Fisher’s solution was one part new technology and one part new strategy based on intelligence. The new technology offered an overwhelming combination of firepower and speed in the Invincible class, sufficient to crush any existing armoured cruiser, although without a change in how they were used, the new ships would merely have been a faster road to bankruptcy for the Royal Navy. Fisher saw that he could use an operational intelligence system to track raiding cruisers well enough for the Admiralty to vector fast British cruisers to run them down. That would take a lot fewer cruisers than the earlier focal-area concept. It required central direction, high speed and a powerful enough armament to snuff out any enemy cruiser: a battlecruiser. By 1908, Fisher was writing that the new battlecruisers had been given unusually tall masts specifically to improve long-range wireless reception, so that they could be directed by an Admiralty at the centre of an intelligence net.3
Fisher envisaged the Admiralty as the centre of a spider-web of information-gathering. It would have a far better idea of the movements of foreign fleets than any local fleet commander. The Admiralty – the First Sea Lord – should therefore have not only the existing administrative role, but an operational one. He should guide deployed fleets into position to engage enemy fleets. Given its reliance on intelligence, this concept was not publicised. It was, however, tried during manoeuvres and the new role of First Sea Lord was made clear to seagoing commanders. They were understandably unhappy with the loss of their prerogatives. That was particularly evident when Admiral Sir Charles Beresford came from the Mediterranean Fleet to command the Channel Fleet, which by 1908 was the more important of the two due to the strategic shift towards the German threat. Beresford argued that without the usual detailed war orders he could not train his fleet for war. Fisher told him that the Admiralty would provide him with guidance when it was needed. Beresford was defeated in the subsequent inquiry, but Fisher found himself retiring early (January 1910) specifically to ensure that his favoured candidate Admiral Sir A K Wilson would succeed him.
Fisher’s solution to the cruiser problem helped him solve a central personnel problem. On paper the Royal Navy had immense strength, but much of it was inactive reserve ships which would be recommissioned by reservists in an emergency. Unfortunately reservists were generally unfamiliar with the ships to which they would be assigned on a more or less random basis. The French, the most likely enemy, had a far more efficient reserve system. When Fisher returned to the Admiralty in 1904, he proposed a new Scheme (with the motto, ‘the Scheme, the whole Scheme and nothing but the Scheme’) to solve the manpower problem. The key was to scrap many of the ships on foreign stations. The personnel released in that way would become the nucleus crews always assigned to reserve ships. Reservists would be earmarked for the ships they would man on mobilisation and they would drill on board those ships. The fleet would be split into three, depending on their degree of readiness. The First Fleet would be fully manned at all times. The Second Fleet would be nearly ready, the Third Fleet less so, but all ships would be mobilised periodically for training.
Fisher generated extreme passions; officers were either supporters or enemies. Because he rammed his innovations through the navy, he rarely felt compelled to explain his logic. Some of Fisher’s decisions as First Sea Lord seem to have been designed specifically to attack particular enemies within the Royal Navy. Examples are the abolition of the Trade Division in the Admiralty and his refusal to countenance the creation of a formal Naval Staff for war planning. The fight over the idea of all-big-guns led Fisher to regard the adoption of 6in secondary guns as heresy. That is why the battlecruisers and ‘large light cruisers’ Fisher ordered during his second term as First Sea Lord (1914–15) had 4in secondaries, rather than the 6in guns of the previous battleships. The decision to adopt the 5.5in gun for HMS Furious may have been a face-saver.
It says much for Fisher’s competence and promise that he had survived that long. In October 1905 the Conservatives lost a snap election. The incoming Liberals had the opportunity to appoint a new Board of Admiralty. Fisher was nearing retirement age. He was promoted Admiral of the Fleet, for which rank there was no retirement age at all and thus was able to continue at least some of his policies beyond the end of the Conservative Government which had appointed him. This was despite the Liberals’ desire to cut naval spending further and their interest in negotiating arms limitation with the Germans.
Once out of office, Fisher tried to retain influence through protégés. For example, he tried to advise Winston Churchill, who became First Lord in October 1911. Fisher returned to the Admiralty in November 1914 but had to leave the following June. At this time he exerted unusual influence because the civilian Cabinet ministers had no military credibility. Thus he was able to force through his new capital ship projects by threatening to resign. He came to see Churchill as a menace and his final resignation (June 1915) seems to have been a failed attempt to use the same tactic.
National Strategy and Naval Policy
The Royal Navy was usually the largest single item in British pre-1914 budgets because Britain was a seaborne empire, dependent on the sea for survival. Naval policy was designed to defend the Empire against all comers. Before 1904 the most important potential enemies were France and Russia, joined in alliance. Germany was beginning a hostile naval build-up. In the autumn of 1904 the worst case envisaged by First Lord of the Admiralty Selborne was a war against France and Russia, with Germany jumping in to take advantage of British weakness. The only major naval power Selborne did not include as a possible enemy was the United States (which had been considered a potential enemy for most of the nineteenth century).
Britain had long avoided peacetime alliances, but by 1900 she was seeking allies. The new policy, which led to the alliance with Japan, is usually explained as a reaction to growing relative British weakness. The 2:1 cruiser standard tells a different story. The British needed to balance off the cruiser power of the Franco-Russian coalition. In 1898 the British Colonial Secretary offered the Germans an alliance, initially as a way of resolving colonial differences (Selborne later advocated a similar alliance as the only way to contain naval costs). Such an alliance would have placed the French in a more difficult position, probably forcing them to expand their army at the expense of their navy. The Germans rejected the offer; privately some of their statesmen said that the British would not even have made the offer had they realised the intensity of German anti-British sentiment (due in large part to incidents during the ongoing Boer War).
The alliance with Japan, signed in 1902, dramatically reduced any threat posed by Russian cruisers in the Far East. Even then Selborne felt compelled to maintain the 2:1 cruiser ratio. This ratio explains why the 1905–6 programme included three armoured cruisers (the Invincibles) but only one new battleship (Dreadnought). This cruiser figure had already been dramatically reduced due to the destruction of Russian ships during the Russo-Japanese War.
By 1904 the only likely cause of a war between Britain and her traditional enemy France was friction in the colonial world. War nearly broke out in 1898 at Fashoda in upper Egypt. The memory of Fashoda caused French governments to keep building a fleet to fight the British, but in 1904 the two governments reached an entente (agreement), initially on colonial issues. On this basis the British helped the French avoid war with Germany over Morocco in 1905. They sought to preserve the balance of power in Europe which British statesmen had always considered essential. This crisis came as the British came to accept that aggressive building programmes made Germany a more and more significant naval threat. British naval attaches reported that in order to sell his expensive fleet German naval chief Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz relied increasingly on anti-British propaganda.
In the late 1905 General Election the Liberals, led at that time by Henry Campbell-Bannerman, defeated the Tories. To them social reform trumped defence. In effect social reform would defend against potential internal threats. External threats were less significant and to some extent mutual economic ties would deter war by making it so obviously ruinous. Social reform demanded money which might otherwise have gone into the capital ship programme.
Entente with France made the Two-Power Standard obsolete. As the Germans built a modern fleet, the new Standard came to be a set superiority over the Germans not in the total number of capital total but in modern (dreadnought) battleships and battlecruisers. During 1908 the Liberal Government in