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12 AUSTRALIAN MARITIME ISSUES 2006: SPC-A ANNUAL
He was to visit India, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the battlecruiser HMS
New Zealand was made available for the cruise.
As his Chief of Staff (COS), Jellicoe took with him Commodore Frederick Dreyer, who
was by now his habitual retainer, having been his Flag-Captain in the Grand Fleet and
then his Director of Naval Ordnance at the Admiralty. A large, overbearing man, Dreyer
was a notorious bully, celebrated by historians as the inventor of ineffective fire-control
gear. Dreyer recommended Commander Bertram Ramsay as Staff Commander. There
is no evidence of any special link between the two, although they had served together
twice: briefly in 1907 in the first commission of HMS Dreadnought, and then in early
1914 in the battleship HMS Orion.
Ramsay had been commanding the destroyer HMS Broke, in the Dover Patrol, for
slightly more than a year. He had taken her over from the heroic Edward Evans, and
proved himself an unbending martinet in pulling her back from near-anarchy. Very
likely he had been chosen for that purpose: ‘his concern for discipline was out of the
ordinary and was recognised as such by both his ship’s companies and his superiors’. 3
The Dover Patrol also supplied the Flag Lieutenant, Vaughan Morgan, who had been
‘flags’ to Sir Roger Keyes of Zeebrugge fame, and was thus already well known to
Ramsay. Three other officers were carried, to advise on anti-submarine, mining and
air matters. For Jellicoe’s small, select band, it was barely conceivable that they might
refuse such an appointment. It was highly prestigious, promised many months of
glamour and adventure, and resolved the anxieties about their immediate future that
no doubt accompanied the prospect of postwar demobilisation.
Ramsay duly handed over his destroyer — having told his diary: ‘am happy to think I
shall pay off Broke a much improved ship in every way’ — and went down to Portsmouth
to join New Zealand on 19 February. That afternoon he went to see his friend and
near-senior, Commander James Somerville, at the Signal School for experimental
duties, and they had a long talk on the way ahead for the Empire’s wireless telegraphy
arrangements. The day of departure, 21 February, started with a harrumph: ‘Admiral’s
[teenaged] daughters arrived at breakfast to my astonishment, not being used to said
procedure’; and did not improve: ‘so we start on our Dominions tour, on a Friday &
raining, with a falling barometer’.
His superstition was justified: Jellicoe’s mission was fatally flawed from the start. The
project had been mooted in wartime, when strategical priorities had been obvious and
urgent. Just a few months later, the clear objectives and the great sense of commoncause
had disappeared along with the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman
empires. The Admiral had been given little guidance on postwar defence strategy,
on likely expenditure or force levels, or even on whom the next enemies (if any)
were officially supposed to be. The world’s political kaleidoscope had been violently
shaken and had yet to reform into any clear pattern, and all potential maritime rivals
were friends and/or allies. Yet, in order to make specific recommendations to their