The opening years of the twentieth century are now a controversial period for historians of the Royal Navy; but this was not always so. In the traditional canon of naval history, as first articulated in scholarly fashion by E. L. Woodward in 1935 and by Arthur Marder in 1940, the story was a straightforward one. The appointment of Rear Admiral Alfred Tirpitz as state secretary at Germany's Imperial Navy Office, leading as it did to the passage of the First and, more especially, the Second German Navy Laws – the latter of which was passed in a blaze of highly revealing and very noisy Anglophobia – alerted both the British people and the nation's naval authorities to the hostility and ambition on the other side of the North Sea. The consequences of this revelation were tremendous. Slowly but surely, as the German navy increased in size and importance, the British Admiralty refocused its gaze away from those places that had previously occupied its attention, such as the dockyards of Brest, Cherbourg, Toulon, Kronstadt, Sevastopol and Vladivostok – the main ports of its traditional rivals, France and Russia – and instead gave serious thought, for the first time, to the build-up that was taking place in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, the principal centres of the new, burgeoning and deeply threatening naval power of the Second Reich. In this shift of emphasis, the seeds of the Anglo-German naval race were sown. Although little changed immediately, this new focus ultimately bore significant fruit. In particular, with the elevation of Admiral Sir John Fisher to the post of First Sea Lord in October 1904, the impetus was created, courtesy of Fisher's forceful and determined personality, for a series of wholesale reforms designed to ready Britain to face down the German challenge. Foremost amongst these was the reorganisation of Britain's naval assets. At that point, the Royal Navy's various fleets and squadrons were scattered across the globe with a view to protecting a diverse collection of imperial interests; but with Germany now identified as the main threat and with the locus of that threat placed directly adjacent to the British Isles, a relocation of British forces that positioned more units closer to the domestic heartland became essential.

The year 1908 would usher in a momentous and extremely tense period in Anglo-German relations. As far as the public was concerned, the key issue was the naval scare that broke out suddenly and with great intensity in early 1909 over fears that the German navy was secretly accelerating its construction of new dreadnought battleships in order surreptitiously to overtake the Royal Navy in the number of these vessels. This ‘acceleration’ crisis became a major political event in Britain, dividing both the political parties and the cabinet over the veracity of the claims and the best means of responding to them. The Unionist opposition demanded the immediate ordering of eight new dreadnoughts – a demand epitomised by the famous slogan ‘We want eight and we won't wait’ – while the so-called ‘economists’ in the Liberal Cabinet, led by Lloyd George and Churchill, believed that four new vessels would be more than sufficient. Eight would in the end be ordered, albeit via the face-saving formula of four regular dreadnoughts authorised immediately plus four contingent ones to be laid down subsequently ‘if needed’.

The origins of this crisis have long been controversial among historians. It was fashionable, at one stage, to assume that the clamour for new dreadnoughts had been whipped up artificially by the naval lobby in order to reverse several years of reduced spending on new construction. In a well-known phrase, Lloyd George dismissed the information on which the panic was based as little more than ‘contractors’ gossip’. However, more recent research has suggested that the raw intelligence received by the Admiralty from mid-1908 onwards was genuinely troubling both to the Naval Intelligence Department and the Board, and that the demands of the Sea Lords made perfect sense in the context of the material they had received.

Several documents in this chapter illustrate the dynamic of the crisis as well as shining an interesting light on some of the difficulties of interpreting it. Lloyd George's quip about ‘contractor's gossip’ is partly born out in that, as several documents show [108, 113, 114], one of the people to pass information on to the British government was H. H. Mulliner, the managing director of the Coventry Ordnance works.

In many respects the year 1912 ushered in a new and more frenetic period for the Royal Navy. Although nobody knew that a global war was less then two years away, they were aware that another force of nature had been let loose on the Admiralty in the form of a new and extremely dynamic First Lord, Winston Churchill. Appointed in October 1911, he very quickly left his mark. Among his earliest reforms was the establishment of an Admiralty War Staff, a new central strategy agency intended to erase the deficiencies in the planning system allegedly revealed at the Committee of Imperial Defence meeting of 23 August 1911. To effect this change, Churchill first needed to dismiss Sir Arthur Wilson, the First Sea Lord, who was emphatically opposed to the establishment of a naval staff, a body which he regarded as perfectly suited to land warfare, but utterly out of tune with maritime needs and practices. Although difficult in some respects, this proved a blessing in disguise, as Wilson's enforced retirement afforded Churchill the opportunity of sweeping away a large swathe of the existing senior naval leadership, a process which enabled him to bring in some much needed fresh blood at the top. Significantly, this included a new Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, Sir George Callaghan, whose impact on pre-war planning would unexpectedly prove considerable.

The establishment of a naval staff was not a solitary achievement. As First Lord, Churchill would be instrumental in, among other things, setting up the Royal Naval Air Service, improving the pay and conditions of the lower deck, overseeing the transition from coal to oil fuel, and bringing in the new 15-inch gun and the ships that would mount it, most notably the five famous battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class. Yet, while innovation often appeared the order of the day during this period, the Churchill Admiralty was also confronted with many of the same recurring issues as its predecessors.

By no means the least of these was the question of war-planning.