was control of the sea, to be gained by seeking out and destroying the enemy’s fleet. There had to be a fallback defence of trade to deal with enemy cruisers escaping from the British fleet, but it should be be minimized because the needs of the fleet came first.
For the moment, Fisher retained the focal area strategy. It was affordable, in terms of numbers of cruisers required and in terms of coal and wear and tear on the ships. It made concentration of force (when needed) practicable. Given a squadron operating in a focal area, the officer in command could readily react to information. Merchant ships under threat would know where to run. As pointed out above, Fisher soon became interested in an alternative to focal areas, using fast cruisers to run down raiders based on intelligence – a strategy which became possible with radio. This strategy in turn helped engender the battlecruiser, as a replacement for armoured cruisers.
Naval Presence
With its rise as the centre of world finance, the City of London became an important element of the British economy and hence a factor in policy-making. It did not speak with any single voice, but in effect it demanded that successive British Governments understand that they had a vital interest in keeping the peace abroad so that international trade, and British traders in particular, could flourish. That role was not too different from what is sometimes now called the vital peacetime mission of ‘maintaining good order at sea’. In practice the Royal Navy had to maintain cruiser squadrons on foreign stations. Such squadrons were not necessarily a means of protecting trade. Rather, they were a way of maintaining what would now be called presence. For example, when the Peruvian ironclad Huascar mutinied and became piratical in 1877, she was hunted down and disarmed by the local British squadron headed by HMS Shah – which fired the first self-propelled torpedo to be used in action against the ironclad (it missed).
Shah was not defending British colonies, but rather the British-centred trading system which kept Britain alive. The City was in effect the centre of an informal empire defined by trade. Unlike the formal empire, it was not generally garrisoned by the small British professional army, and it did not figure in formal defence arrangements. In effect the City could and did apply pressure to maintain the naval presence which protected the British traders abroad and which reassured the governments of the informal empire when they favoured policies which helped international trade – which usually meant trade financed by the City. Whether Britain should have a formal empire at all was a matter of intense debate in mid-century, but the informal empire was not, and could not, be debated at all. It was the informal empire which demanded all those cruisers on foreign stations. The formal empire is largely gone, but not the City and therefore not the vital foreign trading interests. That should, but does not, suggest that the presence mission is still vital, quite unaffected by the demise of formal empire.
Ships intended primarily for the presence role did not necessarily have to be very fast, but they needed long endurance, heavy armament, and survivability. Nearly all the masted cruisers built for the Royal Navy before about 1880 shared these characteristics.
It was not obvious to all in British government that global naval presence was worth while. It was certainly expensive; battleships were often maintained in reserve at home, but cruisers on foreign stations had to be manned and maintained and refitted periodically. In times of crisis, the Admiralty also questioned the value of dispersed ships conducting presence operations. In 1858 the French navy approached the size of the Royal Navy, and in at least one category (frigates) they were superior. The naval members of the Board wanted the fleet concentrated in home waters to deter the French from any idea of invasion, some members suggesting in addition spoiling attacks on the French Channel ports (Cherbourg in particular was being fortified as a fleet base).
The Royal Navy was probably the largest single item in the British national budget of the time. William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister during much of the late nineteenth century, was an ardent anti-imperialist hostile to naval spending. In 1861, well before he became Prime Minister for the first time, he argued since steam made it possible to reach out to the world rapidly and reliably, the bulk of the fleet could be maintained in home waters. Implicit in Gladstone’s argument was that the ships (cruisers) on foreign stations were there to protect British colonies. Gladstone could accept a reduced fleet capable of responding to crises, but not naval presence. He would have dramatically reduced the peacetime British cruiser force, which provided presence. Once Gladstone was in office in 1868, he tested the idea. His First Lord, H C E Childers (who famously disregarded professional naval opinion) argued that money saved by eliminating most of the ships on station could be spent instead on more ironclads in home waters and in the Mediterranean. This idea corresponded to Gladstone’s preference for home defence over Empire defence (he was a ‘little Englander’). The idea was tested by sending a Flying Squadron commanded by Rear Admiral Geoffrey Phipps Hornby abroad in 1869. Among the drawbacks to the idea were the low speed of existing ships and their very limited coal endurance. Phipps Hornby later described the Flying Squadron as a valuable means of training officers and men (largely under sail) and of showing the flag (cruising under sail also minimized dependence on foreign coal). Despite its prestige, the squadron could not be in more than one place at a time: the United Kingdom still needed a large cruiser force continuously on station.
Presence, and the somewhat similar imperial police role, required large numbers of small ships, ranging downwards from cruisers capable of fleet operations to steam sloops, gun-vessels, and gunboats. About 1860, for example, large numbers of shallow-draught sloops and gunboats were required for China, even though China was not in any sense a British colony. These small units were never really expected to engage enemy cruisers, but they seemed absolutely essential; during the nineteenth century after 1815 they saw much more action than larger and more capable warships. They were caught up in the financial problems the Royal Navy faced by 1900, as the cost of adequate warships escalated while resources did not. Hence Admiral Fisher’s famous call, upon becoming First Sea Lord in 1904, to scrap all the small ships abroad which could ‘neither fight nor run away’.
In effect Fisher was saying that he could no longer include the cost of the Imperial maritime police force in the Royal Navy budget; in order to maintain a navy adequate for war, he could not continue to pay for assets really needed by the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. He probably hoped that they would realize that they needed the small warships badly enough to be willing to pay for them, but that did not happen (on the other hand, surprisingly few of the sloops were scrapped). The problem has continued to haunt navies, when maritime solutions to national problems other than naval warfare pop up. If that seems abstract, think about strategic submarines. Both in Britain and in the United States, Polaris submarines and their successors did the national job formerly done mainly by land-based bombers. They did not contribute to conventional naval missions. However, in neither country did governments pay for the new strategic weapons out of the budgets formerly allocated to the land-based bombers. Instead, the submarines were paid for by cutting general-purpose naval forces.
The Shape of the Fleet and the Changing Role of the Cruiser
Nineteenth-century cruisers are often regarded as direct descendants of the frigates and sloops of the age of sail. That is not quite true. Sailing frigates and sloops were generally faster than the line-of-battle ships, to the point that they could escape from such ships. As long as steam engines were bulky and inefficient, steam-powered battleships were generally as fast as (if not faster than) most steam frigates and lesser craft. It took a large frigate (often filled with machinery) to outrun a steam-powered battleship when both ships were under steam. Frigates lost their place in fleet engagements, although they certainly retained their roles in trade defence and attack. Only in the mid-1870s did the combination of steel hulls and more efficient machinery restore the cruiser’s speed advantage. It took about a decade more for the cruiser to regain a place in the battle fleet, partly because the nature of the fleet itself was changing.
Even the term cruiser (sometimes spelled cruizer) was not widely used as a ship type until the 1880s. Before that ships were classified as frigates, corvettes, sloops, gun-vessels, and gunboats, of
