Contested Waters: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era

The early twentieth-century Royal Navy holds a strong fascination for scholars and non-scholars alike, and with the centenary of the First World War now upon us the regular stream of new academic works on this period is being supplemented by reprints of ‘classic’ works. Britain’s naval history during these years has long been identified with Admiral Sir John (‘Jackie’) Fisher, who served as Britain’s first sea lord, the professional head of the Royal Navy, from 1904 to 1910 and again in 1914–15. More than any other figure, it was the dynamic, ruthless, and mercurial Fisher who forged the fleet that Britain took to war in 1914. A century later, historians are still divided over Fisher’s legacy. Indeed, there is probably more disagreement now than ever before, with specialists in the field unable to agree as to the underlying motives and ultimate objectives that drove the admiral’s policies. At the heart of current debates are claims that Fisher was animated by a secret agenda that has only recently been uncovered, an agenda so radical that in 1914 it nearly led to a revolution in British naval policy.

Since its publication in 1961–70, the standard work on the Royal Navy in the ‘Fisher era’ has been Arthur Marder’s five-volume From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow. Long out of print, this series has been reissued in its original format with a new introduction to each volume by Barry Gough, author of Historical Dreadnoughts (2010) and a noted authority on Marder’s life and work. ¹ Fisher is undoubtedly the dominant figure in the first two volumes of the series, which together cover the period from 1904 to the eve of the battle of Jutland in 1916. In Marder’s opinion, Fisher’s impact on the Royal Navy during these years was so far-reaching as to constitute a revolution. This assessment rests on the premise that at the onset of the twentieth century British naval efficiency had been eroded by nearly a century of peace and the absence of a serious peer competitor. Specialists no longer accept this view, which Marder was instrumental in establishing, ² but they have been unable to dispel the popular perception that British naval officers, drawn from the upper ranks of British society, were a deeply conservative group of no marked intellectual ability. Though competent in their routine professional duties, they were also, according to conventional wisdom, resistant to technological change and gave little serious thought to preparing for the demands of modern war. All this began to change, according to Marder, when Fisher became first sea lord in October 1904. The reform-minded Fisher had already made a mark at the Admiralty as the driving force behind the ‘Selborne scheme’, adopted in 1902, which overhauled the system of entering and training naval cadets. The goal of these reforms was to break down the social barriers between the executive and engineering branches in order to create a more uniform and efficient officer corps. As first sea lord, Fisher’s reforms were driven primarily by the growing naval threat from Germany. To meet this challenge, he began moving warships from distant stations to European waters, where they would be most needed in wartime. At the same time, he scrapped many older warships of little or no fighting value in order to save money and free up personnel to provide permanent ‘nucleus crews’ for vessels in reserve, thereby increasing their efficiency.

These reforms have been overshadowed, however, by the momentous decision to build HMS Dreadnought, the first turbine-powered, all-big-gun battleship. When launched in 1906, this warship outclassed all older battleships, both British and foreign, by a wide margin. Fisher’s decision to overturn the status quo in warship design has always been controversial. To critics, this was a major blunder, immediately rendering Britain’s existing battleships obsolescent, and needlessly sacrificing the navy’s almost insurmountable numerical superiority in the most powerful warships afloat. As a result, Germany was able to compete with Britain on more favourable terms, which led to a costly and disruptive intensification of the Anglo-German naval race. Marder, on the other hand, applauds Fisher’s decision. He maintains that the move to an all-big-gun capital ship was already under consideration by foreign navies when Fisher decided to take the plunge, so it was just a matter of time before it became a reality. Hence, Fisher’s decision to build the Dreadnought was a stroke of genius, allowing Britain to gain the technological initiative, disrupt the construction plans of rival powers, and secure an early lead in this new type of warship, soon to be known generically as ‘dreadnoughts’.

While clearly an admirer of Fisher and his reforms, Marder does not entirely neglect the admiral’s shortcomings – particularly his abrasive methods and combative personality – although he does tend to underplay them. Fisher made many enemies as first sea lord, and never forgot a grudge. The result, by 1910, was a service riven by factionalism. For Marder, however, the benefits ultimately outweighed the costs: a vigorous, dynamic reformer such as Fisher was necessary to shake the navy out of the doldrums and transform it into a modern, efficient fighting service capable of meeting the test of war. When the fighting started in 1914, the Royal Navy was in a strong position, having maintained a commanding numerical lead in the latest dreadnought battleships. These ships, which were concentrated in a new ‘Grand Fleet’, proved more than adequate to the task of neutralizing Germany’s main battle fleet. This allowed Britain to exert economic pressure on the enemy and, in time, to master the submarine threat to the Allies’ maritime communications. Nevertheless, Marder concludes that Britain’s wartime navy was lacking in some respects, in part because Fisher’s reforms had focused excessively on materiel. The Admiralty did take some steps before the war to address the service’s intellectual shortcomings, even establishing a proper naval staff in 1912, but the fleet that went to war in 1914 possessed few top-notch admirals or first-rate intellects. The most obvious results of these deficiencies were the navy’s uninspired performance at the battle of Jutland and reluctance to adopt convoy for British shipping.

Marder’s conclusions about Fisher and British naval policy were considered authoritative when these volumes first appeared, not least because he demonstrated a mastery of the sources that was unrivalled at the time of publication. Not only was Marder diligent in his research, he was able to persuade the Admiralty to provide access to documents not available to other scholars, including some, it should be noted, that were subsequently destroyed during the normal ‘weeding’ process and therefore never available to later historians. Other influential historians such as Paul Kennedy have accepted and elaborated on the main outlines of Marder’s interpretation. Naturally, there have also been critics. As more documents become available to researchers and new questions are posed, the limitations of Marder’s pioneering work have become increasingly evident. Some of his conclusions have not held up to decades of scrutiny. Recent scholarship has shown, for example, that Marder’s treatment of subjects such as naval war planning, strategy, and tactics was at times superficial, incomplete, or misleading. Specialists are also inclined to take a more critical view of Fisher’s reforms, and, perhaps most importantly, no longer regard the naval officer corps as intellectually stagnant and resistant to innovation. Marder appears to have uncritically accepted the view – which Fisher himself did much to promote – that the admiral was an intellectual giant among pygmies, and thus the only figure capable of driving through the most urgently needed reforms. However, the navy possessed more intelligent, progressive officers than Marder seems to have realized.

While there are good reasons to question whether Fisher was as critical to the Royal Navy’s successes as Marder believed, most historians continue to accept the other central theme developed in From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow – that Fisher’s reforms, driven by naval developments in Germany, revolved around competition in dreadnought-style battleships. This idea remains central to most analyses of British naval policy and strategic planning before the First World War. And while scholars frequently question specific aspects of Marder’s interpretation, most readily acknowledge their debt to his ground-breaking efforts. Rereading this work today, it is clear why it has so long been regarded as a masterpiece. The author’s lively, clear writing remains a model of how academic history can be made accessible to a wide audience, and his character sketches of the leading naval and political figures of the era remain unsurpassed. His conclusions are now dated in places, but Marder consistently made excellent use of the sources that were available to him, and his judgements still command respect. Half a century after publication, the first volumes of From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow remain an indispensable source on the Royal Navy’s development in the decade before the First World War.

The first major work to suggest modifications to Marder’s views was Ruddock Mackay’s 1973 biography of Fisher, which took a more critical view of the admiral and demonstrated that Marder would not have the final word on the subject. ³ It would be more than a decade, however, before a fundamental challenge emerged in the form of a small but influential school of ‘revisionist’ naval historians. This group has developed an alternative interpretation of naval policy in the Fisher era that is incompatible with the broad framework established by Marder in the 1960s. In their opinion, Marder’s work is fundamentally flawed because it is based on the widely held assumption that Fisher, motivated by an early recognition of the rising German threat, sought to perpetuate a conventional naval force structure designed to maintain British naval supremacy with a massive fleet of the new dreadnought-style battleships. The revisionists have at times been sharply dismissive of Marder’s work. Jon Sumida, for example, has denounced him as a mere ‘scissors-and-paste’ historian, and condemned him for ‘methodological backwardness’. ⁴ At first glance, therefore, it seems somewhat curious that the Naval Institute Press would reissue both From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow and Jon Sumida’s In Defence of Naval Supremacy. There is no doubt, however, that both works have had a far-reaching impact on the historiography of the modern Royal Navy, even though their conclusions are often at odds with one another.

In Defence of Naval Supremacy, originally published in 1989, was the first major work in what would develop into a distinct revisionist school. While sharing Marder’s view that Fisher was the driving force behind the Admiralty’s major reforms in the decade before the First World War, Sumida argues that Fisher’s true objectives have been misunderstood. According to this interpretation, contemporaries and historians alike have been distracted by Britain’s naval rivalry with Germany and, in particular, by the Admiralty’s decision to upset the qualitative status quo by building HMS Dreadnought. But Fisher did not want to launch a ‘dreadnought revolution’, Sumida argues. Indeed, Fisher had little interest in building any battleships. His real goal, we are told, was to reduce the strain of warship construction on British finances through radical technological innovation in warship design. Fisher hoped to transform the Royal Navy’s force structure by developing a new type of capital ship which would eventually become known as the ‘battlecruiser’. These ships would have a uniform big-gun armament nearly equal to that of the Dreadnought, but would sacrifice armour protection in order to generate much greater speeds. These attributes, Sumida claims, would allow them to fulfil the roles normally assigned to battleships and armoured cruisers, thereby enabling Britain to maintain its global naval predominance at a manageable cost.

Britain’s first three battlecruisers (the Invincible class) entered service in 1908. In Fisher’s eyes, their key feature was their superior speed, which would enable them to overtake enemy vessels on the high seas and then control the range at which action occurred. However, the first sea lord was unable to convince the Board of Admiralty that these ships should replace the slower, more heavily armoured dreadnought-style battleships, an increasingly expensive type of warship that soon had to be built in large numbers to meet new construction by Germany and its allies. Thus, as a cost-cutting measure Fisher’s construction policies were a failure. But Fisher continued to regard the battlecruiser as the type of capital ship best suited to Britain’s needs. His enthusiasm, according to Sumida, sprang from a conviction that the Royal Navy could obtain a monopoly in long-range hitting through the adoption of a fire-control system that was technologically superior to that of its enemies. As long as British battlecruisers could outrange enemy vessels, including dreadnoughts, and quickly overwhelm them with accurate fire, they would not need heavy armour because they were unlikely to be hit in return.

The alleged importance of fire control to the ultimate success of Fisher’s policies provides Sumida’s justification for a lengthy and detailed examination of the Royal Navy’s efforts to acquire an effective fire-control system before the First World War. The treatment of this subject, which occupies a large proportion of the book, gives centre place to the history of the Admiralty’s often strained relationship with Arthur Hungerford Pollen, a British inventor who spent years trying, with limited success, to persuade the Admiralty to adopt his proposed fire-control system. The Pollen family provided Sumida with privileged access to the inventor’s private papers, and the book offers a detailed – at times exhaustive – account of Pollen’s efforts to obtain official backing for his work. Sumida relies heavily on this particular collection, and seems to accept at face value most of the inventor’s claims about the merits of his system and his ill-treatment by Admiralty officials. The resulting narrative is therefore less about the development of naval fire-control than about the Royal Navy’s failure to adopt one particular system. This failure, according to Sumida, had important consequences, as the Pollen system might have provided the Royal Navy’s capital ships with the monopoly in long-range hitting that Fisher believed was essential to his plans for innovation in capital ship design. It also meant that British capital ships allegedly went to war in 1914 with an inferior system, with disastrous consequences during the battle of Jutland.

These conclusions, based on extensive (albeit narrowly focused) primary research and a seeming mastery of the complex technical issues involved in the science of fire control, attracted considerable attention when first published and encouraged other historians to question long-entrenched views about British naval policy. In this respect, In Defence of Naval Supremacy has undoubtedly had a positive impact. The durability of its main conclusions, however, is less certain. Sumida has frequently lauded his own methodology and research, but there remains a fundamental problem at the heart of this book: the author’s evidence does not support the central claim that fire control was a driving force behind Fisher’s construction policies, and in particular his idea of replacing battleships and armoured cruisers with battlecruisers. Indeed, the evidence presented here could just as easily – and more convincingly – support a different interpretation. Sumida himself demonstrates that long-range gunnery and fire control were still in their infancy in 1904–6, making it difficult for decision-makers to predict what form future developments would take. Given the uncertainty they faced, it is not surprising that Sumida is unable to produce any documents showing unambiguously that the Admiralty was motivated by the optimistic claims of an unproven inventor about the potential of devices that had not yet been built, or even tested. In the absence of hard evidence, Sumida falls back on speculation. He suggests that Fisher may have learned about Pollen’s ideas as early as January 1905, when Dreadnought was still being designed, but even if this happened it does not constitute proof that the inventor had any impact on the decision to build all-big-gun capital ships. And, while Fisher clearly did know about Pollen’s proposed system by September 1906, and for a while believed its development should be supported with public funds, the admiral’s backing was short-lived. By 1908 he had evidently accepted that the fire-control instruments being developed within the service and elsewhere would be equally effective.

The logic underlying Sumida’s claims is also dubious. No explanation is offered as to why Fisher would risk the construction of a fleet of under-armoured capital ships if their success in wartime was entirely dependent on equipping them with not just effective fire-control equipment, but with a system far in advance of anything possessed by rival navies, since nothing less would allow them to destroy their opponents without being hit in return. If Sumida’s claims are correct, it would mean that Fisher was prepared to launch the first battlecruisers before their essential fire-control equipment had been built or tested, that he was confident the new British system would be markedly superior to anything then being developed by the Germans or other potential enemies, and that he was prepared to gamble that Britain, having developed and adopted a superior system, could retain a monopoly on long-range hitting for the entire service life of the battlecruisers then being built. Embarking on a radical transformation of the Royal Navy’s force structure on the basis that German engineers were incapable of devising a fire-control system as good, or even nearly as good, as that possessed by the Royal Navy would have been foolhardy. It seems more likely, on the basis of Sumida’s own evidence, that Fisher and other Admiralty officials were not motivated by a belief that they would soon obtain a vastly superior system of fire control. Nor do they appear to have assumed they could gain anything other than a short-term advantage over foreign rivals through technological innovation. Fisher and his advisers were evidently confident that long-range gunnery would soon be mastered, but their activities before the war suggest that their expectations were more modest – and more realistic – than Sumida claims: to equip their capital ships with an effective fire-control system that would meet the navy’s basic needs.

Readers will probably be surprised to find that the only new material in this edition is a brief (three page) preface by the author. Sumida correctly notes here that scholarship in this field has been very active in the last quarter century, but he does not explore, even in the preface, how his original views might need to be qualified or revised in light of new scholarship (including his own), or how his conclusions fit into the wider revisionist framework that has developed out of even more provocative arguments by Nicholas Lambert. ⁵ Sumida defends the decision not to update the text on the grounds that his conclusions are still fundamentally sound and accurate, although this has been the subject of much debate in recent years. Matthew Seligmann, for example, has challenged Sumida’s explanation of the rationale behind the construction of the first battlecruisers in a meticulously researched and persuasive monograph, The Royal Navy and the German Threat, 1901–1914. Seligmann argues convincingly that Fisher and his advisers initially developed the battlecruiser in response to fears that Germany intended to arm its fast civilian liners in wartime to prey on British commerce. ⁶ Unlike Sumida, Seligmann is able to produce documentary evidence to support his conclusions. Another scholar, John Brooks, has presented an even more devastating challenge to Sumida’s work. In Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland, Brooks takes a fresh look at the question of fire control, and, while acknowledging the importance of Sumida’s ground-breaking efforts, reaches strikingly different conclusions. ⁷ Brooks’s work is based on considerable technical expertise and a firm grasp of the relevant archives. Moreover, he examined important sources that Sumida did not use. After subjecting Sumida’s claims to rigorous scrutiny, Brooks concludes that fire control had no impact on Fisher’s capital ship policies. He also makes a strong case that Sumida is mistaken in his view that Pollen’s fire-control system was clearly superior to that adopted by the Royal Navy. The British fleet’s gunnery, he argues, would probably have been worse than it was at Jutland had it been equipped with Pollen’s system. Surprisingly, Sumida makes no reference here to the work of either Brooks or Seligmann. ⁸

So much has been written since the mid-1990s on Fisher’s strategic ideas and possible secret motives that Sumida’s book, once state of the art, now looks dated. The debate over Fisher’s ‘radical’ programme is not likely to end soon, but if, as it seems to this reviewer, Sumida’s main conclusions in In Defence of Naval Supremacy have been largely superseded, it is difficult to see what purpose an unrevised new edition of the book serves other than to offer a snapshot of where the historiography stood 25 years previously. Still, the original impact of this book is undeniable. Nicholas Lambert, the other leading revisionist historian, accepts all of Sumida’s conclusions and explicitly builds on them in his own work, arguing that Fisher’s hidden agenda was more ambitious and radical than Sumida realized. ⁹ In Lambert’s version of events, Fisher also developed secret plans during his initial tenure as first sea lord to deter or defeat a German invasion by deploying large numbers of submarines and small flotilla craft along Britain’s coast. This idea, which Lambert labelled ‘flotilla defence’, was supposedly part of Fisher’s secret plan to transform the Royal Navy’s force structure. By freeing capital ships from the need to protect Britain’s shores, Fisher’s projected fleet of battlecruisers could be safely deployed to distant waters. Obstruction within the service meant that Fisher was unable to implement his plans before he was forced from office in 1910, but the revisionists argue that the essential components of his radical programme were later embraced by Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915, and his naval advisers. If not for the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, they contend, Britain would have implemented a revolutionary new naval policy based on the radical ideas they attribute to Admiral Fisher. ¹⁰

The Sumida–Lambert interpretation has received a sympathetic hearing from specialists in the field, but has never succeeded in displacing the ‘orthodox’ interpretation popularized by Marder. Nor is it likely to do so. The trend in recent academic studies is to question the assumptions underlying both the orthodox and the revisionist schools. Katherine Epstein’s Torpedo, a new study that seeks to situate itself firmly in the revisionist camp, is an obvious exception. Like Sumida, Epstein focuses on a narrow and highly technical subject – in this case, the development of the torpedo in the navies of the United States and Britain. Her treatment of the British experience is decidedly uneven. The book’s strongest feature is its detailed description of the Royal Navy’s efforts to develop more effective torpedoes before the First World War. Recent scholarship on the Royal Navy in this period has shown that the service was more receptive to innovation and new technologies than traditional accounts recognized, and Epstein’s work reinforces this conclusion. The development of the torpedo was naturally a matter of much concern to naval leaders, given its obvious potential to transform naval warfare, and considerable effort went into designing and building better torpedoes. As Epstein demonstrates, this was a challenging task – one requiring heavy capital investment, a small army of technocrats, a high degree of cooperation between government and private enterprise, and the navigation of complex legal issues relating to matters such as intellectual property rights. The Royal Navy was reasonably successful in the technical challenges it faced in developing this new weapon, in large part, Epstein suggests, because Britain, the dominant naval power, possessed a greater capacity for research and development than its rivals.

Torpedo runs into difficulty, however, as soon as it turns to the wider implications of the torpedo for the Royal Navy. The problem here is that Epstein’s archival research, which underpins her treatment of technical matters, disappears as soon as she begins to consider how this weapon affected naval tactics and strategy. On this subject she is entirely reliant on the work of Lambert and Sumida, and particularly the latter’s argument that the Royal Navy adopted plans – the so-called ‘technical-tactical synthesis’ – for the British fleet to subject its German counterpart to overwhelming gunfire at medium ranges, rapidly inflicting devastating losses on the enemy before withdrawing beyond the range of torpedo attack. Epstein enthusiastically outlines the Lambert–Sumida interpretation at some length in her final chapter, and is clearly eager to associate her work with the ‘revisionist school’. However, a glance at the footnotes reveals that Epstein has nothing new to say about the impact of torpedoes on British naval doctrine. She produces no archival evidence to support Sumida’s claims, and simply accepts his argument uncritically. Moreover, she neglects to warn readers that this particular aspect of the revisionist case is highly speculative, with virtually no documentary evidence to support it. ¹¹ The only indication that the ‘technical-tactical synthesis’ or other aspects of the revisionist interpretation might be controversial is confined to the footnotes, where the views of dissenting scholars are brusquely dismissed.

In contrast, the shortcomings of the revisionist interpretation are frequently mentioned in Strategy and War Planning in the British Navy, 1887–1918, a work that exemplifies the emerging ‘post-revisionist’ school of naval historians. This new study by Shawn Grimes examines the evolution of British naval planning over the 30-year period culminating in the First World War. Prior to the creation of the naval staff in 1912, the Admiralty’s planning process was dominated by the Naval Intelligence Division, established in 1887, supplemented at times by the War Course at the Naval War College in Portsmouth. The plans that emerged from this process are typically characterized as puerile and unrealistic, while those developed under Fisher’s leadership are dismissed as a subterfuge to placate the admiral’s critics within the service rather than a genuine expression of Admiralty intentions. Grimes reaches different conclusions. From a methodical examination of the planning process, he concludes that the navy’s war plans, although not without flaws, were often progressive, innovative, and realistic. Moreover, Grimes makes a strong case that the plans developed under Fisher were taken seriously by naval leaders. The concepts developed by planners were regularly tested in fleet manoeuvres and war games, and directly influenced the Admiralty’s procurement policies.

Grimes sees the navy’s earliest plans against Germany as a natural extension of its preparations for war with France. In both cases, the navy accepted that a ‘close’ or ‘sealing up’ blockade of the enemy’s ports was no longer feasible, and prepared instead to implement a more flexible ‘observational blockade’, utilizing flotilla forces from an advance island base near the enemy’s coast. As Germany began to supplant France and Russia as the navy’s most likely opponent, attention turned to the possibility that combined operations would be required to seize Heligoland or some other island to serve as an advance base, or possibly to secure the passage of British forces into the Baltic Sea. By 1907, however, it was becoming clear that the inshore operations favoured by British planners might be too difficult and costly to implement. Support for the ‘observational blockade’ began to wane, and attention shifted to the idea of establishing a ‘distant blockade’, in which British naval forces remained a safe distance from enemy shores and established a cordon around the North Sea designed to inflict economic pressure on Germany. The naval staff threw its support behind this more cautious strategy in the years leading up to the First World War, and by late 1912 the ‘distant blockade’ was at the centre of British war plans.

The navy’s new strategy may have been a sensible response to new operational realities, but it did not sit well with many naval officers, including some senior figures such as Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, Fisher’s successor as first sea lord (1910–11). Among those who chafed at the idea of a slow-acting distant blockade as Britain’s main weapon was Winston Churchill. As first lord of the Admiralty, Churchill was eager to revive earlier plans involving combined operations, advance bases, and inshore flotilla operations. Taking the war to Germany’s North Sea littoral seemed to offer the most effective means to neutralize German naval forces, secure Britain’s essential maritime communications, and obtain access to the Baltic, thereby exposing Germany’s northern coast to attack and blocking critical iron-ore shipments from Sweden. When the naval staff and senior commanders rejected these plans, Churchill attempted to circumvent them by establishing a separate planning group within the Admiralty made up of officers who shared his outlook. The outbreak of war in 1914 strengthened Churchill’s conviction that aggressive measures were needed, and he spent his remaining time as first lord lobbying the government and his naval advisers for support. These efforts were unsuccessful, and the distant blockade strategy prevailed throughout the First World War. However, as Grimes demonstrates in his final chapter, the relative inactivity of the British Grand Fleet and the mounting threat from German submarines ensured that the navy’s leaders were frequently under pressure, both from outside the service and from below, to develop a more aggressive strategy.

The Royal Navy might have grudgingly accepted that it could not dominate the Heligoland Bight, but Grimes shows that it was not prepared to abandon the rest of the North Sea. By demonstrating the navy’s strong and persistent interest in operating along the German coast and in the Baltic, this book poses a formidable challenge to the revisionist argument that British naval strategy in the Fisher and Churchill periods was based on the concept of ‘flotilla defence’. It also flatly contradicts recent claims by Lambert in Planning Armageddon (2012) that British naval strategy from late 1912 until the outbreak of war revolved around secret plans to inflict a rapid defeat on Germany through economic warfare. The utility of Grimes’s volume would have been greater, however, if it had looked beyond the navy’s plans for war against Germany alone. It does not examine, for example, how the Admiralty intended to meet the threat in the Mediterranean from Germany’s Triple Alliance partners, or later from the Ottoman Empire. The author also largely ignores the development of Britain’s wartime naval strategy as part of a coalition that included France, Italy, Russia, Japan, and the United States. However, none of these omissions detract from the high quality of Grimes’s analysis of British naval strategy for an Anglo-German war centred on the North Sea.

Like Grimes, Stephen Cobb examines the evolution of naval policy over an extended period. In Preparing for Blockade, 1885–1914, the focus is British plans before the First World War to restrict or eliminate German commerce on the high seas. Previous treatments of this subject by Avner Offer and Nicholas Lambert argue that the navy’s preparations for economic warfare were developed in great secrecy by a small group of naval planners. ¹² Cobb argues that this aspect of the navy’s plans was actually well known within the service, especially among those connected to the Naval Intelligence Department. Cobb charts their movements around the service and examines their influence. He concludes that British naval officers believed the Royal Navy had always destroyed its enemies’ seaborne trade in the past, and assumed that it would do so again in the future. Economic warfare was the subject of frequent discussion and debate within the service, and in Cobb’s opinion constituted part of the navy’s ‘strategic culture’. However, this does not mean that naval officers were necessarily well informed about the details of the navy’s plans for economic warfare, a subject that receives little attention.

The book attempts to illuminate the navy’s preparations for an Anglo-German war by tracing the evolution of the Admiralty’s plans to augment the navy’s cruiser strength in wartime by arming select British merchant ships. As early as the 1870s the Admiralty actively identified vessels suitable for conversion into armed merchant cruisers, and at times provided subsidies to shipowners to ensure that the most useful ships would be available when needed. This policy was complicated in the early 1900s when it appeared that Germany was preparing to arm its merchant ships in wartime to attack British trade. This created a serious problem, as no British ship, either naval or merchant, had the speed to catch the fastest new German liners. The Admiralty’s initial response was to subsidize the construction of two fast Cunard liners, Mauritania and Lusitania, which could be armed in wartime and used to hunt down and destroy their German counterparts. This policy was short-lived, however. Cobb explains that by 1905 the Admiralty concluded that warships would be more effective in the hunter-killer role than armed merchant cruisers. And like Seligmann, Cobb provides compelling evidence that in late 1905 Fisher designed the new Invincible-class battlecruisers with this specific role in mind.

Cobb’s detailed analysis of Admiralty policy demonstrates that armed merchant cruisers were expected to play a prominent role in the protection of British trade, but it is difficult throughout most of the book to discern the connection between these ideas and the navy’s contemporaneous plans to wage economic warfare against Germany. It is only when the author reaches the final chapter, covering the First World War, that the offensive role of these ships is finally addressed. Cobb suggests here that the intended use of armed merchant cruisers as commerce defenders was largely abandoned early in the war in the absence of a serious threat to British trade from German surface raiders. However, years of preparing to arm these ships for defensive purposes ensured that they were available soon after the outbreak of hostilities for use in an offensive role: patrolling the North Sea and enforcing the commercial blockade of Germany as part of the Grand Fleet’s 10th Cruiser Squadron.

Preparing for Blockade has a narrower focus than its title would suggest, and actually says very little about the details of British preparations for a wartime blockade of Germany. Nevertheless, the volume illuminates aspects of Admiralty policy that have attracted little attention. Given that scholars are still deeply divided over basic questions about the Royal Navy in this period, Cobb’s study, like Grimes’s book on war planning, demonstrates the importance of continuing to question received wisdom, whatever its source. These two books are not simply an attempt to return to an imagined golden age in which Marder reigned supreme: they represent a healthy trend among a new generation of scholars to test the interpretations of both orthodox and revisionist historians against the archival record. ¹³ They also illuminate the advantages of studying the formulation of naval policy over an extended period. The most notable feature of the emerging ‘post-revisionist’ literature is the shift towards an ‘evolutionary’ paradigm. Orthodox and revisionist scholars alike have characterized the Fisher era as a period of naval revolution, even though they disagree on whether it stemmed from an aggregation of conventional reforms or a secret radical agenda. Moreover, both see the decision-making machinery as revolving around a single larger-than-life figure, Sir John Fisher, rather than as a complex and diffuse bureaucratic process. And both assume that Fisher’s overall influence was a positive one. There are strong grounds for rejecting Marder’s caricature of the Royal Navy as a deeply reactionary organization that had to be single-handedly reformed by Fisher, but it is also time to question whether British naval policy was really animated for over a decade by the same figure’s alleged secret agenda. The continuities in British naval policy from the 1880s to 1914 are essential to understanding the service that entered the First World War, and the obvious challenge for scholars of the ‘Fisher era’ navy will be forcing the eponymous admiral out of the spotlight.