The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (21 page)

While some in Britain had worried as early as the 1890s about what a new powerful Germany meant for the balance of power at sea,
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it was Tirpitz’s Navy Laws of 1898 and 1900 that significantly increased British unease about Germany. Even though their underlying purpose was not
yet clear, Lord Selborne, Tirpitz’s British counterpart as First Lord of the Admiralty, was telling his colleagues in the Cabinet by the autumn of 1902: ‘the German navy is very carefully built up from the point of view of a new war with us’.
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In 1903, Erskine Childers, a respectable civil servant, wrote his only novel, a gripping story of espionage and adventure, to warn his fellow countrymen of the dangers of a German invasion.
The Riddle of the Sands
was an instant success and is still in print. (Childers joined the Irish rebels after the Great War and was shot by a British firing squad; his son became the President of Ireland in 1973.) Articles started to appear in the British press suggesting a preventive attack on the German fleet.

Thanks to its geography Britain had generally been able to regard the growth of powerful land forces on the Continent with equanimity. It could never do the same on the seas. The British navy was at once its shield, its means of projecting its strength and its lifeline to the wider world. Every schoolchild was taught how the navy had seen off the Spanish Armada (with some help from the weather and Spanish incompetence) in the sixteenth century and had helped to bring Napoleon down at the beginning of the nineteenth. With the navy, Britain had defeated the French in the worldwide struggle of the Seven Years War and gained control of an empire that stretched from India to Quebec. And it needed the navy to protect that empire and its huge informal network of trade and investment around the world.

It was a policy supported not just by the ruling elites but by much of the British public. The British across the political and social spectrum took great pride in their navy and in the two-power standard. At the 1902 coronation review, the sightseeing ships, more than a hundred of them, were chartered by groups that ranged from the travel agent Thomas Cook and Sons to the establishment Oxford and Cambridge Club to the Civil Service Co-Operative Society. When the navy put on a week-long show in London in 1909, complete with mock fights, fireworks and special children’s programmes, it was estimated that there were nearly 4 million spectators.
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Tirpitz, Wilhelm and their fellow enthusiasts for a big German navy which could challenge Britain’s never understood how vitally important the Royal Navy was for the British and that failure of imagination was to cost them, and Europe, dearly.

‘The Empire floats on the Royal Navy,’ said Admiral Jacky Fisher,
and for once he was not exaggerating.
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Britain’s continuing prosperity and the stability of British society, so many assumed, floated on it as well. Britain’s very success as the first industrialised power of the nineteenth century was also its Achilles heel. The continuing health of the British economy depended on Britain’s ability to obtain raw materials from overseas and send its exports out. If Britain did not control the seas, would it not always be at the mercy of those who did? Moreover, by 1900 Britain relied on imports to feed its growing population; some 58 per cent of the calories the British consumed came from overseas and there was simply no way, as the experience of the Second World War was going to show, of making those up by increasing home production.
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In 1890, long before Kaiser Wilhelm and Tirpitz set the new German naval building programme underway, the United Services Institute in London initiated a debate which highlighted another worry. Was the Royal Navy up to the job of protecting British trade? Did it have enough fast cruisers, for example, to patrol the world’s most important trading routes, or to scout out the enemy’s fleets in wartime and raid his commerce? By the mid 1890s a newly formed Navy League was noisily demanding more spending on the navy.
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In 1902 the
Daily Mail
, the most successful of the new mass-circulation newspapers, found cause for concern even in the great coronation naval review:

To the casual eye this great fleet, as it lies peacefully at anchor in the historic harbour, makes the bravest of shows. But true wisdom demands that we must look beneath the surface and consider how far it is fit for the purpose for which it was designed. What cannot but strike the observer is that it is much weaker than the fleet assembled in 1897 for the late Queen’s Jubilee. No doubt our squadrons are stronger than they were at that date … but there is also the fact that in the meantime a powerful navy has grown up in the North Sea which has to be considered in the balance of power.
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As Selborne, one of the more competent First Lords of the Admiralty in the period before the war, said: ‘Our stakes are out of all proportion to those of any other Power. To us defeat in a maritime war would mean a disaster of almost unparalleled magnitude in history. It
might mean the destruction of our mercantile marine, the stoppage of our manufactures, scarcity of food, invasion, disruption of Empire.’
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And what would happen to society if the food supplies flowing in by ship were choked off? Shortages, perhaps even starvation, would, it was assumed, hit the poor first. In the two decades before 1914, many in the ruling classes, whether military or civilian, foresaw a grim picture of an embattled Britain with widespread riots, perhaps even revolution. Did they really think that the upper classes would be safe in wartime, an army general asked a meeting at the United Services Institute in the late 1890s? ‘From the East End of London the masses would march to the West End, would sack our houses, would snatch the bread out of our children’s mouths, and say, “If we are to starve, justice declares we should starve together.”’
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It would rapidly become impossible to wage war, so the Director of Naval Intelligence, Prince Louis of Battenberg (and grandfather of the Duke of Edinburgh) wrote in 1902: ‘The panic of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom produced by the dislocation of seaborne trade in the early phases of the war may be sufficient to sweep away any Government bent on seeing the war out.’
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Famine, or the fear of it, increasingly cast its shadow over the navy’s war plans and it seeped into the public consciousness as well.
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By the end of the nineteenth century, influential groups and individuals were agitating for government action to protect and stockpile food supplies. In 1902 a cast which sounded like the Twelve Days of Christmas – with its 5 marquises, 7 generals, 9 dukes, 28 earls, 46 admirals and 106 Members of Parliament – came together to form the Association to Promote an Official Enquiry into our Food Supply in Time of War. (They succeeded in getting a Royal Commission which agreed that there was a problem but did not make any dramatic recommendations.)

Interestingly, the Association’s members also included trade union leaders, perhaps in an attempt to co-opt an increasingly important, and problematic, set of organisations. Nobody questioned the steadfastness of the working classes, ‘their patriotism, their courage, or their endurance’, the Association’s manifesto said; ‘but with a population in constant hunger a position of great danger would arise, and if it were continued, a disaster to the country could neither be escaped nor long postponed’.
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Of course, doubting the loyalty and reliability of the working classes was precisely what many of the British upper and
middle classes were doing before 1914. Studies by the great Victorian social reformers such as Charles Booth had uncovered the appalling conditions in which many of the poor lived, and the consequences for their health, and, it was feared, for their attachment to their own society. Would the men of the lower classes fight to defend Britain? And could they? Although Britain did not have a conscript army, revelations about the number of volunteers who had been unable to meet the army’s physical standards during the Boer War further raised worries in official circles about the manpower available to defend Britain in a major conflict.

There were other worrying signs that Britain was becoming a more divided society as time went on. The Irish question had flared up again and Irish nationalists were pushing for self-government, even independence. Trade unions were growing; by 1900 their membership was 2 million (and was to double again by 1914) and concentrated in areas that were crucial to the British economy such as mining or the docks. Strikes were longer and frequently violent. And with the broadening of the franchise, political power now seemed within the reach of the workers and their middle-class supporters. By the time the 1906 election was over, there was an official Labour Party with twenty-nine seats in the House of Commons. The popular novelist William Le Queux published a highly successful novel,
The Invasion of 1910
, which had Germany invading Britain while the socialists agitated for peace and mobs in the streets of London shouted ‘stop the war’. The
Daily Mail
serialised the book and sent men out through London dressed in spiked helmets and Prussian-blue uniforms to carry placards with advertising. (At Northcliffe’s insistence, Le Queux also obligingly changed the putative German invasion route to reach the maximum interested readership.)
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The government, both the Conservative and the Liberal one which took its place in late 1905, found itself in the awkward but familiar situation of balancing security needs with fiscal ones. Germany, it was generally agreed, was a growing threat and the navy must be strong enough to deal with this as well as the longer-standing threats from France and Russia. (The British army received about half of what the navy did from the defence budget.) Yet the advances in technology – stronger armour plating, better engines, bigger guns, for example – also
were expensive. In the fifteen years between 1889 and 1904, the cost of battleships, the heavyweights among naval vessels, had doubled and that of the lighter, faster cruisers had gone up five times. In addition, its far-flung empire meant that Britain had to have forces stationed around the world. In the two decades before 1914, overall defence spending took up approximately 40 per cent of the British government expenditure, a higher proportion than in any other of the great powers, and British taxes per head were also significantly higher.
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At the same time government spending on social programmes was going up. Like their continental counterparts, the British government worried about domestic unrest and saw measures such as unemployment insurance or old-age pensions as a way of heading it off. And the new Liberal cabinet formed in 1906 contained radicals such as David Lloyd George for whom spending on social welfare was not just a wise precaution but a moral obligation. Could Britain’s economy afford both new warships and pensions? Successive Chancellors of the Exchequer feared that it could not. If the government tried to raise taxes it might well provoke unrest, especially among the poorer classes. As C. T. Ritchie, Conservative Chancellor in 1903, put it: ‘One of the greatest dangers that I am afraid of is that, with one shilling income tax [in the pound; i.e. 5 per cent], and with bad times entailing want of employment, and perhaps an appreciably increased price of bread, there will be a violent reaction …’
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In an attempt to find a middle way between higher taxes and cuts to defence spending, successive governments before 1914 tried to find both savings and efficiencies. A new Committee of Imperial Defence came into being in 1904 to co-ordinate defence planning and, so it was hoped, budgets; much-needed reforms were made in the army after the end of the Boer War; and the navy was brought into the modern age. Its minister, Selborne, may not have been the cleverest of men; his Cecil sister-in-law (he was married to one of Lord Salisbury’s daughters) said of him, ‘Willy has what one might call an early English sense of humour … simple, hearty and unwearied by repetition.’
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Nevertheless he was energetic, committed to improving the navy, and, most importantly, prepared to back reformers, in particular Admiral John Fisher.

Jacky Fisher, as he was always known, shoots through the history of the British navy and of the prewar years like a runaway Catherine
wheel, showering sparks in all directions and making some onlookers scatter in alarm and others gasp with admiration. He shook the British navy from top to bottom in the years before the Great War, bombarding his civilian superiors with demands until they usually gave way and steamrollering over his opponents in the navy. He spoke his mind freely in his own inimitable language. His enemies were ‘skunks’, ‘pimps’, ‘fossils’ or ‘frightened rabbits’. Fisher was tough, dogged and largely immune to criticism, not surprising perhaps in someone from a relatively modest background who had made his own way in the navy since he was a boy. He was also supremely self-confident. Edward VII once complained that Fisher did not look at different aspects of an issue. ‘Why should I waste my time,’ the admiral replied, ‘looking at all sides when I know my side is the right side?’
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Fisher could be charming; he made Queen Victoria laugh, not an easy matter, and was invited frequently to stay with her at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. ‘I believe, dear Admiral, that I would walk to England to have another waltz with you,’ the young Grand Duchess Olga of Russia wrote to him.
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He was also dangerous to cross and could be vindictive. ‘He laughs,’ said Alfred Gardiner, a prominent journalist, ‘he cracks jokes, he talks with voluminous geniality, but behind all these breezy externals of the seaman are his “three R’s of War” – “Ruthless, Relentless, Remorseless” – and his “three H’s of gunnery” – “Hit first, hit hard, keep on hitting”.’
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Fisher did not seek battles, whether against his political opponents or enemy nations, but if they came he believed in waging all out war. His great hero was, as for so many in the British navy, Horatio Nelson, the victor in the naval war against Napoleon. Indeed Fisher delayed taking up his appointment in 1904 as the First Sea Lord (the operational head of the navy) until 21 October, the anniversary of Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar. He frequently quoted Nelson’s saying ‘He would be a ——— fool who fought an enemy ten to one when he could fight him a hundred to one.’
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