Nelson: Britannia's God of War (66 page)

In the same year that the
Victory
began her restoration, the Royal Navy faced up to a very different threat. The cost of the First World War left Britain indebted to the United States, and soon the relationship between the old imperial power and the new naval colossus was deteriorating. For the past two decades Britain’s alliance with Imperial Japan had been the basis of her Far Eastern security, and Japan had adopted the Royal Navy as the model for its own fleet. Proving adept pupils, the Japanese annihilated the Russian navy in 1904–5, to considerable American alarm. Tension between the US and Japan was exacerbated by arguments with over China during the First World War, and the result was a naval arms race in the Pacific. Unwilling to be left behind as the size of battleships continued to escalate, Britain prepared to build her own monster ships. The Americans then used their economic power to call an arms-limitation conference at Washington, which ended the Anglo-Japanese alliance, cut the size of all major fleets, limited the number and size of future warships, and called a ten-year holiday in battleship construction. The Americans had got what they wanted.

Naval arms limitation penalised Britain, which depended on the Navy for security, prosperity and communications, to a far greater extent than continental powers like the USA, Germany or France. Even Japan, as an East Asian power, was less affected. As no limitations were placed on armies and air forces, the treaty greatly reduced the relative effectiveness of naval power. The Washington Treaty had been necessary, but it created as many problems as it solved, and left Britain unable to rebuild the Royal Navy to the strength necessary in the 1930s.

The treaty did at least have one positive short-term consequence. The sudden end of battleship construction left the Americans and Japanese with new ships fitted with sixteen-inch guns: Britain, with no new ships nearing completion, secured the right to build two of this type. This was a priceless opportunity to make a statement about Britain, and reassure the Dominions and the Empire that sea communications were still secure. Consequently the lead ship was named HMS
Nelson,
her
sister the
Rodney.
When she entered service on Trafalgar Day 1927 she was the most powerful ship afloat.
Nelson
served as the fleet flagship until 1941. It was appropriate that Nelson’s name should adorn the mightiest vessel afloat, representing what was still the pre-eminent naval power.
Nelson
was the ultimate expression of Britain’s desire for peace, using the power of her name and her artillery to deter aggression. Throughout her peacetime service the ship carried one of the hero’s less famous coats, a tangible connection with glory.

A less benign celebration of Nelson occurred at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich in June 1933: a grand right-wing pageant staged by its Admiral President, Sir Barry Domvile, and scripted by the deeply unpleasant historian Arthur Bryant.
²⁴
The attempt to appropriate Nelson as a fascist hero would be amusing if it were not so appaling – fortunately a sense of the ridiculous prevented the British taking such posturing seriously. Domvile, once the navy’s most promising young captain, spent the Second World War locked up as a threat to national security; Bryant, who had run with the appeasers and facist apologists, was more nimble, and took thirty pieces of silver to write Churchillian history.
²⁵

An altogether less dangerous approach to the cult of the hero was taking shape across the road in the buildings of the old Royal Hospital School. The school was about to move, and the buildings would be transformed into the National Maritime Museum, under the direction of Geoffrey Callender, lately Professor of Naval History at the Royal Naval College, and editor of the critical edition of Southey. The new museum would be based around the Painted Hall collection begun by Edward Hawke Locker, and the Navy’s own museum, both of which had been in the Naval College buildings. This gave Callender the lion’s share of the great Nelson relics: the coat, swords, the best pictures and numerous other items. With the support of shipping magnate Sir James Caird he was able to extend the collection into new areas, but he never forgot the central place of Nelson to any institution devoted to the history of Britain and the sea. The purchase of important manuscript collections and the creation of a research culture soon made Greenwich the prime destination for Nelson scholars. The restored
Victory,
meanwhile, had its own museum in Portsmouth dockyard, and over time this developed into The Royal Naval Museum, another important collection of Nelson artefacts, archives and ephemera.

*

At the outbreak of the second World War the Navy found itself once more under the political direction of Winston Churchill. His record of interfering, overruling and making mistakes in 1914–15 must have made the signal ‘Winston’s Back’ seem more warning than encouragement to many senior officers. However, this time his finest qualities would be in evidence. In the darkest period of the war, from the fall of France in May 1940 to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Churchill’s belief in ultimate victory, his confidence in the Navy, and his constant references to Nelson imbued his leadership and his speeches with a conviction that no one else in British public life could match. Churchill called Nelson to aid the war effort with far more skill than had been the case a generation earlier. It was perhaps fortunate that his popular book
The
History
of
the
English
Speaking
Peoples
had reached Trafalgar in early September 1939,
²⁶
leaving the subject fresh in his mind. The connection was recalled when he spent a day with the Home Fleet a week later, on board the flagship, HMS
Nelson;
and in February 1940 he observed, ‘The warrior heroes of the past may look down, as Nelson’s monument looks down upon us now, without any feeling that the island race has lost its daring or that the examples which they set in bygone centuries have faded.’
²⁷
Churchill’s admiration of Nelson was evident everywhere, from the bust of the hero that featured in his study at Chartwell to the naming of the Admiralty cat. The feline Nelson, a fine black creature who was often stretched out across Churchill’s bed as he dictated and discussed the war, had to be evacuated to Chequers when he became frightened by the anti-aircraft guns.

It was not just Churchill who made better use of Nelson in the Second World War. The over-centralised, stiff tactical instructions the Royal Navy had used during the First World War were neither in the tradition set by Nelson, nor particularly successful. The approach taken during the Second World War was closer to that of Nelson: officers were enjoined to seek close-range engagement, where the outcome would be decisive, at lower fighting ranges than rival fleets. The 1939 Fighting Instructions opened with a truly Nelsonic injunction:

It was under this system that the navy recovered the initiative, élan and aggression that had made Nelson’s fleets so effective.

On taking over as Prime Minister in May 1940, Churchill faced the gravest crisis since 1805: France was about to surrender, Italy had joined the war and Japan was increasingly hostile. Throughout August, as invasion threatened, Nelson’s heroic example was never far from Churchill’s thoughts. He used Nelson’s line about the want of frigates as the basis for his plea to Roosevelt to supply old destroyers, and told the House of Commons that the government was acting on good precepts in attacking enemy invasion harbours. ‘As in Nelson’s day, the maxim holds, “our First line of Defence is the enemy’s ports.”’ Churchill compared the crisis to ‘when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne’.
²⁹
When the crisis passed his dining club bought him one of Nelson’s gold snuff boxes, with subscriptions from over sixty people, including Lloyd George, J. M. Keynes, Air Marshal Lord Trenchard, Admiral Lord Chatfield, Edwin Lutyens and H. G. Wells. This distinguished list of donors clearly considered that Churchill had earned the right to be linked with the original owner.
³⁰
Later in the war, of course, Churchill would go further and establish himself as a modern equivalent to Nelson, the subject of an equally powerful legend. Only a man so immersed in the naval and military history of Britain would have found inspiration in the past at such times, and only one who shared Nelson’s strong streak of personal vanity would possess the self-belief to stand out against the prevailing gloom.

Churchill’s idolisation of Nelson found sustenance in his repeated viewings at Chequers of Alexander Korda’s
Lady
Hamilton,
produced in 1941. Although Churchill could not resist observing to the director that he had erred in having Big Ben chime fifty years before it was completed,
Lady
Hamilton
became his favourite film, and he never tired of hearing Laurence Olivier deliver the portentous line: ‘You can’t make peace with dictators’ – not surprisingly, since he had written it himself! Though Vivien Leigh’s Emma was too thin, and Olivier’s Nelson had an accent quite unlike his thin nasal Norfolk drawl, this Nelson undoubtedly stood for Britain – the Britain of the Blitz, defying the tyrant. Like the original he had a dry humour, but unlike the hero of 1805 he was fashionably understated and reserved, his upper lip inappropriately stiff.
³¹
Churchill’s staff came to find the film a little wearing, and the senior officers who received Churchill’s
Nelsonian missives after he had viewed it cannot have found advice such as ‘No Captain can do very wrong …’ particularly welcome.
³²

The year after Korda’s film was released, an edited version of Mahan’s
Life
was published by Penguin, pioneers of the cheap paperback. The unnamed editor cut ‘a considerable amount of material, dealing with Nelson’s early career and domestic life’. In his foreword, A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, stressed that the book would enable thousands ‘to learn from Mahan something about the creation by Nelson of the tradition of Britain’s mission at sea, which has done so much to make today’s victories possible.’ Alexander also implied that Mahan’s book had been chosen to express the nation’s gratitude to the Americans, now that all had combined under ‘the flags of freedom’.
³³

The physical locations associated with Nelson, too, played an important role as a focus for national identity throughout the war. Down in Portsmouth, the
Victory
was visited by countless heads of state, military leaders and other worthies, paying tribute to the man who died saving Europe from tyranny. She was hit by German bombs, but fortunately no serious damage was done. Her survival, like that of St Paul’s, only increased the talismanic quality of the man. HMS
Nelson,
meanwhile, served throughout the war, being mined twice, and hit by a torpedo. After forming the backbone of the initial British war effort, securing command of the sea and escorting several crucial Malta convoys, she spent the second half of the war supporting a succession of amphibious landings, on Sicily, and Salerno in July to September 1943. The success of these landings led Italy to seek an armistice, the official ceremony taking place on board the
Nelson
in the Grand Harbour at Malta on 29 September 1943. In June 1944
Nelson
supported the D-Day landings, and completed her service operating on the Malayan coast against the Japanese. At the end of the war, the natural focal point for the VE Day and VJ Day celebrations was Trafalgar Square: civilians mixed freely and jubilantly amid a sea of uniforms from many nations. However, the man the square commemorated passed out of the minds of the nation, as it turned from war to peace, from danger to opportunity. Nelson, like Churchill, was a hero for times of war: now new heroes were needed.

*

In the aftermath of a second total war, Britain was exhausted and bankrupt – and yet she recovered, as the Beveridge Report and the
arrival of the Welfare State gave people a new belief in their leaders and new enthusiasm for the future. Perhaps it was time to shed the old ideas of Britain, and the old heroes who sustained it? The Empire, rigid class barriers, deference and deprivation were consigned to the history books, and with them went much of the justification for Nelson. Having been transformed by the late Victorians into the creator,or saviour of their Empire, he was now guilty by association of all the crimes and misdemeanours that it soon became fashionable to load onto Britain. He was a symbol from the bad old past, and would soon be subverted and mocked. Once again the historical Nelson was irrelevant to this process: it was the Victorian image, not the Georgian hero, who earned the ridicule of the anti-imperialists. Even the strategic pattern suggested the time had come to abandon Nelson: in an age of jet bombers, ballistic missiles and atomic bombs, surely the future lay with air power?

After the war HMS
Nelson
resumed her role as Flagship of the Home Fleet, but only briefly, and after a period in the training squadron she was sold in February 1948, suffering the ultimate indignity of being used to test RAF bombs before being scrapped. She was replaced not by a new aircraft carrier, or a powerful cruiser, but by a concrete accommodation block in Portsmouth – an absurd waste of the most powerful name in naval history. It is inexplicable and shameful that this situation should continue into the twenty-first century: no other navy in the world would waste the names of their greatest naval heroes – Nelson, Collingwood, Drake – on barrack blocks and training establishments. Surely Britain can find a ship to honour the greatest name in naval history?