(^268) Chapter Eight
metal. This required a fundamentally different plant from anything
Woolwich had in hand. No matter how fast changes were made, wait
ing for officials of the arsenal and of the Board of Ordnance to take the
necessary steps to convert their establishment to the new require
ments was bound to strain the navy’s patience.
Long-standing army-navy frictions here came into play, for the
Board of Ordnance was under army control and responded sluggishly
to demands and initiatives coming from the navy. Or so it seemed to
naval gunnery officers. In particular, they chafed at the fact that in the
years 1881–87 the board authorized only one-third of the expenditure
necessary to meet the navy’s program for conversion to breech-
loading.^6 Such a pace, however revolutionary in itself, seemed wholly
inadequate at a time when the French and Germans as well as private
gun manufacturers in England were already turning out steel guns that
made all the Royal Navy’s existing armament hopelessly obsolete.
Bureaucratic infighting against cheeseparing army officers and un
sympathetic arsenal officials seemed an inadequate response to such a
critical technical situation. This was what persuaded Captain John
Fisher to leak information surreptitiously to the journalist W. T. Stead,
with the knowledge that he intended to publish a series of inflamma
tory articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. The first broadside of the cam
paign came in September 1884 in the form of an article entitled “The
Truth about the Navy,” portentously attributed to “One Who Knows
the Facts.” It provoked widespread concern, for it argued, with abun
dant substantiating detail, that “the truth about the Navy is that our
naval supremacy has almost ceased to exist.”^7 Other articles followed,
climaxing in a detailed account of “What Ought to Be Done for the
Navy.” This article appeared on 13 November, shortly after Parlia
ment had reconvened and two weeks before the government got
round to responding to the agitation which had swept the country in
the wake of the Pall Mall Gazette revelations. The official response
was to recommend an increase in naval appropriations of£5.5 million,
to be spread over five years’ time. Since the regular appropriation for
the navy in 1883 was £10.3 million, this increase, unsatisfactory
though it seemed to “One Who Knows the Facts,”^8 represented a very
considerable victory for the alarmists.
By going public, even if surreptitiously, Fisher had forced decisions
that the Liberal government and indeed Fisher’s own naval superiors
- Cf. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone, p. 187.
- Pall Mall Gazette, 18 September 1884, p. 6.
- Ibid., 8 December 1884, p. 1.