Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon: Driving Change in Naval Technology 1900-1918
352 pages
Rear Admiral Guy Liardet
David Craddock is a published historian with an Open University degree and a previous merchant navy career. He is a Trustee of the Britannia Museum. This is an interesting biography of a man who was caught between the opposing forces of welcome and resistance to change in an era that will be familiar to this readership. Being a significant and loyal member of the ‘Fishpond’ and described as “the cleverest and ablest officer”, he was not universally popular. As a lieutenant he commanded a torpedo boat and became a torpedo specialist. Promoted Commander in 1895, he was awarded the DSO for his participation in the Benin expedition in 1897 which gave rise to his first book, Benin, City of Blood.
His ideas on the tactical use of torpedo boats caught the eye of Jacky Fisher who recommended his promotion to Captain and his appointment as Inspecting Captain of Submarine Boats in 1901. Craddock describes the Admiralty’s generally positive attitude to this new Service, despite certain senior officers’ antipathy. Lord Charles Beresford, Fisher’s enemy and rival, called them “Fisher’s playthings’” and Fisher himself “the gentleman from Ceylon…our dangerous lunatic.” Bacon contributed to the numerous technological improvements required to make the Holland boats operable; for example, adopting diesel engines instead of petrol and, to establish crew endurance, developing ‘fug trials’ with air purification methods. Bacon quickly found that the Hollands were not large enough, so under his leadership Holland 6 became A1 with the first conning tower; sadly, the first major submarine disaster in collision with a steamer. Bacon can therefore be counted as the Father of the Submarine Service. Britain entered the war with the largest fleet of 75 boats.
In 1905 when Captain of the Irresistible in the Mediterranean under Admiral Sir Charles Beresford, Bacon became involved in the first of his factional ‘political’ issues by writing personal letters to Fisher about how things were in the Mediterranean and the warfighting capability of the Navy. These were later exposed and Bacon accused of ‘espionage’, a row which led to an early resignation. Interestingly, Craddock here lists Fisher’s far-reaching ‘Headings’ for the modernisation of the Navy when newly appointed as First Sea Lord in 1904 and also the personalities appointed to his ‘Committee on Designs’ which included Captain Bacon.
He was next the first Captain of the Dreadnought, the amazing battleship that rendered obsolete all others with its turbines, uniform big gun armament and director firing. Oil fuel is not mentioned here but was again an immense social, health and safety and operational improvement – a demonstration voyage to USA and back at 17 knots with no vibration was widely acclaimed.
Bacon’s next appointment of significance was to succeed VAdm Sir John Jellicoe as Director of Naval Ordnance (DNO) in 1907. He was immediately involved in the labyrinthine and protracted discussion between the Admiralty and the northern industrial engineer Arthur Pullen who’s ‘Argo Clock’ was ahead of its time but finally lost out to the home-grown and cheaper Dreyer Table, both systems seeking to solve the prediction problem of long-range gunnery. Among numerous projects, Bacon also energised an aeronautical experiment, the building of a large rigid airship, the Mayfly,aping the Zeppelin, which subsequently failed by breaking up when leaving its hangar on a windy day. (Non-rigid RNAS ‘blimps’ prospered later).
Promoted Rear-Admiral, Bacon’s earlier correspondence with Fisher became the subject of rancorous interchanges in the press, averring espionage, betrayal and the criticism of superior officers, prompting his early retirement and acceptance in 1910 of the post of Managing Director of Coventry Ordnance Works (COW), a company he had promoted while DNO. (Would this be allowed today?) A successful business career was marked inter alia by the winning of a bid for the army’s 4.5-inch medium howitzer, also the design of the 9.2-inch howitzer produced by Vickers and Bethlehem Steel.
In February 1915 he was granted a temporary colonelcy in the Royal Marines Artillery to take the first of COW’s 15-inch howitzers to France, giant weapons needing giant tractors which some say might have initiated the ‘tank’ development. While in France he received a telegram from the First Lord calling him back to the Admiralty and to be Vice-Admiral Dover Patrol.
This reinstitution is perhaps the one for which Bacon is best known. It was not so much a Patrol, more an Area Campaign. Craddock devotes 50 pages to Bacon’s energetic pursuit of the wide range of objectives confronting the Patrol.
Early in the war these required shore bombardment by monitors which successfully halted the German advance in Belgium and earned the thanks of both French and Haig. Bacon planned and proposed amphibious assaults, designing an innovative landing craft. Zeebrugge/Ostend happened after he left. The Patrol was remarkably unsuccessful in interdicting submarine traffic through the Channel, despite his forces using up to 132 drifters and 60 minesweepers in laying nets, minefields and barrages under difficult conditions of storms and strong tides. Intelligence counted 253 unharmed U-boat passages in 1917. But to the Patrol’s credit, the French coal imports and the continuous flow of troops and materielconvoys to the Western Front suffered astonishingly few casualties. Amongst the very large number of various vessels and warships allocated at various times, destroyers were woefully inadequate; on one occasion reduced to one Tribal-class. His tactics were annoyingly second-guessed by a Barrage Committee which presaged his eventual removal along with the political fall of his protagonist the First Sea Lord, John Jellicoe (see our review Jellicoe’s War by Nicholas Jellicoe recently in these pages). After two years he was replaced by the irritating firebrand Sir Roger Keyes in 1917 and promoted Vice Admiral as Controller of Munition Inventions and full Admiral upon retirement.
His elder son Duncan died of wounds after Loos in November 1915 and his son Robin of pneumonia in February 1919.
Bacon is also famous for his writing. As well as biographies of Fisher and Jellicoe, two novels, a history of the Dover Patrol from his perspective, a book on modern naval strategy and his memoirs, he joined the frenzy by writing The Jutland Scandal in 1925 which ran to five editions, making its points against Churchill’s mistaken account in The World Crisis and others as they arose. Craddock deals very fully with the Jutland Question and Bacon’s fierce contributions as, needless to say, a Jellicoe man.
Was the Communications Branch mantra “Equal Speed Charlie London” timid? Was Jellicoe right not to follow von Scheer into the baffling mist after the High Seas Fleet’s ‘Gefechtskehrtwendung nach steuerbord’? Why did Beatty cause the Harper Record to be suppressed? Corelli Barnett (The Swordbearers (1963)) catalogues battlecruisers’ and Beatty’s shortcomings; poor gunnery, lack of flash door discipline; extraordinary failure to meet ashore and plan with RAdm Evan-Thomas who led the four Warspite-class super-dreadnoughts; extraordinary failure first to integrate them with the battlecruisers against Hipper and by incompetent signalling and force management cause them to be exposed alone to the whole High Seas Fleet, nearly losing Malaya and Warspite; a lamentable failure to signal Jellicoe the whereabouts of the enemy battlefleet. (Jellicoe twice asked Beatty by light (that close!) “Where is the enemy battlefleet?”, receiving ambiguous answers. (Lacking a Tactical School, enemy reporting ‘What Where Whither When’ had not been instituted in this Navy).
Barnett says “Beatty…heading for the Grand Fleet, a third of his force sunk…a decisively beaten admiral.” But Andrew Gordon’s marvellous The Rules of the Game (1996) disagrees. Beatty was “once again setting the agenda, something that had he been ‘a decisively beaten admiral’ he could not possibly have done”. Gordon quotes von Hase, gunnery officer of the Derfflinger, “his ships carried out an admirable feat of technique. He accomplished the famous ‘crossing the T’, compelled us to alter course, and finally brought us into such a position that we were completely enveloped by the English Battle Fleet.”
Gordon also says that Evan-Thomas, a known signals stickler, could easily have reported Scheer’s p, c and s to Jellicoe.
In deep retirement, Bacon published two more books on naval warfare and strategy. This very well researched and supported biography illuminates a man who has been undervalued in his activities as a technical innovator at a time when the Royal Navy was evolving at an alarming rate into something we can recognise today. Highly recommended.
