Part 13

2. In 1911 four naval officers were appointed to learn aeroplane work. Subsequently a few others were appointed. Others, again, qualified privately. In 1912, the Royal Flying Corps was established--both naval and military aviators becoming “wings” of the same body--an excellent principle, but one necessarily experimental so far as practical work was concerned.

3. In practice it proved a failure; so the Naval Air Service was formed into a branch by itself. Four small army airships were handed over to it--craft too small to be of any value except for instructional purposes.

At the outbreak of war there were two effective dirigibles--one of French type of Astra-Torres design, the other a Parseval purchased in Germany. Neither of these ships is in any way comparable to the German Zeppelins in dimensions or endurance. A number of other dirigibles of varying sizes were on order, but it is inadvisable to publish any particulars on this subject. The designs for these were foreign, but the construction was British.

In the matter of aeroplanes a number of special naval stations were established and supplied with seaplanes and landplanes of various types, while strenuous efforts were made towards the training of a large number of efficient pilots. The building of an aeroplane is a matter of only a few weeks, whereas the training of a really efficient pilot is a matter of a year or thereabouts.

VII

AUXILIARY NAVIES.

No account of the British battle fleet would be complete without reference to the various auxiliary navies. Though none of them possesses any very serious fighting value, yet all possess potentialities for the future which can with difficulty be computed.

The auxiliary navies may be divided into two main sections--(1) those which are direct branches of the British Navy, and (2) those which belong to the semi-independent colonies.

Of the former, the principal is the Royal Indian Marine, which consists of a number of armed troopships. Of these the chief are the _Northbrook_, launched at Clydebank in 1907, 5,820 tons, 16 knot speed, and an armament of six 4-inch and six 3-pounders. The _Dufferin_, which was launched in 1904, is of 7,457 tons, has a speed of 19 knots, and an armament of eight 4-inch and eight 3-pounders. The _Hardinge_, launched 1900, is of 6,520 tons, 18 knots speed, and carries six 4.7-inch guns as well as six 3-pounders and 4 Maxims.

There are three older troopships, the _Minto_ (1893), the _Elphinstone_ (1887), and the _Dalhousie_ (1886). These are supplemented by ten small steamers and nine small mining vessels.

The germ of this fleet was created in the early seventies when the breastwork monitors _Abyssinia_ and _Magdala_ were sent out for the defence of Indian harbours. These were small predecessors of the _Devastation_, very similar to the home coast-defence monitors of the _Cyclops_ class, and carried four 18-ton muzzle-loading guns.

About the year 1888 some new torpedo boats (Nos. 100–106) were lent for the Indian Marine service. These, with their names and numbers, were as follows:--_Baluch_ (100), _Ghurka_ (101), _Kahren_ (102), _Pathan_ (103), _Maharatta_ (104), _Sikh_ (105), and _Rajput_ (106). The two earliest numbers were built by Thornycroft, and were of 92 tons; the others were built by White, of Cowes, and were of 95 tons displacement.

In the years 1890–91 two torpedo gunboats, _Plassy_ and _Assaye_, of the _Sharpshooter_ class, were launched at Elswick for the Indian Marine, in which they remained until withdrawn in the early years of the present century.

On a similar footing to the Royal Indian Marine are the flotillas, mostly consisting of river gunboats, maintained in North and South Nigeria and in Central Africa, and the gunboats on the Nile under the Egyptian Government.

The Colonial Navies are on a different standing. First place in their formation belongs to Australia. The monitor _Cerberus_, practically a sister of the _Abyssinia_ and _Magdala_ already mentioned, was launched at Jarrow in 1868 for Victoria. This vessel (which still exists as a drill ship) is of 3,480 tons, armed with four 18-ton muzzle-loaders, and protected with an 8-inch belt.

In 1884 Australia’s local defence was re-inforced with four gunboats as follows:--The _Protector_, of 920 tons, carrying one 8-inch and five 6-inch guns, for South Australia. She, as well as the others, was built at Elswick. For Western Australia a similar vessel of 530 tons, named the _Victoria_, was built, armed with one 18-ton muzzle-loader. The _Gayundah_ and _Paluma_, also of the same type, carrying one old 8-inch and one 6-inch, were built for Queensland. Their displacement is 360 tons each.

From that time onward the Australian Navy occasionally sent a few officers and men for training in the British Navy.

Towards the end of the eighties interest began to be taken in Australian naval defence, and five cruisers and two torpedo gunboats were ordered for local Australian service while borne on the Royal Navy List. Of these vessels the five cruisers were the _Katoomba_ (ex _Pandora_), _Mildura_ (ex _Pelorus_), _Ringarooma_ (ex _Psyche_), _Tauranga_ (ex _Phœnix_), and the _Wallaroo_ (ex _Persian_), all 2,575 vessels of the old _Pallas_ class, of which at the time of writing the _Philomel_ still exists. These ships had a designed speed of 16.5 knots, a protective deck, and an armament of eight 4.7-inch and some smaller guns.

The torpedo gunboat _Boomerang_ (ex _Whiting_) and _Karrakatta_ (ex _Wizard_) belonged to the _Sharpshooter_ class, and were lent under the same conditions as the cruisers.

In the course of time all of them wore out and were eventually recalled.

Coincident with this the Australians commenced to have a revived interest in Imperial defence, and in the year 1905–6 Australia and New Zealand contributed £240,000 to Imperial naval defence, and a project was put forward for the building of eight destroyers and four torpedo gunboats for Colonial Defence purposes.

A few years later this project took a more definite shape, and about the year 1910 the battle-cruiser _Australia_, a sister of the _Indefatigable_, was ordered. As part of the same programme, three protected cruisers of the _Dartmouth_ type, the _Melbourne_, _Sydney_, and _Brisbane_, were also ordered. Previously to this, three destroyers of the _Paramatta_ type had been commenced, and in 1911 three more were ordered, thus forming a nucleus of a serious Australian Navy.[40]

New Zealand’s interest in the Imperial Navy may be said to have commenced about the year 1900. It eventuated in paying for the battleship _New Zealand_[41] of the _King Edward_ class, which was laid down in September, 1903. An old gunboat of the _Magpie_ class was purchased, re-christened the _Amokoura_, and used for training purposes, while to replace some old torpedo boats, which had been sent to New Zealand about the same time as similar boats went to Australia, three destroyers of the _Paramatta_ type were ordered. Finally, an offer from the New Zealand Premier to supplement the Dreadnought efficiency of the British Navy culminated in the battle-cruiser _New Zealand_, which was offered to be provided about the same time or a little before Australia offered a similar vessel.[42]

The Dominion of Canada has always maintained a certain number of small vessels for Customs duties or fishery protection, also for service on the Great Lakes. In 1909 the question of a Canadian Navy became insistent, and two old British cruisers--the _Niobe_ of the _Diadem_ class and the _Rainbow_ of the _Apollo_ class--were purchased as training ships for the Canadian Navy. A project was also brought forward for the creation of Canadian dockyards and building therein four second-class cruisers of the _Dartmouth_ class and six destroyers, though up to the time of writing none of these ships have materialised, and the Canadian Navy is still very much a project in the air.

Newfoundland has a naval reserve, trained over many years in the drill-ship, which is ex H.M.S. _Calypso_.

The whole subject of Colonial Navies is somewhat involved, owing to the question as to how far they should be under the orders of and part of the British Navy, liable to be used when and where required for Imperial needs, and how far they should be regarded as merely for local defence. It has been argued from one point of view that Colonial Navies acting on their own responsibility might create undesirable Imperial complications--as for instance, Australia with Japan, or Canada with the United States. On the other hand it is argued that it would not be possible to arouse Colonial enthusiasm for a Colonial fleet which was not always on the spot, despite any strategical grounds that might exist for its being elsewhere. New Zealand, in May, 1912, negatived this by presenting her battle-cruiser to the Imperial Navy for use where most needed, but generally speaking Colonials think first of local defence.

These two divergent points of view, which are certainly extremely delicate, may be said to be still _subjudice_, but in the year 1911 the following agreement, which is of the nature of a very judicious compromise, was drawn up:--

1. The naval services and forces of the Dominions of Canada and Australia will be exclusively under the control of their respective Governments.

2. The training and discipline of the naval forces of the Dominions will be generally uniform with the training and discipline of the fleet of the United Kingdom, and by arrangement, officers and men of the said forces will be interchangeable with those under the control of the British Admiralty.

3. The ships of each Dominion naval force will hoist at the stern the white ensign as the symbol of the authority of the Crown, and at the jack-staff the distinctive flag of the Dominion.

4. The Canadian and Australian Governments will have their own naval stations as agreed upon and from time to time. The limits of the stations are described in Schedule A (Canada) and Schedule B (Australia).

5. In the event of the Canadian or Australian Government desiring to send ships to a part of the British Empire outside of their own respective stations, they will notify the British Admiralty.

6. In the event of the Canadian or Australian Government desiring to send ships to a foreign port, they will obtain the concurrence of the Imperial Government, in order that the necessary arrangements with the Foreign Office may be made, as in the case of ships of the British Fleet, in such time and manner as is usual between the British Admiralty and the Foreign Office.

7. While ships of the Dominions are at a foreign port a report of their proceedings will be forwarded by the officer in command to the Commander-in-Chief on the station or to the British Admiralty. The officer in command of a Dominion ship so long as he remains in the foreign port will obey any instructions he may receive from the Government of the United Kingdom as to the conduct of any international matters that may arise, the Dominion Government being informed.

8. The commanding officer of a Dominion ship having to put into a foreign port without previous arrangement on account of stress of weather, damage, or any unforeseen emergency, will report his arrival and reason for calling to the Commander-in-Chief of the station or to the Admiralty, and will obey, so long as he remains in the foreign port, any instructions he may receive from the Government of the United Kingdom as to his relations with the authorities, the Dominion Government being informed.

9. When a ship of the British Admiralty meets a ship of the Dominions, the senior officer will have the right to command in matters of ceremony or international intercourse, or where united action is agreed upon, but will have no power to direct the movements of ships of the other service unless the ships are ordered to co-operate by mutual arrangement.

10. In foreign ports the senior officer will take command, but not so as to interfere with the orders that the junior may have received from his Government.

11. When a court-martial has to be ordered by a Dominion and a sufficient number of officers are not available in the Dominion service at the time, the British Admiralty, if requested, will make the necessary arrangements to enable a court to be formed. Provision will be made by order of his Majesty in Council and by the Dominion Governments respectively to define the conditions under which officers of the different services are to sit on joint courts-martial.

12. The British Admiralty undertakes to lend to the Dominions during the period of development of their services, under conditions to be agreed upon, such flag officers and other officers and men as may be needed. In their selection preference will be given to officers and men coming from, or connected with, the Dominions, but they should all be volunteers for the service.

13. The service of officers of the British Fleet in the Dominion naval forces or of officers of those forces in the British Fleet will count in all respects for promotion, pay, retirement, etc., as service in their respective forces.

14. In order to determine all questions of seniority that may arise, the names of all officers will be shown in the Navy List, and their seniority determined by the date of their commissions, whichever is the earlier, in the British, Canadian, or Australian services.

15. It is desirable in the interests of efficiency and co-operation that arrangements should be made from time to time between the British Admiralty and the Dominion for the ships of the Dominions to take part in fleet exercises or for any other joint training considered necessary under the Senior Naval Officer. While so employed the ships will be under the command of that officer, who would not, however, interfere in the internal economy of ships of another service further than is absolutely necessary.

16. In time of war, when the naval service of a Dominion or any part thereof has been put at the disposal of the Imperial Government by the Dominion authorities, the ships will form an integral part of the British Fleet, and will remain under the control of the British Admiralty during the continuance of the war.

17. The Dominions having applied to their naval forces the King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions and the Naval Discipline Act, the British Admiralty and Dominion Governments will communicate to each other any changes which they propose to make in these Regulations or that Act.

The Schedules A and B defined the stations of Canadian and Australian ships respectively. These stations cover the territorial and contiguous waters in each case. The agreement generally seems framed in an exceedingly able and statesmanlike spirit, designed so far as may be to avoid any possible friction or misunderstanding in the future, and in preparation for the day when the Imperial British Fleet shall be something very much more than a dream or just a fancy.

This chapter merely records the birth of something the end of which none can foretell. It may be the first hint of a great world-wide English-speaking confederation: it may be the swan song of the British Empire. But it is probably one or the other in full measure.

VIII.

GENERAL MATTERS IN THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.

Since the Great French Wars the British Navy has altered out of all recognition in its _materiel_; but changes in the _personnel_ are often considerably less than appears on the surface.

To take matters in the same order as they are taken in Chapter VIII, Vol. I., uniform has, of course, long established itself. It has done so with a formality which, in the view of many, has “established the régime of the tailor rather than the sailor.” Within the last few years a slight change for the better has occurred; but of the greater part of the period so far as concerns purposes for which uniform was first introduced--the sailor and tailor exchanged places. Much has been written about admirals and captains whose ideas of naval efficiency were limited by “spit and polish,”[43] but “spit and polish” at its worst was never so bad as that tailoring idea which was the ultimate result of George II admiring the costume of the Duchess of Bedford.[44]

The mischief is popularly supposed to lie with naval officers. Actually its roots lie with officials, who have piled regulation upon regulation, and the Vanity of Vanities is to be found so far back as the days of the great St. Vincent and his recorded orders about officers shoe-laces. Lesser lights than he, being in authority, blindly imitated. And so the uniform fetish grew and prospered.

This is not to be taken wholly as a condemnation--for all that a system which made one of the most important duties of a lieutenant to be the carrying round of a tape measure with a view to ascertaining whether every man was “uniform” within a fraction of an inch may seem more suggestive of comic opera than of naval efficiency. Within reasonable limits, conformity has many virtues; and a man slovenly in observing uniform regulations is likely enough to be slovenly in things of greater moment. Like most bad things in the Navy, the principle was ideal: only the carrying of it too far was at fault. There is not the remotest reason to believe that a Navy not in uniform would be as efficient as one in uniform--all the probabilities are that it would be less so. The man who invented the saying that “a pigmy in uniform is more impressive than a giant in plain clothes” was making no idle statement, but stating a general verity. The trouble is solely in the difficulty that has ever been experienced in striking a common-sense mean--a difficulty created by the first mediocrity who tried to stand in St. Vincent’s shoes, and who lacked the brains to realise that what St. Vincent had started with a definite Service object in view, he--the unknown mediocrity--had merely lost in the _means_. An example once created had to be followed. The hardships of conformity--of which overmuch is heard nowadays--are actually trivial, on account of the custom. The mischief lies not in the conforming, but in the waste of time of those who are made responsible for that conformity.

In essence, modern uniform is simple enough: that the various ranks should be noted by special insignia is obviously desirable. For combatant officers, the distinguishing sleeve-marks are:--

Engineer officers wear the same insignia with purple between the stripes. Non-combatant officers are without the curl to the stripes, and wear colours to distinguish them as follows:--Doctors, red; Paymasters, white; Naval Instructors, blue.

The system for the supply of the _personnel_ is to-day altogether different from what it was a hundred years ago. Till comparatively recently future deck officers were taken very young, passed into the Service as Naval Cadets, and thence promoted up to Midshipmen, etc., while Engineers and officers of the other civilian branches joined later in life.

More or less contemporaneously with the Dreadnought era this was altered by the “New Scheme of Entry,” also known as the “Selbourne Scheme,” after the then first Lord of the Admiralty, but really the creation of Admiral Fisher, the Sea Lord who was the moving spirit at the Admiralty at that time.

Few schemes have been more virulently criticised--few, in some cases, more unfairly. Like nearly all Admiral Fisher’s innovations, the scheme was better on paper than in fact. Like all his other schemes it was carried through at far too great a pace for the ultra-conservative moods of the British Navy, which has ever resented anything but the most gradual of changes. On the other hand, it is too often forgotten by critics that a great agitation on the part of naval engineer officers, backed by very considerable shore-influences, was then in existence. Something had to be done, and done quickly. Of Admiral Fisher it may ever be said that he acted where others merely argued.

Under the New Scheme, the deck-officer, the engineer, and the marine-officer were all to enter as cadets at a very tender age, undergo a common training, and be specialised for any Branch at option or at Admiralty discretion later on.

Whatever may be said against the New Scheme, it was magnificent on paper. Engineer officers had first come into the Navy as mechanics to work an auxiliary motive-power in which no “seamen” had much faith. From that humble beginning the status of their Branch grew and grew, till both motive-power and the existence of nearly everything on ship-board depended on the engineers. At the same time the official status of the Branch remained practically in the same stage as it did when the first few “greasers” were entered. The deck-officer was (nominally, at any rate) drawn from the aristocracy; the engineer officer from the democracy in a great measure. In so far as this obtained, “social war” was added to the real issue. It was obvious that this state of affairs was detrimental to naval efficiency. Something had to be done.

Admiral Fisher cut the Gordian knot in his own fashion. In substance his Scheme provided that future engineer officers were to be drawn from the same class as deck-officers--to gild the pill, marine officers were flung into the same melting pot. He might have done better: but far more conceivably harm might have been perpetrated.

As an argument behind him, he had Drake and Elizabethan conditions, the history of the days when every man was made to “sail his ship and fight it too.” The U.S. Navy had already plunged on a somewhat similar experiment. When the Russo-Japanese War came, the Japanese, in the middle of a life-and-death fight, suddenly granted executive rank to their engineer officers--_i.e._, that right to control and punish their own men which British marine officers have always had.

The Scheme met its first rock in the Marines. For three hundred years or thereabouts the “Sea Regiment” has been afloat as a thing apart. The “leather-necks”--as the sailors call them--have built up their own traditions. They have ever remained a force apart from both Army and Navy, belonging to both and yet to neither. The record of the Marines is such that when, recently, it was proposed that they should have a regimental colour with their battles emblazoned on it, the idea had to be abandoned because there was not room on the flag for their services!

Any attempt to interfere with the continuity of such a corps was fore-doomed to failure from the first. The Marines resisted being turned into sailors just as they would have resisted being turned into soldiers. They stood out uncompromisingly for being “the Sea Regiment.” The expected happened. By 1911 this part of the New Scheme was practically shelved, and the most unique body of men in the world was left to carry out its own traditions.

In the matter of future engineers, snags were struck likewise, but here a more or less unreasoning conservatism on the part of parents played its full part. The average parent objected to his son becoming an engineer specialist over old-time reasons. A further and weightier objection was, and continues to be, raised by engineering experts, who argue that engineering is a life profession, not to be picked up efficiently by casual specialization.