Hall’s strategy of trade protection required instant destruction of every French force abroad, because every such force could be used against British trade. Thus he listed each British foreign station with the ships normally present and the corresponding French foreign station. There were obvious imbalances, because the two countries valued their overseas possessions rather differently. For example, the British squadron on the Australia station consisted of a second-class ironclad, a corvette, two sloops, and three gunboats. Facing this force at New Caledonia, the French had a fast sloop, a gun-vessel, and two small gunboats, hardly a match. Hall thought a corvette, a sloop, and two gun-vessels would suffice to overwhelm the French. He clearly separated fleets into categories, seeking equality or superiority in each category. Thus he accepted that any ironclad could overwhelm every unarmoured ship, but he does not seem to have accepted that even several gunboats or gun-vessels would have no chance against a corvette or frigate, hence that the attacking British force did not have to include small unarmoured craft.
French foreign interests were clearly concentrated in China (their force included one second-class ironclad and three third-class, plus five corvettes) and in a second Pacific force based at Tahiti (one second-class ironclad, a corvette, and two sloops). At this time the British counted what would later be called armoured cruisers as second-class ironclads, so the apparent deficit in such ships was a deficit in cruisers.
Hall classified unarmoured ships as frigates (with a covered battery) of first or second class (speed at least 14½ or 10kts, respectively, and of at least 3000 and 2500 tons, respectively), as corvettes of first, second, and third classes (first: at least 3000 tons, speed not less than 14½kts; second, at least 1700 tons, speed not less than 12kts; and third class, at least 1400 tons, speed not less than 11kts), plus sloops, gun-vessels, and gunboats.
Hall’s analysis showed the Royal Navy with a deficiency of 14 armour-clads (first and second class), 37 frigates and corvettes, 97 torpedo vessels, and also auxiliaries. The British had too many third-class armour-clads (10), coast defence armour-clads (5), small unarmoured ships (sloops and below: 37), and torpedo boats (20). The coast defence armour-clads could be employed in some of the operations envisaged, but not the old third-class armour-clads, whose belts could be penetrated by even moderate-calibre guns. They were in effect the left-overs of the building race with France twenty years earlier, and the deficit in more modern armour-clads could be blamed on the habit among successive governments to count the entire British armoured fleet as equivalent, hence to downplay obsolescence. The excessive number of small unarmoured ships could be traced to the need to maintain a maritime police force in a large maritime empire. Nine of them might replace second-class corvettes, albeit inefficiently.
The Royal Navy could not execute all of Hall’s envisaged operations simultaneously, but it could begin by attacking all French ships in commission. The French ships active on foreign stations were clearly the most dangerous to British trade, as they could be sent on that mission ‘by a flash of the telegraph’. With the exception of China, the British already had powerful enough forces on foreign stations to deal with the French; that was the case even in the Mediterranean. China was a worse proposition. Not only were the French more powerful, but some of their cruisers were faster than anything the British had. Thus the French had the options both of attacking Hong Kong and of attacking British commerce in the Far East. Hall’s only solution was to commission six of the fastest British merchant steamers using crews taken from the collection of unarmoured ships already in the Far East. The merchant ships might not be as fast as the French cruisers on a short-time basis, but they would be able to sustain full speed for very much longer, and would not have to coal nearly as often. Once the French squadrons abroad had been dealt with, the remaining British forces would deal with French coaling stations and commercial ports, thus dramatically reducing further French ability to attack British trade.
The British armour-clads in home and Mediterranean waters could meanwhile attack the French ports. This was not blockade, but rather something more like the direct attack of the past. For example, Hall suggested that the five armour-clads in commission in the Channel and First Reserve Squadrons plus the coast defence armour-clad in commission at Portsmouth could form a squadron to attack Cherbourg, the strongest of the French Channel ports, by day, and then disperse to attack the rest simultaneously. After those attacks it would reform as an observation (not blockading, in Hall’s words) force off Cherbourg, to prevent the ships there from coming out. If the initial bombardment sufficiently damaged the ships in Cherbourg, the squadron might proceed to attack Brest. Hall wrote that he deliberately avoided using the term blockade because he considered it impossible to establish a true blockade by any squadron which did not include torpedo vessels (i.e., torpedo gunboats).
The Mediterranean ships in commission would watch Toulon. Some of these ships might be sent to reinforce the China station. The Mediterranean would be reinforced by armour-clads in reserve at home and at Malta.
All of this suggests that at this time the French did not yet have sufficient ocean-going torpedo boats to prevent a force from bombarding a port from just outside, but that earlier ideas of actually entering the port in force to destroy the ships inside were no longer practicable.
In effect Hall showed that the existing British force could fight a naval war against France as long as it did not try to execute all necessary offensive operations simultaneously. There was one essential caveat. The necessary blockades could not be enforced so long as fleets had to stay well out to sea at night to avoid French torpedo boat attacks. Thus Hall’s most important recommendation was the mass purchase of what he called torpedo vessels, anti-torpedo boat ships. He noted in passing that some of the French cruisers were considerably faster than their British counterparts, and the only solution he could offer in the near term was to take up and arm large liners. Hall also pointed out that his war plan required that several British squadrons keep the sea for a sustained period; to do that he advocated large fast auxiliaries carrying stores, ammunition, and, most important, coal. As there was no way of transferring coal in the open sea, Hall proposed doing so either in protected waters or in neutral ports (where the usual restrictions on what neutrals could supply in wartime would not apply).
Hall listed deficiencies in terms of his plan for simultaneous operations. They amounted to 5 first-class and 9 second-class armour-clads; 2 frigates; 8 first-class and 35 second-class corvettes; and lesser craft (these numbers did not take into account the replacement of some corvettes by sloops). Hall’s program was not affordable, but it seems to have shaped what was done. For example, the need for nine second-class armour-clads may well have been met by the construction of the seven Orlando class belted cruisers plus Imperieuse and Warspite, which were seen as small battleships. The two frigates were, in effect, the big first-class cruisers Blake and Blenheim. Eight Leander and Mersey class cruisers, which Hall might have considered first-class corvettes, were already under construction. Within a few years the Royal Navy would have a substantial fleet of third-class cruisers which might fill Hall’s requirement for second-class corvettes.14 The deficit in ironclads was considerably reduced (but the cruiser situation complicated) as the French tried a new naval strategy (jeune école) based on a combination of base and harbour defence by torpedo boat and commerce warfare (guerre de course) abroad.
It was accepted that in wartime the Royal Navy would need far more cruisers than it could afford to build in peacetime. The solution often advanced was to take up merchant ships from trade and arm them. DNC Nathaniel Barnaby described what would be needed.15 For a time the parsimonious Gladstone administration seems to have imagined that armed merchant ships were viable substitutes for all cruisers. The British first tested the armed merchant cruiser idea during the Anglo-Russian crisis in 1877-78, HMS Hecla being retained in effect as a test case. Several fast liners were chartered in 1885 during another war scare. The only one commissioned into the Royal Navy, Oregon, performed impressively. Within a year or so, possibly due to a change in administration, it seems to have been accepted that, although they would be useful in wartime, fast armed merchant ships were no substitutes for real cruisers.
Fleet Manoeuvres and Their Lessons
The first formal large-scale British naval manoeuvres (June–July