Castles of Steel (18 page)

None of this gave Ethel what she really wanted. Her husband’s spectacular success and the presence of her two sons were not much good to her as long as she was barred from the summit of society.

[On April 2, 1910, a few months after Beatty became an admiral, a second son, Peter, was born. In his infancy, Peter’s eyelids stuck together when he slept, a condition called ophthalmia neonatorum. This condition, probably acquired from his mother during the process of birth, suggested meningitis. Treated by frequent eye irrigation, the infection cleared up, but, according to Beatty’s nephew, complications over the years indicate that the problem may have been of venereal origin. An even more surprising statement by Charles Beatty is that “David must have known that he could not have been the boy’s father. This was generally accepted in later years and I was told who the other man was: [he came from] a well-known family of the British aristocracy.”

As a mother to David Junior and Peter, Ethel was little better than she had been to the abandoned Ronald. When Peter was two, Ethel left him and went to gamble in Monte Carlo. Beatty, remaining with the boys in London, wrote her that Peter kept saying, over and over, “Mum, Mum, come!” As he grew older, Peter became practically blind, and “meningeal symptoms made it difficult for him to control the nerve reflexes of his head and neck, making him slobber and appear uncouth.” He lived into adulthood, but Ethel, says Charles, “made no secret of her embarrassment at his conspicuous disability in company and in private she often ignored or even mocked him.”]

Her wealth had opened many doors, but her status as a divorced woman had kept the highest door firmly closed. Now Ethel fixed on this new objective: she was determined to be presented at court; if she was not, her husband would quit the navy. As Beatty explained his situation to another officer, “My little lady likes the good things of this world including the gay side of it. She has a nice house in town and is sufficiently supplied with the necessary to be able to live in London and enjoy the entertaining and being entertained that a season produces. And it has undoubtedly struck her that my being in the service precludes her from participating in what to her provides something of the joy of life.” Their friends saw the situation more baldly. “David was threatening to leave the Navy,” said Eugenie Godfrey-Fausset. “Ethel was putting on one of her hysterical acts . . . she would force David to leave the Navy unless she was received at Court.” In 1911, Eugenie’s husband, the naval aide-de-camp and close friend to the new monarch, George V, arranged that Ethel Beatty, formerly Ethel Tree, be formally presented to the King of England.

Even as Ethel triumphed without forcing her husband to leave the navy, Beatty was risking his career on his own. He already had imperiled it by marrying a divorced woman; now he risked it again by refusing a major sea command. In 1911, as a new rear admiral, he was offered the respectable assignment of second in command of the Atlantic Fleet, a command that Jellicoe before him had automatically accepted as a necessary rung on the ladder of promotion. Beatty turned it down. The Atlantic Fleet was based at Gibraltar; Beatty had asked for the Home Fleet, which was more likely to be involved in any coming war with Germany—and which was based closer to home and to Ethel. His refusal, once known, stirred bitterness. Sea commands were scarce; to turn one down seemed almost unthinkable. Many officers senior to him also preferred the Home Fleet and were waiting in line for an appointment. The Sea Lords were shocked by Beatty’s effrontery and Captain Ernest Troubridge, the First Lord’s naval secretary, wrote to him, “The fact is that the Admiralty view is that officers should serve where the Admiralty wish and
not
where they themselves wish.”

Beatty’s friends thought his behavior foolishness, a reckless gamble with his whole future; others described it as insufferable arrogance. Despite his physical courage in the Sudan and China, Beatty’s rapid promotions had not endeared him to his seniors and contemporaries. Many dismissed him as merely a dashing officer suddenly endowed with great wealth whose heart was not in the service. It was said that he had too many interests ashore—a millionaire wife, a place at society dinner tables, polo and foxhunting. Everyone was aware that, without his wife’s money, he could never have challenged the Admiralty. Now, despite his record, he appeared to have gone too far; it was rumored that Beatty would never be offered another assignment. Indeed, for almost two years after his early promotion to admiral, Beatty remained unemployed.

Then, once again, Fortune handed him a prodigious gift. In 1911, when he refused the Atlantic Fleet appointment, Reginald McKenna was First Lord of the Admiralty. In October of that year, Asquith reshuffled his Cabinet, McKenna moved on, and Winston Churchill arrived at the Admiralty. Beatty still had no assignment when Battenberg suggested to the new First Lord that the prickly young admiral had talent and might be useful. Churchill had heard the prevailing gossip that Beatty preferred the life of a wealthy socialite to service in the navy. But the new First Lord was familiar with Beatty’s exploits and navy record and invited the rebellious admiral in to see him. According to Churchill, this was not their first meeting. In his book
My Early Life,
he recalled that fifteen years before, on the eve of the Battle of Omdurman and his own extravagantly self-publicized charge with the 21st Lancers, he was strolling along the west bank of the Nile when he was hailed from a white gunboat anchored twenty or thirty feet from the shore. “The vessel was commanded by a junior naval lieutenant named Beatty. We had a jolly talk across the water while the sun sank. Then came the question, ‘How are you fixed for drinks? Can you catch?’ And a large bottle of champagne was thrown from the gunboat falling into the river near the shore. Happily, a gracious Providence decreed the water to be shallow and the bottom soft.” Churchill promptly “nipped into the water up to my knees and bore the precious gift in triumph back to our Mess.”

Beatty did not remember the episode, but before their late 1911 meeting at the Admiralty, he had no high opinion of Winston Churchill, whom he considered a flamboyant, irresponsible political maverick. In 1902 he had written to Ethel: “You are quite right, Winston Churchill is not nice; in fact, he is what is generally described as a fraud.” His point of view had not changed in December 1909 when it seemed that Churchill might be named to lead the Admiralty: “I see in the papers that Winston Churchill will become First Lord of the Admiralty. No greater blow could possibly be delivered to the British Navy.” Now, at their meeting in Churchill’s office, the thirty-seven-year-old politician and the forty-year-old admiral appealed to each other. (There is an apocryphal story that when Beatty entered his office, Churchill looked up and said, “You seem very young to be an admiral.” Whereupon Beatty is said to have replied, “And you seem very young to be First Lord of the Admiralty.”) In any case, Churchill immediately set aside the Sea Lords’ opinions of Beatty. “My first meeting with the Admiral,” he said, “induced me immediately to disregard their unfortunate advice. He became at once my Naval Secretary.” Privately, Beatty still regarded Winston as an enthusiastic amateur. Writing to Ethel, he said, “I had two hours solid conversation with W.C. . . . I think he had rather a shock at first but in the end he saw things with my eyes.” In April 1913, he wrote, “I hope to be able to squeeze some sense into him.”

Beatty’s new position gave him plenty of opportunity to influence Churchill. By tradition, the First Lord had at his disposal the Admiralty yacht
Enchantress,
a 4,000-ton miniature ocean liner with an exceptional wine cellar, which allowed the political head of the navy to act as seagoing host to any persons he chose. During a Mediterranean cruise in May 1912, Churchill’s guests included Asquith, Asquith’s daughter Violet, Prince Louis of Battenberg, Kitchener, Jacky Fisher, and other senior politicians and military officers on board to participate in decisions about Britain’s strategy in the Mediterranean. Beatty, with unparalleled access to the political and military chieftains of the British empire, nevertheless wrote to Ethel,

Oh dear, I am so tired and bored. Winston talks about nothing but the sea and the Navy. Old Asquith spends his time immersed in a Baedeker Guide and reading extracts to an admiring audience. Prince Louis is, of course, charming but not terribly exciting . . . that old rascal Fisher never stopped talking and has been closeted with Winston. . . . I find this wretched party on board getting duller and duller. Mrs Winston is a perfect fool. Old Asquith is a regular common old tourist. . . . On shore it makes one ashamed to have to introduce him as the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Churchill, of course, did not know what Beatty was writing to his wife, and over the next fifteen months, the young First Lord decided that Beatty “viewed naval strategy and tactics in a different light from the average naval officer; he approached them, it seemed to me, much more as a soldier would. His war experiences on land had illuminated the facts he had acquired in his naval training. His mind had been rendered quick and supple by the situations of polo and the hunting field.” In addition to winning Churchill’s favor, Beatty’s work positioned him splendidly to help himself. It was his duty—as it had been Troubridge’s—to keep track of appointments, to know what posts were becoming vacant, and to supply the First Lord with suggestions in assigning flag officers. From this vantage, a naval secretary could virtually arrange his own next post. In the spring of 1913, command of the Battle Cruiser Squadron, the most coveted appointment possible for a rear admiral, became available, and everything fell into place. “I had no doubts whatever,” Churchill wrote of Beatty later, “in appointing him over the heads of all to this incomparable command, the nucleus as it proved to be of the famous Battle Cruiser Fleet—that supreme combination of speed and power, the strategic cavalry of the Royal Navy.” On March 1, 1913, David Beatty hoisted his admiral’s flag in
Lion,
flagship of the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron.

Command of these fast, powerful ships perfectly suited David Beatty; he led them with the dash and flair that characterized him in the saddle. In war, his tactic was to attack; in peacetime, he burned his restless energy in riding, hunting, or tennis—he played until darkness made the ball invisible. His Flag Captain—the captain of his flagship—Ernle Chatfield, described him as having “a love of doing everything at high pressure and high speed.” His ships and squadron began exercising at 24 knots rather than the usual 14, and firing at 16,000 yards rather than the customary 9,000. His tactics, pushing the offensive and courting risk, differed greatly from those of the Home Fleet commander, Sir George Callaghan, whom Beatty described to Ethel as “a nice old thing, full of sound common sense.” Nor did Beatty wish to keep the image of himself and his squadron hidden from the public. Less than two months after taking command, he invited a well-known naval journalist, Filson Young, to visit
Lion
and observe the battle cruisers exercising at sea. Young took a long walk with Beatty over the Scottish hills, dined with the five captains of Beatty’s force, watched the battle cruisers firing at long range, and was given plenty of time to observe the admiral controlling everything from the flagship’s bridge.

Ethel, whatever the distinction of her husband’s new command, did not change. She continued trying to adjust his schedule to accommodate her own. At one point, Beatty discovered that she was suggesting to the First Lord and to Admiralty officials whom she met in society that the battle cruisers be shuttled from one place to another to suit her own convenience. This time, Beatty’s letter was sharp: “You must not bother Prince Louis or Winston by asking them where we are going and to send them here or there because you want to spend Whitsuntide with me. It won’t do. The Admiralty have a good deal to do without having to consider which port will suit the wives best.”

Nevertheless, Ethel was very much a part of David Beatty’s greatest social triumph when together in St. Petersburg they acted as host and hostess to the Emperor and Empress of Russia. At the end of May 1914, the Admiralty decided to display British naval power in the home waters of the German and Russian empires. In June, Vice Admiral Sir George Warrender led four new dreadnought battleships,
King George V, Ajax, Audacious,
and
Centurion,
into Kiel at the time of the annual yacht races attended by the kaiser. At the same time, Beatty took the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, including
Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary,
and
New Zealand,
farther up the Baltic, to St. Petersburg. Because the head of the Gulf of Finland was too shallow to permit the big ships to come up to the city, they moored in the naval harbor of Kronstadt, twenty miles from the mouth of the Neva River. And no sooner were the four giant ships swinging on their moorings than a smaller vessel, a 200-ton yacht, appeared and dropped her anchor within shouting distance of
Lion.
It was Ethel’s yacht
Sheelah.
During ten days of ceremonial lunches and banquets and visits to the theater, opera, and ballet, Ethel never left David’s side. When Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their four daughters came to lunch on
Lion,
the tsar was shown through the gun turrets and magazines while his daughters were escorted around the deck by four British midshipmen. When Beatty and his captains lunched with the imperial family at the country palace at Tsarskoe Selo, Ethel accompanied them. His own hospitality, Beatty decided, had been too meager, so he invited 2,000 Russian guests to a ball on board the British warships. As this number of guests was beyond the capacity of
Lion
’s broad quarterdeck to accommodate,
New Zealand
was made fast alongside. Her deck provided space for dancing, while the flagship’s deck, covered by red-and-white-striped awnings, was set with 200 circular supper tables. Covered gangways joined the two ships, which were hung with bunting and colored lights. With the help of the British embassy in St. Petersburg, 1,200 bottles of champagne were wrested from diplomatic cellars all over the city. Twenty whole salmon weighing twenty pounds apiece were set in blocks of ice on the serving tables. For Ethel, it was a culmination: here was Ethel Field Tree Beatty of Chicago acting as hostess to the representatives of a 300-year-old imperial dynasty. Nor was this the last of Beatty’s successes that summer. On returning from Russia, he was knighted and on August 2, with war imminent, he was promoted to the rank of acting vice admiral.