Blackett's War (6 page)

It was inconceivable, too, because Britain
did
depend on its navy for its very existence. Two thirds of Britain’s food was imported; half the world’s oceangoing commerce was carried on British merchant ships. Churchill, who served as first lord of the Admiralty until 1915, would afterward speak of the ships that were his charge with his usual rhetorical flourish, and his usual kernel of essential truth: “They were all we had. On them, as we conceived, floated the might, majesty, dominion, and power of the British Empire. All our long history built up century after century … all the means of livelihood and safety of our faithful, industrious, active population depended upon them.”
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The Royal Navy was not only the bulwark of Britain’s empire abroad and its security at home but an institution that had put down roots deep into British society. It was vast, ponderous, imperturbable, with a nearly unbroken history of victories at sea and an administrative bureaucracy almost as indomitable. Politicians who tried to institute reforms and modernizations came and went; the navy, with its careerism and traditions, its book-length schedules of job classifications and victualing lists, its vast empire of bakers, coopers, rope makers, and dockyards, sailed serenely on. Samuel Pepys, in the 1670s, had tried to do something about the clubby system of patronage and personal favors by which the captains of the navy doled out midshipmen’s commissions to friends, nephews, and others with whom they were connected by class and obligation. He instituted qualifying examinations for promotion to lieutenant and tried to give the Admiralty the power to appoint at least a few midshipmen directly on its own authority. It took merely two centuries for Pepys’s reforms to be completed: only in 1864 did the Admiralty manage at last to take full control of entry into the naval officer corps and institute a regular system for admitting and training cadets to supply the navy’s future officers.

That was a tactical triumph over the old snug way of doing business, but what was really needed was a thoroughgoing revolution. The advent of steam, torpedoes, turret guns, wireless, and other technical innovations from the 1870s on made it painfully clear just how much more of a complete shake-up was required in the selection and education of new officers. Ships were becoming increasingly complex machines, but the engineering officers
who actually knew how to operate them remained a separate branch from the sea officers who commanded the ships and who, with characteristic condescension, persisted in looking down on anyone tainted with practical knowledge and its associations with “trade.” Officers were gentlemen; engineers were dubious on that score.

The naval arms race with Germany in the thirty years leading up to the war quintupled the British navy’s budget; it also created a relentless demand for new manpower, especially officers, and especially technically proficient officers. The increase in the number of smaller ships like torpedo boats and submarines meant that the ratio of officers to men required was increasing, too: the officer corps needed to expand faster than the navy as a whole. Yet the navy’s administrators seemed almost paralyzed in the face of what was obviously a growing crisis. From the 1870s to the turn of the century the manpower of the service had already doubled; during the same period its officer corps shrank from about 4,000 to 3,500.
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Resistance to change was exacerbated by instinctive resentment on the part of senior naval officers toward any civilian administrators who presumed to know better than they did, all the more so when the presumption was correct. Serving officers referred to the civilians in the Admiralty as “frocks.” The civilians returned the compliment by referring to officers as “boneheads.” (It was a senior admiral’s complaint that Churchill was impugning naval “traditions” with one of his proposals for shaking things up during his time as first lord of the Admiralty which prompted the famous Churchillian retort that the traditions of the Royal Navy could be summarized in three words, “rum, sodomy, and the lash.”) In 1902, in the midst of the officer shortage crisis, there burst into the corridors of power in Whitehall a man who had both the determination and the moral authority to drag the navy into the twentieth century whether it liked it or not. Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher was, as Churchill would later remark, “a veritable volcano of knowledge and inspiration.” He would often be called Britain’s “greatest admiral since Nelson,” though he had never commanded a fleet in battle. Fisher was short and stocky, “ugly” by his own reckoning, with a sallow complexion that prompted his enemies to name him “the Yellow Peril.” But he cut a brash and fearless image the British public loved, and he reveled in a take-no-prisoners manner and unconcealed contempt for those he considered mired in the past. He routinely referred to fellow officers who stood in his way as “pre-historic admirals,” “mandarins,” and “fossils.”
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Fisher was serving as commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet
when he received word he would be the next second naval lord, the senior admiral in charge of personnel, and he promptly threw himself into the task of completely reforming officer selection and education. Besides addressing the navy’s critical shortage of officers, Fisher wanted to put an end to the stigma associated with engineering by greatly increasing the amount of scientific training that all cadets received and eliminating the invidious distinction between executive and engineering officers. Under Fisher’s plan all officers would have a single career path up to the rank of lieutenant; only at that point would they specialize—as sea officers, gunnery or torpedo officers, engineers, Royal Marines, or instructors. Then, at the rank of commander, they would once again come together on a single general list. The key point was that all officers would have a basic grounding in engineering and science, and all would be equally eligible for promotion to senior commands.

The proposal horrified the old guard. But Fisher was not used to losing bureaucratic battles; he marshaled public support with well-timed leaks to sympathetic reporters, and by the end of the year the Selborne Scheme—named after Lord Selborne, the first lord of the Admiralty, though it might have more accurately been called the Fisher Scheme—was a reality. To accommodate the influx of new cadets, a new school was hastily established on the grounds and stable block of what had been Queen Victoria’s favorite summer home, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. (Her son Edward VII had presented it as a gift to the nation.) Starting at age thirteen, cadets attended school there for two years before transferring to the naval college at Dartmouth, whose buildings were undergoing an equally hasty expansion.

In accordance with Fisher’s insistence, the curriculum provided an unprecedented emphasis on science, engineering, and mathematics—subjects scarcely recognized by England’s public schools of the time, which held fast to the belief that a gentleman’s education was properly confined to the classics, the less practical the better. (Even subjects such as modern history and English were considered less respectable than Latin and Greek.) Fisher managed to recruit a senior science master from Harrow to be Osborne’s first headmaster; his successor was a mathematics master from Winchester College, another of the elite English public schools. A full third of the cadets’ time was devoted to engineering, including about nine hours a week in the machine shop, where they learned lathe work, toolmaking, forging, casting, and carpentry—an even more remarkable bow to the new
realities of the modern technical world. It was safe to say that from 1903 on, naval cadets received far and away the best secondary-level education in the physical sciences and mathematics available anywhere in England.

In theory, admission to Osborne was open to all boys who could meet the entrance requirements, which included passing a written examination in English history, geography, French, Latin, arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. In practice, the old barriers of class had changed little. Even with Fisher’s reforms, the naval officer corps remained a vocation for the sons of gentlemen. For one thing, parents had to pay the cost of tuition for a boy’s four years’ cadet training, which effectively kept the bar at the middle class. For another, a rigorous interview conducted by a board of examiners, which included a senior admiral, made sure that the boys who were accepted were (in the words of a publication explaining the process) “the right sort.” Among the questions routinely asked were many that a twelve-year-old boy who was not “the right sort” would be unlikely to have a clue how to answer: how much did a London cab charge to carry a piece of luggage; which animals and birds would be regarded as game in the countryside; what dish did caper sauce go with; how would you address a duchess, a king, or a bishop. The results spoke loudest: the successful candidates were nearly all the sons of army or navy officers, Church of England clergymen, landed gentry, or professional men such as lawyers, doctors, and engineers.
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It would still in many ways be a very nineteenth-century Royal Navy that would face the very twentieth-century menace of the U-boat amid all of the technological and unchivalric horrors that the Great War would usher in.

PATRICK BLACKETT WAS
undeniably the right sort. His grandfather had been a vicar, his father a “reluctant stockbroker” whose main interests were books, fishing, and collecting butterflies. On his mother’s side was a long line of minor landed gentry in Shropshire; the family had held a pocket seat in Parliament for three centuries and produced along the way the occasional navy or army officer and India tea planter.

Blackett had enjoyed a typically comfortable Edwardian upbringing in Kensington and Surrey of a boy born into the English middle class in 1897. It was an era when even a fairly modest income of £500 or £600 a year—what a bank manager or other mid-level professional would earn—bought comforts on a scale unimaginable today. A new six-room villa in London could be had for £30 a year. Low income taxes, about 5 percent, and an abundance of cheap domestic labor meant that even “ordinary” households routinely could afford a live-in cook and maid, as did the Blackett family: a cook typically earned £30 a year, a parlor maid £12—the approximate equivalent of $4,000 and $1,500, respectively, in 2010 dollars.
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Blackett’s parents were kind but distant in the approved fashion; children were not praised or shown overt affection “lest they become conceited,” as he remembered.
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But there was, Blackett recalled, a “kindly security” to his boyhood domestic life. It was a feeling matched by the snug security of British society as a whole—at least for the middle class—at a time when
King, Country, Empire, and Church still held their accustomed places in the firmament of unchallenged Edwardian respectability.

Like many scientists-to-be, Blackett had all the indications of being a born skeptic on matters of religious belief, but it never occurred to him to rebel against ritual practices that, after all, by then had far more to do with social convention than religious conviction. “I was baptised into the Church of England, then vaccinated and finally confirmed, as was the usual order in those stately days,” he would write in a slightly wry account (“The Education of an Agnostic”) that appeared decades later in the humor magazine
Punch
, after he had won the Nobel Prize in physics and become one of Britain’s most famous scientists. “Like many others I felt some slight disappointment that confirmation left on me no noticeable mark … definitely with me confirmation did not take.” But, he continued:

In the spring of 1910 Blackett’s parents entered him as a candidate for one of Fisher’s new naval cadetships. “I do not remember any strong wish to go into the navy,” Blackett would later remark, “nor any marked reluctance,” but his enthusiasm for airplanes stood him well in the interview:

For the next four years he received “an excellent modern and scientific education, with a background of naval history, and the confident expectation
that the naval arms race with Germany then in full swing would inevitably lead to war.” Blackett graduated second in his class at Osborne and was the top cadet at Dartmouth. A half century later his former divisional officer at Dartmouth dropped him a congratulatory note on the occasion of his being awarded the Order of Merit and quoted from the notes he had made about his former cadet at the time: “Games. Does not shine. Remarks on Character. Clever, quiet, and nice. Works & does well, and should turn out well.”
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