Abstract
Winston Churchill’s appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty (1911-1915) coincided with a marked phase of ‘social improvement’ in the Royal Navy. In this original study, Matthew Seligmann uses Churchill’s famous though apocryphal quote about naval tradition, ‘Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash’, to examine the key elements of that period of reform. As with Seligmann’s oeuvre on naval strategy before World War I, it is preoccupied with policymaking and policymakers. Yet, in examining how they handled social questions, the book provides an innovative approach to the social history of the Royal Navy in the modern era.
Improving the quality and quantity of recruits was the corollary of the profound change in battleship design heralded by the arrival of HMS Dreadnought. This and the naval arms race with Germany informed the position taken by Churchill’s Admiralty in making improvements in pay, diminishing the consumption of ‘grog’, giving greater latitude in religious matters, curtailing the caning of boy sailors, and adopting a more active stance in policing homosexual practices. As Churchill’s dealings with the Treasury reveal, Liberal impulses were at work in both his desire to open up and democratize officer selection, and pay competitively for sailors with technical skills, as well as the Treasury’s desire to place some sort of limit on naval spending. As a result, extracting concessions from the Treasury proved to be slow and difficult, and the results were often modest. There was some tension too between Churchill and senior naval officers, especially as Admiralty consultation exercises among ships’ captains revealed widespread scepticism and resistance to specific reform initiatives.
A degree of tension between naval tradition and the Liberal social conscience was inevitable. The corporal punishment still meted out to boy sailors elicited condemnation from Liberal MPs and complaints from naval officers about the likely effect of its abolition on discipline. Churchill inclined towards the Liberal line, helping to ensure that the caning of boys was further limited though not abolished outright. A clash of values was evident also in religious matters. The long-standing Anglican identity of the navy, by law and custom, ran counter to the Liberals’ deep-rooted latitudinarianism. In a period of heightened denominational sensitivity, the Church of England’s near monopoly on chaplains and places of worship was hard to sustain given that a quarter of sailors belonged to other denominations. Again, Churchill favoured the Liberal position. Yet, even before his arrival at the Admiralty, change was afoot with increasing cooperation among protestant chaplains on one hand, and concessions in the navy’s provision for Catholics on the other. The decisive weakening of Anglicanism’s grip, however, arose out of the antagonism between Great Britain and Germany; first with the movement of naval bases to Scotland, where the established church was presbyterian, and the pressing need afterwards to actively demonstrate respect for sailors of all faiths during World War I.
On some social questions, there was congruence between Liberal and Admiralty opinion, even if their starting points differed. The push to eliminate the rum ration, for example, satisfied the vocal temperance lobby in Liberal ranks, and addressed also the concerns expressed by captains about its deleterious effects on sailors’ work and discipline. It helped too that the German navy did not dish out grog. Churchill successfully addressed the issue, with Treasury agreement, by offering sailors a choice between rum or its monetary equivalent. Likewise, the increasing sense of moral panic about homosexuality evident in the 1910s sat comfortably with the Liberals’ religiously inspired disposition to support social control. The Admiralty responded by abandoning its previous practice of not bringing cases to trial for want of evidence, and instead issued advice encouraging the use of medical experts, and if that did not do the trick, it revived the offence of uncleanliness. For all its paranoia about the behaviour of naval personnel, however, the number of cases remained stubbornly low. This might have been otherwise had officers been targeted too, but class prejudice ensured otherwise.
Seligmann concludes that Churchill was a passive accomplice in this development, his personal toleration of homosexuality seemingly irrelevant when faced with a shift in attitudes that could be rationalized as part of a broader agenda of ‘social improvement’. Similarly, Seligmann notes that Churchill’s support for curtailing corporal punishment did not extend to the mutineers hailing from Aden and Somalia aboard HMS Dartmouth. These assessments are typical of Seligmann’s judiciousness and commitment to the sources. Indeed, in spite of the book’s title, this is not a study unduly preoccupied with Churchill. It is, rather, an examination of social change and policymaking in which Churchill looms large, but without losing sight of the complex and dynamic relationship between the navy and society that preoccupied naval policymakers.