“Play the man, Master Ridley! We shall this day light such a candle by God’s Grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.”
So may it be in our being burnt for the sake of the great Merchant Navy that saved our country!
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As regards the years 1902 to 1910, the first conceptions of these great changes stole upon me when I perceived in that great Fleet in the Mediterranean how vague were the views as to fighting essentials. For instance, in one of the lectures to the Mediterranean Fleet Officers I set forth a case of so dealing with a hostile fleet that we should ourselves first of all deliberately and in cold blood sacrifice several of our fastest cruisers. Why?
To delay the flying enemy by the wounding of his hindermost ships. Possibly a ruthless German Admiral might leave a “Blücher” to her fate; but not so our then probable and chivalrous foe! The most shocking description I have ever read of the horrors of war was that detailed by one of the crew of the “Blücher” as he describes Beatty’s salvoes gradually approaching the “Blücher” and falling near in the water, and then the hell when these salvoes arrived, immediately extinguishing the electric light installation, till all below between decks was pitchy darkness only lighted up by the bursting shells as they penetrated and massacred the crew literally by hundreds, who, huddled up together in the “Blücher’s” last moments, were hoping behind the thickest armour to escape destruction.
I saw that the plan of sacrificing vessels in the pursuit of an enemy seemed a new feature to my hearers; and yet it was as old as the hills. And another “eye-opener” I had—in the inability to realise so obvious a fact as, alas! was somewhat the case in the North Sea recently—that you need not be afraid of a mine field; for where the enemy goes you can go, if you keep in his wake, that is. In close regard with this matter, I am an apostle of “End-on Fire,” for to my mind broadside fire is peculiarly stupid. To be obliged to delay your pursuit by turning even one atom from your straight course on to a flying enemy is to me being the acme of an ass. And, strange to say, in connection with this I, only yesterday, September 13th, 1919, got a letter from Admiral Weymouth—a most excellent letter, delightfully elaborating with exceptional acuteness this very idea, which came along so long ago as 1900, when the first thought of the “Dreadnought” came into my brain, when I was discussing with my excellent friend, Mr. Gard, Chief Constructor of Malta Dockyard, the vision of the “Dreadnought.”
I greatly enjoyed years ago overhearing a lady describe to another lady, when crossing over to Ryde, a passing Ryde passenger steamer (just built and differing very greatly from the one we were on board of) as a Battleship. And she wasn’t far out as to what a battleship should be. The enterprise of the Ryde Steam Packet Company had just produced that vessel, which went just as fast astern as she did ahead. In fact, she had no stern. There was a bow at each end and a rudder at each end and screws at each end; so they never had any bother to turn round. Now when you go to Boulogne or Folkestone, I don’t know how much time you don’t waste fooling around to go in stern first, so as to be able to come out the right way; and having escaped sea-sickness so far, I myself have found that the last straw. Let us hope every ship now built after this Chapter will be a “Double-Ender.” But in this world you are a lunatic if you go too fast.
Take now the submarines. They began by diving head first to get below water; and in the beginning some stuck their noses in the mud and never came up again, and in the shallow waters of the North Sea this limited the dimension of the submarine. But now there’s no more diving. A lunatic hit by accident on the idea of sinking the ship horizontally; so there is no more bother about the metricentric problems, and all the vagaries of Stabilities. No limit to size!
This sort of consideration brought into one’s mind that a great “Education” was wanted; and that we wanted “Machinery Education,” both with officers and men; and also that the education should be the education of common sense. My full idea of Osborne was, alas! emasculated by the schoolmasters of the Nation; but it is yet going to spread. As sure as I am now dictating to you, the practical way of teaching is “Explanation, followed by Execution.” Have a lecture on Optics in the morning: make a telescope in the afternoon. Tell the boys in the morning about the mariner’s compass and the use of the chart; and in the afternoon go out and navigate a Ship.
Similarly, with the selection of boys for the Navy, I didn’t want any examination whatsoever, except the boy and his parents being “vetted,” and then an interview with the boy to examine his personality (his soul, in fact); and not to have an article in the Navy stuffed by patent cramming schoolmasters like a Strasburg goose. A goose’s liver is not the desideratum in the candidate. The desideratum was: could we put into him the four attributes of Nelson:—