Sunk by the Signal Book

The Rules of the Game is a work of military history, a genre which I have always seen as male-dominated and which I usually avoid. There are no women in this book. The only females are ships. Nevertheless, for the past nine months or so I have lugged around this 700-page tome by Andrew Gordon on the Battle of Jutland. Published by John Murray in 1996, the edition which I bought first was a hefty American paperback, a slab of thick pages illustrated with unintelligible diagrams of ship formations, published by the Naval Institute in Maryland. Then I discovered a new Penguin edition which is infinitely more digestible (though identical in content) and much lighter.

I came to Andrew Gordon’s book through my research for a biography of King George V, the Sailor King. George went to sea aged 11 and stayed in the Navy until the sudden death of his older brother catapulted him into the direct line of succession when he was 26. His biographers skim swiftly over those fifteen years, but I have a hunch that the seasickness, homesickness and loneliness of his life as a lieutenant made George the salty, breezy and unexpectedly emotional man that he became. For me, though, the Navy was a closed world, and George’s career a meaningless list of ships’ names and ranks and fleets. Then I started reading The Rules of the Game. The story begins in the North Sea a century ago with the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916. The first few chapters are heavy going for the militarily illiterate. I struggled with the acronyms – what is the difference between the 5th BS (5th Battle Squadron), the BF (Battle Fleet) and the BCF (Battle Cruiser Fleet)? However, through the fog of detail the outlines are clear enough. The Battle of Jutland was the Royal Navy’s great missed opportunity of the First World War. When the German High Seas Fleet blundered into the much larger British Grand Fleet the latter should have smashed them. They did not. Both sides claimed victory, but the British lost 14 ships and the Germans 11. The German fleet remained in harbour for the rest of the war, but the British had allowed the decisive victory which was within their grasp to elude them. Until the war ended they waited for another chance, but it never came. As with that other spectacular British cock-up, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Reason Why lay in a failure in communication and personal feuds. Today the busts of the commanders Beatty and Jellicoe stand side by side in Trafalgar Square, but the two men were bitter enemies. Gordon brings their characters wonderfully to life. Beatty was ‘young, dynamic, arrogant and photogenic’. He was also rich, thanks to his wife, the daughter of the American millionaire Marshall Field of the Chicago chain store. Jellicoe, on the other hand, was ‘a pleasant tactful man’. A born administrator who churned out reams of paper, he was an ideal number two but a reluctant Commander-in-Chief upon whose ‘slight, tired, anxious shoulders’ the burden of leadership sat uneasily. At Jutland Beatty commanded the advance force, the Battle Cruiser Squadron. He lost two of his six battle cruisers in an attempt to decoy the Germans towards Jellicoe, who commanded the Battle Cruiser Fleet. But the cautious Jellicoe failed to grasp the opportunity to annihilate the German fleet. The recriminations have continued ever since. Beatty blamed Jellicoe for allowing the Germans to escape. He browbeat the Admiralty into writing his version of the battle in their official history. Like that other seismic quarrel of 1916 between Asquith and Lloyd George, the Jellicoe/Beatty clash signified the death of Liberal England and the triumph of the first-class twentieth-century shit, a takeover made imperative by the demands of total war. As Gordon points out, however, Jutland is not a zero-sum game of credit and blame between the Jellicoe-ites on the one hand and the Beatty-ites on the other. For one thing, he brings attention to the third leading protagonist in the battle – Evan-Thomas, the Commander of the 5th Battle Squadron, a decent, uncomplicated officer and a Jellicoe man. Positioned in reserve, Evan-Thomas waited for over two hours for a signal from Beatty, and when eventually one came it was unclear. He claimed that he was obeying orders, and strictly speaking that was true, but what is remarkable is that he made no attempt to act. At 4.50 p.m. on 31 May 1916, the moment when Beatty signalled to Evan-Thomas, Gordon breaks off his narrative of the battle. Evan-Thomas’s blind obedience was rooted deep in the culture of the Royal Navy. That culture, for Gordon, was the underlying Reason Why, and he leaves the North Sea to explore the peacetime Victorian Navy in 250 pages of gloriously rich history which almost form a separate book.

*

We tend to think of the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century as a period defined by the effortless superiority of the Royal Navy. In fact, as Gordon shows, this was far from the case. The Royal Navy peaked as a fighting machine under Nelson, and during the long Victorian peace it regressed, becoming little more than an imperial police force. By the outbreak of the First World War, the Navy had forgotten how to fight. Of course, peacetime forces by their very nature tend to become complacent and conservative. But there was a systemic problem. At the root of the Navy’s decline lay the signal book. The system of hoisting flags to issue public communications developed after Nelson, and this new language of terse, formal exchanges allowed an admiral to exercise tight control over his fleet. Nelson’s leadership, by contrast, had depended upon the community of thought he built up with his officers. His ‘band of brothers’ understood his thinking so well that in battle he could rely on them to use their initiative. In the same way as email allows bosses today to micro-manage rather than meet colleagues face-to-face, signals undermined Nelsonic delegation. Obedience trumped initiative, and in place of the ‘band of brothers’ the Victorian Navy established a top-down hierarchy of command. Original thinking was positively discouraged. The officers who gained promotion were those who religiously obeyed orders and excelled at ‘bull’. Gordon describes them as ‘authoritarians’: they wore meticulously correct uniforms, were obsessive about personal cleanliness and cared more about painting their ships and scrubbing the decks than making war. They were the products of a brutal and inadequate naval education which began aged 11 on the training ship Britannia. Their training ground was the Mediterranean, and in the Grand Harbour at Malta they perfected labour-intensive fleet evolutions – displays of naval acrobatics which depended on total obedience to orders: a marvel to behold, but of little use as preparation for war. There were some officers who perceived the Navy’s problems. Gordon calls them ‘autocrats’: the lateral thinkers, scornful of ‘bull’, untidily dressed, but possessed of rat-like cunning and capable of taking the initiative. One of these was Sir George Tryon. Realizing that the signal book would paralyse the fleet in war, he attempted to introduce a system of manoeuvring (known as action principles) which left more to the discretion of individual officers – in other words, a return to Nelsonic leadership. In a tragedy which could hardly have been invented if it hadn’t been true, Tryon was killed in 1893 during manoeuvres while executing his system when his ship the Victoria crashed into the Camperdown and sank, drowning 393 men. Tryon was in Gordon’s view the Navy’s best chance of reforming itself before 1914, and the collision left the authoritarians firmly in control. Even Sir John Fisher, who became First Sea Lord in 1904, failed to reform the Navy. Fisher was an autocrat – he didn’t play the game, he played to win, and he was a monomaniac who believed in Nelsonic delegation. But he wasted time feuding with Lord Charles Beresford, an obedience officer, dismissed by Gordon as a ‘superannuated matinée idol’ and ‘a Hogarthian figure, resplendent, vain, cantankerous and beset with gout’. Fisher failed to grasp the opportunity to break the tyranny of the signal book. As Gordon suggests, he was dazzled by the new technology of Dreadnoughts, and he thought in terms of fleets and seas, neglecting tactics and strategy.

*

I had expected to discover from Gordon’s book how the Navy shaped George V – and there is plenty about that – but what I hadn’t realized was how strong the influence was the other way. Ties with royalty turn out to be one of the defining features of the obedience school of officers. Sometimes this was indirect – through membership of the Royal Geographical Society, for example, which sponsored naval officers on polar expeditions, the most famous of whom was Captain Scott. George himself was firmly in the obedience camp. The royal yacht was the holy of holies of authoritarian principles – sanitized, scrubbed and painted to within an inch of its life. As King, George appointed his cronies from the Navy to positions in the royal household. Evan-Thomas was exceptionally close to the court. He had known George since he was a cadet on the Britannia. His sister was married to George’s tutor, the creepy Canon Dalton, and George pulled strings to advance Evan-Thomas throughout his career. As Captain of Dartmouth College, Evan-Thomas was in charge of the disastrous schooling of George’s sons David and Bertie. Because of his naval experience, George interfered more in naval appointments than his father had done, and his meddling had a baleful effect. Some of the royal favourites for whom he secured promotions bungled things dreadfully in 1914 and lost their ships early in the war. But the First World War changed George and taught him much about kingship. It was typical of this new George that he visited his old friend Evan-Thomas, suffering from a stroke caused by Beatty’s bullying, but didn’t support him publicly. He understood by now that for the monarch public duty trumped loyalty to friends.

*

The final part of the book returns – somewhat abruptly, it must be said – to the Battle of Jutland at 4.51 p.m. on 31 May 1916 and plays out the rest of the story. In the Jutland controversy, Gordon is a Beatty-ite. For all his arrogance and bullying, Beatty possessed the rat-catcher instinct for war which Jellicoe lacked. Gordon admits Beatty’s flaws, but as Commander-in-Chief in succession to Jellicoe, Beatty introduced much-needed reforms devolving battle action on flag officers. I suspect that there is more to be said in defence of Jellicoe than Gordon admits. It’s possible too that the split between authoritarians and autocrats was less clear-cut than he suggests. Still, for me this is a great history book – one that constructs and argues a thesis and sustains a grand narrative, that combines a mastery of detail with a sense of the big picture, that changes how one thinks about the subject and opens a door on to a vanished world. Gordon knows his subject intimately. Though sometimes opinionated, he is always colourful, and he writes prose which is dense, exuberant and authoritative. This book is a classic.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 52 © Jane Ridley 2016