John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher
Admiral of the Fleet John Arbuthnot "Jackie" Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, GCB, OM, GCVO (25 January 1841 – 10 July 1920) was a British admiral known for his efforts at naval reform. He had a huge influence on the Royal Navy in a career spanning more than 60 years, starting in a navy of wooden sailing ships armed with muzzle-loading cannon and ending in one of battlecruisers, submarines and the first aircraft carriers. The argumentative, energetic, reform-minded Fisher is often considered the second most important figure of British naval history, after Lord Nelson.
Early life and career
Fisher was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to an English family, the eldest of eleven children. His father was Captain William Fisher, a British Army officer and aide-de-camp to the governor of Ceylon.
Fisher was sent to Englandto live with his Aunt because his family could not support all their children, he joined the navy in 1854 age 13. After completing his training at HMS Britannia he was assigned as a cadet to HMS Calcutta, an old ship of the line which was sent to assist in blockading Russian ports in the Gulf of Finland during the Crimean War. A few months later the ship returned to the UK where he was assigned to Agamemnon, which arrived at Constantinople (now Istanbul) just as the war ended. Promoted to midshipman, he served on a corvette, Highflyer, then the steam frigate Chesapeake and finally the paddle sloop Furious in the China Wars of 1859–1860.
He studied at Excellent, the naval gunnery school, for 14 months before being transferred as gunnery officer to Warrior, the first all-iron sea-going armoured battleship. He returned to Excellent in 1864 as an instructor where he remained until 1869. Whilst there he married Frances Broughton.
Early reform efforts
Following two and a half years as commander (i.e., second in command) of Ocean, flagship of the China Station he returned to the gunnery school Excellent again in 1872, this time as head of torpedo and mine training, during which time he split the Torpedo Branch off from Excellent, forming a separate establishment for it called HMS Vernon.
From 1876 until 1883 he served as a captain, commanding five ships in succession, the last being Inflexible. Inflexible was a very prestigious appointment, the most powerful warship of her day, although in practice the four huge muzzle-loaded guns took so long to load that she was almost useless for naval warfare. Nevertheless she was assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet where she took part in the Egyptian War of 1882, bombarding the port of Alexandria as part of Admiral Seymour's fleet.
During this time he became a close friend of the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.
Fisher returned to the UK to become commanding officer of Excellent in April 1883. He was Director of Naval Ordnance from 1886 until 1890, where he met with limited success in trying to wrest the design of naval guns from the War Office.
At the Admiralty
Fisher was superintendent of the dockyard at Portsmouth for a few months in 1891–1892 after which he became Third Sea Lord, the naval officer with overall responsibility for provision of ships and equipment. He presided over the development of torpedo boat destroyers, later shortened to destroyers, for countering torpedo boats. Torpedo-boats had become a major threat as they were cheap but able to sink the largest battleships, and France had built large numbers of them. Torpedo-boat-destroyers were small, fast warships equipped with the then novel water-tube boilers and quick-firing small calibre guns.
Fisher was knighted in 1894 and put in charge of the North Atlantic and West Indies station in 1897 before heading the British delegation to the First Hague Peace Convention. Following this he was made chief of the Mediterranean station from 1899 until 1902. Unlike the North Atlantic station, it was a vital British operational command because of the line of communication between India and the UK which passed through the Suez Canal and which was felt to be under continuous threat from France.
In 1902 he returned to the UK as Second Sea Lord, in charge of personnel and in 1903 became commander in chief of Portsmouth dockyard. In October 1905 he was appointed First Sea Lord, the overall operational commander of the Navy. In December 1905 he was promoted Admiral of the Fleet.
Fisher was brought to the admirality to reduce the naval budgets, and to reform the navy for a modern war. Amidst massive public controversy, he ruthlessly sold off 90 obsolete and small ships and put a further 64 into reserve, describing all these vessels as "too weak to fight and too slow to run away", and "a miser's hoard of useless junk". This freed up crews and money to increase the number of large modern ships in home waters.
He was a driving force behind the development of the fast, all big-gun battleship, and chairman of the Committee on Designs which produced the outline design for the first modern battleship, Dreadnought. His committee also produced a new type of cruiser in a similar style to Dreadnought with a high speed achieved at the expense of armour protection, this became the battlecruiser, the first being Invincible. Fisher's policy with regards to Dreadnoughts has often been misunderstood; it was not a class of ship which he favoured, as his time as admiral of the Mediterranean fleet had taught him the vulnerability of slow big gun ships to mines, torpedoes and submarines. He wanted battlecruisers to defend Britain’s colonies, and a large fleet of small ships to defend the British Isles. However, when his plans for battlecruisers met with opposition from within the service, he was forced to compromise. He also encouraged the introduction of submarines into the Royal Navy, and the conversion from a largely coal fuelled navy to an oil fuelled one. He had a long-running and public feud with another admiral, Charles Beresford.
He was created Baron Fisher, of Kilverstone in the County of Norfolk, in 1909 (taking the motto "Fear God and dread nought" on his coat of arms as a reference to Dreadnought), just before his retirement in 1910.
The First World War, and Fisher's last years
On the outbreak of the First World War, Lord Fisher was recalled as First Sea Lord, after Prince Louis of Battenberg had been forced to resign because of alleged German ties. Fisher resigned on May 15 1915 amidst bitter arguments with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, over Gallipoli, causing Churchill's resignation too. Lord Fisher was never entirely enthusiastic about the campaign -- going back and forth in his support to the consternation and frustration of members of the cabinet -- and all-in-all preferred an amphibious attack on the German Baltic Sea coastline, even having the shallow draft battlecruisers Furious, Glorious and Courageous constructed for the purpose. As the Gallipoli campaign failed, relations with Churchill had become increasingly acrimonious.
Lord Fisher was made chairman of the Government's Board of Invention and Research, serving in that post until the end of the war. He died of cancer in 1920 and is buried in the churchyard at Kilverstone in Norfolk.
In folklore and popular culture
- Fisher's life is celebrated in the folk song "Old Admirals" by the Scottish singer Al Stewart, and he is expressly referred to in Stewart's earlier song "Manuscript" - "Admiral Lord Fisher is writing to Churchill, calling for more dreadnoughts".
- A reference to Jackie Fisher was hidden as an encrypted message, the Smithy code, by Mr Justice Peter Smith in the April 2006 judgment on the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case. Smith's biography in Who's Who stated that he was a "Jackie Fisher fan".
References
- Fisher, John Arbuthnot Fisher, Baron. Memories, by the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher. London, New York [etc.]: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919.
- Fisher, John Arbuthnot Fisher, Baron. Records by the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher London, New York [etc.]: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919.
- NOTE: These two autobiographical works were published together in 1920 as Memories and Records, by Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher, by George H. Doran Company, New York.
- Lambert, Nicholas A. Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
- Massie, Robert K. Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea. Great Britain: Jonathon Cape, 2004.
- Massie, Robert K. Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. New York: Random House, 1991.
- Morris, Jan. Fisher's Face, or, Getting to Know the Admiral. 1st American ed. New York: Random House, 1995.
- Sumida, Jon Tetsuro. In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy 1889-1914. Paperback ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
