Jacky Fisher - a naval genius

An earlier version of this article appeared in Victorian Military History 2014.

Jutland 1916        

At 7.17 pm on 31 May 1916 Admiral Reinhard Scheer’s German High Seas Fleet had been in battle against Admiral John Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet for just under an hour. The main battle had begun at 6.15 pm and, after a mere twenty minutes, Scheer had turned his fleet through 180º as if he were heading for home. But  he inexplicably came back for a second attempt to smash the British Fleet. Within minutes König, Grosser, Kurfürst, Markgraf, Kaiser and Helgoland were all hit. To stay would have been madness. Scheer fled the scene once more, leaving Jellicoe as the triumphant victor of the day. The one and only large scale naval battle of World War One (and the only dreadnought battle ever) had seen Jellicoe’s fleet decisively rout the German menace.

Yet it was not really Jellicoe’s fleet: it was Fisher’s, and its origins went back to his time as commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1899-1902.

Early years

Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher (1841-1920) is widely considered to have been the greatest British reforming admiral of all time. No man ever made more changes to the Navy in so short a period, against so much opposition but with so much justification. John ‘Jacky’ Fisher was born into a humble family, his father, William, being an army captain who had resigned his commission to take up coffee planting in Ceylon, at which he lost a good deal of money before dying in 1866 after falling from his horse. The young Fisher had been shipped home to England in 1847 and had entered the Navy ‘penniless, friendless and forlorn’ aged 13 in 1854.[1] Two years later he was taken up by the kindly Captain Charles Shadwell of HMS Highflyer who, after being badly injured at the Battle of the Peiho Forts in 1859, passed his protégé on to Admiral James Hope, the Pacific commander-in-chief. From that day on Fisher’s career was unstoppable as he excelled in every post in which he was placed. When he took his lieutenancy exams in 1861 he scored 968 out of 1000 marks – the highest ever recorded at that time. He became a torpedo and gunnery expert and by 1886 was the Director of Naval Ordnance at the Admiralty. Promotion to  rear admiral followed in 1890. But it was Fisher’s posting as commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1899 that revealed his true genius as a reforming admiral.

The fleet in 1899

Britain had last fought a significant naval battle in 1805 at Trafalgar. The country had become the largest naval power in the world and, from then on effortlessly, commanded the oceans. With no serious rival and no immediate potential enemy, the Navy fell into a stupor. Every corner of the globe had a fleet with a comfortable base and all the usual accoutrements by way of clubs, entertainments, riding stables and so on, as befitted the officer class. When Gilbert and Sullivan’s  Sir Joseph Porter lampooned the Navy in HMS Pinafore singing that he had  ‘polished up the handle of the big front door’ and in due course had become ‘the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!’ he was not far from the truth.[2] A typical ship’s inspection report in 1900 complimented the captain on the men’s ‘good physique’ and the fact that they were ‘well dressed’. The inspectors went on to admire the men, who ‘moved very smartly’ and the ship, which was ‘very clean throughout’. Down in the engine room they appreciated the ‘appendages’, which they found to be ‘very good’.[3] At no point, though, did their report mention guns, gunnery or shooting accuracy – the raison d’être of a battleship. The Navy at the end of the nineteenth century was utterly unprepared for war. One man changed all this: Fisher.

Turning a fleet inside out

Fisher detested war but recognised that, if it came, no quarter should be given: ‘You hit first, you hit hard, and keep on hitting: You have to be Ruthless, Relentless and Remorseless,’ he used to say.[4] And it was ruthlessness that he applied to the complacent Mediterranean Fleet. When he took up his command on 1 July 1899 Fisher threw aside the tradition by which no one did anything until the commander-in-chief had visited each vessel – a routine that could take up to six weeks. Instead he called the captains to his flagship, HMS Renown, gave them a 30-minute address and dismissed them. By the end of the morning, the fleet was ready for action.[5] 

Action, of course, was the last thing the captains were expecting. From the day that their cadet-aged bare feet had first trod a deck they had relished their life of cruising in neat lines, manoeuvring in pretty formations and, in extreme cases, throwing practice ammunition over the sides to avoid burning the paintwork on the guns. All this was to change and change quickly since Fisher knew that torpedoes and long-range guns had put an end to centuries of naval practice.

Robert Whitehead had first perfected the self-propelled torpedo in 1868. By 1899 a small torpedo boat could creep up on a capital ship and send it to the bottom in minutes with just one well-aimed weapon. And, if a capital ship managed to avoid torpedoes, it still had to keep its distance from the enemy’s warships since gun ranges were now of the order of 6000-10,000 yards. Fisher intended to teach his captains to manoeuvre and fight at high speed: in a future war, only the alert and nimble would survive.

So Fisher made his fleet race at full speed to evade torpedoes, and fire its guns at long ranges to evade shelling. One early witness to these changes was Maurice Hankey, then a marine officer and, later, secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence. In a letter that he wrote home in 1899 he recalled how (before Fisher)  ‘I have railed against the Navy for their want of long-range firing’. Now, he said, ‘the present Admiral … carried out practice at 6,000 yards, a most valuable and in every way instructive lesson’.[6] Hankey was to remain a valiant Fisher supporter for the rest of his life. Even Fisher’s second-in-command and future antagonist, rear admiral Lord Charles Beresford,  was impressed, recording in his private notebook his approval of Fisher’s ‘practical manoeuvring of one Fleet against another’ and added: ‘Simply incredible!!!’[7]

But Fisher’s manoeuvres were more than exercises: they were designed to winkle out the fleet’s weaknesses and prepare it for war. He insisted that exercises should provide an experience as near to war conditions as was feasible and test specific potential war scenarios. One such exercise in 1901 revealed a horrifying and important fact. Fisher had set up a blockade of a port in which there were ‘enemy’ destroyers. These vessels had to attempt to put to sea without being ‘sunk’ by the blockading ships. Every one of the torpedo boats passed unnoticed through the blockade under the cover of darkness.[8] Had they wished to sink the blockading fleet they could have done so with impunity. Fisher had proved that close blockade was no longer feasible – a result that had huge implications in 1914.

There was one more – and crucial – aspect to Fisher’s command of the Mediterranean Fleet. He knew (and told the Admiralty so almost weekly) that the fleet was seriously short of almost every type of vessel. (At that time the Mediterranean Fleet was threatened by a hostile French fleet at Toulon and a Russian one in the Baltic Sea.) He squeezed a few extra ships out of his masters but to go further he needed a change in public opinion. He had first learnt the value of leaking stories to naval journalists in 1884 when the Admiralty did battle with the then Prime Minister, William Gladstone. While his superiors turned a blind eye, he leaked Admiralty papers to the journalist William Stead for his lobbying campaign The Truth About the Navy. The upshot was Gladstone’s resignation and bigger naval estimates. Now he chose Arnold White of the Daily Mail as the recipient of his stories of the fleet’s weakness. White duly obliged with a stream of well-informed articles which listed every flaw and deficiency, while praising Fisher’s genius.

When Fisher left the Mediterranean in mid-1902 there was no trace of the sedate fleet that he had inherited. In its place lay an aggressive war machine, tensed for action. Beresford credited  Fisher with around twenty important changes, including creating ‘[a] fleet a 15-knot one without breakdowns, in place of a 12-knot one with breakdowns’.[9] The Fleet’s improvement was also noted by the British Ambassador at Constantinople who thanked Fisher for ‘the state of efficiency to which you brought the Fleet in the Mediterranean’.[10]

So far, so good. But Fisher had only been in command of one fleet: the rest of the Navy still basked in its nineteenth century apathy. Serendipity set in. Just as Fisher’s command was coming to an end a frustrated First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selborne, was in search of a man who could head off a crisis: the engineer problem. He chose Fisher.

The Selborne Scheme

Selborne promoted Fisher to be Second Naval Lord at the Admiralty in order to tackle this pressing problem. When ships had first begun to be powered by steam, men with a knowledge of engines were recruited to look after them. They were practical, hands-on mechanics and engine drivers. Not surprisingly they were called ‘greasers’ and other derogatory names by the executive officers, who looked down on them as mere civilians and banned them from the ward room. As the years went by, engines and engine rooms grew bigger and more complicated, requiring a wider range of skills. By the late nineteenth century, an engine room was still manned by hands-on mechanics, but it was managed by professional engineers who, in their own way, were the equal of the executive officers on the bridge. However, the executives continued to treat their engineers with disdain. By 1902 the discontent was rising to a crescendo and Parliament was threatening an enquiry. (The Admiralty feared nothing more than anyone enquiring into its activities.)  Even more to the point, recruiting engineers was becoming more and more difficult. (Just two months before Fisher took up his post the Incorporated Association of Headmasters passed a resolution at their annual conference condemning ‘the unsatisfactory conditions of service of engineer officers’ and warning that unless their status was raised, there would continue to be a shortage of ‘desirable candidates’.[11])

Fisher’s solution to the lowly status of the engineers was perhaps the most audacious of his great reforms – certainly it caused more consternation amongst the officer class and in the clubs and salons of London than anything else he ever did. Quite simply, he proposed to remove the distinctions between officers by the simple expedient of having only one system of training for all. (There were currently three: executive branch, engineering branch and marine branch.) He explained in the introduction to this scheme, published on Christmas Day 1903,  that ‘in the old days it sufficed if a Naval Officer were a seaman. Now he must be a seaman, a gunner, a soldier, an engineer, a man of science as well’. This meant that there was a need both for ‘a more general scientific training’ and, for the specialisation. He promised that  ‘the unmistakable naval character’ of an officer would be preserved but in reality Fisher was to end the long-cherished superior status of the executive officer. The old ‘spirit of unity’ was now to mean ‘equality of ranks’. As the memorandum said, the changes were ‘far-reaching, and in some respects sweeping’. In outline it was proposed that: (1) all officers should begin their training together at the age of 12 or 13; (2) they should all receive exactly the same training until they reached the rank of sub lieutenant; and (3) the newly qualified sub lieutenants would be ‘distributed between the three branches of the Service’.[12] Wherever possible, though, the sub lieutenants would enter the branch of their choice. These changes came to be known as the Selborne Scheme, despite being totally Fisher’s work.

There were howls of anguish from the traditionalists, who saw an end to the high status of the executive officer. But there were enough supporters (including  The Times and Beresford) for the reforms to be implemented. Many changes to entry and training  have since been made as the Navy has struggled to balance the need for specialisation against the principle of ‘equality of ranks’, but at no point has the Navy departed from the spirit of Fisher’s first great reform.

Having proved that he could both reform a fleet and reform a training system, Fisher was now in line for the real job: to reform a Navy. But his appointment was by no means automatic. Many, including the then First Naval Lord, Walter Kerr, were strongly opposed. For them Fisher was too wayward and too inclined to violent changes. Yet Selborne was convinced that only Fisher could simultaneously satisfy the government’s two naval priorities: to build a stronger Navy while also reducing its budget. Selborne had heard enough of Fisher’s ideas for cost-cutting to believe that he was the man for the job.

Fisher great reforms

With his educational reforms completed Fisher was temporarily parked in the post of commander-in-chief at Portsmouth until the post of First Naval Lord became vacant in late 1904. Fisher, who strongly identified himself with Lord Nelson, always claimed that he took up his post on Trafalgar Day (21 October) but in fact he began work on the previous day. With his arrival he revived the old title ‘sea lord’ while that of ‘naval lord’ was consigned to history. In his five years as First Sea Lord Fisher introduced around eighteen reforms. Of these five were major and we have already met his first: the Selborne Scheme. The other four involved fleet distribution, obsolete ships, nucleus crews, and all big gun battleships and cruisers.

Fleet distribution

Until Fisher became First Sea Lord, the Admiralty had spread its ships in squadrons and fleets around the world with little regard to strategic needs. (For example, Fisher served on the sleepy North America station from 1897 to 1899, where the fleet had next to nothing to do.) Under the dual pressures of the need to economise on the one hand and the need to strengthen the fleets in home waters on the other, Fisher ruthlessly abolished redundant stations. ‘5 keys,’ he said ‘Lock up the world!’ These were Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar and Dover. It was at these points that he intended to base his main fleets.[13] This great scheme was partly possible because of advances in technology. Before the days of the telegraph and the motive power of steam engines, London was incapable of responding to emergencies in far flung places. It might take weeks or months for a despatch to reach Britain and a similar time to send out orders to ships. But by 1904 telegrams daily reached the Foreign Office and the Admiralty from every station on the globe. The same telegraph could carry orders to fast steamships, directing them to scenes of trouble.

Selborne was able to announce the new fleet distribution on 6 December 1904. The Home Fleet was to become the Channel Fleet with 12 battleships while the Channel Fleet was to be renamed the Atlantic Fleet and move to Gibraltar with 8 battleships. These two fleets would each be supported by a cruiser squadron. The Mediterranean Fleet would remain at Malta with 8 battleships.[14]

The ‘also rans’ –  the fleets far from home waters –   were all in places that Fisher regarded as unlikely trouble spots and he intended to drastically reduce their importance. Three stations – the South Atlantic, the West Indies, and the Cape – were amalgamated into a single Cape Station. China, Australia, the East Indies, and the Pacific suffered the same fate as they merged to form a single China station. However, Fisher still wanted to provide sea-going experience to as many flag officers as possible so the Cape station was allocated a vice admiral and three rear admirals, while the China station was to have one admiral, two vice admirals and two rear admirals.[15]

The bonfire of obsolete ships

Fisher’s shuffling of the fleets was accompanied by a bonfire of obsolete vessels. In some ways his decision to scrap 154 ships that could, as he put it, neither fight nor flee was the most dramatic of his reforms simply because it was so visible. These vessels included ones which, Fisher said, would ‘cause an Admiral grave concern if allowed to wander from the protection of larger ships’. In the event of war, he added, they would be ‘Lucky if they can reach a neutral port, disarm, and have their crews interned for the remainder of the war. Lucky, indeed, if a far worse fate does not befall them.’[16]

The selection of the vessels to be scrapped was based on a four-level assessment of their value, and defined in a typically vigorous Fisher fashion:

A Fighting ships

B Ships of doubtful value

C Utterly useless ships for fighting purposes

D Absolutely obsolete ships.[17]

In the event 90 ships were sold for scrap, 37 were allocated to non-war duties and 27 were kept for their armament but no longer maintained.[18] The ships not actually scrapped were laid up without crews.[19]

Nucleus crews

The culling of the ships was a brilliant conception since it solved so many problems. It saved money on maintenance and docking while releasing 950 officers and 11,000 men who, in turn, could man the modern ships that were lying un-crewed in British dockyards. Since the naval estimates did not permit his full manning of every ship, Fisher created what he called ‘nucleus crews’. The nucleus allocation to each ship was ‘a captain and commander and a proportion of the other officers, including the engineer, gunnery, navigating and torpedo lieutenants’ together with two-fifths of the crew complement. This two-fifths was to include ‘all the more expert ratings, especially the torpedo ratings and the principal gun numbers’. The nucleus crews would live on board their ships. So manned, the ships would go to sea from time to time for gunnery practice and testing their machinery. In the event of a threatening situation, the crews could be quickly made up to full strength from reserves on land.[20]

All big gun battleships and cruisers

Having sorted out fleets and men for immediate needs, Fisher turned to a long-term need: a new type of battleship. In May 1904 he had written a paper on gun calibres for battleships and armoured cruisers. The ballistics expert Sir Andrew Noble had recommended that the ‘smallest big gun’ should be 10-inch, although Fisher felt there were arguments to justify 12-inch guns as the minimum. Bigger shells, he wrote, had greater ‘wrecking effect’, which increased in proportion to the cube of a gun’s calibre. More importantly, his paper made the case for ‘uniform armament’, that is all guns on a warship being of the same calibre. This, Fisher argued, reduced ammunition stocks and spares and so released space for other purposes. The importance of this paper is that it set out his first ideas on what was to become HMS Dreadnought.[21]

Behind Fisher’s thinking lay a number of technological imperatives. Until the end of the nineteenth century battleships were unthreatened by submarines and their gun ranges were no more than 3000 yards. They still fought at modest distances – near enough to range and aim guns by eye. With the advent of submarines and long-range guns fleets kept their distance in battle and gun ranges increased to thousands of yards. As early as April 1904 a committee report on gunnery in the Mediterranean had recommended that battleships engage at ranges of 8000-10,000 yards.[22] This same committee also identified what was to be called salvo firing, that is finding the range of a target by marking the fall of all the shots from one round. Salvo firing required guns of one calibre,  although the committee did not explicitly say so.[23]

Dreadnought’s design was also influenced by a report from Captain William Pakenham, naval attaché in Japan, on the effect of guns of different calibre at the Battle of Tsushima (1905) when the 12-inch Japanese shells inflicted such massive damage on the Russian ships that the latter might as well have had no guns at all. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the day of the all-big-gun ship had arrived.

For many observers, though, Fisher’s Dreadnought was a catastrophic blunder since, overnight, it wiped out Britain’s advantage in battleship numbers over other nations. But this argument ignored the fact that other nations were already planning their own dreadnoughts. As early as 1903 the Italian Admiral Vittorio Cuniberti had published a design for what he called a ‘monocalibre battleship’. It displaced 17,000 tons, had a speed of 24 knots and carried twelve 12-inch guns. Meanwhile the Admiralty were in possession of a secret report that showed that the Japanese and Russians were investigating 12-inch armament and, as early as December 1904, Kaiser Wilhelm had forecast that big guns were on the way.[24] Although Cuniberti’s ship was never built, his design and the rumours of dreadnought-planning around the world were a warning to Britain: its battleships were on the verge of becoming obsolete, Fisher or no Fisher. He understood this and realised that, since Britain would soon have to build dreadnoughts, it would pay to build one quickly in order to test and refine its design. Then, since Britain could build warships faster than any other nation, it could quickly regain its superiority in the new type of warship.

Fisher’s new navy was now rapidly taking shape on the drawing board. He wanted four types of fighting ship: battleships, armoured cruisers, destroyers and submarines. He made a first attempt to define the difference between battleships and armoured cruisers saying that battleships ‘have more powerful guns and have more armour’ while ‘The armoured cruiser somewhat foregoes these to get more speed.’ To help his readers recall the key features of each type of ship he named them HMS Untakeable (battleship, 20 knots), HMS Unapproachable (armoured cruiser, 25 knots). HMS Uncatchable (destroyer, 36 knots), and HMS Invisible (submarine, 14 knots)[25]

He summarily dismissed other types of vessel, saying that, in war, the Navy could commandeer large merchant ships for scouts. As for the consuls who were accustomed to calling for a gunboat at will, he thought they should make do with ‘small mercantile vessels furnished with a Maxim gun, a White Ensign, and a retired Naval Officer’.[26] The Prince of Wales demurred at Fisher’s disrespectful treatment of the diplomatic corps and suggested that he build large, fast destroyers for the consuls to call on.[27] (He didn’t.)

But, for all Fisher’s vigorous pursuit of a more powerful battleship, he would have much preferred to concentrate on cruisers and flotilla craft. He questioned ‘whether the naval supremacy of a country can any longer be assessed by its battleships’. And why, he asked, build expensive battleships ‘so long as cheaper craft can destroy them’. Up to that point his logic was sound, but his conclusion was bizarre: ‘But it is evidently an absolute necessity in future construction to make the speed of the battleship approach as nearly as possible that of the armoured cruiser.’[28] The truth was that Fisher was gradually making battleships more like cruisers and cruisers more like battleships. The argument was, though, purely academic. Both the public and the politicians had only one measure of naval strength: battleship numbers, as the ‘we want eight and we won’t wait’ slogan of 1909 was to demonstrate.

Flotilla defence and the end of close blockade

Fisher’s greatest contribution to naval policy at this time (although this was not strictly a reform) was his invention of the concept of flotilla defence. He didn’t talk openly about it, perhaps because he feared an outcry from the traditional admirals, perhaps because he wanted to keep his war plans secret.

The traditional admirals assumed that the function of the great warships was to seek out and destroy the enemy’s fleet in battle. Fisher, on the other hand, saw the Navy as a means to prevent invasion. Despite his occasional belligerent outbursts, he had no intention of being the aggressor. The question for Fisher was how best to repel an approaching fleet intent on invasion. He recognised that any attempt to seek out a German fleet in the narrow seas around the Thames and Dover would expose a British fleet to deadly torpedo attacks, without its ever sighting a German battleship. His response was to replace the idea of annihilating the enemy fleet with the idea of simply denying it the sea. This would be done by a vast flotilla of destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines, which would patrol the narrow seas, so compelling the enemy fleet to remain in safe anchorage. Meanwhile the British fleet would remain out of range of the enemy at Scapa Flow.

Flotilla defence was also related to the changing nature of blockade. For hundreds of years Britain had used close blockade as a primary means of dealing with the navies of hostile nations. It was easier to bottle-up a fleet in port than to chase it over the oceans. Should the hostile fleet come out, battle could commence. But destroyers and submarines had put an end to close blockade (as Fisher had demonstrated in the Mediterranean) because submarines were always undetectable and destroyers were undetectable at night. While warships blockaded off a coast, they could be picked off by submarines in the day and by destroyers at night. For Fisher close blockade was no longer practicable.

So important was flotilla defence to Fisher that, even at a time of a falling construction budget, he doubled expenditure on flotilla craft. In 1904 they took up 10 per cent of the construction budget; by 1909 the figure was 20 per cent. Indeed, he planned to allocate 30 per cent in 1906-07 but the incoming Liberal government insisted on estimate reductions which curtailed this ambition. As early as January 1904 Fisher had told the Director of Naval Intelligence, Prince Louis of  Battenberg, that submarines were about to ‘revolutionize Naval Tactics’. It was time, he said, to build fewer battleships but twice as many submarines.[29] With or without cuts, though, these figures show a side of Fisher that is rarely extolled. So often presented as an aggressive war-monger, his budgets show a strong defensive streak.[30]

Fisher’s navy and the First World War

At first sight it might seem far-fetched to claim that the fleets which defended the home waters and  fought the battles of the First World War were the creation of a First Sea Lord who left office in January 1910. But Fisher’s influence was long and deep. After being forced out of office in January 1910 he went into retirement and chose to live on the Continent in order to keep out of the way of his successor, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Knyvet Wilson. However, in October 1911 the young Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty. Lacking any naval experience, he began a long series of secret consultations with his mentor  – Fisher – so helping to continue the latter’s influence on naval policy right up to the outbreak of the First World War. (Indeed, Fisher even became First Sea Lord for a second time in October 1914 and remained so until his resignation in May 1915.) As a result, Fisher was able to ensure that policy broadly followed his lines. (Although, despite his urgings, he was unable to persuade Churchill’s Admiralty to attach any importance to submarines.) So, when war broke out, it was his dreadnoughts that led the Grand Fleet to its wartime base at Scapa Flow and  it was his flotilla craft that were stationed at Harwich and Dover to harass potential invaders and keep the passage to France open for the army. Also,  many of the key First World War officers were his protégés – most notably Jellicoe, who Fisher had long planned to command the fleet in war.

The few battles of the war and its numerous raids and skirmishes demonstrated the rightness of Fisher’s decisions. There were no disasters in the far-flung corners of the Empire, despite his having withdrawn or reduced the outlying squadrons. At the Battle of the Falklands Islands in December 1914 his battle cruisers, despatched from home waters, scored a stunning victory over von Spee’s squadron. At the Battle of Jutland in 1916, despite British dreadnoughts being less robust than German ones, they acquitted themselves magnificently. Historians have had much to say about the three battle cruisers which exploded at Jutland and have frequently held this as evidence of a flawed design on Fisher’s part. But he never intended that battle cruisers should take their place in line of battle alongside dreadnoughts. And, more to the point, these ships exploded not because shells penetrated their lightly-armoured decks but because of careless ammunition handling, which turned gun turrets into powder-kegs. As Marder points out, had Fisher still been First Sea Lord, he would doubtless have improved on a design that was by 1914 about ten years old. And finally, his conviction that flotilla craft were enough to deter invasion, while the big ships kept in the background, proved true.

It is a truism that armed forces always train to fight their most recent war - yet Fisher did not. From the 1870s onwards his correspondence is full of the warnings that future wars would be nothing like the past. He argued against masts and sails, but the Admiralty continued to build such ships. He fought against muzzle-loading guns but in 1882 Britain’s newest battleship, the Inflexible, still had them; he pressed for faster ships, while the Navy still paraded fleets like ballet dancers; and he early recognised that torpedoes and submarines would be the end of big ship fleets. As each technical development came on the scene, Fisher responded by rethinking naval tactics. So when the First World War came Britain had a Navy that was equipped for the new type of warfare.

In summary Fisher inherited a navy that was based on tradition, privilege and idiosyncratic admirals. He turned it into a navy based on engineering, brains and professionalism. His approach still dominates Navy thinking today.

(c) Richard Freeman 

References

CCA = Churchill College Archives

[1] Fisher J 1919. Records. Hodder & Stoughton. p. 10.

[2] W S Gilbert 1878. Libretto for HMS Pinafore.

[3] Scott, P 1919. John Murray. pp. 28-9

[4] Fisher J 1919. Records. Hodder & Stoughton. p. 76.

[5] Bacon, R 1929. The Life of Lord Fisher of Kilverstone. Hutchinson and Co. p. 126.

[6] Hankey, M 1961. The Supreme Command. Collins. p. 16.

[7] Beresford’s Notebook, Nov 1901. NMM GBK/1.

[8] Marder, A 1940. The Anatomy of British Sea Power. Cass. p. 368.

[9] Bennett, G M 1968. Charlie B: A Biography of Admiral Lord Beresford. Peter Dawnay Ltd. p. 235-6.

[10] Bacon, R 1929. The Life of Lord Fisher of Kilverstone. Hutchinson and Co. p. 161

[11] Penn, G, 2000. Infighting Admirals. Lee Cooper. p. 133.

[12] Memorandum Dealing With Entry, Training, and Employment of Officers and Men of the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines. Cmd. 1385.December 1902.

[13] CCA FISR 8/4 FP 4705.

[14] Kemp, P K 1960. The Papers of Admiral Sir John Fisher. Navy Records Soc. pp. 189-196.

[15] CCA FISR 8/4 FP 4705.

[16] Fisher, J 1919. Records. Hodder & Stoughton. p. 141.

[17] CCA FISR 8/4 FP 4705.

[18] Marder, A 1940. The Anatomy of British Sea Power. Cass. p. 491.

[19] Marder, A J 1961.From The Dreadnought To Scapa Flow. Oxford University Press. p. 40.

[20] Kemp, P K 1960. The Papers of Admiral Sir John Fisher. Navy Records Soc. p. 193.

[21] Kemp, P K 1960. The Papers of Admiral Sir John Fisher. Navy Records Soc. pp. 32-4

[22] Marder, A 1940. The Anatomy of British Sea Power. Cass. p. 522-3

[23] Marder, A 1940. The Anatomy of British Sea Power. Cass. p. 522-3.

[24] Marder, A J 1961.From The Dreadnought To Scapa Flow. Oxford University Press. p. 57.

[25] CCA FISR 8/38 FP 4932.

[26] CCA FISR 8/38 FP 4932

[27] CCA FISR 1/4 FP 133.

[28] CCA FISR 8/4 FP 4705, pp. 55-7.

[29] CCA FISR 1/3 FP 112.

[30] Lambert, N A 1999. Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution. University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

p. 124.