Sir Frederick Richards and the whole of his naval colleagues on the Board immediately informed the Government that, unless their proposals for strengthening the Fleet and for providing for the naval defence of the Empire, were accepted, they would resign. It was enough. The Government yielded.
The Naval Lords were: Admiral Sir Frederick Richards, K.C.B.; Rear-Admiral the Lord Walter Talbot Kerr; Rear-Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher, K.C.B.; and Captain Gerard Henry Uctred Noel.
It was in commemoration of the action of Sir Frederick Richards that the Navy caused his portrait to be painted, and presented it to the nation. Inscribed with the legend "From the Navy to the Nation," it hangs in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, where it was placed during the lifetime of the admiral, an unique distinction.
As in 1889, when many of my brother officers and myself were conning the ship, it was the helmsman at the Admiralty who put the wheel over, and again I was wholly ignorant of his intentions. But this time the helmsman was none other than the First Sea Lord, and with him were his naval colleagues. With him, too, was the great body of public opinion in the country; and as in 1888, those of us who had been toiling to educate it, may at least claim to have set in motion a force lacking which it is almost impossible, under a pseudo-democratic government, to accomplish any great reform whatever.
It is not too much to say that to the shipbuilding and naval works programme initiated and planned by Sir Frederick Richards in 1894-5, and carried by his courage and resolution, the Empire owes its subsequent immunity from external attack, notably at the time of the Fashoda incident and during the South African war.
Sir Frederick Richards was so great a man, that he could even nullify the injurious effect of the legal supremacy of the civilian First Lord over the Board, which technically deprives it of collective administrative authority. He served, however, with two high-minded gentlemen, Lord Spencer, and Mr. Goschen who succeeded Lord Spencer.
I have had to do with three great shipbuilding programmes. The first was carried after the resignation of one member of the Board, myself; the second, by the threatened resignation of all the Naval Lords! Of the third anon.