FIFTY YEARS IN THE ROYAL NAVY.*
WE associate the name of Sir Percy Scott with naval gunnery. It is no surprise, then, to find that his memoirs are mainly devoted to this question, and are in fact a sustained indictment of the Admiralty for neglecting, and even discouraging, the development of gunnery on scientific lines. The book deserves careful reading, for the subject is of prime importance. It is, or should be, a truism that the function of a gun is to hit the target, and that a costly battleship armed with big guns is something worse than a luxury if the gunners are not properly trained and are not equipped with all the apparatus that can be devised to help them in their work. Sir Percy Scott shows, however, that this truism was scouted by the Admiralty and by flag officers for many years, and he reprehends the intense conservatism which was the besetting sin of an old and famous Service. We should be the last to say a word against the magnificent traditions of the Royal Navy, which, as the war has shown, had been successfully maintained through long years of peace. But it must be admitted that the Navy had been too exclusively recruited from one section of a class, and that the old plan of catching officers very young and giving them a very narrow and excessively professional education had been followed too long and too slavishly. In the circumstances it was really not at all remarkable that the Navy of thirty years ago should have been out of touch with modern scientific developments. The wonder is that new ideas were adopted from time to time, and that during Sir Percy Scott's half-century of service the improvement, though slow, was very considerable indeed. The British Navy, it must be remembered, kept well ahead of its old rivals, the French and the Russian Navies, and had nothing to fear from comparison with the American Navy. It was only when Japan and Germany, starting where we left off in all that concerns ships and guns, began to apply scientific principles to their brand-new Navies that there was any need for uneasiness in regard to the mental and material equipment of our own Navy. The difficulty then was to persuade the senior ranks, who were necessarily all-powerful at the Admiralty, that a new era had opened. Public opinion could compel the Government to build more and bigger ships, but it could not do much to promote a higher standard of efficiency in the handling of the ships as weapons of offence. These professional matters had to be left to the heads of the profession, many of whom did not realize that gunnery, for example, had been transformed since their youth. Moreover, the strict etiquette of the Senior Service—an etiquette for which there is a good deal to be said—could not be violated with impunity by a junior officer who felt and showed that he knew better than the Lords of the Admiralty. An enthusiast is very often apt to seem egotistical and overbearing in his anxiety to carry out his pet schemes, and Sir Percy Scott's memoirs suggest unconsciously that he obstructed his own admirable plans for improving naval gunnery by exciting the personal illwill of the Admiralty officials. The way of the professional reformer is hard. If he is too courteous and considerate, he achieves nothing. If he stirs up a veritable cyclone of agitation, he arouses active opposition and achieves little. Sir Percy Scott did not hit the happy mean, or his reforms might have been introduced with much leas delay and friction. The author entered the ' Britannia' in 1866, and went to sea in the Forte,' a fifty-gun frigate, in 1868. He says that the Forte' captured a slave dhow off the Arabian coast and, having emptied her, used her as a target. " We opened fire on her with all our guns, but expended a quarter's allowance of ammunition wit':.out result and finally sank her by ramming. This was my first lesson in gunnery." The subject was in fact neglected then and for many years later. Sir Percy Scott tells us again and again that inspecting flag officers took no notice of a ship's shooting record, but considered only " her success in tailoring and housemaiding." "A ship had to look pretty ; prettiness was necessary to promotion, and as the Admiralty did not supply sufficient paint or cleaning material for keeping the ship up to the required standard, the officers had to find the money for buying the necessary housemaiding material." The author gives a photograph of the aft deck of the Edinburgh' in 1886a spick-and-span scene, like the deck of a rich man's yacht at Nice, with the xe:ts all gilded and statuettes of Mercury and Venus on the revolver-racks in the foreground. It is easy to imagine that an active Gunnery Lieutenant who wanted to fire the guns and blister the paint was regarded as a nuisance. " Fortunately target practice could easily be avoided." Such were the easygoing ways which Sir Percy Scott and his seniors, now Lord Fisher and Lord Jellieoe, set themselves to change. The author went in 1883 as instructor to the old floating gunnery school, H.M.S. Excellent,' which Captain Fisher, as he then was, commanded at that time. He says that he induced Captain Fisher to take up his plan for converting Whale Island—then a mud-heap formed of the material excavated from the Admiralty docks and basins further down Portsmouth Harbour—into the gunnery school as it is to-day, with its many trim buildings, parade-ground, football field, menagerie, and " quarter-deck," all the product of a single generation. The author had his first chance of developing his views on gunnery when he commanded the Scylla' in the Mediterranean from 1876 to 1899. He devised a new telescopic sight and a new sub-calibre gun for aiming practice in connexion with his miniature target known as a " dotter." Towards the end of his commission the Scylla' took the first place in the prize-firing competition with eighty per cent. of hits—" a record that had never been approached before." He says that the Admiralty adopted the " dotter " after some years, but spoilt it by trying to improve it, so that all the apparatus had to be altered at great expense. Sir Percy Scott tells the well-known story of how in 1899 he sent some naval guns up to Ladysmith, with special mountings invented by himself and made at Simon's Bay Dockyard. The ' Terrible' went from South Africa to China, and her naval brigade with some guns went up to Peking with the Allied forces. In the Terrible ' Sir Percy Scott again astonished the Navy by training his gun-layers to score eighty per cent. of hits in the prize firing. Other Captains copied his method, but the Admiralty, he says, adopted it with reluctance, and modified it so as to lessen its value by fixing impossibly long ranges. The next step was to improve the gun-sights, which were, he says, hopelessly inefficient. As commander of the Excellent' from 1903 to 1905 he was waging " one continuous battle with the Admiralty," but as Inspector of Target Practice for two years after the author had Sir John Fisher as First Sea Lord and Sir John Jelliooe as Director of Naval Ordnance, so that the Navy's shooting improved rapidly. When Sir Percy Scott commanded the Second Cruiser Squadron from 1907 to 1909 he introduced his system of director-firing, and he persuaded the Admiralty to try it in the Neptune ' in 1911. But there was so much opposition and delay that when the war broke out only eight battleships had been fitted. Sir Percy Scott decisive that the Good Hope' and Monmouth' were lost at Coronel because they could not fire their guns in such rough weather without the " director," which had not been supplied to them. He says that the officers of the similar ships lost at Jutland knew their fate beforehand, as their guns could not be elevated sufficiently and would be outranged. His elder son went down in one of them, so that the author speaks feelingly. The rude test of war showed the superiority of our officers and men, but it revealed also the grave defects of equipment which might have been remedied beforehand, but which cost us the lives of many brave sailors.
Sir Percy Scott recalls his letter to the Times of June 4th, 1914, in which he blamed the Admiralty for laying down more battleships when they ought to build more submarines and aircraft. He is entitled to credit for predicting " that the enemy's sub marines would come to our coasts and destroy everything they could see," and that the enemy's battleships, like ours, would stay in port. But sober people might be excused at that data for doubting whether Germany, if she made war on us, would disregard international law and the fine old traditions of the sea so far as to torpedo harmless merchantmen without warning and murder their crews. Unfortunately Sir Percy Scott was right in thinking the worst of the German Admiralty, but his critics need not regret having disagreed with him. In any case we did not require many more submarines at that date, for the German flag soon ceased to fly on the high seas, and there were few targets outside the Baltic for our submarine commanders. The author describes his measures for the defence of London against Zeppelins, while the Admiralty was responsible, and makes some caustic remarks on the slowness of the War Office to understand the need for heavy long-range guns in the field. Probably the official reply would be that our ordnance works were overwhelmed with orders and could not produce every kind of gun without delay. The moral of the book seems to be that the Navy must encourage the scientific and inventive spirit more generously if it is not to sink again into torpor. We should imagine, however, that the recent drastic reorganization of the Admiralty ought to prevent the recurrence, in the near future, of the old abuses against which Sir Percy Scott tilts so vigorously in his book.
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