The Lion at Sea

Part One

One

It just wasn’t possible!

There weren’t that many ships in the whole world!

In a patchy but warm sun, they stretched as far as the eye could see – 250 of them, 170 of them British. They formed a parallelogram six miles long by two miles wide, yet not a single man and not a single ship had been brought home from abroad for this tremendous display of that principal instrument of Pax Britannica, the Royal Navy.

The great vessels, many wearing admirals’ flags, were drawn up in two columns, first of all the dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts – Collingwood, St Vincent, Superb, Vanguard and others – great angular towering grey fortresses of floating steel sharp against the pearl-grey sky; then the battle cruisers – Indefatigable, Indomitable, Inflexible, Implacable – a whole array of them, only slightly less formidable than the dreadnoughts. Then came the armoured cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, submarines and torpedo boats, and all the ancillary vessels, representing every aspect of naval preparedness, the sea between them covered by darting cutters and picket boats like maybugs on a pond. Finally came the foreign battleships, the German Von der Tann, the French Danton, the American Delaware, and fifteen others, and the foreign potentates’ yachts, aflutter with flags – whole strings and windrows of them, all caught by the south-westerly breeze that poppled the grey water.

It was an awe-inspiring sight. Even to British eyes well used to the pomp and majesty of the navy. Even to the somewhat indifferent gaze of Midshipman George Kelly Maguire, on the deck of the armoured cruiser, Huguenot. A solid phalanx of machinery and armour manned by thousands of the most skilled seamen in the world, the Coronation Review lay broodingly across the entrance to the Solent, one of the most vulnerable waterways in the British Isles, like a solid bulwark against aggression. A vast new fleet that was the brainchild of that dogmatic, difficult and spiteful volcano of a man, Admiral Sir John Fisher, the great ships belonged to a navy that he had transformed almost overnight – from the antiquated collection of Victorian men-o’-war that had previously graced naval reviews, to a twentieth century instrument fit to meet its first challenge for a hundred years and counter anything the Germans, whom Fisher had long since seen as the enemy, could throw against it.

With its stupefying dimensions and potential, it had been assembled to pay tribute to the newly-crowned monarch, George the Fifth, by the Grace of God King of England, Emperor of India and Defender of the Faith. And, staring from Huguenot over the ruffled grey water, untouched by the political overtones that lay behind the review and by the need in an atmosphere of growing European tension for a show of strength, Midshipman Maguire sincerely hoped in his unyielding youthful judgement that George the Fifth, King of England, Emperor of India and Defender of the Faith, appreciated what was being done for him. Because God alone knew how many gallons of paint had been slapped on by bored sailors, how many hundredweights of brass polish and holystone had been used to bring the great vessels up to the standard of cleanliness and beauty they now represented, how much sweat had been wasted, how much cursing uttered, how many hours sleep lost by officers from captains down to midshipmen like himself.

All morning sight-seeing steamers had been leaving for the broad waters of the Solent, and the King, wearing the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, had arrived at the South Railway jetty to the crack of guns from Portsmouth harbour as Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, had fired a salute. Then, accompanied by the Trinity House yacht and other vessels – every one of them stuffed to the bulkheads with dignitaries and officials – and escorted by torpedo boats whose task it was to ensure that wayward shipping was kept well clear of the review area which picket boats had previously emptied of pleasure craft, the royal yacht, Victoria and Albert, left harbour to the din of cheers from people lining the walls of the old port.

As Kelly Maguire watched, the clouds turned the sea to an iron darkness that caught only occasional glimpses of light, and the great ships, sombre and black-looking with their great batteries of guns, steel turrets and ram bows, suddenly seemed less ceremonial than threatening, less decorative than purposeful. He drew a deep breath. He’d got out of the wrong side of his hammock that morning and, his boyish cheeks shaved to the bone, scrubbed, brushed and polished to within an inch of his life, he was in a questioning state of mind as he stared at all the splendour, and came to the conclusion that in recent years, despite Jacky Fisher, despite the reforms that had been made, naval pomp seemed to have become badly confused with power.

Aboard Huguenot, for example, the captain, the Honourable Basil Acheson, was known – without too much effort of imagination either – as God. It was normal enough, of course, for the captain of any ship to be referred to and even regarded as God, but there was always an element of jesting in it, yet on Kelly’s first morning aboard, Captain Acheson had summoned to his spacious quarters aft his three newest and youngest officers, Midshipmen Maguire, Verschoyle and Kimister, and let them know exactly where they stood in the order of things.

‘Aboard Huguenot,’ he had announced, ‘I am God Almighty, and you are not even junior archangels. Indeed, gentlemen, if there were dogsbodies in Heaven, then that is what you would be, so that now that you’ve been promoted from cadets to midshipmen, take care that you don’t let it go to your heads. One thing more: It is not advisable to say Good morning to the captain of this ship before lunch. This is not a good morning ship.’

Even granting that Captain Acheson was unusual – a ‘character’, one of the last of the Victorian eccentrics, with a tendency to enjoy displaying his eccentricities – it had hardly been encouraging.

His youthful eyes narrowed, Kelly Maguire stared again at the assembled fleet. A splash of colour fluttered from Lord Nelson’s yardarm and there was a scuffle of feet behind him, then the whole fleet seemed to burst into a riot of vivid flags as it dressed over-all. What had been a grey and sombre scene was transformed at once with gay bunting, and, as though in response, the sun appeared, picking up the brasswork and white paint, the bulges of the turrets and the lines of the guns. It was as if someone had turned a floodlight on the fleet.

‘They’re coming!’

To Kelly Maguire, a rebel by nature and particularly a rebel this day because he had suffered his share of lost sleep and sweat, it all seemed an awful waste of effort. Not, of course, that anyone in that year of grace, 1911, gave a fig for the opinions of George Kelly Maguire or would do for many years to come. At the age of nineteen, he was nothing more than a mere cog in a huge wheel, all bony wrists and ankles as he grew out of a uniform he was too impoverished to replace at this late stage of waiting for his translation from the humiliating rank of midshipman to the glory of his first stripe.

‘It’s normal enough, of course, for the very young to be rebellious at what they consider unnecessary fuss,’ Midshipman Verschoyle, standing just to his left, murmured. ‘If you’re not a socialist at twenty, you’ve no heart; if you’re still one at forty, you’ve no head.’

Kelly Maguire frowned. The view that all men should be equal seemed at the moment to make very sound sense to a downtrodden snotty. His seniors, however, were doubtless Tories to a man and regarded egalitarianism as a dangerous new form of politics. Even James Caspar Verschoyle, Kelly’s immediate senior in the List, despite his cynical evaluations, was without doubt a hardened Tory who never suffered the slightest qualms of conscience.

‘But then, of course,’ Verschoyle often pointed out, ‘I’m stinking rich.’

And, unlike Kelly Maguire, who, apart from a shock of red hair, was shortish, squarish and indifferent as to colouring and features, he was also tall, patrician and intelligent. Kelly Maguire envied him not only for his airs and graces but also because Verschoyle was an excellent boxer who had had his own way with people all his young life, for no other reason than that he’d always had too much money and too many good looks. The fact that Kelly’s father was a rear admiral and a baronet made no difference whatsoever, and Verschoyle, who knew everything about everybody, was quick to point out why. ‘He’s a rear admiral because he retired as a captain and commodore,’ he said, ‘and he’s a baronet only because his elder brother died of enteric in Bloemfontein during the Boer War. And since the title carries no wealth, young Ginger, you’re really just a lot of bog-trotters, aren’t you? – as poor as church mice and obliged to live in Ireland, unlike my family which has a town house in London.’

Kelly scowled, far from unaware of the circumstances that made up his background. His grandfather, Colonel Seamus Aloysius Kelly – together with his younger brother, Kelly’s Uncle Patrick, lately a major in the Royal Irish Fusiliers but now retired and existing largely on his elder brother’s charity – had had to live for years off the rundown remains of the family estate, so that it had seemed wise at the time to get rid of his daughter, Kelly’s mother, as quickly as possible to the first bidder, Kelly’s father. Instead of getting rid of his daughter, however, Colonel Kelly had merely acquired another hanger-on. The only taste of glory in the long career of Admiral Maguire had been the day when he’d put up his admiral’s stripe just in time to discard it again on settling down in retirement, to wipe out by scrimping and saving some of the debts he’d incurred in a lifetime of enjoying himself at sea.

There had never been much love lost between the two sides of the family, and no advantages whatsoever for Kelly from his father’s rank. Not even when he’d gone none too willingly to Dartmouth. It had been bitterly cold and an elderly petty officer with a nose like a ripe cherry had lined them all up, even the sobbing Kimister, who’d been brought by his mother – something that had taken a lot of living down – and let them know exactly where they stood.

‘You’d better get it into your ’eads ’ere and now, young gentlemen,’ he’d said, ‘You’ve got very varied backgrounds, and some of you even ’ave important fathers. Here we’re all equal and you at the moment are on the lowest rung of the naval ladder.’

Kelly had hated it. Even his six months at sea in the training cruiser, Cumberland, where, if nothing else, he’d learned to be sick over the lee side, hadn’t seemed terribly full of promise, while his arrival in Huguenot had positively failed to warm his heart.