for the first voyage of a
new big cruiser that I commanded. I had arranged for
various responsible persons to report to me at 8 a.m.
how various parts of the ship were behaving. One of
them reported that a rivet was loose, and there was a
slight leak. I said casually : ** I wonder how much water
would come in if the rivet came out altogether." Sir
William was sitting next me at breakfast, very much
enjoying eggs and bacon, and he asked the Officer :
" How big is the rivet ? " and whereabouts it was, etc.
The Officer left, and Sir William went on with his eggs
and bacon, and I talked to Sir Nathaniel Barnaby on
the other side of me, who was the designer of the ship
that we were in. Presently, Sir William, in a mild voice,
never having ceased his eggs and bacon, said so much
water would come in. Sir N. Barnaby thereupon worked
it out on paper and said to Sir William : " You made a
good guess." He replied : " I didn't guess. I worked
it out."

The Midshipmen idolised Lord Kelvin, and they were

253

MEMORIES

very intimate with him. I heard one of them, who was
four-foot-nothing, explain to Sir WilHam how to make a
magnet. Sir WilHam listened to the Midshipman's
lecture on magnetism with the greatest deference, and
gave the little boy no idea of what a little ass he was to
be talking to the greatest man on earth on the subject
of magnetism. The same little boy took the time for
him in observing the lighthouse flashes, and Sir William
wrote a splendid letter to The Times pointing out
that the intervals of darkness should be the exception,
and the flashes of light the rule, in a lighthouse, where-
upon the Chief Engineer of the Lighthouse Department
traversed Sir William's facts. The little boy came up
to Sir William and asked him if he had read the letter,
and he hadn't, so he told him of it and then asked Sir
William if he would like him to write to The Times to
corroborate him. Sir William thanked him sweetly, but
said he would take no notice, as they would alter the
flashes, and so they did.

This little boy was splendid. He played me a
Machiavellian trick. We had an ass one night as Officer
of the Watch, and in the middle watch I was nearly jerked
out of my cot by a heavy squall striking the ship. I
rushed up on deck (raining torrents) and we got in what
was left of the sails, and I came down soaked through and
bitterly cold, and on the main deck I met my young
friend, the little Midshipman, with a smoking hot bowl
of cocoa. I never enjoyed anything more in my life, and
I blessed the little boy, but it suddenly occurred to me
that he was as dry as a bone. I said : *' How is it you

254

SOME PERSONALITIES

are dressed ? " He said : " I am Midshipman of the
watch." I said : '* The devil you are ! How is it you
aren't wet ? " " Well, sir," he said, " 1 thought I
should be best doing my duty by going below and making
you a bowl of cocoa." I feh I had sold myself, like
Esau, for a mess of pottage. He was a splendid boy,
and he wrote me periodically till he died. He was left
a fortune. He was turned out of the Navy for knocking
his Captain down. I received a telegram to say that
he was ill and delirious and talking of me only, and
almost immediately afterwards a telegram came to say
he was dead.

Sir Nathaniel Barnaby, the eminent Director of Naval
Construction at the Admiralty, was also a great man,
but he never had recognition. He was not self-assertive.
He was as meek as Moses, and he was a saint. It was
he conceived the wonder of the time— the " Inflexible " ;
and I was her first Captain. He went out in her with
me to the Mediterranean. We had an awful gale in
the Bay of Biscay. Sir Nathaniel nearly died with sea-
sickness. I was cheering him up, and he whispered in
reply : '' Fools build houses for wise men to live in.
Wise men build ships for fools to go in."

If ever there was a great Christian, he was. After he
retired he devoted his whole life to Sunday schools, not
only in this country, but in America. There was some
great scheme, of which he gave me particulars at the time,
of a vast association of all Sunday schools wherever the
English tongue is spoken. Perhaps it is in being now—
I don't know ; but it was a fine conception that on some

255

MEMORIES

specified day throughout the world every child should
join in some hymn and prayer for that great idea of
John Bright's — the Commonwealth of Free Nations, all
speaking the same grand old English tongue. I was too
busy ever to follow that up, as I would have liked to have
done, and been his missionary.

A letter which he wrote to me in igic, and a much
earlier note of mine to him, which he enclosed with it,
are interesting, and I give them here :

Letter from Sir Nathaniel Barnahy^ K.C.B. {formerly
Chief Constructor of the Navy) to Lord Fisher.

Moray House,
Lewisham, S.E.

i$th January, igio

My Dear Admiral,

I suppose the enclosed brief note must have been
written by you to me over a quarter of a century ago.
You were meditating ** Dreadnoughts " even then and
finding in me the opposition on the ground of '* the
degradation of our other Ironclads " through the intro-
duction of the " i8-knot ' Nonsuch.' "

I have said to you before that I love a man w^ho knows
his own mind, and insists on getting his way. I have
therefore no complaint to make.

In a note dated two days earlier I see you say, " Bother
the money ! if we are all agreed that will be forth-
coming."

And they accuse you of cheeseparing and starving the
Navy !

It was I that stood for economy — see enclosed, on the
principal events affecting and indicating Naval Policy,
1866-1884, drawn up by me for Mr. Campbell-Banner-
man.

256

Sir John Fisher at the Hague Peace Conference,

May, 1899.

SOME PERSONALITIES

See also the other side of me in a letter to the Peace
Society People, and see a little hymn written for children
to " Russian National Anthem " and now widely sung.

With sincere respect and good wishes,

Yours always,
(Signed) Nathaniel Barnaby.

Please return your note to me ; nothing else.

This was the old letter of mine which he enclosed : —

From Lord Fisher to Sir N. Barnaby in 1883.

January 2$th,

I have delayed sending you this letter hoping to find
copy of a brief article I wrote on H.M. Ironclad
" Nonsuch "of 18 knots, after seeing your design A ; I
can't find it, and have written for the original, which I
will send for your amusement. I don't think your
argument is a sound one as to the *' degradation of our
other ironclads by the construction of an i8-knotter."
Isn't the principle right to make each succeeding iron-
clad an improvement and as perfect as you can }

THERE IS NO PROGRESS IN UNIFORMITY ! !

We've had enough of the " Admiral " class of ship. Now
try your hand on a " Nonsuch " (of vast speed !).

In violent haste.

Ever yours,

(Sgd.) J. A. F.

" Build few, and build fast,
Each one better than the last."

Two of Sir Nathaniel Barnaby 's great successors in
that arduous and always thankless post of Director of
Naval Construction are Sir Philip Watts and Sir Eustace

257 s

MEMORIES

Tennyson-D'Eyncourt. These two great men have each
of them done such service as should have brought them
far greater honour than as yet they have received. The
*' Dreadnought " could not have been born but for Sir
Philip Watts. I commend to all who wish to have a
succinct account of the ships of the British Navy that
formed the line of battle on the outbreak of war on the
4th August, 1914, to read the paper delivered by Sir
Philip Watts at the Spring Meeting of the Naval Archi-
tects on the 9th April, 19 19, when a very excellent Sea
Officer with more brains than most people I have met
presided- being the Marquis of Bristol. And it was a
great delight to me that he commanded the " Renown,"
my favourite ship, to bring to England King Alfonso—
an equally admired hero of mine. If ever there was a
brave man it is King Alfonso.

My other scientific hero besides Sir Philip Watts is
Sir Eustace D'Eyncourt. He also was the practical means,
besides his wonderful professional genius, of bringing
forth what are known as the " Hush Hush " ships on
account of the mystery surrounding their construction ;
and notwithstanding the armchair " Know-alls " who
have done their best to blast their reputation, they
achieved — the five of them — a phenomenal success. Sir
Eustace D'Eyncourt also gave us those incomparable
Monitors, with their bulges under water, which were
'' given away " through the unmitigated folly of the
Censors, who permitted a newspaper correspondent to
describe how he had seen men, like St, Peter, walking on
the water — they were walking on the protuberance

258

SOME PERSONALITIES

which extended under the surface as the absolute protec-
tion against submarines ; and when an old first-class
cruiser called the " Grafton " had been so made sub-
marine-proof, the captain of her, after receiving a torpedo
fired at him at right angles and hitting him amidships,
reported to the Admiralty that she went faster than
before, simply because her hull proper had not been
touched ; the submarine had only blown away the sub-
marine obstruction that Sir Eustace had fitted to her.
Has he been made a lord ? Personally I should say the
tanks could never have existed without him ; of that I am
quite sure. Sir Philip Watts and Sir Eustace D'Eyncourt
are enshrined in my heart.

Previously in this chapter I mentioned Mr. Gladstone.
I sat next to him at dinner once. At the other side of
him was a very beautiful woman, but she was struck dumb
by awe of Mr. Gladstone, so he turned round to me and
asked me if I had ever been in China. Yes, I had. And
he asked me who were the best missionaries. I said the
Roman Catholics were the most successful as they wore
the Chinese dress, were untrammelled by families, so
they got better amongst the people in the interior, but
furthermore in their chapels they represented our Saviour
and His Apostles with pigtails and dressed as Chinamen.
Yes, he said, he remembered that, and he told me the
name of the Head of the Roman Catholic Mission, whose
name I had forgotten, and said to me that the Pope
considered he had gone too far in that respect, and had
recalled him. That had happened some twenty years
previously, and I had forgotten all about it. Someone

259 s 2

MEMORIES

said what a pity that all that is now being said is being
lost. Mr. Gladstone said : *' Nothing is lost. Science
will one day take off the walls of this room what we have
been saying." This was years before the gramophone
and the dictaphone and the telephone. He told us a
great deal about Abraham and pigs, and why Abraham
was so dead against them, and how he, Gladstone, had
been driven by Daniel O'Connell in a four-in-hand, and
how the Bishops in his early days were so much handsomer
than now. One Bishop he specially named was called
** The Beauty of Holiness." When he left, he asked me
to walk home with him, which I did. Mrs. Gladstone
said, seated inside the brougham which was waiting at
the door : '' Come in, William." He said : " No, I
am going to walk with this young man." It was midnight,
and Piccadilly was quite alive. He was living with Lady
Frederick Cavendish, I think, at Carlton Gardens. We
were nearly run over, as he was regardless of the traffic.
I remember his saying : " Do right, and you can never
suffer for it." I thought of that when, in my own case
later on, it was *' Athanasius contra Mundum." I was
urged only to attack one vested interest at a time, but I
said, ** No, if you kick everyone's shins at the same time
they won't trouble about their neighbours," and it
succeeded ; but alas ! I gave up one thing, which was
the real democratic pith and marrow, the Free Education
of the Naval Officer, and a competence from the moment
of entry, and open to all. King Edward said to me about
this : ** You're a Socialist." I said that a white shirt
doesn't imply the best brain. We have forty million to

' 260

SOME PERSONALITIES

select from, and we restrict our selection to about one-
fortieth of the population.

I here relate an episode which made a deep impression
on me and one never effaced. At the time of Gladstone's
death I was looking at his picture in a shop window.
Two working men were doing the same. The one said
to the other : " That man died poor, but could have
died rich, had he used his knowledge as Prime Minister
to make investments quite lawfully ; but he didn't ! "

It really is a very fine thing in the public men of this

nation.

I have always worshipped Abraham Lincoln. I have
elsewhere related how he never argued with Judge or
Jury or anyone else, but always told a story, thus
following that great and inestimable example in Holy
Writ : " And without a parable spake he not unto them."
But one wishes it were more known how great were his
simple views. His sole idea of a Christian Church was
to preach the Saviour's condensed statement " to love
God and your Neighbour ! " He said that summed up
all religion. He gloried in having been himself a hired
labourer and believed in a system which allowed labourers
" to strike " when they wanted to, and did not oblige them
to labour whether you pay them or not. He said : " I do
not believe in a law to prevent a man getting rich (that
would do more harm than good), so while we do not
propose any war upon Capital we do wish to allow the
humblest an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.
I want every man to have a chance to better his condi-
tion." And what Lincoln says of diligence is very good :

261

MEMORIES

" The leading rule for the man of every calling is
DILIGENCE ! Whatever piece of business you have
in hand, before stopping do all the labour pertaining to
it which can be done."

That most moving account of Lincoln's simple elo-
quence at the graves of Gettysburg is a most touching
episode. The thousands listening to him never uttered
a sound. There was a dead silence, when he stopped
speaking. He left thinking himself a failure. It was
the success of his life. A great orator just before him
had moved the multitude to cheer unboundedly ! but
after Lincoln their feelings made them dumb.

While on personalities, I should like to say a little
on one of the best friends I ever had and in my
opinion the greatest of all journalists. Lord Morley
once told me that he had never known the equal of
W. T. Stead in his astounding gift of catching the
popular feeling. He was absolute integrity and he
feared no man. I myself have heard him tackle a Prime
Minister like a terrier a rat. I have known him go to a
packed meeting and scathe the whole mob of them. He
never thought of money ; he only thought of truth. He
might have been a rich man if he hadn't told the truth.
I know it. When he was over sixty he performed a
journalistic feat that was wondrous. By King Edward's
positive orders a cordon was arranged round the battle-
cruiser '* Indomitable," arriving late at night at Cowes with
the Prince of Wales on board, to prevent the Press being
a nuisance. Stead, in a small boat, dropped down with
the tide from ahead and swarmed up a rope ladder under

262

SOME PERSONALITIES

the bows, about 30 feet high and then along a sort of
greasy pole, known to sailors as the lower boom, talked
to one of the Officers, who naturally supposed he
couldn't be there without permission ; and the Daily Mail
the next morning had the most perfect digest I have
ever read of perhaps one of the most wonderful passages
ever made. This big battle cruiser encumbered with
the heaviest guns known, and with hundreds and hundreds
of tons of armour on her side, beat the " Mauretania, "
the greyhound of the seas, built of gingerbread, carrying
no cargo, and shaped for no other purpose than for speed
and luxury.

Of course no other paper had a word.

Stead always told me he would die in his boots. Strife
was his portion, he said. I am not sure that my friend
Arnold White would not have shot him at sight in the
Boer War. Stead was a pro-Boer, and so was I. I
simply loved Botha, and Botha gave me great words. He
said: " English was the business language of the globe " —
that's good ! Of course every genius has a strain of
queerness. Does not the poet say : " Great wits to mad-
ness often are allied ? " I remember a book which had
a great circulation, entitled ** The Insanity of Genius"
I very nearly wrote a letter to The Times only I was
afraid they might think me mad, and I was afraid that
Admiral Fitzgerald might not think me modest (see his
letter in The Times of Sept. 8th, 19 19). This was
my letter to The Times : —

" Genius is not insanity, it only means the man is
before his time. That's all."

263

MEMORIES

That was the whole of the letter.

There was a very great scientist (he is a very great
friend of mine and he discovered something I can't
remember the name of) who said : "A man must be
mad to think of flying machines ! " and he lived to see
them as plentiful as sparrows.

Without saying a word to me or even letting me know,
in a few hasty hours Stead wrote in the " Review of
Reviews " in February, 1910, the most extraordinarily
accurate resume of every date and name connected with
my career. It would have taken any other man a month.
However, he made one great mistake in it. He only
spoke in it, like all other things that have been said of
me, of " The full corn in the ear ! " What really is a
man's life is the endurance and the adversity and the
non-recognition and the humiliating slights and the
fighting morning, noon and night, of early life. That
brings fortune. I like that word " fortune." Those
inspired men who translated the Great Bible never said
a thing " happened," they always said it " fortuned."

I here insert a letter kindly lent me by Lord Esher.
As it was written on the spur of the moment and out of
the abundance of the heart, I give it verbatim. Esher
loved Stead as much as I did. I knew it, and that's why
I wrote to him. We felt a common affliction : —

April 22, 1912. Hotel Excelsior, Naples.

This loss of dear old Stead numbs me ! Cromwell
and Martin Luther rolled into one. And such a big
heart. Such great emotions. You must write something.

264

SOME PERSONALITIES

All Fve read quite inadequate. The telegrams here say
he was to the forefront with the women and children,
putting them in the boats ! / can see him ! and probably
singing " Hallelujah," and encouraging the ship's band to
play cheerfully. He told me he would die in his boots.
So he has. And a fine death. As a boy he had threepence
a week pocket money. One penny bought Shakespeare
in weekly parts, the other two pennies to his God for
Missions. And the result was he became editor of a big
newspaper at 22 ! And he was a Missionar}'- himself all
his life. Fearless even when alone, believing in his God
— the God of truth — and his enemies always rued it
when they fought him. He was an exploder of " gas-
bags " and the terror of liars. He was called a " wild
man " because he said *' Two keels to one." He was at
Berlin — the High Personage said to him : ** Don't be
frightened ! " Stead replied to the All Highest : "Oh,
no ! we won't ! for every Dreadnought you build we will
build two I " That was the genesis of the cry " Two
keels to one." I have a note of it made at the time for
my " Reflections." But, my dear friend, put your concise
pen to paper for our Cromwellian Saint. He deserves it.

Yours always,

Fisher.

" You cannot do anyone more good than by trying
unsuccessfully to do him an injury," was one of the
aphorisms of Lord Bailing (Sir Henry Bulwer) ; and it
occurred to me forcibly on one occasion when I went to
stay with my very great friend, Henry Labouchere (the
proprietor of Truth. On the way I had been reading
a peculiarly venomous attack on me in his paper ; and
when he greeted me as affectionately as ever, I showed
it to him, saying : " Don't put your arm on my shoulder !
Read that damned thing there ! " Labouchere glanced

265

MEMORIES

at it and replied, '* Where would you have been if I
hadn't persistently maligned you ? "

When I was with him at his villa at Florence, he used
to smoke the most beastly cigarettes at ten a penny, yet
he left over a million sterling, and was generous to absur-
dity to those he loved.

He had none but Italian servants ; he told me he was
always extremely polite to them for the knife came so
easy to them. He said he didn't realise this until, after
he had had some words with an English friend, his
Italian gardener, who had overheard the altercation,
asked Labouchere if he would like him (the gardener)
to deal with his friend, and he tapped the stiletto in his
waistband.

His own wit was as ready as his gardener's stiletto.
On one occasion he was at Cologne railway station, and
the Custom House Officer was turning his portmanteau
inside out. Labouchere had a telegraph form in his
pocket ; he wrote out a telegram with a stylographic pen
and handed it to the official who was standing behind the
Custom House Officer and told him it was a Government
telegram. This was the telegram :

Prince Bismarck,

Berlin.

Can't dine with you to-night. Missed train through
a damned ass of a Custom House Officer. Will let you
have his name.

Labouchere, Cologne.

They offered him a special train. Labouchere had

266

SOME PERSONALITIES

never seen Bismarck in his life. This was the occasion
on which Labouchere was reprimanded by the Foreign
Office for his delay in taking up his appointment as attach^
at St. Petersburg. His excuse was that the money
allowed him only permitted his traveUing by railway as
far as Cologne ; the rest of the way he walked.

This book would be incomplete if I did not draw
attention to the great debt the nation owes to three men
yet unmentioned in this volume.

Mr. George Lambert, M.P., twice refused office and
sacrificed his political prospects and with a glorious
victory sustained the whole Government effort to kick
him out of Parliament ; but he conquered with a mag-
nificent majority of over two thousand ! Why ?

Because after serving for over seven years in the
Admirahy he could speak of his own knowledge that the
War administration and the fighting Sea Policy were
shamefullv effete.

The Recording Angel will mark down opposite Mr.
Lambert's name : *' Well done, thou good and faithful
servant ! " But may he also have his reward here and
now, as many years of good work here belov/ may lie
between him and Heaven as yet.

Commodore Hugh Paget Sinclair is another ''Stalwart "
of the War. His business was to provide the officers
and men to man the Fleet— imagine the stupendous task
that was his !

We never wanted for Officer or Man !
He is now Director of Naval Intelligence ; and may
his ascent in the Navy be what is his splendid due !

267

MEMORIES

Sir Alfred Yarrow I select for mention, for without
him Mesopotamia would have been a bigger crime than
it was, and throughout all ages it will be branded for
gross and culpable and criminal ineptitude. If I was
asked to name the Capturer of Bagdad I would unhesi-
tatingly reply it was Sir Alfred Yarrow.

The Navy has not had its due credit for the Capture of
Bagdad. If Sir Alfred Yarrow with his usual astounding
push, and without regard to red tape or thanks or recog-
nition, had not sent those splendid light-draught gunboats
of his to Mesopotamia, packed up in bits like portman-
teaux, then Bagdad would not have been ours. The
Viceroy of India sent us (acting on the advice he had
received) the wrong draught of water. We ignored the
Viceroy and all his crew. It took eighteen days to get
this pressing vital business through the Government De-
partments concerned. It took us one day to accomplish
the whole procedure, with Sir Alfred Yarrow, and we
chucked all the Departments. So 24 light-draught gun-
boats grew up like Jonah's Gourd, which came up in a
night (Jonah, iv, 10).

I append a memorandum compiled from the Official
papers : —

History of Provision of 24 Light-draught Gunboats

for Mesopotamia.

Note. — These Vessels played a great part in the
capture of Bagdad.

January 9th, 19 15. — ^Telegram from Viceroy to India

268

SOME PERSONALITIES

Office that Admiralty be asked to provide 4 gunboats —
draught 4 J feet for Tigris.^

January nth, 191 5. — India Office asked Admirahy to
meet Viceroy's wishes.

January 29th, 1915.^ — Admirahy Departments sug-
gested various types. War Staff proposed 3 from Egypt
be sent.

January 29th, 1915. — Lord Fisher ordered 24 light-
draught gunboats. In order to save time, Captain [now
Rear-Admiral Sir S. S.] Hall, R.N., (Lord Fisher's Sec-
retary) was directed by Lord Fisher to co-operate with Mr.
Yarrow^ and carry the operation through without reference
to Admiralty Departments or any other Departments.^'
January 29th, 191 5. — Conference held. Design settled.^
January 30th, 1915. TCaptain Hall toured the country
February ist, 191 5. ] for likely firms to construct

the 24 gunboats.
February 2nd, 1915.^ — Proposals made for placing
orders approved by Lord Fisher and First Lord, and
orders were placed as follows : —
12 Small by Yarrow.
4 Large by Barclay Curie.
2 Large by Lobnitz.
2 Large by Ailsa Shipbuilding Co.
2 Large by Wood Skinner.
2 Large by Sunderland Shipbuilding Co.

^ This shows how badly advised the Navy was by the India Office,
as under 3 feet was vital, and the order was given accordingly.

2 Eighteen days going through Departments.

8 Mr. Yarrow had technical charge of the whole business and was the
sole designer — and there was no paper work whatever,

* All this action on the same day.

^ All the rest of the required action taken in 4 days.

269

MEMORIES

February 8th, 1915. — Captain Hall was appointed
Commodore-in-Charge of the Submarine Service, but
was directed by Lord Fisher to continue supervision of
the provision of 24 gunboats.

Sir Alfred Yarrow ought (like Mr. Schwab) to have
been made a Duke, and I wrote to Sir John Jellicoe,
when he was First Sea Lord, and told him so.

The history of the Flotillas of light-draught gunboats
built both for Mesopotamia and the Danube will ever
be associated with the good service done by Sir Alfred
Yarrow, and for which he was only made a Baronet.
Those built for the Tigris led our Army to Bagdad and
far beyond, and were at times unsupported far ahead of
the military force ; and without any question whatever
without them the Mesopotamian muddle could never have
emerged into a glorious victory. The speed with which
these vessels were constructed and despatched in small
parcels to Mesopotamia and there put together in an
extemporary dockyard arranged by Sir Alfred Yarrow's
staff was as much a feature as any other part of their
production. It necessitated masses of natives of different
religious persuasions being gathered together to assist
the skilled artizans in bolting the pieces together and
launching them on the Tigris. Their differing hours
of prayer were a disturbing element in the rapidity of the
construction ; but my splendid friend the foreman from
the Scotstoun Yard of Messrs. Yarrow contrived a prayer
compromise. The Danube Flotilla arranged for with
a number of other builders was equally remarkable ;
and Commodore (now Admiral) Bartolome wrote

270

SOME PERSONALITIES

me a commendatory letter of their good service
there.

I must also mention Commodore (now Admiral)
Sir S. S. Hall, but for whose continual journeys from
shipyard to shipyard these vessels would never have been
delivered on the scene of action in the time required.

Within six months all these Flotillas were thought of
— designed — built — and in service, and nothing gave
me intenser delight than the visit I paid to these craft
as they were all built and then taken to pieces for transit
to their destination in packages that any motor car could
have transported.

The world at large can have little conception of the
remarkability of those comparatively large hulls with
good speed and practically drawing but a few inches of
water — the propellers (which were too large in diameter
for the depth of water) being made by an ingenious
device to revolve in a well above the water-line, the water
being drawn up by suction. I thought to myself as I
viewed these miracles of ingenuity and rapidity :
*' England can never succumb."

271

CHAPTER XVI

THINGS THAT PLEASE ME

" I have culled a Garland of Flowers —
Mine is the string that binds them."

* * *

Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive !

(When catching Submarines).

* * *

Seest thou a man diligent in business — he shall stand
before Kings — he shall not stand before mean men.

* « #

God who cannot be unjust,
Heedeth all who on Him trust.
Them who call on Him for aid,
Anguish shall not make afraid.
Trust him then in life. In death
He can give thee Living Breath !
After death the Life now thine
He can make the Life Divine.

I never bother to bother about anyone who doesn't
bother to bother about me !

* # *

272

I Portrait by J. Mallia &^ Co. , Valetta.
CoMMANDER-lN-ClIIEr OK THE MEDITERRANEAN FlKET, 1899-I902.

THINGS THAT PLEASE ME

" Put on the impenetrable armour of contempt and

fortitude."

* * *

When danger threatens and the foeman nigh,
" God and our Navy / " is the Nation's cry.
But^ the danger over and the Country righted,

God is forgotten and the Sailor sHghted.

* * *

Never fight a Chimney Sweep ; some of the soot comes

off on you.

« * *

Pas de Cuke sans mystere.

* * *

Ode to an Apple —

Newton saw an apple fall,
Eve an apple did enthral ;
It played the devil with us all,

The Devil making Eve to fall.

* * *

" Liberty of Conscience " means doing wrong but not
worrying about it afterwards.

m * *

*' Tact " is insulting a man without his knowing it.

« * *

Even a man's faults may reflect his virtues.

* * *

Sincerity is the road to Heaven.

* * *

I thought it would be a good thing to be a missionary,
but I thought it would be better to be First Sea Lord.

mm*

273 T

MEMORIES

Think in Oceans — shoot at sight.

* # *

Big conceptions and Quick Decisions.

* # #
Napoleonic in Audacity.
Cromwellian in Thoroughness.
Nelsonic in Execution.

* # #

*' Surprise " the pith and marrow of war !

* * #

Audacity and Imagination beget surprise.

* * #

Rashness in war is Prudence.

* # #

Prudence in war is ImbeciHty.

* * *

Hit first ! Hit hard ! Keep on hitting ! ! (The 3 H's).

* # #

The 3 Requisites for Success — Ruthless, Relentless,
Remorseless (The 3 R's).

m * m

BUSINESS — Call on a Business man in Business hours
only on Business. Transact your Business and go about
your Business, in order to give him time to finish his
Business, and you time to mind your own Business.
[I had this printed on cards, one of which was handed
to every caller on me at the Admiralty.]

* # *

274

THINGS THAT PLEASE ME

The Nelsonic Attributes —

(a) Self Reliance.

(b) Power of Initiative.

(c) Fearlessness of Responsibility,

(d) Fertility of Resource.

* # #

Originality never yet led to Preferment.

* * «

Mediocrity is the Road to Honour.

# # #

Repetition is the Soul of Journalism.

# # #

No difficulty baffles great zeal.

* * *

The Pavement of Life is strewn with Orange Peel.

* m *

Inconsistency is the bugbear of Silly Asses.

# # #

Never Deny : Never Explain : Never Apologise.

«: # #

** To defy Power that seems omnipotent . . .
Never to change, nor falter, nor repent."

(Shelley.)

# # #

Cardinal RampoUa got his Hat at a younger age than
any preceding Cardinal. Asked to account for his
phenomenal success, he replied : — It's due to 3 things :

asked for

anything.

I never

refused
resigned

275 T 2

MEMORIES

The best scale for an experiment is 12 inches to a foot.

• # *

Dread Nought is over 80 times in the Bible (" Fear
Not "). So I took as my motto '' Fear God and Dread

Nought."

• * *

Moltke wrote as follows :

" A clever militar\- leader will succeed in many cases in
choosing defensive positions of such an offensive nature
from a strategic point of view that the opponent is com-
pelled to attack us in them."

• • *

In looking through a packet of ancient papers I find
some vouthful thoughts of my own and some others
which evidently I thought ven,- choice.

" -\nnhing said before a lecture muddles it."
" An}thing after weakens it ! "

• * *

" There is nothing you can't have if you want it

enough."

• * *

The follo\^4ng extract is from Blake :

*' He who bends to himself a joy,
Does the winged life destroy ;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternits''s Sunrise."

• • •

Dean Swift satirized the vulgar exclusiveness of those

276

THINGS THAT PLEASE ME

who desired the infinite meadows of Heaven only to be
frequented by the reHgious sect they adorned on earth :

" We are God's chosen few !
All others will be damned !
There is no place in Heaven for you,
We can't have Heaven crammed 1 "
* • •

Lord Bailing (Sir Henry Bulwer) codified his life in
axioms and phrases. His intimate friend, Sir Drummond
Wolff, says so. (By the way, Wolff's father was a mar-
vellous Bible scholar. I heard him preach the sermon of
my life : it was extempore, on *' The Resurrection." A
great friend of his told me that Wolff did really know
the Bible by heart.) These are Lord Balling's sayings ;
he quotes Talleyrand for one of his rules of life :

" Acknowledge the receipt of a book from the author
at once : this relieves you of the necessity of saying
whether you have read it."

Again this is excellent :

" You cannot do anyone more good than by trying
unsuccessfully to do him an injury." (Mr. Labouchere
gave me the same reason for attacking me in his paper

Truth.)

" Nothing is so foolish as to be wise out of season.

" The best trait in a man's character is an anxiety to
serve those who have obliged him once and can do so

no more."

# • *

Nelson's Ipsissima Verba.

" Do not imagine I am one of those hot-brained
people who fight at an immense disadvantage without
an adequate object ... in a week's time I shall get

277

MEMORIES

reinforcements and the enemy will get none, and then I
must annihilate him."

It was not *' Victory " that Nelson ever desired. It
was *' Annihilation I "

tF ^F ^p

Moses, Gideon and Cromwell.

Moses and Gideon were each of them summoned straight
from their simple daily task to go and help their fellow
countrymen, and both were able to perform the task
allotted to them in spite of their first great doubts of their
fitness for the work. The figure of Moses looms through
the Ages as gigantic as the Pyramids, and nearer home
and in a lesser sphere stands our English Cromwell, the
Great Protector !

" I would have been glad," said Cromwell, " to have
lived on my woodside or kept a flock of sheep rather
than have undertaken a government like this." And
yet in the end he had undertaken it because he said he
** had hoped he might prevent some imminent evil."

*rr *ff "ff

Suffragettes.

The nine Muses were all women.
The three Graces were all women.

* * *

A great philosopher has stated that a woman can be
classed under two categories :

1 . A mother, a mistress and a friend ; or,

2. A comrade and queen and child.

A woman is really rooted in physical reality, and all

278

THINGS THAT PLEASE ME

the above six attributes of the philosopher always live
in her.

Thus the Song of Solomon produced a passionate
commodity, but it required the Mary Magdalene of the
Gospel to express the summum honum of a woman of
" Greatly Loving."

In the first prayer book of a.d. 1549 there was a Collect
for her ! No other woman had a Collect except the
Virgin Mary.

Emotion, self-surrender, selflessness, immortal cour-
age, wondrous physical beauty ! Mary Magdalene was a
great human reality. It is quite obvious she was no
debauchee or her Beauty would have failed, nor could
she have been a " hardened " sinner or she would have
scoffed !

What was her history ? What caused her lapse ? Who
was her Betrayer }

** Her sins, which are many, are forgiven ; for she
loved much. Verily I say unto you. Wheresoever this
Gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall
also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a me-
morial of her."

And is it not very striking that St. Peter, who dictated
St. Mark's Gospel, records in the i6th chapter, verse 9,
of St. Mark, that the first person in the world to whom
the Saviour showed Himself after His Resurrection was
Mary Magdalene ?

" Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the
week. He appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of
whom he had cast seven devils. And she went and told

279

MEMORIES

them that had been with Him as they mourned and
wept. And they, when they heard that He was aHve
and had been seen of her, believed not."

• • •
A Sun-Dial that I Love.

Que Dieu eclaire les heures que je perds.
(May God light up the hours that I fail to light.)

• • «
Though hidden yet from all our eyes.
He sees the Gideon who shall rise
To save us and His sword.

280

EPILOGUE

MOUNT PISGAH

It is stated that the historian, Lecky, O.M. (I assisted
at the operation of his receiving the Order of Merit)
gave more thought and time to the book of his last years,
" The Map of Life," than to any other of all his works,
and it is said that for three years he kept on revising
the last of its chapters.

The book was derided to me by a literary friend of
great eminence as being " The Pap of Life ! " I read
its last chapters with great avidity. If for nothing
else, the book is worthy of immortality for the reason
that it so emphasises those great words of Dryden as
being appropriate to the close of a busied life —

" Not Heaven itself upon the past has Power,
What has been has been, and I have had my hour."

Whenever (as I often do) I pass Dryden's bust in
Westminster Abbey I invariably thank him for those
lines.

Mr. Lecky urges his readers to leave the active scenes
of life in good time and not to *' Lag superfluous on the

281

MEMORIES

Stage " (I believe Mr. Gladstone recommended this
also, but didn't do it I).

To illustrate Mr. Lecky we have that great and
splendid Trio of Translation to Heaven at the very zenith
of their powers. Elijah was hurrying along (that great,
hairy, weird old man) so that Elisha could hardly keep
pace with him, and he is suddenly caught up in a Chariot
of Fire to Heaven ! I ask, " Was not Nelson's leaving
this earth quite a similar glorious departure ? "

*' Partial firing continued until 4.30 p.m. when a
victory having been reported to Admiral Lord Viscount
Nelson, K.B., and Commander-in-Chief, he THEN
died of his Wound."

Moses (with whom I am now more particularly con-
cerned) also left this life in a similar glorious way, for
God was his companion when his Spirit left this Earth,
and it markedly is recorded of Moses that —

" His eye was not dim,
Nor his natural force abated ! "

Mr. Lecky doesn't quote my three men above. I
consider them superior to Noah, Daniel and Job, who
are the three named in Scripture as being so dear to the
pious man. Ezekiel, chapter xiv., verse 14.

I reiterate that the advice of the derided Lecky seems
to me excellent, to leave active life at one's zenith, and
thus anticipate senility.

The Archbishop of Seville is a lovely story by Cervantes.
All Spain came to hear him preach. Indeed he had
to preach every day, the crowds were so great, and he

282

EPILOGUE

said to his faithful Secretary : " Tell me when you
notice me waning, for a man never knows it himself.'*
The Secretary did so, and the Archbishop gave him the
sack ! Yes ! The Archbishop had passed the Rubicon,
and this dismissal was the proof. Having this fear,
I left Office on my birthday in 1910, though for a few
short months in 19 14 I enjoyed the " dusky hues of glori-
ous war," and exceedingly delighted myself in those
seven months in arranging a new Armada against Germany
of 612 vessels, and in sending Admiral von Spee and
all his ships to the bottom of the sea.

The following much-prized lines were sent me on the
Annihilation of Admiral von Spec's Squadron off the
Falkland Islands on December 8th, 19 14. He had
sunk Admiral Cradock's Squadron five weeks before.
The " Dreadnought " Battle Cruisers, " Inflexible " and
" Invincible," sent to sink von Spee, made a passage of
14,000 miles without a hitch and arrived just a few
hours before von Spee. It was a timely arrangement : —

From the President of Magdalen College, Oxford,
Sir Herbert Warren (Professor of Poetry).

Merserat Ex-spe Spem, rediit spes, mergitur Ex-spes.

" Von Spee sent the ' Good Hope ' to the bottom :
hope revived ; he is sunk himself, without hope."

From Mr. Godley, the Public Orator at Oxford
University.

Hoc tibi Piscator Patria debet opus.

" Your country owes this exploit to you, O Fisher ! "

283

MEMORIES

But that Great Providence, that shapes our course,
rough hew it how we will, ordained my departure from
the conduct of the War. Amongst the masses of regretful
letters at my departure I choose one from an Admiral
then 88 years old, who satisfies the great Dr. Weir
Mitchell's dictum of the clear brain becoming clearer
with age. This Admiral annexed a Continent for
England, abounding in riches in New Guinea ; but he
got no thanks ; and England gave away his gift. But
his name lives there. I conclude with his letter : —

Dear Old Fisher,

It is marvellous how all variations of our lives are
unravelled by Divine Inspiration that cannot err,
" No one can ' hustle ' Providence."
(That's one of your sayings !)
Think of Moses I

" He was the truest warrior that ever buckled sword.
He the most gifted Poet that ever breathed a word :
And never Earth's Philosopher traced with his golden pen,
On the Deathless Page, truths half so sage as he wrote down for
men ;

Yet no man knows his sepulchre, and no man saw it e'er.
For the Angels of God up-turned the sod and laid the Dead Man
there."

Moses saved his people. He prepared them for the
conquest in which he was to take no part. He was the
meekest man on earth, yet he could be the most ruthless !

Doubtless you saved England at the Falkland Islands.

Doubtless you prepared our Fleet tor this war !
(Nothing to boast of ! You the clay in the hands of the
Potter !) And it seems likely that some Joshua will

284

EPILOGUE

reap what you have sown ! Yet history will put it
right.

" 0 lonely grave in Moab's land! O dark Beth-Peor's hill !
Speak to these curious hearts of ours and teach them to be still !

Ever faithfully yours,

(Signed) J. Moresby.

285

INDEX

INDEX

^ Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J., 36, 64,

82, 182, 210
Abdul Hanoid, 56 ; the Pope and, ^^^aby. Sir Nathaniel, 263,
91 et seg., 204, 206 255 ; letter to Lord Fisher,

Aboukir Bay, French Fleet in, 256-267

161 Bamardo, Dr., 160

Adalbert, Prince, 230 Bartolom^, Admiral Sir Charles

Adams, John, editor of " The New *^®' ■^^*' 270

Teaching," 261 n. Battenberg, Prince Louis of,

Admiralty clerks and the Naval ^^^

War Staff, 102 et seq. Beatty, Lord, 37, 40, 121

Aircraft, 124 et seq. Beilby, Sir George, 116

Alcester, Lord, 140 Beit, Mr., 4, 33, 34, 182

Alexandra, Queen, 12, 20, 198, 238 ^ei^bow. Admiral, 163
Alfonso, Kong, 237-238, 258 Bernstorff, Count von, 210

Americans, 221 et seq. Bieberstein, Marschall von, 204,

Anderson, Mr. J. W. S., Ill 205

Angell, Mr. Norman, 126, 211 Birdwood, General Sir William

Arbuthnot, Sir R., 60 R-» 82

Arnold- Forster, Rt. Hon. H. O., Bismarck, Prince, 229

169-171,179 *' "Blucher," sinking of the, 149-

Asquith, Rt. Hon. H. H., 42, 50, ^^^

68, 59, 70, 74, 196, 199 Booth, General, 160

Borden, Rt. Hon. Sir R. L., 218
Botha, General, 136, 263
g Boys, Admiral, 168

Bridgeman, Admiral Sir Francis,
246, 247
Bacon, Admiral Sir Reginald, Bridgman, Mr., 92
_ ^^*' ^28 Bright, John, 23, 100, 223, 226-

Baddeley, Mr. V W., Ill 227, 256

*WM0BnS8 o

u

INDEX

Bristol, Marquis of, 258

Brock, Commander, at Zeebrugge,

60
Bryce, Lord, 205
Buckle, Mr., 181
Bulwer, Sir Hem-y, see Bailing,

Lord
Byron, Lord, 92, 102

C

Caillaux, M., 209

Caldwell, Major- General Sir

Charles, 83, 84
Callaghan, Admiral Sir George A.,

37, 39
Campbell -Bannerman, Sir H., 42,

176, 182, 183, 256
Canning, Sir Stratford, 95
Garden, Admiral Sir Sackville H ,

79, 82
Cartagena, 237-239
Cavendish, Lady Frederick, 260
Cawley, Lord, 56
Cervantes, 282-283
Chalmers, Dr., 153
Choate, Mr., 17

Churchill, Mr. Winston, 36, 41, 60,

52, 65-59, 63, 64, 66, 67, 71-73,

81, 124, 127, 183, 196, 198, 206,

207, 212-214, 246

Clark, Mr. Champ, 202

Clarke, Sir George, 16, 165, 169,

173, 179, 196
Clemenceau, M., 209
Corbett, Sir Julian, 2 n., 101
Cornwallis, Admiral, 163
Cradock, Admiral, 135, 136, 283
Crease, Captain, 104
Cromer, Lord, 56, 60, 70, 76, 94
CromweU, Oliver, 107, 278

D

Dalling, Lord, 265, 277

" Daniell cell," the, 140

Daniels, Mr. Josephus, 225

Dardanelles, the, 49 et seq.

Denbigh, Lord, 10

Depew, Mr. Chauncey, 224

DUko, Sir Charles, 16

DisraeU, 25, 101

Dogger Bank incident, the, 65, 71,

94
Dryden, 281
Dumanoir, Admiral, 162
Dundonald, Lord, 146, 163

E

Ellison, General Sir C, 166,

166
Empress Marie, 198
Eshor, Lord, 6, 12 ; letter to

Lord Fisher, 13; 33, 34;

Lord Fisher's letters to, 165

et seq.

Falkenhayn, General von, 97
Fisher, Mr. Andrew, 61, 69
Fitzgerald, Admiral, 263
Flint, Mr., 110
Franklin, Benjamin, 163 n
Frederick the Great, 34

290

INDEX

French, Lord, 57, 58, 69, 169, Hankey, Sir Maurice, 58, 84, 74,
172-174, 188 194

Hanotaux, M., 187
Harcourt, Sir William Vernon,
186, 216
Q Hawke, Admiral Lord, 163

Hawthorne, 115
C d Mr 122 Henderson, Admiral Sir Reginald,

Gardiner,'Mr. A. G., 53 xr^^f"" ^f a .u ah

Garibaldi. visit of, to the Henderson, Mr. Arthur, 47

"Warrior" 150 Hertz German eubmarme mine

Garvin, Mr. J. L., 187 J^^' 130, 151
German Emperor on Lord Fisher, Hertzog, General, 136

go igo Hildyard, General, 169

Girouard. Sir E. P. C, 166 Hindenburg, Field-Marshal von,

Gladstone, Mr., 41, 42, 244, 259, ^4, 106

260, 261, 282
Gladstone, Mrs., 260
Godley, Mr., 283
Goschen, Viscount, 107, 139
Grand Duke Nicholas, 52, 79
Granville, Lord, 205
Greene, Sir Graham, 111
Grey, Lord, 18, 96, 189, 190,

205
Qrierson, General, 172
Quazzo, Steven, 35

Hood, Admiral Sir Horace,

104
Hood, Admiral Viscoimt, 60,

163
Hornby, Admiral Sir GeofEi-ey

Phipps, 65-66, 71, 93, 228
House, Colonel, 45
Howe, Admiral, 163
Hvish Hush ships, 98-101, 243,

258

H

Haddock, Commodore, 144, 145

Haig, Lord, 172

Haldane, Lord, 102, 104, 106,

209
Hall, Admiral Sir S. S., 269-271
Hall, Admiral W. H., 103
Hall, Rear-Admiral Sir William

Reginald, 85
Hamilton, Sir Ian, 83, 215

Inge, Dean, 51

Ingenohl, Admiral von, 32

Inglefield, Admiral Sir Frederick

S., 168
Ismay, Mr. 145
Isvolsky, M., 182, 187,233

Hamilton, Lady, 158

Hamilton, Lord George, 242, 243, Jackson, Admiral Sir Henry B.,
244 40

291

INDEX

Jellicoe, Lord, 30, 31, 36-40, 64, Lecky, Rt. Hon. W. E. H., 281,

74, 105, 208-210, 270 282

Johnson, Abraham, 148-149 Leishman, Mr. John G. A., Ameri-

Jones, Commodore Oliver, 146 can Ambassador to Germany,

204, 205
Lincoln, Abraham, 261, 262
Lister, Lord, 250
K Lloyd George, Mr., 55, 66, 69,

81 n., 131, 186, 204, 213, 215-
Kelly-Kenny, General, 174 ^ ^17, 223

Kelvin, Lord, 143, 193, 251 et ^oubet President. 12, 236

Ludendorfi, General von, 32, 97,

106
Lyttelton, Sir N., 66

M

aeq.

Kerr, Lord Walter, 140

Key, Sir Cooper, 143

Kiamil Pasha, 93 96, 239

Kiel Canal, the, 19, 130, 131

Kiderlen-Waechter, von, 204

Kiernan, John, 147-148

King Edward, 1 et seq. ; letter

from author to, 3-4 ; his tact, McClintock, Admiral Sir Leopold,

6-7; 25, 51, 113, 117, 184, 186, 143

187, 191, 192, 198-199, 203, McCrea, Mr., 222

207, 211, 225, 226, 232, 234, 236, Macgregor, Sir Evan, 111

237, 260 McKenna, Mr. Reginald, 41, 43,

King William, 229 44, 62, 186, 193-197, 199-201,

Kitchener, Lord, 50, 52, 57, 59, 206, 207.

65, 67, 74, 79, 80, 83, 104, 105, McKenna, Mrs. Reginald, 43
176, 198, 199, 241 Mackenzie, Sir Thomas, 61-62, 70

KnoUys, Sir Francis, 3, 20, 21, Macnamara, Dr. T. J., 42, 44

171, 193
Knox, Mr. Philander, 205
Kruger, Paul, 169
Kuropatkin, M., 187

Labouchere, Mr. Henry, 266-267
Lambert, Mr. George, 267
Lansdowne, Lord, 82
Latimer, Bishop, 120
Law, Mr. Bonar, 82
Learmonth, Admiral, 132

Madden, Admiral Sir Charles,

104
Magee, Archbishop, 151
Mahan, Admiral, 5, 37, 187, 216
Maxim, Sir Hiram, 227, 228, 250
Maxse, Mr. Leo, 182
Maxwell, General, 172
Mears, Sir Grimwood, Secretary

to the Dardanelles Commission ,

61
Merchant Navy, the, 119-120
Milne, Mr., 139
Mitchell, Dr. Weir, 284
Moltke, Field-Marshal Count, 229,

230, 276

292

INDEX

Moresby, Admiral J., letter to

Lord Fisher, 284-285
Morgenthau, Mr. H., 84
Morley, Lord, 216, 262
Munro, General Sir Charles, 85
Murray, Mr. George, 199
Mvirray, Sir Oswyn, 111

N

Naples, Queen of, 158
Napoleon, 18, 44, 162, 201
Naval War Stafis and Admiralty

clerks, 102 et seq.
Nelson, 18, 25-27, 51, 66, 105,

107, 109, 111, 117, 142, 147,

158 et seq.
Nicholson, Field-Marshal Lord,

65, 85
Nicholson, Mr. W. F., 103
Northbrook, Lord, 156, 157, 244,

245

o

O'Connell, Daniel, 260
Oldenburg, Grand Duke of, 229,

232
Olga, Grand Duchess, 231, 232 ;

letter to Lord Fisher, 233-234
Oliver, Admiral Sir Henry, 104
Orde, Sir John, 244
Orloff, Prince, 2, 234

Palmerston, Lord, 203
Parker, Sir Hyde, 66
Parsons, Sir Charles, 249

Pepya, Samuel, 111

Perrin, Mr, W. G., Ill

Petersen, Mr., 119

Phillips, Mr. J. F., Ill

Pitt, Mr., 18, 36, 203

Plumer, General, 32, 172, 174

Pohl, Admiral von, 29 et seq.

Pohl, Frau von, 30-32, 105

Polsonare family, the, 162

Pope, the, and Abdul Hamid,

91 et aeq.
Probyn, Sir Dighton, 20

Q

Queen Alexandra, 12, 20, 198,

238
Queen Victoria, 156, 157

R

Rawlinson, Sir Henry, 119

Redesdale, Lord, letter to Lord
Fisher, 14

Reich, Herr von, on " Dread-
noughts," 14: et seq.

Reid, Sir George, 199

Reval, 231 et seq.

Rhodes, Cecil, 34, 35

Richmond, Captain, 104

Ridley, Bishop, 120

Roberts, Lord, 53, 183

Roch, Mr. W. F., 62

Rodney, Admiral, 163

Roon, Count von, 229

Roosevelt, Mr., 23

Rosebery, Lord, 27, 44, 49, 55,
138, 158, 162, 248

Rothschild, Lord, 244

Roxisseau, M., 187

Rozhdestvensky, Admiral, 107

293

INDEX

Runciman, Mr. Walter, 44
Russia, Emperor of, 191, 261

T

S

St. Vincent, Lord, 181
Salisbury, Lord, 94, 204
Sampson, Admiral, 225
Samuel, Mr. Herbert, 42
Samuel, Sir Marcus, 116
Sanders, Marshal Liman von, 85,

97
Scapa Flow, 31
Schreiner, Mr. G. A., 84
Schwab, Mr., 270
Schwartzhofi, Gross von, 105,

106, 212
Scott, Mr. Robert Falconer, 163 n.
Scott, Sir Percy, 248, 249
Seely, General, 216
Selborne, Lord, 170, 245, 246
Shipbiiilding, new, inaugurated

by Lord Fisher, 86 ef seq.
Sinclair, Commodore Hugh Paget,

267
Slade, General F. G., 174, 175
Smith, Sir F. E., 183
Smith, Sir Thomas, 250
Smith-Dorrien, General, 169, 172,

174
Some Personalities, 242 et seq.
Southey, 249

Special Missions, some, 229 et seq.
Spee, Admiral von, 36, 78, 135,

136, 283
Spencer, Lord, 242, 244, 245
Stead, Mr. W. T., 35, 170, 171,

197, 249, 2G2, 263, 264
Stolypin, M., 187, 231, 236-237
Stopford, Sir F., 172
Submarines, Lord Fisher's Memo-
randum on, 88-90
Swift, Dean, 276

Taft, Mr., 202

TaU, Isaac, 151

Taylor, Bishop Jeremy, 114

Tennyson -D'Eyncourt, Sir Bus-

tace, 257-259
Thomas, Mr. Holt, 126, 126
Thompson, Mr., 224
Thomson, Sir William, see Kelvin,

Lord
Tirpitz, Admiral von, 16, 29 e^ seq.,

97, 184
Togo, Admiral, 107
Treves, Sir Frederick, 249-251
Troubridge, Sir Thomas, 165, 161
Try on. Sir George, 146
Tweedmouth, Lord, 5
Tyrwhitt, Sir Reginald Yorke,

170

Villa Vieja, Marquis de, 233

W

Walker, Sir Charles, 1 1 1

Warburton, Eliot, 27

War Council Meetings, Lord
Fisher's notes of his special
intervention at, 78 e^ seq.

Ward, Sir Joseph, 193

Warren, Sir Herbert, 283

Washington, George, 223, 226

Watts, Dr., 114

Watts, Sir Philip, 187, 257-269

Weymouth, Admiral, 122

294

INDEX

White, Mr. Arnold, 263 Y

White, Sir WUliam, 95

Wilmot, Admiral Sir S. Eardley, Yarrow, Sir Alfred, 116, 268

letter to Lord Fisher, 129 et eeq.

Wilson, Mr. A. K., 199, 206 Yelverton, Sir Hastings, 231

Wilson, Sir Arthur, 102, 183, 194,

196, 197, 200, 246, 247
Wilson, Mr. Havelock, 119-120

Wilson, President, 202, 222 2

W^olff, Sir Drummond, 277
Woolward, Captain Robert, 144 Zeebnigge, 50, 68, 75, 79, 81, 119

295

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