Of all the challenges faced by the Royal Navy during both world wars, the control of the Narrow Seas of the English Channel and the Straits of Dover were both formidable and continuous. Drawing mainly on the letters and papers of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, Vice-Admiral Dover Patrol during the last eleven months of the First World War, this essay examines the critical changes at the Admiralty that, during the anxious days of the German spring offensive, would restore public confidence in ‘The Old Naval Touch’1
Among the letters and papers of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, is one that stands out for its brevity of just eight words. Dated 8 April 1918, the handwritten note came on paper headed ‘Munitions Invention Department, Princes Street, Westminster, SW1’ and said, ‘Dear Keyes, Just a line to wish you good luck.’ It was signed ‘V. sincerely, RH Bacon.’2 On the face of it there appears little of consequence but its message, author and recipient are inextricably linked to doctrinal debates on offensive or defensive postures adopted by the Royal Navy in response to Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. The recipient of the letter was then (Acting) Vice-Admiral Dover Patrol and the author of the message, Vice-Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, Keyes’s immediate predecessor at Dover. The ‘good luck’ message anticipated the first of two aborted attempts to carry out the operations to block the entrances to the Bruges Canal at Zeebrugge and Ostend on 11 April 1918.
Keyes and Bacon had very different career paths in the Royal Navy: the former, seen as a gallant fighting officer who had seen action during the Boxer Rebellion and at the Dardanelles; the latter, nine years Keyes’s senior, the brilliant technocrat, inventor and master of detail. Both had served as Inspecting Captain of Submarines; both had commanded Dreadnought battleships, with Bacon having the inaugural command of HMS Dreadnought. Where their respective paths differed was in Bacon’s closeness to Jacky Fisher, first as the founding ICS and then, when Fisher became First Sea Lord, as his Naval Assistant and a member of Fisher’s Committee on Design. It was a relationship that, through no fault of his own, was to lead to an early pause in his naval career when, in 1909, Fisher by accident or design allowed the content of a confidential letter from Bacon to leak. Before taking command of Dreadnought, Bacon had served briefly under Lord Charles Beresford in the Mediterranean Fleet where he had been encouraged, in a private conversation with the King, to keep Fisher au courant with opinions within the fleet. With the ensuing row following the disclosure of the letters some three years later and with heated questions in the House, Bacon, then Director of Naval Ordnance and about to be appointed Third Sea Lord, was forced to step down and seek transfer to the retired list. He was later able to shrug off the damage done by Fisher’s indiscretion and went on to write his two-volume biography The Life of Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, but for many in the Service his reputation was permanently tarnished.
Adding to the suspicion with which Bacon was already regarded was his appointment upon his early retirement at the age of 46 as the Managing Director of the Coventry Ordnance Works. This came in the wake of the so-called Mulliner Scandal that led to the dismissal of his predecessor, Herbert Mulliner.3 Government confidence was restored and orders for naval ordnance resumed. For Bacon it was an opportunity for development and invention that resulted, by the time war broke out, in a 15-inch howitzer designed in three component parts for ease of road transport to the front. Though not taken up by the army, it caught the attention of the First Lord, Winston Churchill, who ordered twelve with which to form a Howitzer Brigade for the Royal Marine Artillery, in which Bacon was granted a temporary commission. In the spring of 1915, with the attempt to force the Dardanelles from seaward abandoned, Churchill ordered Bacon to supervise the transport one of the howitzers to Gallipoli; within days the order was countermanded and Bacon, though still on the retired list, was appointed to succeed Rear Admiral Horace Hood in command of the Dover Patrol. In July he was promoted Vice-Admiral.
The Dover Patrol was established by Hood, initially to provide naval gunfire support to the Belgian army during the first critical weeks of the war. Its role quickly became one of protection of the vital Channel crossing for men and materiel, the interdiction of the passage of German submarines passing from their bases down the Channel to the Atlantic and the protection of allied merchant shipping. Despite initial misgivings, Bacon threw himself into the work with all his inventive flair and energy but within little over a year came rumblings of unhappiness within the Service over his appointment. Writing to his former Chief of Staff, Roger Keyes, in August 1916 Rear-Admiral John de Robeck, by then Rear-Admiral Commanding 3rd Battle Squadron at Sheerness, was scathing at finding ‘… Bacon, a retired officer is my senior … if one is allowed to leave the Service entirely [italics in original] for one’s own convenience & benefit … & come back and take command … it seems there is not much object in serving except when convenient to oneself.’4
At the end of the year came a letter from Keyes’s former close colleague, Reginal Tyrwhitt, Commodore Harwich Force. He attacks both Bacon whom he dubs ‘the streaky one’ and, by association, the First Sea Lord, Sir John Jellicoe. ‘Our bugbear is VA Dover.’, he writes, complaining that Bacon had commandeered ‘…20 of my destroyers + his own force to look after 6 Hun TBDs at ZeeB[rugge] and the Channel is choked with Hun submarines.’5 This would become the central issue, subsequently backed up by the Naval Intelligence Department, that, despite Bacon’s mined net barrage between Folkestone and Cap Gris Nez, and regular surface patrols, large numbers of German submarines were passing through the Straits of Dover unscathed.6 Tyrwhitt continued, ‘VA Dover … has obsessed everyone at the Admiralty and does exactly what he pleases with them. I am not going to bore you with what he does & does not do, but you will understand what I say when I tell you that he is not a white man.’7 In the following spring, Keyes received a letter from his close friend Captain Herbert Richmond, then commanding HMS Conqueror in the Grand Fleet. With some prescience, he asks Keyes to make a note that should he be sent to Dunkirk ‘in place of Porky … I should be more than delighted to serve under you in any capacity you like.’8 In a slightly barbed note he adds ‘Porky may have saved his Bacon by bombarding Zeebrugge after months of inactivity, but if this is only to be a spasmodic effort it will be a useless waste of energy.’9
What these letters from three very different sources reveal – setting aside the public school banter – is a consistent irritation across the Service with Reginald Bacon as VA Commanding Dover Patrol. A more formal critique of the perceived failings of the Dover Patrol came in the Interim Report of the Channel Barrage Committee set up under the chairmanship of Roger Keyes. He had been brought to the Admiralty from the Grand Fleet as Director of Plans by newly appointed Deputy First Sea Lord Vice-Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss.10 The report, a copy of which was sent to Bacon, draws attention in its first paragraph to ‘…the complete ineffectiveness against submarines of the present barrier between Dover and Dunkirk …’ This is backed up by records from the NID showing 253 passages through the Straits by enemy submarines during 1917.11 The report goes on to make specific recommendations which included the imperative of illumination by searchlight and flares to force submarines to dive and become entangled in the mined nets. This was a tactic which Bacon had always resisted, to avoid risk of silhouetting his patrol craft except when a submarine had been definitely identified.
In a letter to David Beatty, C-in-C Grand Fleet, inviting himself to Rosyth ‘for a breath of fresh air’ a week after his Interim Report had been published, Keyes shared his frustration with the current position. ‘Our Interim Report is a very strong indictment of Bacon and all his works. We will make Dover Straits unhealthy for submarines, but Bacon’s presence adds to our difficulties and I’m afraid the Board won’t kick him out.’12 This was the nub of the problem as Keyes saw it; Bacon’s essentially defensive posture still had the support of the First Sea Lord, Sir John Jellicoe and now both Wemyss and Keyes pressed for an urgent change of tactics. What followed was a twenty point memorandum from Keyes as Director of Plans for the First Sea Lord, in which he spells out to Jellicoe his views on VA Dover’s failure to close the Straits to submarines and the reasons for it.13
Having set out his views, he adds in the formal protocol of such documents ‘Submit to inform VA as follows:’ and continue with a set of specific instructions as to how Bacon’s forces should be deployed. He concludes his highly prescriptive list urging that ‘In the face of the present most unsatisfactory state of affairs, nothing should be left to chance.’14 The document was passed to the DCNS Sir Henry Oliver who appended a note to the effect that it was undesirable to give Senior Officers ‘…detailed orders as to the disposition and working of vessels under their command.’ This drew an acknowledgement from Keyes in a further minute dated 13 December politely concurring with the DCNS but suggesting that in this case ‘…some departure from established custom is necessary.’ He went on to argue bluntly that the Admiralty had a choice: it could take responsibility for ‘directing certain measures to be carried out’, or it could face the greater responsibility ‘…of knowing that the measures which the Vice-Admiral proposes are inadequate to deal with a situation which is vitally affecting our power to carry on the war.’ He ends, ‘I submit that the strongest measures possible are necessary and time passes!’15 With this addition, the memorandum went to Jellicoe, who added his own minute which began with a rejection of the ‘…sweeping indictment of the work of VA Dover as stated by the Director of Plans’, but continued over eight paragraphs to detail actions ‘to be put into force at the earliest possible moment…’ Critically among them is the insistence on the necessity ‘for the patrol boats and destroyers to use their searchlights intermittently, the drifters using flares.’16
Vice-Admiral Bacon’s response would have been addressed formally to the Secretary to the Admiralty Sir Oswyn Murray and is not included in the NRS volume of the Keyes papers. It is, however, for the sake of fairness to Bacon, worth seeking out. Notwithstanding the DCNS’s remarks on interference with a Senior Officer’s dispositions, it is clear from Bacon’s reply, given in his account of the work of the Dover Patrol, that he saw through Jellicoe’s list of actions as having been dictated by the Barrage Committee for whom he did not hold back his contempt. In a long letter dated 15 December, Bacon, while respecting the wishes of their Lordships argued ‘I must have latitude in my dispositions and I must vary them as necessary; and I submit that having expressed their wishes, their Lordships should leave the executive dispositions of forces to me…’ He added, in parenthesis and not in the letter, ‘Just fancy an admiral in war-time having to write in this strain to the Admiralty to answer the meddlings of an irresponsible committee.’17 This was too much for their Lordships and Bacon was summoned to the Admiralty to give a full account of his intentions for closing the Strait.
The meeting took place in the First Sea Lord’s room on 18 December with Vice Admiral Bacon facing the First Sea Lord Sir John Jellicoe, his Deputy, Vice Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss and Rear-Admirals Sir Henry Oliver, DCNS, George Hope, Director of Operations Division and Sir Roger Keyes, Director of Plans. While we don’t have minutes of that meeting, if any were taken, we have two accounts of it, both from Roger Keyes: the first written as a memorandum on 23 December, the second in recollection in his Naval Memoirs seventeen years later. In the formal Memorandum, Keyes reprises opinions already formed and well documented, summarising the two key objectives of the Dover Patrol since 1915 as (a) denying the Straits to German submarines and (b) rendering the use of Zeebrugge as a base impossible. His conclusion: ‘I cannot refrain from expressing the opinion that the operations have been a complete failure.’ In a final sentence he adds ‘Definite proposals for anti-submarine measures in the Straits are being submitted on another paper.’18
Keyes’s second account of the meeting is, perhaps with the distance in time, more conciliatory towards Bacon, in his description of the second half of the meeting on 18 December. Bacon was asked by Jellicoe to present his views on and proposals for the planned blocking operations at Zeebrugge and Ostende. ‘He was now in his element’, recalled Keyes ‘and we were all struck with the ingenuity of his special arrangements which were to be built into a 12-inch monitor … his suggestion to assault the Mole from the seaward side was brilliant.’19 Bacon’s proposals were approved and he was ordered to begin preparations, but he would not be in post long enough to see them through; in the event they were modified by Keyes – whether or not for the better can never be known.20
To return to the formal record, the recipients of Keyes’s Memorandum of 23 December are not named, but it is very likely, given the inclusion of a ‘précis of the relevant papers’, it was intended for those not familiar with the detail of VA Dover’s alleged failings. To add fuel to the fire that Keyes was stoking, Bacon’s undertaking at his Admiralty grilling on 18 December for his patrols to make more aggressive use of searchlights and flares on the following night (19/20 December) had resulted in the destruction of U59 when she was forced to dive into the deep mine barrage. Here was the lucky vindication of all that both Keyes and Wemyss had been pressing for and there is little doubt that the First Lord, Sir Eric Geddes would have been sent a copy of the Memorandum.
Geddes was acutely aware that he was getting conflicting advice from his two most senior advisors, Jellicoe and Wemyss on the question of the Command at Dover: the First Sea Lord for retaining Bacon as the best man for the job, his Deputy for him to go. Whether or not the Memorandum of the 23 December convinced him, according to Vice Admiral Wemyss account, Geddes had already made up his mind to ask for Jellicoe’s resignation on 22 December on the evening of which he formally asked Wemyss if he was prepared to take his place.21 It was not a comfortable moment for either men which Geddes compounded by choosing to avoid speaking directly to Jellicoe; instead he had a letter delivered to the First Sea Lord at 6pm on Christmas Eve peremptorily dismissing him with immediate effect. Two days later Sir Rosslyn Wemyss was appointed First Sea Lord and the way was now clear for VA Dover, in turn, to be relieved of his command. The leader in The Times of 27 December referred blandly to Jellicoe’s ‘retirement’ as ‘A Chance for the Younger Seaman’ and on the same page prints a brief biography of both men.22 Wemyss was all of five years younger than his predecessor. There was, of course, more than an expedient to facilitate other changes in the First Lord’s decision to relieve Sir John Jellicoe, including personal differences and political pressures from Lloyd George, which lie beyond our scope here. Sir Archibald Hurd, reflecting on his long career as Naval Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in 1941 remarked that ‘Of all the incidents in the history of this country since Ministers were despatched by despotic kings, the dismissal of Jellicoe from the Admiralty by Lloyd George … with the concurrence of Eric Geddes … was the most disgraceful.’23 Unsurprisingly, Hurd had much more to say about the sudden dismissal of both Jellicoe and Bacon and the leadership of the First Lord.
Keyes, still Director of Plans, recorded the conversation with the new First Sea Lord on the day after The Times announcement, in which he was asked to take over from Bacon: ‘Well Roger, you have talked a hell of a lot about what should be done in the Dover area, now you must go and do it.’24 Promoted (Acting) Vice-Admiral, Sir Roger Keyes became the new VA Dover on 1 January 1918. He was now able to pursue his preferred tactic against submarines with which there is no doubt he had some success. But how much that was due to the availability of more suitable mines and moorings for the deep barrage and how much to more aggressive use of searchlights and flares by his patrol craft is a matter of conjecture. Keyes was also now able to own and lead the blocking operations at Zeebrugge and Ostende and the ‘Old Naval Touch’ celebrated in The Times on 24 April was therefore forever associated with his name.
For Bacon, there was excusable bitterness, but not, as the opening document demonstrates, lasting personal rancour. Anger at his treatment may have allowed some hyperbole to creep into his own account of the Dover Patrol but the statistics he quotes in the Preface to the first volume are unarguable. In paying tribute to year-round task of the ‘fisher folk’ manning the mine-sweeping trawlers, he recorded that ‘in the first three years of the war [they] swept a total distance equivalent to twelve times round the earth!’25 Amongst the achievements of his Command he cites the 120,000 merchant shipping movements through the Straits of Dover with the loss of forty-eight to mines and one only to enemy raids. ‘As to cross-Channel traffic we passed over 5,600,000 troops without an accident to a single man.’26 Bacon had a right to reply to his critics and he used the Preface and pages of the two volumes of Dover Patrol to do so upon his second retirement in March 1919. But before that, Winston Churchill as Minister of Munitions, once more called on Bacon’s inventive mind. Less than a fortnight after stepping down as VA Dover, Bacon was installed as Controller of the Munition Inventions Department at the Ministry from where his good wishes were sent to Keyes in April 1918.
1 The Times, leader, 24 April 1918, p.7, on news of what was believed to be the successful blocking of the canal at Zeebrugge.
2 Paul G Halpern (ed.) The Keyes Papers, Selections from the Private and Official Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Baron Keyes of Zeebrugge, Volume I (Navy Records Society, Vol.117, 1972) Bacon to Keyes, 8.4.18, Document 233, p.482
3 Herbert Mulliner had presented to Cabinet apparent evidence, later proved to be incorrect, that Krupps were expanding their heavy armaments works and canvassed a reciprocal move by the government to the benefit of his own company.
4 The Keyes Papers, De Robeck to Keyes, 14.8.16, Document 164, p.367
5 Ibid. Tyrwhitt to Keyes, 29.12.16, Document 170, p.376
6 Bacon always denied the numbers passing through and claimed in his own two-volume account of the Dover Patrol that the barrage ‘…became the graveyard of dozens of submarines.’ Reginald Bacon, Dover Patrol, Vol 1 1915-1917 (London, Hutchinson and Co, 1919) p.20
7 Tyrwhitt to Keyes, 29.12.16, ibid.
8 Richmond to Keyes, 17.5.17, Document 181, p.396
9 Ibid. Bacon’s squadron of 12 and 15-inch monitors bombarded Zeebrugge on 12 May but were not successful in destroying their principal target, the lock gates.
10 After service in the Gallipoli campaign, Wemyss became C-in-C East Indies and Egyptian Squadron in which capacity he had lent solid naval support to TE Lawrence during the Arab Revolt. He was appointed Second Sea Lord in September 1917 and made Deputy First Sea Lord in a specially created staff role somewhere between First and Second Sea Lord in the following month.
11 Keyes to Secretary of the Admiralty, 29.11.17, Document 198, p.419
12 Keyes to Beatty, 5.12.17, Document 200, p.422
13 Memorandum by Keyes and Minute by First Sea Lord, 8.12.17, Document 201, p.424
14 Ibid. p.429
15 Ibid. p.430
16 Ibid. p.431
17 Reginald Bacon, Dover Patrol, Vol 2 1915-1917 (London, Hutchinson and Co, 1919), p.407 et seq.
18 Memorandum by Keyes [Carbon], 23.12.17, Document 204, p.437
19 Roger Keyes, The Naval Memoirs of Sir Roger Keyes, Vol II, Scapa Flow to the Dover Straits (London, Thornton Butterworth, 1934), p.141. Bacon’s proposal was to fit a false bow to a monitor which would crush and act as a fender against the Mole with the vessel held at right-angles against the tidal stream by anchor cable veered upstream fore and aft. Troops would disembark over a wide articulated brow designed to clear the 14 ft parapet on top of the Mole.
20 For a full and clear narrative of the action that became known as the Zeebrugge Raid, the events leading up to it and the consequences, see Sir Henry Newbolt, Naval Operations Vol V (London, Longman Green and Co, 1931), p.241 et seq.
21 See Wemyss’s own account of the conversation and his reluctant acceptance in Lady Wester Wemyss, The Life and letters of Lord Wester Wemyss (London, Eyre and Spottiswode, 1935), p.366
22 The Times, 27.12.17, p.7
23 Sir Archibald Hurd, Who Goes There? (London, Hutchinson and Co, 1941) p.138.
24 Keyes, Naval Memoirs Vol II, p.351
25 Bacon, Dover Patrol Vol I, p.xi
26 Ibid. p.xii