Stephen Roskill - Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty: The Last Naval Hero: An Intimate Biography

THE AUTHOR

Stephen Roskill, a retired Royal Navy captain, was the author of the official history of the Second World War at sea and a prodigious number of other highly regarded naval books, including a study of Churchill and his admirals. He died in 1982.

Admiral of the Fleet

The Last Naval Hero

AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY

STEPHEN ROSKILL

NEW INTRODUCTION BY ERIC GROVE

Dedicated to the memory of the late George Godfrey-Faussett, and to Iris, Lady Leslie and the 3rd Earl Beatty but for whom this book would never have been written .

Copyright Stephen Roskill 1980

New Introduction Eric Grove 2018

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2018 by

Seaforth Publishing,

A division of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street,

Barnsley S70 2AS

www.seaforthpublishing.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5267 0655 3 ( PAPERBACK )

ISBN 978 1 5267 0657 7 ( EPUB )

ISBN 978 1 5267 0656 0 ( KINDLE )

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing of both the copyright owner and the above publisher.

The right of Stephen Roskill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Capital ships at Rosyth

Indomitable, Australia and New Zealand taken from the Forth Bridge

Australia coaling ship

Capital ships at sea and in harbour

Eugnie

Beatty in Vice-Admirals uniform

Beatty by Orpen

Lady Beatty by Laszlo

Beatty and his aides

Rangers Lodge

Three German ships that fought at Jutland

Battle scenes

British ships that fought at Jutland

After the battle

King George V and Beatty

Beatty in uniform and in plain clothes

Encaenia at Oxford, 1919

Death mask

The North Sea Theatre

The Dogger Bank Action

The Battle of Jutland. Preliminary Moves

The Battle of Jutland. The Battle Cruiser Action

The Battle of Jutland. The Deployment

The Battle of Jutland. Movements of Principal Forces 6.307.25 p.m.

The Escape of the German Fleet

Captain Stephen Wentworth Roskill (190382) was one of the two major historians of the Royal Navy in the twentieth century. His four-volume War at Sea is perhaps the best of the official histories of the Second World War, and his two-volume study Naval Policy Between the Wars is still the standard work on the subject. The second volume of that series was delayed by a diversion into a monumental three-volume biography of Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey, published in the early 1970s, and he followed the second volume of Naval Policy with a rather provocative study entitled Churchill and the Admirals , published in 1977. This was an important contribution to Roskills developing conflict with that other historical giant, Professor Arthur Marder, a rivalry that has been ably chronicled by Barry Gough.

Finally, he turned to the Beatty biography, whose background he explains in his own foreword. One important reason for Roskills writing the book was the access to one side of the correspondence between Beatty and his mistress Eugenie Godfrey-Fausset. This allowed the book to be subtitled An Intimate Biography. One suspects also that Roskill, whose period of the Second World War had been trespassed on by Marder, wanted to have a go at re-examining Marders period of the first.

There are a number of differences of opinion with Marder in Beatty , notably Roskill attributing the loss of the battlecruisers at Jutland to defects in concept and design. It is now generally accepted by leading historians that this was not the case. Indeed, it was an alibi for the highly dangerous ammunition handling arrangements in the British ships. As Norman Friedman has put it in his recent study of British capital ships, the loss of the three battlecriuisers can be traced to extraordinary magazine practices rather than flaws in the battlecruiser concept.... After the battle, both Beatty and Jellicoe had excellent reason to avoid the magazine-practices explanation, because both could be held culpable.

Indeed, Beatty more so. Strangely, Roskill ignores the role of HMS Lions Senior Warrant Officer, Gunner Alexander Grant, who returned Beattys flagship to the proper ammunition handling arrangements before the battle, a measure ignored in other ships in order to increase the rate of fire. Marder mentioned this in his volume on Jutland which put me onto finding out more. Readers are recommended to see the chapter of Grants memoirs which I edited and published in the Navy Records Societys seventh Naval Miscellany volume in 2008. If Grant had not, via a dramatic demonstration, convinced Chatfield of the need to change ammunition handling practices in Lion Beatty would likely have been killed in another cataclysmic explosion. It is a sign of the lackadaisical way the Battle Cruiser Fleet was run that the new practices were not imposed on the other ships. This is an important biographical point Beatty owed his life to Grant although it did not fit well with Roskills all too typical naval officers vendetta against the naval constructors.

At the time of writing Beatty Roskill had just become aware of Jon Sumidas work revising the history of the Fisher era. He saw Sumida as a natural ally given the prospect of the latters demonstration of the weaknesses of Marders work on the pre-First World War period. His gunnery officers instincts latched on to Sumidas views on the negative effects of the Royal Navy adopting the Dreyer system of fire control. This, both Roskill and Sumida argued, was the reason for the weaknesses in the Battle Cruiser Fleets shooting against the Gerrman First Scouting Group. Roskill was also friendly with Sumidas main informant on fire control, Anthony Pollen, the son of the designer of the rival system (hardly a neutral source). The latter had just published a book (which Roskill quotes approvingly in the following) that started the great gunnery controversy that would divide naval historians in the following decades. Whatever the pros and cons of the two systems there can be little doubt now that the patent weaknesses of the Battle Cruiser Fleet shooting were a result of insufficient practice compounded by visibility problems, and not of the deficiencies of equipment.

Nor does he mention Cowan being Beattys contemporary in Britannia though they were partners in crime long before sharing HMS Alexandras gunroom.