the British had to neutralize the French battleships. That was not too difficult in European waters, but it became far more difficult as the French gained colonies in Africa and in Asia. The British had to station their own armoured ships in the Far East specifically because a single French armoured ship could destroy the unarmoured cruisers which would execute the trade protection mission in wartime. Hence the British (and French) policy of building second-class armoured ships, many of them classed as armoured cruisers, for foreign service. The nature of these ships is obvious partly because their Ships’ Covers are clearly marked ‘second-class ironclad’ rather than ‘armoured cruiser’.
Milne also pointed to the varied peacetime (presence) roles of unarmoured British warships, such as presence missions for the Foreign Office and suppression of piracy and of the slave trade. He was embarrassed that he could not provide ships; there was no reserve apart from the Channel Squadron and the Detached Squadron.
It is not clear to what extent Iris and Mercury were intended to meet Milne’s needs. Certainly he did not get the large cruiser program he wanted. The British cruiser program continued to consist mainly of relatively slow corvettes through the early 1880s.
In the aftermath of the 1878 crisis with Russia the Carnarvon Committee met to examine the ability of the Empire to maintain the food supply of the United Kingdom in the face of foreign attacks on British trade. It spent relatively little of its effort examining naval efforts to deal with enemy commerce raiders, concentrating instead on the defence of British colonies and coaling stations. Most of the world’s steaming coal was in exactly these places. Without coal, an enemy raider would soon be rendered immobile.8 The Carnarvon Committee did collect statements from some prominent shipowners attacking the earlier trade protection tactic of convoy, which had apparently already been abandoned.
In 1885 the Foreign Intelligence Committee (now in effect a naval staff) issued a comparison of trade protection by focal area patrol and convoy.9 The unpleasant reality was that the Royal Navy had no cruisers capable of working with really fast merchant ships. Very few had the combination of speed and high-speed endurance needed to convoy even 10kt freighters, which were quite common by that time. Even sailing merchant ships would be difficult to convoy, because they might easily be becalmed. Their owners considered them so vulnerable that they would be laid up in wartime. The alternative of directly protecting the trade routes by flanking them with cruisers along their whole length had been already rejected as impossible. That left only the focal area concept Milne had laid out a decade earlier. The 1885 paper advocated employment of 83 cruisers and 75 merchant auxiliaries; it also offered a reduced version requiring 38 cruisers and 37 merchant auxiliaries. The main later development was to analyse trade routes to decide exactly what areas demanded cruisers. A formal Admiralty Memorandum on protection of British trade in wartime was drafted in November 1898 and printed in February 1900 so that it could be issued to merchant ships in an emergency. It restated the focal area policy: protecting squadrons would be stationed ‘where the convergence of the important ordinary trade routes offers to the enemy great opportunities for making captures’. This pamphlet explicitly stated that convoys would not be formed except under special circumstances (i.e., of ships, such as troopships, whose loss could not be tolerated – but that was not said).
Milne’s focal area strategy was not for public consumption: any offensive trade protection strategy implied that the British merchant fleet would face heavy losses early in a war. After a few months the enemy raiding force would have been destroyed, and losses would cease. That is what happened to the German cruiser force intended to destroy British commerce during the early months of the First World War. Things later went badly wrong because the anti-raider strategy, so little discussed prewar, was ineffective against U-boats, which could not easily be hunted down. The economics driving the strategy – that there were too few ships for effective escort – explains the Admiralty’s attempt to revive hunting in 1939, when it thought that the advent of Asdic had made the earlier strategy viable again. In each case the key failure was not to understand that a primary requirement, the ability of a cruiser or other ship on station to detect a raider at a distance and kill it, had been lost. The US Navy revived offensive anti-raider strategy when it sought to deal with Soviet nuclear submarines during the Cold War; again, there was little prospect of building enough escorts of sufficient capability. Moreover, a convoy too lightly escorted became a tasty meal for a raider. That had become evident during the Napoleonic Wars, and the unpleasant experiences of such convoys were cited during the 1878 hearings of the Carnarvon Commission on colonial defence and on protecting British seaborne trade.
The Doterel class sloop Espiegle rearmed with ten 5in Mk III breech-loading guns in shields, four of them (in shields) on VC and six (on the broadside) on VB mountings. The Mariner class were similar but slightly larger, completed with breech-loading guns (eight 5in). They displaced 970 tons. Two ships of that class (Mariner and Racer) participated in the 1885 fleet exercise, proving that they were far too slow (rated at 11.5kts on 850 IHP) to work with a battle fleet. The Mariners were laid down as gun-vessels, but reclassified as sloops on 26 November 1884, while under construction.
It did not help that the Royal Navy’s rivals did not have to match its numbers. For example, the Royal Navy squadrons deployed in the Far East had to deal with a Russian threat to trade mounted from Vladivostok. A Russian raider might appear anywhere in the area, so any of the deployed squadrons there had, at least in theory, to be able to counter the most powerful of the potential raiders. British numbers were set by the number of places that had to be covered. It did not take large numbers of potential Russian (or, for that matter, French) raiders to force up the size of the ships the Royal Navy had to deploy in the Far East, hence the cost of the Royal Navy.
The number of vulnerable focal areas increased as the French and the Russians gained bases outside the area the Royal Navy could expect to dominate. Just before the turn of the century the French seem to have been particularly keenly aware that building limited numbers of armoured cruisers would place intolerable financial burdens on the Royal Navy. By that time a big armoured cruiser cost about as much as a battleship, so a Royal Navy forced to build a large number of such ships (to cover the focal areas) would be building, in effect, two battle fleets. It was time to find a new way to handle the problem. Admiral Sir John Fisher seems to have seen the way: use intelligence to find the enemy cruisers, and build overwhelmingly powerful large fast cruisers to run them down. That was a key rationale of the battlecruisers which Fisher hoped would replace armoured cruisers.
Conversely, it was argued that by stationing powerful cruisers at focal areas, the Royal Navy would be forcing enemies to limit their attacks on trade to their most powerful cruisers, and in that way much reducing the scale of the attack.10
When he became First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher rethought trade protection.11 He again rejected convoy, partly because an entire convoy could be lost if its escorts were overwhelmed. It would be impossible to keep formation of a convoy secret, and the mass of smoke it produced by day (and the lights it would have to show at night) would attract attack. Probably the worst problem was that there were just not enough cruisers to escort convoys and to do ‘the far more effective work of hunting down the enemy’s commerce destroyers’. It seemed that most of the large number of merchant ships, each proceeding unpredictably, would escape a small number of enemy raiders.
Recent analysis had shown that even famous raiders of the past, such as CSS Alabama, had not been very productive. A US analysis conducted after the Civil War showed that Confederate raiders had destroyed only about 5 per cent of the Union merchant fleet; another 32 per cent had been lost as shipowners fled to neutral flags. The latter loss proved permanent due to onerous post-war taxes rather than to anything the Confederates had accomplished directly. Alabama herself had accounted for about three ships each month of her raiding lifetime.
The Royal Navy was increasingly arguing that
