Chapter XIV: Some Predictions

When I was “sore let and hindered” in the days of my youth as a young Lieutenant, a cordial hand was always held out to me by Commodore Goodenough. He was killed by the South Sea Islanders with a poisoned arrow. Being on intimate terms with him, I sent him, in 1868, a reasoned statement proving conclusively that masts and sails were damned as the motive power of warships.

(As a parenthesis I here insert the fact that so late as 1896 a distinguished Admiral, on full pay and in active employment, put forward a solemn declaration that unless sixteen sailing vessels were built for the instruction of the Officers and men of the Navy the fighting efficiency of the Fleet would go to the devil.)

Commodore Goodenough was so impressed by my memorandum that he had a multitude of copies printed and circulated, with the result that they were all burnt and I was damned, and I got a very good talking to by the First Sea Lord. I hadn’t the courage of those fine old boys--Bishops Latimer and Ridley--and ran away from the stake. Besides, I wanted to get on. I felt my day had not yet come. Years after, I commanded the “Inflexible,” still with masts and sails. She had every sort of wonderful contrivance in engines, electricity, etc.; but however well we did with them we were accorded no credit. The sails had as much effect upon her in a gale of wind as a fly would have on a hippopotamus in producing any movement. However, we shifted topsails in three minutes and a half and the Admiral wrote home to say the “Inflexible” was the best ship in the Fleet. Ultimately the masts and sails were taken out of her.

It was not till I was Director of Naval Ordnance that wooden boarding pikes were done away with. I had a good look round, at the time, to see if there were any bows and arrows left.

What my retrograde enemies perfectly detested was being called “the bow and arrow party.” When later they fought against me about speed being the first desideratum, the only way I bowled them over was by designating them as “the Snail and Tortoise party.” It was always the same lot. They wanted to put on so much armour to make themselves safe in battle that their ideal became like one of the Spithead Forts--it could hardly move, it had so much armour on. The great principle of fighting is simplicity, but the way a ship used to be built was that you put into her everybody’s fad and everybody’s gun, and she sank in the water so much through the weight of all these different fads that she became a tortoise! The greatest possible speed with the biggest practicable gun was, up to the time of aircraft, the acme of sea fighting. Now, there is only one word--“Submersible.”

But to proceed with another Prediction:

The second prediction followed naturally from the first. With machinery being dictated to us as the motive power instead of sails, officers and men would have to become Engineers, and discipline would be better, and so you would not require to have Marines to shoot the sailors in case of mutiny. Now this does sound curious, but again it is so obvious. When the sails were the motive power, the best Petty Officers--that is to say, the smartest of the seamen--got their positions, not by good conduct, but by their temerity aloft, and the man who hauled out the weather-earing in reefing topsails in a gale of wind and balanced himself on his stomach on a topsail yard, with the ship in a mountainous sea, was a man you had to have in a leading position, whatever his conduct was. But once the sails were done away with and there was no going aloft, then the whole ship’s company became what may be called “good conduct” men, and could be Marines, or, if you liked to call them so, Sailors. One plan I had was to do away with the sailors; and another plan I had was to do away with Marines. I plumped for the sailors, though I loved the Marines.

In December, 1868, I predicted and patented a sympathetic exploder for submarine mines. In the last year of the war this very invention proved to be the most deadly of all species of submarine mines.

Quite a different sort of prediction occurs in a letter I wrote to Sir Maurice Hankey in 1910, and of which he reminded me in the following letter:

LETTER FROM SIR M. HANKEY, K.C.B. (SECRETARY TO THE WAR CABINET).

OFFICES OF THE WAR CABINET,
2, WHITEHALL GARDENS, S.W.
_May 28th, 1917._

MY DEAR LORD FISHER,

I am sending your letter along to my wife and asking her to
write to you and send both a copy of your letter to me in 1910
about Mr. Asquith’s leaving office in November, 1916,[13] and
also to write to you about your prophecy of war with Germany
beginning in 1914, and Sir John Jellicoe being in command of
the Grand Fleet when war broke out.

I have the clearest recollection of the incident. My wife and
I had been down to you for a week-end to Kilverstone. You had
persuaded us not to go up by the early train on the Monday,
and you took us to the rose-garden, where there was a sundial
with a charming and interesting inscription. You linked one
arm through my wife’s and the other through mine, and walked
us round and round the paths, and it was walking thus that you
made the extraordinary prophecy--

“_The War will come in 1914, and Jellicoe will command the
Grand Fleet._”

I remember that my practical mind revolted against the prophecy, and I pressed you for reasons. You then told us that the Kiel Canal, according to experts whom you had assembled five or six years before to examine this question, could not be enlarged for the passage of the new German Dreadnoughts before 1914, and that Germany, though bent on war, would not risk it until this date. As regards Jellicoe, you explained how you yourself had so cast his professional career in such directions as to train him for the post, and, after a brief horoscope of his normal prospects of promotion, you indicated your intention of watching over his career--as you actually did.

All this remains vividly in my mind, and I believe in that of my wife, but, as I am not going home for a few days, she shall give you her unbiassed account.

The calculation itself was an interesting one, but what strikes me now as more remarkable is the “flair” with which you forecasted with certainty the state of mind of the German Emperor and his advisers, and their intention to go to war the first moment they dared....

No more now.

In haste,
Yours ever,
(Signed) M. P. A. HANKEY.

The grounds for my prophecies are stated elsewhere. I won’t repeat them here. They really weren’t predictions; they were certainties.

I remark in passing that what the sundial said was:--

“Forsitan Ultima.”

By the way, I was called a sundial once by a vituperative woman whom I didn’t know; she wrote a letter abusing me as an optimist, and sent these lines:--

“There he stands amidst the flowers,
Counting only sunny hours,
Heeding neither rain nor mist,
That brazen-faced old optimist.”

Another woman (but I knew her) in sending me some lovely roses to crown the event of a then recent success, sent also some beautiful lines likewise of her own making. She regretted that I preferred a crown of thorns to a crown of the thornless roses she sent me. The rose she alluded to is called “Zephyrine Drouhin,” and, to me, it is astounding that it is so unknown. It is absolutely the only absolute thornless rose; it has absolutely the sweetest scent of any rose; it is absolutely the most glorious coloured of all roses; it blooms more than any rose; it requires no pruning, and costs less than any rose. I planted these roses when I left the Admiralty in 1910. Somebody told the Naval Attaché at Rome, not knowing that he knew me, that I had taken to planting roses, and his remark was: “They’ll d--d well have to grow!” He had served many years with me.