to escorting and protecting merchant shipping. It was not easy to adapt to the shepherd’s role. The Royal Navy was by tradition wolflike; its speciality had always been making sudden raids upon the unprepared. ‘It could be fairly said,’ wrote the naval historian Jacques Mordal, ‘that with the exception of Trafalgar, the greatest successes of the British navy were against ships at their moorings.’1 Damme, Sluys, La Hougue, the Nile, Copenhagen, Navarino and Vigo Bay were all such encounters. So were the actions against the French navy in 1940.
It was Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo that gave the Royal Navy mastery of the seas. France, Holland and Spain, weakened by years of war, conceded primacy to the Royal Navy. Britain became the first world power in history as the machines of the industrial revolution processed raw materials from distant parts of the world and sent them back as manufactured goods. Machinery and cheap cotton goods were the source of great profits; so were shipping, banking, insurance, investment and all the commercial services that followed Britain’s naval dominance. The British invested abroad while Britain’s own industrial base became old, underfinanced, neglected and badly managed, so that by the mid-nineteenth century the quality of more and more British exports was overtaken by her rivals. Manufacturing shrank, and well before the end of the century service industries became Britain’s most important source of income. The progeny of the invincible iron masters dwindled into investment bankers and insurance men.
To cement the nineteenth century’s Pax Britannica Britain handed to France and the Netherlands possessions in the Caribbean, removed protective tariffs and preached a policy of free trade, even in the face of prohibitive tariffs against British goods and produce. The Royal Navy fought pirates and slave traders, and most of the world’s great powers were content to allow Britain to become the international policeman, especially in a century in which restless civil populations repeatedly threatened revolution against the existing order at home.
The British fleet showed the flag to the peoples of the Empire in five continents and was a symbol of peace and stability. Well-behaved children of the middle classes and workers too were regularly dressed in sailor costumes like those the British ratings wore.2 But appearances were deceptive. The Royal Navy was unprepared for battle against a modern enemy.
As the nineteenth century ended the importance of the Royal Navy was diminishing. Population growth, and efficient railway networks, meant that armies were becoming more important than navies. The new-found strength that industrialization, much of it financed by Britain, had given to other nations ended their willingness to let Britain play policeman. Although in 1883 more than half of the world’s battleships belonged to the Royal Navy, by 1897 only two of every five were British3 and countries such as Argentina, Chile, Japan and the United States had navies which challenged the Royal Navy’s local strength.
Since the time of Nelson the cost of the Royal Navy had increased to a point where it tested Britain’s resources. Nelson’s ships were cheap to build and simple to repair. Needing no fuel, sailing ships had virtually unlimited range, and by buying food locally cruises could be extended for months and even years. But the coming of steam engines, screw propellers and turbines, together with the improving technology of guns, meant supplying overseas bases with coal, ammunition and all the tools and spares needed for emergencies. Full repairs and maintenance could only be done in well-equipped shipyards. A more pressing problem was the steeply increasing cost of the more complex armoured warships. In 1895 the battleship HMS Majestic cost a million pounds sterling but HMS King George in 1910 cost almost double that.
The time had come for Britain’s world role, its methods and its ships, to be totally revised. An alliance with Japan, and the recognition that cultural ties made war with the USA unthinkable, released ships from the Pacific stations. An alliance with France released ships from the Mediterranean so that the Royal Navy could concentrate virtually its entire sea-power in home waters facing the Germans. Germany had been identified as the most potent threat, and anxiety produced a climate in which talk of war was in the air.
The German navy
Germany dominated Europe. Prussia, where in 1870 nearly 45 per cent of the population was under twenty years of age, dominated Germany. Otto von Bismarck (nominally chancellor but virtually dictator) had remained good friends with Russia while winning for his sovereign quick military victories over Denmark and Austria-Hungary. Then to the surprise of all the world he inflicted a terrible defeat upon France. Reparations – money the French had to pay for losing the war of 1870 – made Germany rich, universal conscription made her armies large, and Krupp’s incomparable guns made them mighty. After the victory over the French, the German king became an emperor and, to ensure France’s total humiliation, he was crowned in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Bismarck now had everything he wanted. He looked for stability and was ready to concede the seas to Britain.
But in 1888 a vain and excitable young emperor inherited the German throne. Wilhelm II of Hohenzollern had very different ideas. ‘There is only one master in the country, and I am he.’ He sacked Bismarck, favoured friendship with Austria-Hungary instead of Russia, gave artillery and encouragement to the Boers who were fighting the British army in southern Africa (a conflict that has been called Britain’s Vietnam), spoke of a sinister-sounding Weltpolitik and, in an atmosphere of vociferous anti-British feeling, began to build his Kaiserliche Marine.
Despite Britain’s small population4 and declining economic performance, the strategic use of sea-power had given the British the most extensive empire the world had ever seen. Yet although a large proportion of the world lived under the union flag, Britain had nothing like the wealth and military power to hold on to the vast areas coloured red on the maps. Tiny garrisons and a few administrators convinced millions of natives to abide by the rules of a faraway monarch. The army’s strategic value was in guarding the naval bases where the Royal Navy’s world-ranging ships were victualled, coaled or oiled. Luckily for Britain, its military power was not seriously challenged for many years. Only when the Boers in South Africa erupted was Britain’s tenuous grip on its territories clearly demonstrated.
The German army on the other hand had shown its might and skills again and again, and having seen their army march into Paris in 1870 the German navy itched to test itself against the British. With almost unlimited funds at his disposal Rear-Admiral Alfred Tirpitz was to build for the Kaiser the sort of fleet that would be needed to challenge the Royal Navy. In anticipation of this moment, German naval officers more and more frequently held up their glasses and toasted ‘Der Tag!’ – the day of reckoning.
Admiral Tirpitz claimed to be unaware that his preparations were aimed at war with Britain. ‘Politics are your affair,’ he told the Foreign Ministry, ‘I build ships.’5 And as if to prove his point he sent his daughters to study at the Cheltenham Ladies’ College in England.
The British were alarmed by the prospect of an enlarged German navy. Still more worrying for them was the rise in German trade, which went from £365 million in 1894 to £610 million in 1904, with a consequent increase in German merchant ship tonnage of 234 per cent. In fact Britain’s foreign markets were suffering more from American exporters than from German ones but – still smarting from Germany’s pro-Boer stance – the British resented the Germans, while Anglo-American relations on personal and diplomatic levels remained very good.
In December 1904 Britain’s new first sea lord, Admiral Fisher, started planning his new all-big-gun battleships. Although naval architects in Italy, America and Japan had all predicted the coming of a super-warship, this one was so revolutionary in design that it gave its name to a new category of battleship.
The big hull had spent only one hundred days on the stocks when King Edward VII launched HMS Dreadnought on a chilly February day in 1906. He wore the full dress uniform of an admiral of the fleet, which Britain’s monarchs favoured for such ceremonials,
