At the end of 1904 Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher, set up a committee that met over a period of several months into early 1905 and produced two new types of vessel: an all big-gun battleship and its armoured cruiser homologue. The latter subsequently evolved into a type the British officially called a ‘battle cruiser’ – two words – from October 1911.[1] The idea of homogenous main armament was not new even for Britain,[2] and the battleship – HMS Dreadnought – was not the first such warship to be conceived.[3] A policy summary Fisher assembled in January 1907 makes clear he saw Dreadnought’s main advantage as cost effectiveness, and that he expected future ships to introduce other ideas.[4] But his public promotion of the ship in this age of social militarism caused such a splash that all similar ships, popularly, became ‘dreadnoughts’.[5]
This popular perception has since shaped the way historians see the period, creating a hard cut-off between ‘before’ and ‘after’ Dreadnought.[6] This has remained the key framework for understanding the development, albeit modified by the ‘revisionist’ historical school of the late twentieth century into the idea that Fisher’s favoured ship was actually the equivalent cruiser. This was well known at the time – ‘your type of ship’, Maurice Hankey told him after the Battle of the Falklands in December 1914.[7] Later historians have argued that Fisher was determined to abandon armour for speed.[8] In this vision the concept of the ‘fast battleship’ is seldom attached to his work. However, if we look at the evolution of his thinking from the late 1890s into Fisher’s first few years as First Sea Lord, it is clear that this is exactly where he was heading – and quickly. What stopped him, as we shall explore here, was the politics of procurement.
In this we have to be careful when quoting Fisher’s writings. The New Zealand historian Ruddock Mackay and an assistant, Hazel Edbury, spent much of 1967-68 cataloguing Fisher’s papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, listing over 6000 items in 120 file boxes.[9] More Fisher papers are held by the Bodelian Library at Oxford, and others have been found since.[10] He scattered ideas like candy, interspersing them with hyperbole, slogans, exaggerations and outright lies. In 1919, as an embittered old man, Fisher dictated two autobiographies, re-casting his own life in the image he wanted.[11] It is possible to ‘prove’ virtually anything from these words if taken out of their context, the volatile and politicised world Fisher built around himself.
We get a more reliable picture from Fisher’s official policy documents, designed for real-world outcomes, and duly tempered with input from his colleagues. The key documents backgrounding Fisher’s capital ship plans as First Sea Lord were collected in three compilations in 1904-07, written by Fisher and his ‘Fishpond’. These show that while Fisher liked to portray his ideas as having emerged complete, his thinking evolved over time and he accepted ideas from others.[12]
Warship design was in flux by the turn of the twentieth century, buoyed by ongoing technological change. New metallurgy was improving armour, guns were gaining size and range, and propulsion technologies were – literally – revolutionized by the steam turbine. The US Naval College began wargaming fast heavy warships around this time,[13] and the Italians experimented with fast battleship concepts, among other nations.[14] At this time Fisher’s ideal revolved around speed and medium calibre guns – 9.2 or 10-inch – because such weapons had higher rates of fire than 12-inch, yet could penetrate most armour at ranges outside the effective range of the 6-inch quick-firing batteries then standard on battleships and cruisers.[15] In 1900 Fisher obtained help from William Gard, Chief Constructor at the Malta dockyard, who sketched a warship along thse lines, HMS Untakeable. Fisher called it a ‘cruiser battleship’. He also devised a cruiser which was even faster. Both ideas went through evolutions in subsequent years, including gaining homogenous main armament. Fisher reputedly saw this last as a means to increase battle range and so reduce the threat of torpedo boats. From around 1903 Fisher also gained input from his ‘Fishpond’, notably John Jellicoe and Reginald Bacon. Meanwhile, the Royal Naval College and Naval Intelligence Department also looked into tactics: and a 1902 paper by Lieutenant Tristan Dannreuther identified a need for the van squadron of any fleet to have at least a 3-knot speed advantage over its opponent.[16]
Fisher’s challenge when he became First Sea Lord in 1904 was selling the changes he wanted to Cabinet. The political head of the Admiralty, William Palmer, Second Earl of Selborne, had a programme for the next two financial years built around existing types, including 5 battleships and 8 armoured cruisers. These were maximums: Selborne wanted reductions, which he saw as ‘most important for the stability of national finance and credit.’[17] Fisher wanted to do so by eliminating smaller cruisers while reforming the nature of the heavier ships, which required a political sell. He began with first principles. ‘Strategy should govern the types of ships to be designed. Ship design, as dictated by strategy, should govern tactics.’[18] He also urged Cabinet and the Board of Admiralty to ‘divest our minds totally’ of the idea that current ship types were ‘necessary, or even advisable.’ In a nod to existing types he accepted that battleships were an ‘absolute necessity in future construction’,[19] but insisted on widening the definition, arguing that it was essential ‘to make the speed of the battleship approach as nearly as possible that of the armoured cruiser’.[20] Battleships and armoured cruisers, Fisher declared, were ‘approximating to each other’ – the armoured cruiser was a ‘battleship in disguise’.[21] He argued that his Mediterranean flagship Renown – a second class battleship – was an armoured cruiser.[22] As for armoured cruisers, their weakness was their thinner armour, which meant they could not scout with impunity. Although Fisher imagined scouting eventually being accomplished by wireless (radio) equipped airships, the practical reality in 1904 was that this task still fell to scout cruisers. Such ships ‘without high speed and protection’, he declared, ‘are entirely and absolutely useless’.[23]
The implication was a ship with the armour and armament of a battleship and the speed of an armoured cruiser, an idea Fisher persistently referred to as a ‘cruiser’, but which did not easily meet any prior classification.[24] However, those classifications had political momentum, and Fisher and his colleagues had to consider separate battleship and cruiser designs in 1904. Because Britain was judged short of armoured cruisers, the programme specified three for the 1905-06 programme, which Fisher envisaged would carry a homogenous armament of 9.2 or 10-inch guns. Just one battleship – Dreadnought – was authorised. As Angus Ross has shown, Fisher likely saw the battleship as an interim technology demonstrator.[25] Certainly Dreadnought was not fast enough for Fisher’s liking – as he put it later, her 21 knots ‘does not give much margin over what may be achieved in battleships of foreign powers.’[26]
The larger element of the 1905-06 programme was the armoured cruisers. These were also intended for homogenous main armament, and Fisher did not intend to sacrifice protection. His formal design brief made that clear: ‘the chief characteristic of the armoured cruiser is speed, associated with a suitable armament and protection.’[27] The specification called for armour of ‘exactly the same’ extent as a battleship, mostly of cruiser thickness – but he wanted the usual 6-inch belt ‘thickened to 8 inches abreast the redoubts’.[28] The Royal Navy had devised techniques for scouting during the 1890s, first used armoured cruisers in battle-fleet work during exercises in 1897, and scouting vessels were expected to come under battleship fire:[29] As the Committee on Designs put it, ‘Speed is necessary to ensure safety – armour protection to ensure vision’.[30] Nor was armour sacrificed in other ways: when Fisher’s committee debated ways of armouring magazines against mines during their meeting of 25 February 1905, both battleship and cruiser received the same treatment.[31] The fact that Philip Watts’ final design for Invincible did not achieve the original armour specification does not reduce the intent.
The more serious problem was that the committee wanted 12-inch guns instead of Fisher’s preferred 9.2 or 10-inch, partly on the basis of reports from William Pakenham, naval attache to Japan,[32] but primarily on the basis of an exhaustive technical analysis of the advantages.[33] Fisher accepted 12-inch for the battleship, but agreed to up-gun the cruiser only with reluctance.[34] The decision rendered their protection marginal against the usual measure by which a ship had to be armoured against its own guns. Jellicoe, now Director of Naval Ordnance, considered at least 11 inches armour was required against 12-inch fire at the new minimum battle range of 6000 yards.[35] The issue became crucial in 1905 when the role of harrying an enemy fleet – already part of the rationale – became tactical doctrine in Fisher’s second volume of Naval Necessities.[36]
Now Fisher and his associates tried to push the idea of a single heavy type. Key targets of Fisher’s drive included the powerful Naval Estimates Committee.[37] Battleships and cruisers, Fisher insisted, were both essential ‘unless and until the two types are united in a single design, which shall combine the speed of cruiser with the offensive and defensive strength of the battleship.’[38] He also highlighted French developments along those lines, notably a report by Charles Bos, Reporter to the Chamber of Deputies on the Naval Estimates, who advised that existing battleship speeds were ‘absolutely insufficient’.[39] Fisher had a copy, supplied by the Director of Naval Intelligence, which he reproduced in that year’s Naval Necessities.[40] He may also have been aware of German developments. The Reichsmarineamt (RMA/Imperial Naval Office) had been looking at all-big-gun heavy warships since 1904, before Dreadnought, and – as Alfred Tirpitz told the Kaiser – in full knowledge of the tactical advantages of speed.[41] Meanwhile the Controller, Henry Jackson, tried blurring the political definitions by arguing that the Invincibles were ‘fast battleships rather than armoured cruisers’.[42] He also used reports on the Russo-Japanese naval experience to argue that speed was ‘of overwhelming tactical value’.[43]
Fisher’s breakthrough came later in 1905 when he got the idea embedded into policy by the political head of the Admiralty, Frederick Campbell, Lord Cawdor. This ‘Cawdor Memorandum’ called for four heavy ships annually,[44] and made no distinction between cruiser or battleship, referring to them as ‘armoured ships’. That opened the door for the ship Fisher wanted. Late that year, in preparation for FY 1906-07, he set up a new Committee on Designs. On instruction, the Director of Naval Construction, Phillip Watts, produced a series of sketches combining Dreadnought armour and fire-power with high speed for the day. The sketch of 2 December, ‘X4’, carried ten 12-inch guns, arranged as Invincible but with greater spacing between midship turrets. Protection was similar to Dreadnought, speed 24 knots.
While ‘X4’ was purely a sketch, a developed design would have produced the first fast battleship of the all-big-gun era. However, the committee rejected the plan. To constrain length and displacement, Watts specified triple heavy gun mountings, which did not exist in Britain. The B.VIII twin mounting entering service in 1907 had taken several years to develop, and any new mounting would require similar time, implying delays. Displacement was estimated at 25 percent higher than Dreadnought, meaning only three ‘fusion’ ships could be built for the price of four Dreadnoughts. But by policy the Admiralty needed four heavy ships in FY 1906-07. More crucially, the Committee did not want to render Dreadnought obsolete, ‘until we possess sufficient superiority in modern Armoured Vessels over other countries’. They instead wanted ‘to add gun-fire to our Fleet before proceeding in the direction of greatly increased speed’. The 1906-07 programme therefore called for four near-repeats of Dreadnought and no ‘dreadnought armoured cruisers’. Ironically, a back-bench protest by 120 Liberal MP’s in mid-1906 prompted government to slash the battleship count to three.[45]
Fisher tried again in FY 1907-08, for which programme Cabinet authorized just two heavy ships. He now proposed a further ‘fusion’ vessel, joined by a fast cruiser which had a 50 percent increase in armour thickness by comparison with Invincible. In short, protection was still a priority. However, these ideas failed. After the 1907 Hague peace conference the Liberal government allowed a third vessel, but no increase in budget, which in practice limited construction to modified Bellerophons. Cost remained the primary constraint, and it was this repeated rebuff on fiscal grounds that apparently pushed Fisher in a new direction. He had periodically considered sacrificing armour for speed as a device to keep displacements – hence costs – constrained, and the idea continued to evolve after Fisher left office in 1910, when his views were no longer tempered by his peers. Other factors included rising gun-power, which implied that armour was never going to be fully effective.
By the First World War Fisher had gone to extremes, demonstrated by the three ‘large light cruisers’ he ordered with battleship-calibre guns.[46] Curiously, while these designs were conceived in part to get around a political ban on capital ships,[47] they mirrored the ‘battle scout’ being investigated by the US Navy in the same period.[48] Fisher finally reduced his late-era thinking to slogan in his first 1919 autobiography: ‘speed is armour’ – a line he wrote specifically in context of his trenchant critique of HMS Hood.[49] This later thinking obscured the fact that in 1904-07, as the policy documents show, Fisher and his colleagues had no intention of compromising armour and Fisher’s ideal warship evolved into the fast battleship. Furthermore, he would have got the first of them in FY 1906-07 had the political landscape been a little different.
Matthew Wright is a professional naval historian and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society at University College, London. Buy his book The Battlecruiser New Zealand: a gift to Empire (USNI Press 2021)
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2024
[1] Admiralty Weekly Order 351, 24 November 1911. This term, with two words, remained in official British usage thereafter: the term ‘battlecruiser’ (one word) is a neologism.
[2] For example the DNC, Philip Watts and his assistant J. H. Narbeth proposed homogenous big-gun armament in sketch designs of 19 November 1902 and of 12 August 1903. See Norman Friedman, The British Battleship, Seaforth, Barnsley pp. 69-70.
[3] The USN and IJN were already working with the concept in 1904.
[4] P. K. Kemp (ed) The Fisher Papers Volume I, Navy Records Society, Routledge, Oxford 1960, p. 341, henceforth F.P. I.
[5] Usefully described in, e.g. Ruddock Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1973, pp. 323-326. This was never a formal naval classification.
[6] For example. Arthur Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Vol. I, Seaforth, Barnsley 2016 reprint (1961), general thesis but see specifically pp. 56-70., R. A. Burt British Battleships 1889-1904, Seaforth, Barnsley 1988; Roger Chesneau and Eugene Kolesnik, Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1860-1905, Conway Maritime Press, London 1979.
[7] Hankey to Fisher, 10 December 1914, in Arthur Marder (ed), Fear God and Dread Nought, p. 92.
[8] For summary of the revisionist position see, e.g. Nicholas A. Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution, University of South Carolina Press, 1999, pp. 92-93; also Angus Ross, ‘HMS Dreadnought (1906) – a Naval Revolution Misinterpreted or Mishandled?’, The Northern Mariner, Vol. XX, No. 2 , April 2010; and Matthew Seligman, ‘Naval History by Conspiracy Theory: The British Admiralty before the First World War and the Methodology of Revisionism’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 38, No. 7, May 2015, pp. 966-984.
[9] Mackay, introduction. Mackay (1922-2019) served with the RNZN and subsequently pursued an academic career, see John Brooks ‘Ruddock Mackay (1922-2019) (obit), The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 105, No. 2, 2019. For list of files see https://archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/repositories/9/resources/1562
[10] https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/archival_objects/42453
[11] Fisher, Memories, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1919; Fisher, Record, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1919, p. 98.
[12] The first two were republished in F. P. I and P. K. Kemp; (ed), The Fisher Papers Volume II, Navy Records Society, Routledge, Oxford 1964, henceforth F. P. II.
[13] William M. McBride, ‘Nineteenth century American warships: the pursuit of exceptionalist design’, in Don Leggett and Richard Dunn (eds), Re-inventing the Ship: Science, Technology and the Maritime World, 1800-1918, Routledge, London, 2012 p. 202
[14] See, e.g. Fred T. Jane (ed), Jane’s Fighting Ships 1914, David & Charles Reprints, London 1968, p. 298.
[15] For summary see, e.g. Burt, esp. pp. 68-71 outlining origins of the prototypical design.
[16] Noted in Scott Lindgren, ‘The genesis of a cruiser navy: British first class cruiser development 1884-1909’, PhD Thesis, University of Salford, 2013, p. 245.
[17] Noted in Mackay, p. 307.
[18] F.P. I, p. 40.
[19] Ibid, p. 42.
[20] Ibid. My italics.
[21] Ibid, p. 221.
[22] Ibid, p. 28.
[23] Ibid, p. 42. My italics.
[24] Variously referred, but see, e.g. Ibid, p. 28, opening paragraph ‘Types of fighting vessels’.
[25] Ross, p. 194, 198.
[26] F.P.. I, p. 316.
[27] F.P., I, p. 220. My italics.
[28] Ibid, p. 87. Note that this specification differed from the particulars of the eventual design.
[29] For discussion see pp. 144-147.
[30] F.P. I, p. 220.
[31] Ibid, pp. 250-252.
[32] Noted in Arthur Marder, ‘Fisher and the genesis of the Dreadnought’, USNI Proceedings, Vol. 82, No. 12, December 1956.
[33] Reproduced in F.P., I, pp. 305-314.
[34] See, e.g. Mackay, pp. 325-326.
[35] F.P., I, “Armour Protection’, p. 278. Note that while practical experience at Jutland showed that 9 inch plates were not penetrated by German 12-inch shells, this was at significantly greater ranges. Jellicoe, who had proving-ground data, was correct in his assessment relative to range.
[36] F. P. II, pp.262-263. My italics.
[37] Mackay, p. 325.
[38] F.P., II, p. 259. My italics.
[39] Ibid, ‘French Navy Estimates 1906’, p. 285.
[40] Ibid, pp. 281-285.
[41] Dirk Nottelman, ‘From Ironclads to Dreadnoughts: The development of the German Navy 1868-1918, Part VI-A “The Great Step Forward”, Warship International Vol. 52, No. 2 (June 2015), pp. 137-174, pp. 159, passim Tirpitz to Wilhelm I, p. 159. Nottelman argues that the first German all-big-gun designs were provoked by the British Lord Nelson class.
[42] F.P. II, ‘HM Ships Dreadnought and Invincible’, pp.262-263. My italics.
[43] Ibid, ‘H.M. Ships “Dreadnought” and “Invincible”’, p. 262.
[44] ‘A Statement of Admiralty Policy’, reproduced at http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/A_Statement_of_Admiralty_Policy
[45] Todd Christopher Campbell, ‘Financing the Royal Navy, 1905-1914: sound finance in the Dreadnought era’, MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 1994, p. 21
[46] For background discussion see Mackay, pp. 473-474.
[47] Noted in ibid.
[48] https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/numerical-list-of-images/nhhc-series/s-file/S-584-089.html Cruiser scouting was considered crucial in these pre-aircraft, pre-radar days.
[49] Fisher, Memories, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1919; Fisher, Record, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1919, p. 98