An instance of the necessity of testing appliances according to sea requirements occurred when I was testing capstans. The ships were taken into deep water, so that the whole length of the cable was run out by the time the anchor touched bottom; and it was then discovered that the capstan was too weak to lift the amount of vertical chain specified.
When I was trying a torpedo-boat at full speed, the helm suddenly jammed, and the boat instantly went out of control in the neighbourhood of a number of trawlers. Luckily, she went round and round in a circle until she was stopped. She did not hit a trawler; but it was a very lively minute or two.
A party of us went to a ball at Sheerness, going thither in a tug; and intending to return the same night, we left the house at about one o'clock. There was a thick fog, and the captain of the tug declined to start. As I made it a rule to sleep in my own quarters at Chatham if I possibly could, I said I would take the tug back. As there were no lights, I found the channel by the simple method of hitting its banks; and cannoning off and on all the way, we made the passage.
In November, 1892, the Howe battleship had struck upon an uncharted rock in Ferrol harbour; and Rear-Admiral Edward Seymour (now Admiral of the Fleet Sir E. H. Seymour, G.C.B., O.M., G.C.V.O.) was appointed to inspect the salvage operations. These occupied nearly five months. Sir Edward gives a brief but interesting account of the work in his book, My Naval Career. After the Howe had been floated, she was dry-docked at Ferrol, where she remained for nearly two months, while temporary repairs were being effected. When she struck the rock, her port side forward was stove in for nearly half her length, and her after part remained resting on a "rocky shoal of hard granite." Sir Edward Seymour says "that after the ship was got into dock at Ferrol, I could stand on a temporary flooring where the bottom of the ship used to be, and holding one hand over my head could not touch where the ship's bottom plates had been driven up to." He adds that "the mud, slime and dirt covering everything as the water was cleared from below, and the bad smell were almost beyond belief."
We at Chatham could confirm the observation; for it was to Chatham that the Howe returned to be repaired. When she arrived, she was still coated with stinking mud, and we did our best to clean her. But notwithstanding our utmost diligence, a minute quantity of this virulent slime was afterwards found under the rolling-plate of the turrets. The men who slung their hammocks near the turrets fell sick of fever; and its origin was traced to the mud.
The salving of a vessel so badly injured was a fine achievement. Sir Edward Seymour brought her to Sheerness under her own steam at eight knots. We dealt with her for a few months, until she was all a-taunto again, when she was re-commissioned and went to the Mediterranean.
It is the duty of a captain of the Dockyard Reserve to make representations, through the admiral-superintendent, to the Admiralty, with regard to improvements in construction and material. My suggestions concerning water-tight doors in ships were subsequently embodied in a paper read before the Institution of Naval Architects. In the design of the first ironclads, the vessels were actually divided into water-tight compartments by bulkheads without doors or apertures. In later designs, numerous doors were cut in the bulkheads for the sake of convenience of access, which, together with the many ventilating shafts and valves, in effect nullified the system of dividing a vessel into water-tight sections. The doors themselves were hung on hinges and closed with hanks and wedges; an inefficient method. My suggestions, which were afterwards adopted, were that the number of doors should be greatly reduced; and that they should be vertical, and made to screw up and down; and that the ventilating shafts fitted with an automatic closing apparatus which did not work should be abolished.
Among other proposals were the substitution of ships' names, plainly lettered, for figure-heads and scroll-work, and the abolition of the ram. At that time, our men-of-war were built with unarmoured ends, only the protective steel deck extending the whole length and breadth of the ship. It followed that if the side of a hostile vessel were pierced by the long projecting ram of a British ship, the force of her impact would strip her bows of the light construction above the protective deck, and she would remain toggled in the enemy and helpless. Far more effective, if ramming is to be done, would be the direct blow of a vertical bow. At the same time, I continued to represent the radical weakness of unarmoured ends.
In 1894, five years after the passing of the Naval Defence Act, and the elate at which the great Spencer shipbuilding programme, involving a large increase of officers and men, was begun, the serious deficiency in the personnel became manifest. The fact was, that the Naval Defence Act of 1889 had not included proper provision for manning the new ships as they came into commission; and just when the boys who ought to have been entered in 1889 would have become available as able seamen, it was discovered that they did not exist. But by that time, of course, the Government responsible for the deficiency was out of office, and, as usual, there was no one to be called to account.
In September, 1894, Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, who has performed so much invaluable service in educating the public to logical ideas upon organisation for war and problems of national defence, began to publish his excellent articles dealing with "The Command of the Sea," in which the demand for the institution of a Naval War Staff was formulated. It was for the purpose of enforcing this necessity that the Navy League was founded by "four average Englishmen" in December, 1894. Among its original supporters were Earl Roberts, V.C., Lord George Hamilton, Sir Charles Dilke, Sir John Puleston, the Master of Trinity House, Sir Charles Lawson, Mr. Joseph Cowen, Mr. Arnold-Forster, and myself.