286 Chapter Eightsupport the naval race had its shady side. Outright bribery and cor
ruption played a lesser role than half-truths and deliberate deceptions.
Businessmen seeking contracts found support from their local MPs
helpful in persuading Admiralty officers to incline in their direction;
and candidates for Parliament found contributions from grateful or
merely hopeful constituents useful in meeting election expenses.
Newspaper agitation, too, could be arranged by giving cooperative
journalists inside information, or by entertaining them lavishly while
hinting at secrets they were expected to trumpet to the world the next
day.
Using these techniques, naval officers began to fight battles among
themselves through calculated and uncalculated leaks to the press,
exacerbated, as often as not, by journalists’ speculation and plain
rumor-mongering. In particular, a personal vendetta between Admiral
Fisher and Admiral Charles Beresford, conducted largely through the
press and in Parliament, came to involve almost every aspect of Ad
miralty affairs. Naval officers achieved star billing in the popular press,
much as movie actors were later to do, and sometimes behaved like
spoiled children.
Rules of the game were unclear. Muckracking journalism dated
back only to the scandals of the Crimean War, and all who undertook
to manipulate public affairs through newspapers faced awkward ten
sions between personal advantage and presumed public good. A jour
nalist who built up circulation at the expense of truth was on morally
dubious ground. So was the manufacturer who set out to influence a
naval contract by contributing to politicians’ election funds. The mor
als of naval officers who resorted to the press as a means of criticizing
their superiors or who tried to influence public policies by divulging
secret information were also questionable, since their private sense of
“higher duty” to the nation collided with long-standing rules of obedi
ence and discipline. Yet personal careers were made and broken by
such gambits, as Admiral Sir John Fisher’s example so conspicuously
demonstrated.
Any important change in society is likely to entail disturbances in
prevailing moral codes and patterns of conduct. The moral ambiguities
inherent in the new way of mobilizing resources, so flamboyantly in
augurated in 1884, perhaps only registered the importance of this new
path for getting things done.
How powerfully it operated is best summed up by the figures in
table 1. Thus we see that while army costs fell short of doubling, navy
costs multiplied almost five times in thirty years, and this in an age of