Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 269
had been loath to make. The First Sea Lord of the time, Sir Astley
Cooper Key, did not approve of such tactics. Indeed, he detested
public agitation and distrusted the stategy of increasing naval appro
priations dramatically, believing that such a policy would merely pro
voke other nations to increase their naval expenditures, thus hastening
instead of heading off the decline of British naval preponderance.^9 As
the senior officer ol the navy he held that his proper role was to do the
best he could with what the government of the day provided in the
way of funds. Naval discipline forbade entry into the political process
by which such sums were determined. But Fisher was prepared to
violate this long-standing code to get his way, impelled partly by per
sonal ambition and partly by a sense of technological urgency which
more senior naval officers, immersed in paper work, did not share.
Emergence of the Military-Industrial Complex in
Great Britain
Needless to say, Fisher did not act alone. The year 1884 was a time of
depression. Idle shipyards were eager for work and journalists did not
hesitate to point out that “it might be possible at the present time to
kill two birds with one stone—to find ships for our fleet and employ
ment for starving artisans by applying to private dockyards for aid
which the Government yards cannot supply.”^10 A question in Parlia
ment raised the issue of aid to the unemployed on 25 October, as the
government prepared its revised naval estimates; and when the First
Lord of the Admiralty disclosed his supplementary program to the
House of Lords he declared: “if we are to spend money on the in
crease of the Navy, it is desirable in consequence of the stagnation in
the great shipbuilding yards of this country, that the extra expenditure
should go ... to increase the work by contract in the private yards.”^11
In earlier decades, when Parliament had represented property own
ers and taxpayers, a depression of trade could be counted on to pro
voke a demand for corresponding reduction in government expen
diture. But just two weeks before that upward revision of the naval
estimates in 1884, William E. Gladstone’s Liberal government brought
- For Cooper Key’s views see Richard Hough, First Sea Lord: An Authorized Biog
raphy of Admiral Lord Fisher (London, 1969), p. 83.
- The Daily Telegraph, as quoted in the Pall Mall Gazette, 11 October 1884.
- Hansard, 2 December 1884, col. 410. The Earl of Northbrook referred to the
letting of private contracts four separate times in his speech, and in rebuttal mentioned
the government’s intention of encouraging “the great manufacturers of steel” by re
fraining from giving Woolwich the capacity to produce the new gunmetal.
