Chapter IV: Economy Is Victory

Mr. Gladstone stood by me last night. Mr. McKenna was by his side. I am not inventing this dream. It is a true story. (It is Godly sincerity that wins--not fleshly wisdom!)

A gentleman, such as you, was by way of interviewing Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone was castigating me. I was a Public Department. He said to you, who were interviewing him, that he was helpless against all the Public Departments, for he was fighting for Economy, and he gave a case to you worse than either Chepstow or Slough. I am sorry to say it was the War Office he was illustrating, as I am devoted to Mr. Churchill and would not hurt him for the world--even in a dream. It is too puerile to describe in print, but what Mr. Gladstone pointed to I have told you in conversation.

Now, the above is an Allegory.

Imagine! nearly a year after the Armistice and yet we are spending two millions sterling a day beyond an absolutely fabulous income--beyond any income ever yet produced by any Empire or any Nation!

_Sweep them out!_

Dr. Macnamara, a few days since, in his _apologia pro vita sua_ excuses his Department to the public by saying that on the very day of the Armistice the Board of Admiralty sat on Economy! _So they did!_ They _sat_ on it!

Economy! To send Squadrons all over the globe that were not there before! The globe did without them during the War--why not now? “Oh my Sacred Aunt!” (as the French say when in an extremity). “Showing the flag,” I suppose, for that was the cry of the “baying hounds” in 1905 when we brought home some 160 vessels of war that could neither fight nor run away--and whose Officers were shooting pheasants up Chinese rivers and giving tea parties to British Consuls. How those Consuls did write! And how agitated was the Foreign Office! I must produce some of these communications directly “DORA” is abolished. Well, that’s what “showing the flag” means.

_Sweep ’em out!_

Gladstone was hopeless against Departments--so is now the Nation.

Dr. Macnamara may not know it, but Mr. Herbert Samuel was to have had his place. I did not know either of them, but I said to the Prime Minister “Let’s have the ‘Two Macs’!” Mind, I don’t class him with the Music Hall artist. (_Tempus_: Death of Campbell-Bannerman)--that epoch--I cannot forget Mr. Asquith’s kindness to me. He had telephoned to me from Bordeaux after seeing the King at Biarritz, asking me to meet him on his arrival home next night at 8.30 p.m. at 40 Cavendish Square. His motor car was leaving the door as I arrived. He told me he had seen the King, and had proposed Mr. McKenna as First Lord of the Admiralty. The King seemed to have some suspicion that I should not think Mr. McKenna a congenial spirit. I made no objection--I thought to myself that if Mr. McKenna were hostile then _Tempus edax rerum_. I don’t think Jonathan and David were “in it,” when Mr. McKenna and I parted on January 25th, 1910--my selected day to go and plant roses in Norfolk. I blush to quote the Latin inscription on the beautiful vase he gave me;

Joanni Fisher
Baroni Kilverstonæ
Navarchorum Principi, Ensis, Linguæ,
Stili Valde Perito,
Vel in Concilio vel in Praelio insigni,
Nihil Timenti,
Inflexibili, Indomitabili, Invincibili,[6]
Pignus Amicitiæ Sempiternae,
Dederunt Reginaldus et Pamela McKenna.

To
John
Lord Fisher of Kilverstone
First of Admirals
Skilled of Sword, Tongue & Pen
Brilliant in Council and Battle
Dreading Nought
Inflexible, Indomitable, Invincible[6]
This Token of Enduring Friendship
a Gift from
Reginald & Pamela McKenna

And, even now, when time and absence might have deadened those feelings of affection, he casts himself into the burning fiery furnace, bound with me in a trusteeship of a huge estate with only 3_s._ 4_d._ in the £ left--all that the spendthrifts leave us. “Showing the flag” and presumably resuscitating the same old game of multitudinous dockyards to minister to the ships that are “showing the flag”; and so more Chepstows and more Sloughs! And these multitudes of shipwrights superfluous in Government Dockyards who ought to be in day and night shifts making good at Private Yards the seven millions sterling of merchant vessels that Dr. Macnamara’s Government associates supinely allowed to be sent to the bottom! Those political and professional associates, who, instead of using the unparalleled British Navy of the moment as a colossal weapon for landing Russian Armies in Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein, aided by the calm and tideless waters of the Baltic, were led astray to follow the road that led to conscription and an army of Four Million Soldiers, while the Navy was described in the House of Commons as “a subsidiary service.” How Napoleon must now be chortling at his prognostication coming true, that he put forth at St. Helena, as described on page 177 of Lord Rosebery’s “Last Phase,” that the day we left the sea would be our downfall!

But this chapter is on “Economy”; and I have to tell a story here about my dear friend McKenna. He was Secretary of the Treasury; he, and an almost equal friend of mine--Mr. Runciman--were, as we all know, extremely cunning at figures. Lots of people were then looking after me--Kind friends! For instance, I remember my good friend John Burns at one Cabinet Committee meeting instructing me on a piece of blotting paper how to deal with a hostile fleet. I don’t mean to say that John Burns would not have been a first-class Admiral. To be a good Admiral, a man does not need to be a good sailor. That’s a common mistake. He wants good sailors under him. He is the Conceptionist. However, to resume. At that time I was “Pooh-Bah” at the Admiralty; the First Lord was in a trance, and the Financial Secretary had locomotor ataxy. I was First Sea Lord, and I acted for both the Financial Secretary and the First Lord in their absence. I wasn’t justified, but I did it. So I was the _tria juncta in uno_; and I referred, as First Sea Lord, a matter to the Financial Secretary for his urgent and favourable consideration, and he favourably commended it to the First Lord, who invariably cordially approved. It was all over in about a minute. _Business buzzed!_

(I’m doubtful whether this ought to come out before Dora’s abolished. That’s why I wanted these papers to be edited in the United States by some indiscreet woman, where no action for libel lies. Colonel House did ask me to go to America when I saw him in Paris last May. There is a great temptation, for the climate goes from the Equator to the Pole, and a dear American Admiral friend of mine expatiated to me on the joy of laying hold of the hand of the summer girl at Palm Beach in Florida and never letting it go until you get to Bar Harbour in the State of Maine. I have had endless invitations and most hearty words from Florida to Maine, and from Passedena to Boston, and I have as many American dear friends as I have English.)

Well! the Treasury could not make out how all those submarines were being built--where the devil the money was coming from; so these ferrets came over. I led a dog’s life, or rather a rabbit’s life, chased from hole to hole. Nothing came of it; and as an outcome of that time I left the Admiralty with 61 good submarines and 13 building. The Germans, thank God! had gone to the bottom with their first submarine, which never came up again, and the few more they had at that time were not much use.

I must tell a story now. Mind! I don’t want to run down the Treasury. The Treasury is an absolutely necessary affliction.

There was once a good Parsee ship-owner with a good Captain. But this Captain _would_ charge his owner with the cost of his carriage from his ship to the office. Not being far, the old Parsee thought the Captain ought to walk, and if he didn’t walk then he ought to pay for the cab himself. They call the carriages “buggies” at Bombay. However, when the old Parsee had to pay the bill next month--there it was: “Buggy--so many rupees.” He told his Captain he would pay that once but never again; and not finding it in the items of the bill presented the following month he gave the Captain his cheque. As the Captain put it in his pocket he said: “Buggy’s there!” That’s what happened to the Treasury and the submarines.

I had a friend in the Accountant-General’s Department called “The Mole.” He taught me how to hide the money. I may observe I was called a “Mole.” It wasn’t a bad name. I was not seen or heard, but I was recognised by upheavals--“There is that damned fellow Fisher again, I will swear to it!” But, as David said, “Let us be abundantly satisfied” that we have such among us as McKennas and Runcimans. I should like to let those ferrets loose now. However, “Out of Evil Good comes.” Now comes a pardonable digression, I think.

Here’s a letter I got yesterday, September 9th, 1919, coming from Russia. Now suppose we had not made the very damnedest mess of Russia ever made in this world--with Lord Milner first going there and then Mr. Henderson, the head of the Labour Party, ambassadoring (as least, he says so) and this nation in every possible conceivable way alienating the Russian people--then I never could have had this magnificent letter from Russia to give you. Just observing, before I quote it: Supposing a French Army landed at Dover to help us subjugate Ireland? I guess we should all forget whether we were Tories or Carsons or Smillies, and unite to get this French army out of our Archangel, and the Entente Cordial would be “in the cart,” as the vulgar say. Well, this is the letter which does my heart good. It is from a young lad in an English man-of-war, now off St. Petersburg. He is writing of the recent defeat of the Russian fleet there:--

“There has been such a fight. I was only a looker-on. I was
furious. Kronstadt was attacked by our motor boats each carrying
two torpedoes” [by the way, I was vilified for introducing motor
boats] “and seaplanes with destroyers backing them up” [isn’t it
awful! I introduced destroyers also]. “Two Russian battleships, a
Depôt ship and a Destroyer Leader were torpedoed.

“Our motor boats were MAGNIFICENT!

“I nearly cried with pride at belonging to the same Race.

“There has been nothing like it in the whole War.

“I would rather take part in a thing like that than be Prime
Minister of England. You would have been so proud if you could have
seen them.”

The letter is to the boy’s mother. On it is written, by him who sends it me, “The Nelson touch, I think!”

[_By kind permission of “The Westminster Gazette._”

NATIONAL SERVICE OR THE NAVY?

SIR JOHN FISHER AND LORD ROBERTS, 1906.]