Barging in the Ballet
Admirals. in Collision. By Richard Hough. (Hamish Hamilton, 18s.) ADMIRALS Tryon and Markham came into colli- sion in 1893, just three miles off the Tripoli coast. As a result HMS Victoria—a sheer Gothic horror of marine architecture, yet a prestige vessel among the Navy's ironclads and the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet—capsized within fifteen minutes; 358 officers and men were lost. 'The most ignoble form of destruction which awaits a. giant ship of war is that of being capsized,' said the Standard leader writer, adding, in uncon- scious anticipation of the Lady Bracknell manner, 'To be sunk is paying a kind of homage to the ocean. To be capsized is, if we may be pardoned the phrase, almost to be made ridiculous. Our ships may be forgiven if they take a header, but to roll over topsy-turvy implies a grave fault some- where.' Certainly much was ridiculous as well as admirable about the Navy in the last century's last decade. A full fleet action had not been fought within living experience, and the Sea Lords' major campaigns were conducted over the Naval Estimates. The Man(ruvring Book destroyed initiative like some manual of choreography. The 14,000 kinds of signal had become an occult study, the endless strings of flags a confounded nuisance.. And the Victoria, with its long forecastle almost disappearing into the sea, (giving it the nickname 'the slipper') and Ill-ton guns, which buckled the deck when fired forward and ,seared the bridge- work when fired abaft, was, little more bizarre in design than many others.
No one saw the danger of this state of affairs more clearly than • Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon. When he became C-in-C Of the Mediter- ranean fleet he experimented with a follow-my- flagship method of leadership without signals, and trained his officers to a quick response by constantly ordering unorthodox evolutions. Yet while the captains of the eleven ironclads that left Beirut on the day of the catastrophe never expected to be brought on to their anchorage off Tripoli in the simple, obvious way, the order Tryon gave them seemed to ask the impossible. The two columns :of ships were required to re- verse their course by turning inwards although the distance that separated them was less than their combined turning circles. Slowly, in a dream- like way, Tryon's Victoria and his second-in-com- mand Rear-Admiral fv1arkham's. Cam perdown bore down on each other in a wide arc., as though playing a game of bluff, and faking no evasive action until too late. Had the fleet misunderstood the signal? Had Tryon miscalculated'? Or had he simply tried to demonstrate that sometimes,.dis- obedience is a duty'? Richard Hough can only make a good guess based on the first possibility, but he has Written a fine essay on military folly.
Although Alvin Moscow had eye-witnesses and not just dead records to consult, he did not have Mr. Hough's freedom of conjecture in deal- ing with the collision of the liners Andrea Doria and Stockholm in 1956. The 'shipping companies reached a settlement out of court. So no blame is fixed by Collision Course, a solid piece of work by a news agency man, but the Andrea Doria does emerge as the less seamanly of the two.
LI:LIFI•RLY NICHOLSON
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