David Morgan-Owen

Evolution or Revolution? British Naval Policy in the Fisher Era

Abstract This article outlines recent trends in the scholarship on the Royal Navy in the years preceding the outbreak of the First World War. It explains the evolution of the historiography on the topic and outlines how and why new approaches are required to progress our understanding of the topic henceforth.

'An 'Intermediate Blockade'? British North Sea Strategy, 1912-1914'

Historians have argued that, between 1912 and 1914, Britain’s naval leadership projected a so-called ‘intermediate blockade’, a line of vessels strung across the mid-North Sea. This strategy has been widely criticized as impractical and unrealistic. However, this article demonstrates that the Admiralty never projected such an approach. Rather, the naval leadership intended to adopt a system of mid-North Sea patrols during this period. By misunderstanding Admiralty policy before 1914, historians have been unable to ascertain that these patrols were resurrected in late 1914 and played an important part in the Royal Navy’s wartime strategy.

Commemorating the centenary of the First World War: National and trans-national perspectives

This special issue examines the ways in which contemporary political, diplomatic, social and cultural trends have influenced centennial commemoration of the First World War in Europe, Russia and the Middle East. The four articles identify and examine a diversity of narratives that have emerged over the centenary period, charting similarities and differences between states, organisations and individuals. While divergent narratives certainly exist within and between states, the greatest differences may be located in attitudes to the use of force and the way in which different cultures interpret the loss of life in war.

Britain, Europe and the War at Sea, 1900-1918

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the growth of the first international associations for the study of history. After meetings of likeminded scholars at The Hague in 1898, Paris in 1900 and Rome in 1903, The International Congress of Historical Studies began a regular series of gatherings, arranged on a quinquennial basis. The 1913 meeting in London was the first time that the fledgling disciplines of naval and military history, hitherto primarily consigned to staff colleges, were represented in the programme. Julian Stafford Corbett, Lecturer at the Naval War

Crisis in the Mediterranean: Naval competition and Great Power politics, 1904–1914

Where she covers the genuinely heroic tales of two captains’ wives, Mary Patten in the clipper Neptune’s Car (1856) and Margaretha Meinders in the three-masted schooner Johanna (1890), it is clear that the press coverage ensured that they conformed to the Victorian heroine mould. Thus it was entirely proper to celebrate women who supported their men folk in adversity, provided that they were suitably modest and content with their lot, and thus did nothing to challenge the concept of male headship. Indeed, in the 1930s the Nazi Party (NSDAP) went so far as to hijack the saga of the Johanna, and to portray Margaretha Meinders as an ideal example of German National Socialist womanhood, even erecting a statue in her home town. There is no doubt that many wives learned to do the complex mathematical calculations necessary for astronomical navigation. Indeed it made good sense, as wives enjoyed much more rest than their husbands, and fatigue is ever the friend of arithmetical error. Of course, it was all done discretely, out of sight of the rest of the crew, so once again the authority of the male remained inviolate. Perhaps it is appropriate to mention that Mary Blewitt’s Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen has remained in print for the last 65 years (including a German edition); thus there are many modern male yachtsmen who have learned what they know of astronomical navigation from a woman. When she moves on to women working at sea professionally, she provides a most interesting section on work in steamships, which remarkably included female stokers in German merchant ships during the First World War. She also shows how Annalise Sparbier (later Teetz) managed to circumvent the National Socialist obsession with an idealized image of Germanic womanhood, and qualified as a deck officer. The final section covers women sailing in Finnish ships in the 1930s, and includes some rare photographs of Lena Ringbom-Lindén in Viking. Since this involves largely English language sources, and she uses numerous quotations in English, this part feels welltrodden. It has to be said that the concept of having no more than one female trainee deckhand in a ship was deeply flawed, as this ensured that they could only be outsiders. Indeed, in retrospect it might be said that the only surprise was that anything went right, given the hothouse atmosphere of a sailing ship which was entirely isolated for passages of four months or more. After reading of the struggles of those early pioneers, it is pleasing to record that in the modern world of sail training ships women have been fully integrated for more than 30 years, and in the wider field they now serve worldwide in both warships and merchant ships. However, there is no room for complacency, as there are disturbing signs that in deep-sea cargo-ships the situation has regressed. These very large ships are both lean-manned and heavily reliant on cheap Third World labour, and as a result female seafarers often feel isolated, and have to struggle very hard for acceptance. Overall, this is a most interesting book, with much new material. However, Anglophone readers should beware of the English summary, which contains several errors not present in the original German text. I also regret the absence of an index, although the comprehensive table of contents does compensate to some extent. frank scott bognor regis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2015.1067950

A Revolution in Naval Affairs? Technology, Strategy and British Naval Policy in the ‘Fisher Era’

Abstract This article examines the applicability of the concept of ‘revolutions’ in warfare to the study of pre-First World War British naval history. It argues that by attaching an overt degree of importance to the role of technological change in affecting transformations in contemporary views of war-fighting, historians have overlooked many aspects of Admiralty policy that can be better understood in terms of continuity, rather than ‘revolution’.