Fear God, Dread Nought… regret plenty

Happy Sunday!
​
We know that every object tells a story. That doesn't necessarily mean we're motivated to investigate every object we see.

Growing up, my parents' house was full of things that had simply always been there. I walked past them every day for years without wondering where they came from or why they mattered: a black and white photograph in a frame, an ornament gathering dust, a print of an old master.

And then there was that small, dark leather box on the mantlepiece.

Years later, I discovered a handwritten note by my grandmother mentioning 'an empty valve box which was to hold a crystal used for detecting and receiving wireless signals'.

She was referring to that dark leather box. It turned out to be the property of the Imperial German Navy during World War I.

The question is, how did it end up on our mantlepiece?

The story begins on a cold February morning in 1906 at Portsmouth Dockyard on the south coast of England. Sixty thousand people had gathered to witness something extraordinary.

King Edward VII stood ready with a bottle of Australian sparkling wine, preparing to christen the most revolutionary warship the world had ever seen.

He swung the bottle against the bow. It bounced back. He swung again. This time it shattered.

---

The man standing beside the King that day, watching his monumental, steel vision become reality, was Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher.

‘Jackie’ Fisher was born in 1841 in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), just as Queen Victoria’s reign was gathering momentum and the British Empire was spreading unchecked across the globe.

He was about five feet seven inches tall, ‘stocky, with a round face and a fixed, compelling gaze’. Jackie’s parents were British, though some later suggested Asian ancestry due to his distinctive features and yellow-tinged skin.

The truth was simpler: dysentery and malaria in middle life had nearly killed him.

At thirteen, Fisher joined the Royal Navy. It was 1854.

By the 1860s, Jackie had made his name as a champion of torpedo technology. While stationed in China, he installed the first electrical firing system on any Royal Navy warship.

The more conservative admirals weren’t impressed. Torpedoes, they sniffed, were 'underhand and un-British'.

Fisher didn’t care.

In 1899, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, and by 1904 he had been promoted to First Sea Lord, head of the Royal Navy.

It was perfect timing. The world was shifting. Germany, under Kaiser Wilhelm II, had been expanding its navy since 1898 to stake a claim as a global power.

The British clung to their long-standing ‘two-power standard’, meaning the Royal Navy should outnumber the combined fleets of any two other powers. That policy was under pressure.

Fisher wasn’t intoxicated by a desire for quantity. He wanted quality. He knew that overwhelming firepower, range and speed were the keys to winning on the high seas.

Fisher demanded the impossible.

He wanted a ship with ten 12-inch guns in five twin turrets—raw destructive power. She would have steam turbine propulsion—unprecedented in a large warship—and a speed of 21 knots.

And most ambitiously of all, Fisher wanted her built in twelve months. The typical battleship took around 2½ years to complete.

The keel was laid at Portsmouth Dockyard on 2 October 1905. Three thousand men would work a punishing 69-hour week—six days straight, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., with compulsory overtime and a 30-minute lunch break.

By day 125—just four months after the keel was laid—the hull was finished.

…and so we return to that cold February morning in 1906—the launch.

One hundred and twenty years ago this Tuesday, 10 February 1906, Admiral Fisher stood beside King Edward VII at Portsmouth Dockyard, watching as the last blocks were knocked away. The great hull hung on a single symbolic cable.

The King reached for that bottle—Irvine’s Victorian sparkling wine by later accounts—and swung it against her bow.

The 18,000-ton vessel slid into the Solent, stirring up waves that would be felt around the world.

She was 526 feet of revolutionary naval power and would carry a crew of 800. Her four propeller shafts, driven by steam turbines, would give her an unprecedented top speed of 21 knots. Those 12-inch guns could hurl 850-pound shells nearly ten miles.

She was HMS Dreadnought.

Poignantly, overlooking proceedings was HMS Victory—Lord Nelson’s flagship from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805—serving out her days reduced to harbour duties.

In that moment, the old wooden warship and the revolutionary steel dreadnought, separated by a century of naval evolution, shared the same waters.

One represented Britain’s past naval supremacy; the other, its uncertain future.

Out of Curiosity

The name Dreadnought came from the old English ‘dread nought’—fear nothing. It was perfect for Fisher, whose personal motto was “Fear God and Dread Nought.”

HMS Dreadnought was the sixth Royal Navy ship to bear the name. The first had fought off the Spanish Armada in 1588. Number five had sailed with Nelson at Trafalgar.

But this Dreadnought would eclipse them all.

Paradoxically, Fisher’s masterstroke, HMS Dreadnought, may have accelerated Britain’s decline as a global power.

The fearsome ship had made Britain’s massive naval fleet almost obsolete overnight. The older vessels in the fleet became ‘pre-dreadnoughts’, relics of a bygone era.

Japanese, German and American navies—followed by other European powers—scrambled to build their own dreadnoughts.

Fisher had wiped the slate clean. The Empire’s naval dominance was suddenly under threat.

Despite the British government’s commitment to an ambitious shipbuilding program, Germany had narrowed Britain’s advantage by 1914.

The naval arms race unleashed by the HMS Dreadnought drained the treasury, fuelled tensions that helped tip Europe into war, and left Britain economically exhausted by 1918—victorious, but in no position to celebrate.

Fisher’s revolutionary warship had made Britain supreme at sea—but at a cost the Empire would struggle to afford.
​

---

​
Jackie Fisher died on 10 July 1920. His coffin, mounted on a gun carriage, was drawn through London’s streets to Westminster Abbey by bluejackets—ordinary sailors honouring their admiral.

Eight admirals acted as pallbearers, led by Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland four years earlier in 1916.

Fisher’s ashes were later placed in the grave of his wife at Kilverstone, Norfolk, under a chestnut tree, overlooking the figurehead of his first seagoing ship, HMS Calcutta.

At the time of Fisher’s death, about 120 dreadnoughts had been launched worldwide. They would dominate the world’s navies for a further 25 years, evolving into massive ships capable of 32 knots—twice the speed of typical 1914 pre-dreadnoughts.

Fisher had started his career in a navy of wooden sailing ships armed with muzzle-loading cannons—the sort of vessels Nelson would have recognised.

He ended it commanding a navy of steel battlecruisers, submarines and the first aircraft carriers. Quite a transformation for one career.

Out of Curiosity

Not many people can claim they invented text-speak. Fisher is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with the earliest known use of ‘OMG’. In a letter to Winston Churchill, then Minister of Munitions, written on 9 September 1917, the 76-year-old former admiral vented his spleen:

Fisher was bitter and resentful toward the Admiralty leadership. He had resigned as First Sea Lord in May 1915 in a dramatic clash with Churchill over the disastrous Dardanelles campaign.

So when Fisher heard rumours of a new knighthood being created, he responded with scornful sarcasm—a mock-horrified reaction suggesting they should hand out honours liberally to the very officials he held in contempt for bungling the war effort.

* ’tapis’ = table

…back to that dark leather valve box

The super-dreadnoughts inevitably followed—bigger and faster than the original HMS Dreadnought. One of those super-dreadnoughts was HMS Revenge, commissioned in 1916 with the 1st Battle Squadron and later serving as flagship.

She carried eight 15-inch guns, each of which could send a shell the size of a small car over 15 miles.

She was a leviathan of the sea.

My grandfather, Cecil Bottle, had run away from home at fourteen and enlisted in the Royal Navy. By 1916, he was serving as a telegraphist and fought in the infamous Battle of Jutland—the largest naval battle of World War I, where fifty-eight dreadnoughts and battlecruisers clashed in the North Sea.

By the end of the war, Cecil Bottle was serving aboard the mighty HMS Revenge.

Scapa Flow

On 21 November 1918, as part of the terms of the Armistice, the German fleet surrendered at the Firth of Forth in Scotland.

Over the next few days, they were escorted to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands to be detained during the peace negotiations at the Treaty of Versailles.

One of those escorts was HMS Revenge with Chief Telegraphist Cecil Bottle on board.

The Germans remained in control of their vessels but were closely guarded by the British 1st Battle Squadron.

For seven months, the German fleet sat at anchor while diplomats argued over the problem of what to do with them.

Then on 21 June 1919, with most of the British fleet conveniently away on exercises, Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter decided to solve the problem himself. He ordered his entire fleet scuttled; seacocks opened, compartments flooded.

It was the greatest act of naval self-destruction in history: fifty-two of the seventy-four interned ships slipping beneath the surface of Scapa Flow within hours.

Better to sink them in a Scottish anchorage than hand them over to the victors as trophies.

Cecil Bottle was sent on trips to many of these semi-submerged vessels to see if any radio equipment could be salvaged.

From an array of recovered radio equipment, he kept an empty valve box as a souvenir—a dark leather container that protected the crystals used in wireless sets to detect and receive signals.

That is the box that now sits on my desk as I write this, a box salvaged by my grandfather from the wreckage of Fisher’s naval arms race.

Epilogue

HMS Dreadnought was placed in reserve in 1919 and sold for scrap in 1921. By 1923, she’d been broken up—a mere seventeen years after her revolutionary launch.

HMS Revenge lasted longer. She was eventually scrapped in 1948. But one part of her survived.

If you visit the famous Jodrell Bank Observatory just outside Manchester, you’ll see the Lovell Telescope still in action, one of the world’s most iconic radio telescopes.

As it rotates, tracking distant galaxies and pulsars, it does so on gear racks salvaged from the gun turrets of HMS Revenge—those same mechanisms that once aimed 15-inch guns at the Kaiser’s fleet now pointing a radio telescope towards the edge of the universe.

Out of Curiosity

Yesterday marked the anniversary of a dark day in Royal Naval history, 7 February 1910.

Herbert Cholmondeley from the Foreign Office sent a telegram to the Royal Navy’s flagship HMS Dreadnought, anchored at Weymouth.

The message announced an imminent visit from the Emperor of Abyssinia and his entourage.

The Navy scrambled into action—red carpets unfurled, honour guard assembled, full ceremonial protocols hastily arranged.

Later that day, five distinguished visitors arrived in elaborate Eastern robes and turbans. They were greeted by Admiral Sir William May, while Captain Herbert Richmond escorted them around Britain’s most advanced battleship.

The Emperor nodded approvingly, occasionally muttering “Bunga bunga”—a phrase his companions took up enthusiastically.

The tour was a great success, but it had a sting in the tail.

Herbert Cholmondeley turned out to be Horace de Vere Cole, one of the infamous Bloomsbury Set. He was joined by his Bloomsbury Set chums, Virginia Woolf, Adrian Stephen and Duncan Grant (plus two others).

The telegram and the whole trip proved to be a hoax. When Cole leaked the story to the press a few days later, the stunt became known as the Dreadnought Hoax.

The Admiralty considered prosecution but quietly dropped it. After all, how do you prosecute someone for making the world’s most powerful navy look utterly ridiculous?

The event even spawned a music hall favourite:

On this Day

Saturday...

Elisha Gray travelled to Washington, D.C. to submit his original patent application for ‘Transmitting Vocal Sounds Telegraphically’ 150 years ago next Saturday, 14 February 1876.

He would be forever remembered as the man who invented the ‘telephone’. ​

That is, were it not for the patent submission earlier the same day by a rival for ‘Apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically’. ​

As it turned out, that rival submission was 5th in the queue at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Elisha’s was 39th. ​

The rival’s name—Alexander Graham Bell.

By the Way

Tycho Brahe was born into Danish nobility 175,000 days ago this Tuesday, 14 December 1546. However, while his fellow aristocrats were busy tampering with politics and warfare, Tycho was obsessed with the stars.

The closest he got to fighting was when, aged twenty, he lost part of his nose in a duel over who was the better mathematician. For the rest of Brahe's life, he wore a brass-and-silver prosthetic nose.

Working from his island observatory Uraniborg, he meticulously charted the positions of over 1,000 stars with unprecedented precision between 1576 and 1597. This was remarkable since the first telescope wasn’t invented until 1608.

Brahe only observed with the naked eye and a bit of help from his a ‘mural quadrant’, essentially a protractor nailed to the wall.

Despite Tycho’s eye for detail, he harboured an astronomical blind spot. He refused to accept Copernicus’s heliocentric model. He believed the Earth remained at the centre of the universe.

When Brahe died in 1601, his assistant Johannes Kepler inherited his observations. Kepler used Tycho’s data to prove what the Dane himself had refused to believe—that the Earth orbited the Sun.

Talk to me...

I receive some wonderful feedback from readers who add colour to the historical snippets that I publish. If you have any thoughts to add to some of today’s topics, or from previous weeks, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an email at steve@battingthebreeze.com.

Question of the Week

The Penny Black, the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, was issued on 1 May 1840. Its introduction was the culmination of 324 years of evolution from Henry VIII’s original Royal Mail in 1516.

As it turned out, the Penny Black was short-lived, less than a year in fact. The colour black caused a problem. When an envelope passed through postal depots, a hand stamp would apply a red ‘cancellation’ mark to the stamp to indicate that it had been used. ​

The British postal authorities found that red cancellation marks on Penny Black stamps could be scraped off, allowing people to reuse the stamps fraudulently.

To prevent this, they introduced a new stamp only a year later.

What was it called?

And Finally…

In 16th century Tudor England, where being different meant being noticed—and not always in a good way—one man managed to stand out for all the right reasons.

John Blanke was a trumpeter in the court of Henry VIII. We know precious little about where he came from, though he likely arrived with Catherine of Aragon’s entourage in 1501, and was good enough to play at both Henry VII’s funeral and Henry VIII’s coronation.

Blanke’s most memorable musical appearance came 515 years ago this Thursday, 12 February 1511, at the Westminster Tournament staged to celebrate the birth of Henry VIII’s short-lived son, Prince Henry.

The tournament was spectacular—thundering horses, jousting knights, strutting noblemen and enough pageantry to bankrupt a small nation.

The whole affair was recorded in the Great Tournament Roll of Westminster, a 60-foot illustrated manuscript capturing every glorious moment for posterity, kept today at the College of Arms near St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

John appears twice in the Roll, wearing turbans of green-and-gold and brown-and-yellow, playing his trumpet among the royal musicians.

But here’s what makes John Blanke remarkable: he was Black.

The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster provides the earliest known images of a named Black person in Britain, challenging the common assumption that Black British history began with the transatlantic slave trade and empire.

It turns out that Black people were present in Tudor England as free, skilled professionals earning competitive wages and receiving royal patronage—completely independent of the slave trade.

Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

​
Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

​
P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.

​
Question of the week… answer

The Penny Black was replaced by the Penny Red, 185 years ago this Tuesday, 10 February 1841.

With the new red stamps, black ink could be used for cancellations, which was much harder to erase.