Today’s birthdayists include Academy Award-winning actor, director and producer Clint Eastwood (96), human rights activist, author and long-time hostage Sir Terry Waite (87), actress Sharon Gless (83), model and Pineapple Dance Studios founder Debbie Moore (80), Marmalade founding member and lead guitarist Junior Campbell (79), former Republican Congressman and Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Duncan Hunter (78), Academy Award-winning actor, director and screenwriter Tom Berenger (77), Lord in Waiting and former Labour MP Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (67), actress, Back to the Future stalwart and 1980s Hollywood youth icon Lea Thompson (65), former Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán (63), President of the Actors’ Equity Association, model, actress and producer Brooke Shields (61), actor Colin Farrell (50) and singer-songwriter Azealia Banks (35).
Stale cake and flat prosecco for the dearly departed among whom are numbered mother of Henry VII, patron of learning and hard-as-nails survivor Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443), poet, essayist and journalist Walt Whitman (1819), economist, philosopher and co-founder of Newnham College, Cambridge, Henry Sidgwick (1838), Chairman of Harland and Wolff, Lord Mayor of Belfast, member of the Senate of Northern Ireland and last-minute cancellation on RMS Titanic’s maiden voyage Viscount Pirrie (1847), microbiologist and inventor of the eponymous dish Julius Richard Petri (1852), Pope Pius XI (1857), painter, printmaker but not Jack the Ripper on balance Walter Sickert (1860), early-adopter Nazi leader and Gauleiter of Bavaria Gregor Strasser (1892), Methodist minister and The Power of Positive Thinking author Norman Vincent Peale (1898), veteran actor Don Ameche (1908), long-time actress and professional old lady Edna Doré (1921), actress, singer and The Third Man standout Alida Valli (Freiin Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg) (1921), scene-stealing character actor Denholm Elliott (1922), Prince Rainier III of Monaco (1923), Labour MP, Deputy Prime Minister, Jaguar enthusiast and have-a-go pugilist Lord Prescott (1938), Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham (1948) and famously unlucky and accident-prone Formula 1 driver Andrea de Cesaris (1959).
A great but indecisive clash of fleets
110 yeas ago today, the largest naval battle of the First World War, the Battle of Jutland, took place in the North Sea. Naval rivalry had been no small impetus for the war but it was nearly two years after the outbreak of hostilities that the two main naval forces, the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet and the Imperial German Navy’s High Seas Fleet, eventually faced each other at full strength. 250 fighting ships converged, yet the outcome of the battle was in some ways inconclusive, and in others a sideshow to the main war effort which, for the Western Allies, was in the mud and trenches and dugouts of Belgium and France.
On the British side, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, had been in post since the beginning of the war. Formerly Second Sea Lord at the Admiralty, he had been appointed in August 1914 when the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had unceremoniously removed 61-year-old Admiral Sir George Cunningham despite previous assurances his tenure would last at lest until the end of that year. The following year Cunningham had become Commander-in-Chief, The Nore, a far less important operational command based at Chatham, and remained bitter about his treatment; Jellicoe too had been uneasy and initially reluctant to accept the command of the Grand Fleet, appalled at the way Cunningham had been handled.
Jellicoe was 56 and had commanded a rifle company of the Naval Brigade during the Second Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 as well as learning his trade as a sailor. (The Royal Navy frequently assembled temporary units for fighting on land in the Victorian period.) He then trained as a gunnery officer, served on the Admiralty’s Ordnance Committee and was badly wounded by a gunshot through his left lung at the Battle of Beicang while Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief, China Station, Admiral Sir Edward Seymour, during the Boxer Rebellion. He confounded medical expectations by surviving and went on to alternate between senior commands at sea and positions in the Admiralty in London, becoming a protégé of Admiral Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord 1904-10 and 1914-15.
Across the North Sea, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, 52, had only taken command of the High Seas Fleet in January 1916, when Admiral Hugo von Pohl had resigned due to the liver cancer which would kill him the next month. He had until then been commander of III Battle Squadron: V Division comprised the four most modern dreadnoughts of the Imperial Germany Navy, the König-class SMS König, SMS Grosser Kurfürst, SMS Markgraf and SMS Kronprinz; VI Division was made up of five Kaiser-class dreadnoughts only slightly older, SMS Kaiser, SMS Friedrich der Grosse, SMS Kaiserin, SMS Prinzregent Luitpold and SMS König Albert.
Scheer had advocated using his powerful force to raid the British coast and attempt to draw out groups of Royal Navy ships rather than the full, numerically superior Grand Fleet; he shared the idea with the previous Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, but his superior was overcautious, and when the German fleet had bombarded Scarborough, Hartlepool, West Hartlepool and Whitby in December 1914, Ingenohl had subsequently ordered a withdrawal rather than confront a smaller British force which had advanced to meet his vessels. But Ingenohl’s replacement by Pohl maintained the innate caution, with only five minor and ineffective fleet actions during the rest of 1915, none more than 120 miles of Heligoland. Scheer on appointment crystallised his more aggressive doctrine in a memorandum entitled “Guiding Principles for Sea Warfare in the North Sea” (Die Leitsätze für die Seekriegsführung in der Nordsee), which was approved by the Kaiser in February 1916. Now the High Seas Fleet could undertake bolder and more provocative action.
(Both men would go on to head their respective navies: Jellicoe was First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff from November 1916 to January 1918, while Scheer was Chief of the Naval Warfare Command and Chief of the Admiralty Staff from August to November 1918.)
The United Kingdom and the Empire had declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914 after the latter ignored an ultimatum to withdraw its forces from Belgium. Just over two weeks later, on 20 August, the British government—formally through George V—issued an Order in Council which declared the intention to act in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of London of 1909 with regard to intercepting commercial shipping going to and from Germany. This was the basis of the naval blockade of Germany by which the Allied Powers hoped to undermine their enemy’s war effort.
German military planners had long been conscious of their vulnerability to a maritime blockade, and it was one of the drivers behind the development of the Schlieffen Plan; Field Marshal Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1891 to 1906, had worked on the assumption that in the event of general hostilities, for various reasons, Germany would need to fight and win a short and decisive war. One consequence of this was that little planning had been done on maintaining supply chains not only for materials vital to the war effort but also basic foodstuffs. When the war began, Germany only had three to six months’ worth of materials like coal, oil, rubber and iron ore.
Although the word was carefully avoided, by 1916 Britain had imposed a virtually complete blockade on Germany. Imports and exports had fallen by about half of pre-war levels, and staples like grain, potatoes, meat and dairy products were beginning to run short. An elaborate system of rationing had been introduced in January 1915 but it had also fuelled the trade on the black market; at times, the available ration amounted to only 1,000 calories a day. And while the Imperial German Navy had declared the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1915, it had antagonised the still-neutral United States, and, in any event, striking at Allied commercial shipping—which was initially very successful—did little to alleviate the shortages in Germany.
On 25 April 1916, with the disadvantages of the policy becoming obvious, the Chief of the Admiralty Staff, Grand Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, who had been recalled from retirement the previous year, issued an order to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare. Henceforth submarines would have to give merchant ships warning and allow them time to evacuate their crews, and vessels from neutral countries would not be attacked at all. Holtzendorff would soon be converted to unrestricted warfare, but for the time being it left Scheer dismayed; he believed—almost certainly rightly—that the conditions imposed would make the use of submarines virtually impossible or at least ineffective, as well as rendering submarines vulnerable to even small guns on merchant ships.
But something had to be done. Instead Scheer made plans to use the submarine fleet to attack Royal Navy vessels, hoping that this would force the British to concentrate many of their ships, especially smaller ships like destroyers, on anti-submarine duties. If that happened, he reasoned, he might be able to achieve the objective he had been arguing for since the beginning of the war: luring small groups of ships from the Grand Fleet out into the North Sea and engaging them on more or less equal terms.
The arithmetic underlying Scheer’s strategy was undeniable and unavoidable. By 1916, the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet had 28 dreadnought and super-dreadnought battleships, of which the most modern, the Revenge-class, were only just in service: HMS Revenge had been commissioned in February 1916, HMS Royal Sovereign in April and HMS Royal Oak in May. In addition, there were nine battlecruisers, faster but more lightly armoured warships which acted as the Grand Fleet’s scouting and strike force.
The High Seas Fleet under Scheer had 16 battleships and five battlecruisers, so was at a considerable numerical disadvantage. This was an act of policy on Britain’s part: the Naval Defence Act 1889 had imposed the “two-power standard” which required the Royal Navy to maintain a strength at least equal to the next two largest navies in the world; when the act had been passed, these had been France and Russia, but the time of the First World War, Germany and the United States had displaced them (although the United States Navy was not yet equipped or prepared to operate on a global scale). The Royal Navy had been the dominant maritime power since the defeat of Napoleon 100 years before; Scheer knew this, and knew that he had to find other ways to take on Britain at sea.
Scheer devised a plan to deploy his submarine force offshore from the Royal Navy’s main bases, stage a provocative action with his surface fleet in the North Sea and hope to draw out British warships which would then fall prey to the waiting U-boats. The operation was at first scheduled for 17 May, then 23 May, then 29 May. But by 28 May there were strong winds which would prevent the German Navy’s airships from operating, and Scheer relied on these to give him advance warning of approaching British warships. But he no longer had the luxury of time: the submarines could only remain on station until 1 June, when they would have to return to port for supplies. An alternative plan was formed to send a force of battlecruisers to the Skagerrak, the channel between Denmark and Norway leading into the Baltic Sea, where it was thought they were likely to encounter merchant ships carrying British cargo and British patrol ships.
The German High Seas Fleet was ordered to gather at the Jade Bight off the coast of northern Germany and be ready for action by midnight on 28/29 May. Still Scheer waited in case the winds dropped and his original plan could be resumed, but it was in vain. At 2.00 pm on 30 May, the coded signal 31 May G.G.2490 was transmitted to the High Seas Fleet informing its commanders that the operation in the Skagerrak would commence the following day, 31 May.
What Scheer did not know was that German naval signals were being intercepted by the Admiralty in London, and its cryptanalysis section known as Room 40 had a copy of the main codebook which had been recovered by the Russians from the light cruiser SMS Magdeburg in 1914. By 11.00 am on 30 May, therefore, Jellicoe knew that the High Seas Fleet was preparing to put to sea the following day, and by 5.00 pm he had the coded signal 31 May G.G.2490. Although the Admiralty’s cryptographers could not tell him what it meant, it was a clear indication that a major German operation was imminent.
Not knowing Scheer’s objective, Jellicoe hedged his bets. He ordered the Grand Fleet to make for a position off the coast of Norway, from where he could intercept the German vessels either heading west for the Atlantic shipping lanes, or attempting to enter the Baltic Sea through the Skagerrak. This was in one way what Scheer wanted but in another his potential nemesis: he hoped that by making his fleet’s presence in the approaches to the Skagerrak known, he would attract a handful of British ships he could outnumber and defeat, but instead he was drawing the whole of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet into a confrontation, one it seemed impossible that he could win.
Converging from Scapa Flow, Cromarty and Rosyth on a position 90 miles west of the Skagerrak, Jellicoe had a force which comprised 28 dreadnoughts, nine battlecruisers, eight armoured cruisers, 26 light cruisers, 79 destroyers and a seaplane carrier. If he could concentrate all of his ships in one place, it was a force of devastating firepower. The heaviest armament came in the form of the 15-inch guns on the Revenge-class battleships, each with four twin turrets: in theory they had a range of nearly 30,000 yards, but, even though that would be considerably less in combat, they could still expect a range of around 20,000 yards—11 or 12 miles. The total weight of broadside of the Grand Fleet—the weight of all the projectiles fired by all of the ships’ broadside-firing guns—was 332,360 lbs, an almost unimaginable figure.
The force which Scheer had assembled was substantial: 16 dreadnoughts, six older pre-dreadnought battleships, five battlecruisers, 11 light cruisers and 61 destroyers. But, as he was soon to find out, that left him heavily outnumbered, and the weight of broadside mustered by the High Seas Fleet says it all: 134,216 lbs, less than half of their opponents’ firepower.
The first German formation to head out to see was the I Scouting Group under Vice Admiral Franz Hipper. It consisted of five new or relatively new battlecruisers: SMS Lützow, Hipper’s flagship; her sister ship SMS Derfflinger; SMS Seydlitz; SMS Moltke; and SMS Von der Tann. Hipper also had five light cruisers and 30 torpedo boats. By 9.00 am I Scouting Group had cleared the minefield surrounding the Amrum channel and sailed into the open seas, making north-west for Little Fisher Bank at the mouth of the Skagerrak. Fifty miles behind them was the main part of the High Seas Fleet; all were line head, in a long column ships. The wind had, at last, slackened enough that Scheer could launch his airships, and by 11.30 am there were five Zeppelins aloft; but visibility was poor that morning, with a cloud base at only 1,000 feet.
The vanguard of the Grand Fleet was Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet. At its core were six modern battlecruisers: Beatty’s flagship HMS Lion; her sister ship HMS Princess Royal; HMS Queen Mary; HMS Tiger, the most heavily armoured battlecruiser; HMS Indefatigable; and her sister HMS New Zealand, which had been funded by the New Zealand government. Beatty also had 13 light cruisers, 18 destroyers and a seaplane carrier, HMS Engadine, which had a hangar astern for two Short Type 184 reconnaissance seaplanes and two Sopwith Baby fighter seaplanes.
By 2.00 pm, the Battle Cruiser Fleet, steaming eastwards, was at roughly the same latitude as Hipper’s I Scouting Group heading north. If Beatty had continued on his course he would have passed between the two German forces, 40 miles south of Hipper and 20 miles north of the main fleet, but his orders were to steam to a point 260 miles east of the British coast and then turn north to link up with Jellicoe and the rest of the Grand Fleet coming from Scapa Flow and Cromarty. As he made the turn, he deployed the Battle Cruiser Fleet into three columns. It would not be long now.
At 2.20 pm, scouts from Beatty’s force, which had made to investigate what turned out to be a neutral Danish steamer, N.J. Fjord, reported enemy ships to the south-east. They were two German destroyers, B109 and B110, who were engaged in the same task as their British counterparts. At 2.28 pm, the first shots of the battle were fired: the light cruisers HMS Galatea and HMS Phaeton, opened fire on the German ships, which withdrew towards their own light cruiser force. At 2.36 pm, the German light cruiser SMS Elbing fired at HMS Galatea with her 5.9-inch main guns and, despite the extreme range of over 14,000 yards, scored a direct hit—but the shell failed to explode and caused minimal damage.
The Battle of Jutland had begun.
Beatty now changed course south-east then east: he wanted to cut the German ships off from their bases and isolate them. But the 5th Battle Squadron of Vice Admiral Sir Hugh Evan-Thomas did not receive the signal to change course, the distance being too great for flags to be used and HMS Tiger, the last ship in Beatty’s column, being too far from Evan-Thomas to communicate by searchlight. The four Queen Elizabeth-class battleships of the 5th Battle Squadron therefore continued on their original course for several minutes, and by the time the mistake was rectified, Evan-Thomas was 10 miles behind Beatty rather than the previous five. But Beatty erred too by continuing at full speed, faster than Evan-Thomas’s ships could go, stretching his force out rather than using the time to concentrate his ships.
Hipper sighted Beatty’s fleet at 3.22 pm at a range of 15 miles, but because of the nature of the weather and the clouds, the British ships did not identify their German counterparts until 3.30 pm. At 3.45 pm, Hipper turned his I Scouting Group south-east to draw Beatty towards the main High Seas Fleet 46 miles away. Beatty’s ships outnumbered and outgunned those of Hipper, but he did nothing yet, and at 3.48 pm, when the two forces were roughly parallel at a distance of 15,000 yards, it was Hipper’s ships which opened fire first. The exchange was chaotic: the first shots in response from the British ships were long because of the poor visibility, and it took them time to find the right range. Only HMS Lion and HMS Princess Royal had taken up position, so the other four ships were trying to navigate into position and hit their opponents at the same time. To compound matters, the British were windward of the Germans, so funnel and gunsmoke hampered Beatty’s gunnery while Hipper had no such difficulty.
SMS Moltke was taking fire from two Britsh battlecruisers but returned fire with a great degree of accuracy, hitting HMS Tiger nine times in the first 12 minutes of the engagement. All told, Hipper’s five ships scored hits of three of Beatty’s six, and it ws seven minutes before the British achieved their first hit.
At 4.00 pm, a 12-inch shell from SMS Lützow, Hipper’s flagship, hit Beatty’s flagship HMS Lion midships, wrecking Q turret and causing heavy casualties. At 4.02 pm, HMS Indefatigable was struck aft by three 11-inch shells from SMS Von der Tann, knocking her out of line and detonating the magazine of X turret. Another shell hit A turret and caused another magazine explosion, this time ripping the ship apart and sinking her. Of the crew of 1,019, there were two survivors. By 4.15 pm, the 5th Battle Squadron finally caught up and began to engage Hipper’s ships, but the German admiral knew his job was almost done, as they were closing on Scheer and the High Seas Fleet.
At 4.25 pm, HMS Queen Mary was hit by a combined salvo from SMS Derfflinger and SMS Seydlitz which caused explosions in both forward magazines. The ship blew up and folded in on herself as she sank, only the masts visible through the smoke, bowing inwards to each other as HMS Queen Mary went under with a loss of 1,266 crew. A minute later, a shell struck HMS Princess Royal, obscured by shell bursts and spray, and at first it was reported that she too had blown up. Beatty turned to his Flag Captain, Captain Ernle Chatfield.
Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.
The leading battleships of Scheer’s High Seas Fleet sighted the battlecruiser engagement at 4.30 pm. When, shortly afterwards, HMS Southampton reported to Beatty a force of 16 dreadnoughts and six older battleships, it was the first time that Beatty and Jellicoe discovered that the full High Seas Fleet had deployed. The Battle Cruiser Squadron now mirrored Hipper’s manoeuvre, as Beatty turned north again to try to lead Scheer’s fleet towards Jellicoe. At 4.47 pm, having assessed the situation, Jellicoe signalled to his captains that the great fleet-on-fleet action everyone had expected for so long was about to begin. He informed the Admiralty by radio at 4.51 pm.
At about 6.00 pm, Hipper’s battlecruisers, having sustained considerable damage, turned away from. the enemy and towards the protection of the main fleet. At the same time, Jellicoe sighted Beatty’s flagship, HMS Lion, and signalled to ask where the German warships were. But Beatty could no longer see the Germans and it took almost a quarter of an hour for him to respond to Jellicoe. Meanwhile the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet was receiving a flurry of vague, inaccurate and contradictory reports about Scheer’s position. He needed to know when to deploy his ships from their cruising formation of six columns of four into a single battle line, but that was impossible to determine without knowing how far away the High Seas Fleet was. The stakes was as high as they could be, as making the wrong decision could put him at a fatal disadvantage. At 6.15 pm, Jellicoe made his choice: he deployed the Grand Fleet to the east, taking it further away from its opponent but holding out he opportunity of “crossing the T” of Scheer’s line and ensuring that the German ships would be silhouetted by the setting sun in the west, while his own would be harder to distinguish in the failing light.
The fleets met at 6.30 pm. Scheer at this point did not even know that the Grand Fleet was at sea, and it was with astonishment that German sailors saw the British ships emerging from the smoke and mist of the evening, drawn up line ahead and promptly crossing the T of Scheer’s fleet, as Jellicoe had hoped. The whole line of British ships could use their guns, but only the lead two or three German ships could respond, giving a devastating imbalance of firepower. In the poor visibility, however, the encounter only lasted a few minutes, though HMS Iron Duke scored a number of hits on the lead German warship SMS König.
Scheer realised the calculus was now hopelessly against him, and order the High Seas Fleet to put about. In unison, as they practiced repeatedly, the German ships turned by 180°, a manoeuvre known as a Gefechtskehrtwendung nach Steuerbord (“battle about turn to starboard”). Later Scheer would say:
It was now obvious that we were confronted by a large portion of the English fleet. The entire arc stretching from north to east was a sea of fire. The flash from the muzzles of the guns was seen distinctly through the mist and smoke on the horizon, although the ships themselves were not distinguishable.
Jellicoe did not immediately pursue for fear of German torpedo boats threatening his capital ships, but headed south to ensure he remained to the east of the High Seas Fleet, cutting it off from its home ports. Scheer was now in a difficult position. It was not yet dark enough to evade Jellicoe safely, so at 6.55 pm he turned his fleet back to the east. This would take him towards the Grand Fleet, but, he reasoned, “the manoeuvre would be bound to surprise the enemy, to upset his plans for the rest of the day, and if the blow fell heavily it would facilitate the breaking loose at night”.
At 7.15 pm, Jellicoe crossed the T of Scheer’s line again, this time more effectively, with five German battleships being hit by gunfire. Two minutes later, Scheer again made an about turn, but it was less regimented and controlled as his ships had to perform the manoeuvre under heavy fire. To try to prevent a pursuit, Scheer made a fateful decision. He ordered his destroyers to make a major torpedo attack on the Grand Fleet, and instructed his four remaining battlecruisers to steam towards the British. Having lost his flagship, Hipper was still on board a torpedo boat, so leading the battlecruisers into their “death ride”, as it was dubbed, was SMS Derfflinger, commanded by Captain Johannes Hartog. All except SMS Moltke were hit and sustained damage as they were targeted by 18 British battleships. In an engagement which lasted until around 7.30 pm, the German ships were hit 37 times—SMS Derfflinger alone sustained 14 hits—but, incredibly, despite heavy casualties, none was sunk, and they veered away from the Grand Fleet gratefully, their job done.
Laying smoke to shield his ships and protected by his torpedo boats harassing Jellicoe, Scheer was now slipping away from the Grand Fleet as the light failed. Jellicoe was forced to make a turn away to avoid a spread of torpedos and it cost him time which probably ensured the escape of the High Seas Fleet. From 8.19 pm to 8.35 pm, there was a last flurry of exchanged of gunfire between the capital ships as Beatty’s battlecruisers launched one more attack on their German counterparts. When the firing stopped, it was the last exchange between capital ships of the Battle of Jutland—and, though no-one could know it, of the First World War.
There were clumsy scraps during the night but by 5.00 am the following morning, 1 June, Scheer’s fleet was safely out of Jellicoe’s clutches. The battle, so long anticipated, had been strangely inconclusive, neither side delivering a decisive blow but both claiming victory. The Royal Navy lost three battlecruisers, three armoured cruisers and six destroyers, and a total of 6,094 officers and men. The Imperial German Navy lost one battlecruiser, one pre-dreadnought battleship, four light cruisers and five torpedo boats as well as 2,5551 officers and men. From that point of view, then, the British had suffered much heavier losses. But that was not the full story.
Strategically, the Battle of Jutland had been a complete failure for Germany, or rather it had illustrated the weakness of her position. The Grand Fleet was unhindered in the North Sea, ready to sail within a few days and able to continue the blockade. By contrast, Scheer’s strategy of forcing limited engagements with small numbers of British ships in an attempt to whittle away the Grand Fleet’s numerical superiority had clearly failed. He knew that another battle of attrition like Jutland would be disastrous for the High Seas Fleet, and indeed the fleet would only put to sea three more times in the war, all for minor raids, in August and October 1916 and April 1918.
The real lesson of the Battle of Jutland was that major fleet encounters, although he navies which they demanded had been a key factor in provoking the war, were fast becoming old-fashioned. Submarines, torpedos and mines had shifted the balance of power, and aircraft would do so even more dramatically in the Second World War. Jutland hinted at that, as it confirmed British mastery of the seas for the remainder of the war. It had been an expensive lesson in blood and treasure, but it was one that had to be learned.
Saints’ world, party time, excellent
Today is the feast of St Petronilla (1st or 3rd century AD); of St Hermias (d AD 160); and of SS Cantius, Cantianus, and Cantianilla (d AD 304)
It is World No Tobacco Day, sponsored by the World Health Organization, but I’m not here to judge, you do you.
In Australia, it is Borobi Day, raising awareness of indigenous languages.
Brunei Darussalam celebrates Armed Forces Day (Hari Ulang Tahun Angkatan Bersenjata Diraja), marking the 65th anniversary of the establishment of the Brunei Malay Regiment (Askar Melayu Brunei) in 1961. On this day in 1965 it was honoured as the Royal Brunei Malay Regiment (Askar Melayu Diraja Brunei) and then renamed the Royal Brunei Land Forces (Tentera Darat Diraja Brunei) on 1 January 1984 when Brunei gained its independence from the United Kingdom. Numbering 3,000 personnel, it is the land component of the Royal Brunei Armed Forces (Angkatan Bersenjata Diraja Brunei).
Factoids
After he was elected as MP for Holborn and St Pancras in May 2015, Sir Keir Starmer was appointed a Shadow Home Office Minister dealing with immigration in September by the new Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Lyn Brown spoke on crime reduction, Sarah Champion was in charge of safeguarding and Jack Dromey took the policing brief. For the next nine months, until he resigned, Starmer’s boss was the Shadow Home Secretary—Andy Burnham.
Sir Keir Starmer is currently the 43rd longest serving Prime Minister (of 58), having been in office for nearly 23 months. If he is to move up the ranking, he will need to remain Prime Minister until 17 August, when he will overtake the Earl of Aberdeen (1852-55); on 20 September he will pass the Earl of Chatham (1766-68) and on 30 September he will overtake George Grenville (1763-65). On 7 November he would move past Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1906-08) and on 17 November Spencer Perceval (1809-12). After that he would need to hold on for another 98 days to exceed Gordon Brown’s tenure (2007-10), taking him into February 2027, which is a lot to ask in the current circumstances.
The Corbyn years were strange ones for the Labour Party and for British politics. A selection of people who served at one point in the Shadow Cabinet of whom you might not have expected that: Ian Lavery, Nia Griffith, Diane Abbott, Kate Osamor, Richard Burgon, Peter Dowd, Rachael Maskell, Kerry McCarthy, Grahame Morris, Dave Anderson, Kelvin Hopkins and Paul Flynn.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) had a brief time in the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Leader of the House of Commons from June to October 2016 (initially as a temporary appointment) and Shadow Welsh Secretary from July to October. When he first spoke from the despatch box on 30 June 2016, he was 81 years old, and believed to have been the oldest person to speak from the front bench since William Gladstone, who was 84 years two months old when he stepped down as Prime Minister in March 1894. Sir Winston Churchill retired as Prime Minister in April 1955, aged 80.
That only applies to the House of Commons, of course. Members of the House of Lords often have rather more longevity: for example, Viscount Addison, Lord President and Leader of the House of Lords under Clement Attlee, left office in October 1951 at the age of 82. The Marquess of Ripon was three weeks shy of 81 when he resigned as Lord Privy Seal in October 1908, while the Earl of Balfour was seven weeks off his 81st birthday when he left office as Lord President of the Council in June 1929. Viscount Wolverhampton (Henry Fowler) was 80 when stepped down as Lord President of the Council in June 1910.
Tracy Brabin, Labour MP for Batley and Spen 2016-21, must surely be the only person to sit in a Shadow Cabinet and to have appeared in no fewer than three of the country’s leading soap operas. She played Tricia Armstrong in 193 episodes of Coronation Street from 1994 to 1997 (having appeared in two episodes as a different character, Chloe, in 1989), appeared as Roxy Drake in seven episodes of EastEnders in 2001 and was then cast as Carole in seven episodes of Emmerdale in 2014. She also appeared as three different characters in Casualty in 2007, 2009 and 2014, and two different characters in Holby City in 2001 and 2005. In October 2016, she was elected as Member of Parliament for Batley and Spen after the murder of the previous MP, Jo Cox, and from January to April 2020 she was Shadow Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary. She stood down from the House of Commons in May 2021, having been elected Mayor of West Yorkshire, and won a second term in May 2024.
If, dear readers, you are as familiar with Anglo-Saxon history as I know you will be, you will be familiar with Æthelred II, King of the English (AD 978-1013, 1014-16), remembered by posterity as Ethelred the Unready, and Harald III, King of Norway (1046-66). You will of course be aware that “Unready” is a mistranslation of unræd, an epithet not recorded until the 13th century and meaning not “Unready” in the sense of unprepared but rather “ill counsel” or badly advised. As a punning nickname it made sense because the King’s name in Old English, Æþelræd, is a compound of æþele, “noble” and ræd, “counsel”; it was therefore a sardonic commentary on his tempestuous reign to dub him “Noble counsel ill counsel” (I realise it’s not going to win the Perrier Award, or rather the Donald and Eleanor Taffner Best Comedy Show Award now, but times were different). You might (or might not) also be interested to learn that Harald III’s most commonly remembered epithet, “Hardrada”, comes from the Old Norse harðráði, the meaning of which is not so very different from Æþelræd: it can be translated as “hard in counsel”, “tyrannical”, “hard-ruled” or “savage in counsel”, but also as “tough”, “severe” or “resolute”, bringing it much closer to the Old English of “noble counsel”. Harald was also dubbed hárfagri (“hair-beautiful” or “fairhair”), while the chronicler Adam of Bremen described him as the “Thunderbolt of the North”. His patronymic was Sigurðarson, after his father Sigurd Syr, petty king of Ringerike.
The longest ever speech in the House of Commons was delivered on 7 February 1828 by the Whig MP for Winchelsea, Henry Brougham (Lord Chancellor 1830-34 as Lord Brougham and Vaux). A Scotsman who was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates, he was then called to the English Bar and represented seats in England in the House of Commons before being ennobled. He was an impressive orator and a passionate supporter of the abolition of the slave trade, of constitutional, parliamentary and legal reform and of better education for the poor. His speech, of which Hansard published a script supplied by Brougham himself, was on the subject of the state of the courts of Common Law. To modern ears is it florid and occasionally ponderous: of the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, he remarks “if he were disposed to say, ‘Thus far have I gone, and no further can I go with you’, the gratitude of his country would still be due to him in an eminent degree, for having abashed the worst enemies of improvement, by his countenance and support”. In Brougham’s time the senior courts sat in Westminster Hall and, as he alludes to in his speech, there were three Common Law courts: the Court of King’s Bench, originally dealing with pleas to the Crown and later with cases involving violence; the Court of Common Pleas, to hear cases between individual subjects in which the Crown was not involved; and the Court of Exchequer, originally responsible for hearing revenue cases. But by the 19th century there was virtually no distinction between the three institutions in terms of jurisdiction, it had become customary to speak of the “twelve justices” of the three courts, and assize cases were shared equally between them. Brougham argued that this was unnecessary and would lead to the best judges and lawyers and the most attractive cases going predominantly to one court, which wouldthen become overburdened. In 1823, 43,465 actions were brought in the King’s Bench, 13,009 in the Common Pleas and 6,778 in the Exchequer of Pleas. Brougham concluded by moving “That an humble Address be presented to his Majesty, praying that he will graciously be pleased to issue a Commission for inquiring into the defects, occasioned by time and otherwise, in the Laws of this realm of England, as administered in the Courts of Common Law, and the remedies which may be expedient for the same”. Brougham himself, as Lord Chancellor, was able to oversee the appointment by Letters Patent on 23 July 1833 a Royal Commission on the Criminal Law, which was dissolved on 22 February 1845 and replaced by a Royal Commission on Revising and Consolidating the Criminal Law; the former produced eight reports and the latter six. One eventual result, though the pace of reform was extremely slow, was the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873, which reorganised the judicial system into the High Court of Justice, consisting of five divisions, the King’s Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer, Chancery, and Probate, Divorce and Admiralty (of which Common Pleas and Exchequer were abolished in 1880); and the Court of Appeal.
Part of Saddam Hussein’s manufacturing infrastructure for weapons of mass destruction was a chemical plant called Falluja 2, 50 miles from Baghdad and near Habbaniya Air Base (RAF Habbaniya until the British withdrawal from Iraq in 1959). It was constructed in the late 1980s for Iraq’s State Enterprise for Pesticide Production (a cover name for the country’s chemical weapons research programme) by a British company, Uhde Ltd, for the production of chlorine and caustic soda, the former of which can be an ingredient of mustard gas. Despite warnings from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence and the intelligence services, the Department of Trade and Industry declined to intervene and providd insurance guarantees for Uhde Ltd. Paul Channon, Minister for Trade 1983-86, told colleagues, “A ban would do our other trade prospects in Iraq no good”. Uhde Ltd was at that time owned by Frankfurt-am-Main-based Hoechst AG, which had acquired the parent company Uhde GmbH in 1952 (and sold it to Krupp AG in 1996). Founded in 1863 as Teerfarbenfabrik Meister, Lucius & Co, Hoechst became on 2 December 1925 one of the six founding companies of chemical conglomerate I.G. Farbenindustrie AG (more commonly known just as IG Farben), along with Agfa, BASF, Bayer, Griesheim-Elektron and Weiler-ter-Meer. From 1941 to 1945, a subsidiary of IG Farben, Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung MbH), supplied a number of concentration and extermination camps with a cyanide-based pesticide, Zyklon B. Originally intended to fumigate clothes and kill typhus-bearing lice. After an experiment on 850 camp inmates at Auschwitz in September 1941, Zyklon B was thereafter used as one of the principal methods of murder in the camps, eventually accounting for around one million deaths, mainly of Jews.
“A word after a word after a word is power.” (Margaret Atwood)
“The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country”: as Labour wracks itself over its leadership and direction, former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair published a 5,400-word essay for his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in which he argued that focusing on the person and even politics of the leader was the wrong place to start in terms of addressing the challenges facing the UK. The problem was that “we don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world and are in the wrong political position from which we can devise one and win a second term”. Like anything Blair does now, this will divide opinion sharply. It certainly makes some breezy assumptions, glosses over some potential challenges and contains the odd lacuna. On the other hand—and I say this as one who was at the time bitterly anti-Blair, though time has given me a more balanced perspective—he demonstrates a grasp of the bigger picture, an ambition and a sense of both possibility and responsibility which is rare in contemporary politicians. Nearly 20 years after he left office, it is easier now than then, perhaps, to see why he was such a dominant figure.
“Burnham’s chips and gravy act is working”: it’s hardly a spoiler alert to say that I’m not and never have been a Labour voter, but, regardless, I remain rather less impressed by Andy Burnham than many. He seems to have made a reasonable fist of being Mayor of Greater Manchester, though several people have pointed to the contributions of Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council 1996-2021 and Burnham’s Deputy Mayor 2017-21, and Sir Howard Bernstein, Chief Executive of Manchester City Council 1998-2017. On the other hand, for those of us who remember Burnham as a minister in the Blair and Brown governments, he was responsible for implementing the Identity Cards Act 2006, delivery and reform at the Department of Health in 2006-07 and the (mis)handling of the independent inquiry by Robert Francis QC into high mortality rates at Stafford Hospital. He also had to apologise to the Director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, after implying an improper and possibly physical relationship with Conservative MP David Davis. I also find something performative and heavy-handed about his Northernness, but it seems, as former Labour MP Tom Harris writes in The Daily Telegraph, to be working: “we are left with the impression that Burnham is a horny-handed son of toil with little time for them there Londoners with their big ideas and no experience of how ordinary people up north live”. His refutation this week of Sir Tony Blair’s essay (see above) was “articulate, intelligent and, to an extent, relevant. But it gave us precious few clues as to what a Burnham government would look like.” I suspect we will become increasingly familiar with this doctrinal flexibility: Burnham is, after all, a man who worked for Tessa Jowell and Chris Smith, became a minister under Sir Tony Blair, was promoted to Cabinet by Gordon Brown and was in the Shadow Cabinets of Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. After 20 years as an MP, and a career before that as an adviser followng graduation from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, he stopped wearing ties and reinvented himself as an outsider and champion of Manchester folk against the overweening central government. You can’t fool all the people all the time, but then, famously, you don’t have to.
“A Blair revival is the only hope for Britain”: in The Spectator, Stephen Daisley, with whatever percentage of seriousness you want to believe, argues that Sir Tony Blair should return to 10 Downing Street and govern in the spirit of the essay he published. Daisley argues he is the only politician to grasp the scale of the challenges facing Britain, and praises his pragmatism which he labels “Nikeism”—just do it. Readers will take the article on its own terms, but it did make me think. At the time, as a young Conservative (but not a Young Conservative) reeling from the shattering defeat of 1997, I loathed Blair and all his works. There are still many things I think he got wrong, and many minor irritants: the affected glottal stops, the theatrical casualness, the use of words and phrases like “Look”, “Come on” and “Guys”. But it’s difficult to deny that he was a brilliant politician (I use that word carefully), a Prime Minister with a clear and strong sense of purpose and a genuinely impressive figure on the national and world stage. The real issue is not some isn’t-it-pretty-to-think-so recall from Blair’s equivalent of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, but rather thinking about where we find the next generation of Blairs (of all political persuasions), how we encourage them to enter public life and why they have largely disappeared. That Blair is still active figure who can grab the headlines is a testament to something; as someone pointed out earlier this week, this is the equivalent of Harold Wilson giving advice to the newly elected Blair government (except Wilson was dead by 1997, of course). It’s 19 years since Blair left Downing Street: that’s makes this the equivalent of Thatcher in 2009, Attlee in 1970, Baldwin in 1956, Asquith in 1935. That in itself is an achievement.
“Milburn review could rewire the welfare state”: a much more important publication this week than the Blair essay was the interim report of Alan Milburn’s review of young people and work. The most able and effective veteran of Blairism, Milburn was asked last December to examine why so many 16- to 25-year-olds are not in education, employment or training (so-called NEETs). My City A.M. column tomorrow will be addressing the review so I will say little of my own here. In The Times, Fraser Nelson suggests that the review is so hard-hitting, so excoriating of the status quo and so powerful in its demand for change that it could inspire “a wholesale rewiring of the welfare state”. It is a tempting narrative, portraying Milburn as the William Beveridge of the 21st century, and I don’t say that sneeringly: I wrote about Milburn earlier in the week, I think he is a very impressive figure, his commitment is undoubted and his diagnosis feels accurate. I have rarely read an official review in which the anger crackles off the page as it does on Milburn’s foreword. But the timing is desperately unlucky: the government is paralysed while the future of Sir Keir Starmer is decided, and the Parliamentary Labour Party has made it clear it has no appetite for radical reform of welfare. It’s hard to see how the review, the final report from which will be published in September just before Labour’s party conference, find enough traction and support to be implemented. I hope Fraser is right; but I am not putting money on it.
“Why the F-35 fighter is a vital U.S. asset in this menacing era”: George Will of The Washington Post takes on an increasingly heated and polarising debate in defence circles, between those who take the lesson of the war in Ukraine to be that the age of manned air platforms is over and cheap, disposable and replaceable drones are the only future, and those who continue to champion ultra-high-tech and commensurately expensive systems to guarantee superiority. Sensibly, I think, Will picks a delicate line somewhere down the middle of this. I’ve long said we must learn the lessons of Ukraine—this was in City A.M. more than three years ago—and the development of autonomous systems has been astoundingly rapid. Our armed forces like many others are right to be anticipating a much larger role for them in future conflicts. It is also true that the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is a very expensive aircraft. The flyaway cost is in the region of $100 million, depending on type, and operating and support costs are between $10 and $25 million a year. But it is a vastly capable aircraft, certainly the most sophisticated the Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm, which jointly have 47 F-35Bs at the moment, have ever flown. That said, availability rates for UK-operated aircraft have been unsatisfactory, and for all smaller air forces—perhaps less for the US Air Force—the cost makes them almost disproportionately valuable, which can affect decisions to deploy them. The real lesson is that Ukraine has changed war, but not all wars will be like Ukraine. Our planners have to remain flexible as well as watchful, and the day of the manned fighter aircraft, while it will come to an end one day, is not over yet.
Podcast corner
“Iraq WMD”: intelligence and espionage-based podcast The Rest Is Classified doesn’t quite have the inexplicable alchemy or mass appeal of its Goalhanger stablemate The Rest Is History, but if spies and spying interest you, author and long-time BBC correspondent Gordon Corera and CIA analyst-turned-novelist David McCloskey make a very entertaining and unobtrusively expert pairing and tell the stories of intelligence, security and espionage triumphs and disasters brilliantly. They have recently finished a six-part series—not as daunting as it sounds, because they make it zip along—on the 2003 war in Iraq and the role of intelligence in provoking and being used to justify American and British military action against Saddam Hussein’s régime. Links here to episodes two, three, four, five and six. No matter how deep your interest or obsession, you’re almost guaranteed to learn something you didn’t know, and their treatment of the still-controversial conflict is balanced and comprehensive. I’ve written before that I take a much less jaundiced view of the invasion and occupation of Iraq than many: much of it was badly handled and much of the justification was distorted or false, but the removal of Saddam was an absolute good and he had been a destabilising influence in the region for decades as well as defying the United Nations. In any event, Corera and McCloskey piece the narrative together very well and coherently and will leave you at a satisfactory level of expertise about that pivotal war and its aftermath.
The wilder, weirder and more unexpected shores of the internet
“Democracy Manifest!”: many of you will be familiar with this oddity from Australia but if you aren’t, just savour the madness for a moment and enjoy one of the great theatrical performances of all time. The facts, if they are important, are that it is a news clip from 1991, filmed in Brisbane by Chris Reason of Seven News. It shows a man called Jack Karlson being escorted from the China Sea Restaurant on Duncan Street to a police car by officers of Queensland Police Service; he had attempted to pay for his meal with a stolen credit card. This is a condensed version: the clip was only uploaded to the internet in 2009, and it was 2020 before Karlson identified himself after several theories had circulated. He had been born Cecil George Edwards in 1942 and died in 2024 and seems, in fact, not to have been a terribly nice man: he was in and out of prison for much of his early adulthood and was allegedly an admire of Adolf Hitler, who would say “Two Heil Hitlers” instead of “three cheers”. But as a performance of outraged innocence and the little man standing up against the state, it remains outstanding. Is the persona he projects an example of that uniquely Australian character, the larrikin? Perhaps, but I leave any Australian readers to make a definitive judgement.
“Right, Said Fred”: it’s fine, it’s just Jessica Mitford and Maya Angelou singing the Ted Dicks/Myles Rudge novelty song with which Bernard Cribbins had unlikely chart success in 1962, reaching number 10. A charity compilation album in 1998 called Stranger Than Fiction corralled some deeply odd performances, manly from writers, including “Stand By Me” by Stephen King and Warren Zevon and “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” by Amy Tan. The proceeds from the sales went to various charities promoting literacy and literature. Mitford had died in 1996 but three years before, at the party to mark her 50th wedding anniversary to Robert Treuhaft, Decca had been persuaded by Angelou, a friend with whom she shared a love of music, to perform this curious duet. It subsequently made its way on to the Stranger Than Fiction album, and why not? It was hardly the most outlandish thing a Mitford sister had done (given that Diana had married Sir Oswald Mosley in Joseph Goebbels’s living room with Adolf Hitler as one of the witnesses). They sound like they’re having fun.
“James Mason visits Jack the Ripper murder site”: in 1967, young Irishman Norman Cohen, who would later find success making the feature film versions of Till Death Us Do Part and Dad’s Army as well as some of the comedy-porn Confessions… films, directed and produced his first feature, The London Nobody Knows. Based on Geoffrey Fletcher’s 1962 book of the same name, it is a strange but sympathetic look at some of the seamier parts of the capital in the Swinging Sixties, and is presented and narrated by Hollywood star James Mason, then in his late 50s and still bruised from an expensive divorce from his wife Pamela which had cost him $1 million. He visits the sites of London with that unmistakeable and inexplicable voice (he was born in Huddersfield), his manner described by Kevin Flanagan in Film & History as “part bemused gentleman, part-raconteur, and part engaged social reformer”. In this excerpt, neatly turned out in tweed jacket and flat cap and polished brogues, a rolled umbrella in one hand, he appears at 29 Hanbury Street in Spitalfields, the site where the second of Jack the Ripper’s “canonical five” victims, Annie Chapman, was found at 6.00 am on 8 September 1888. Her throat had been cut from left to right as far back as the spine, she had been disembowelled, with part of her small intestines placed above her right shoulder, and part of her bladder and uterus was missing. Yet she had probably not been dead more than 45 minutes. It is chilling to think, as Mason says, that “Spitalfields is Jack the Ripper territory—the old people here even remember some of his murders”, and the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street appears unchanged from 79 years earlier, when Chapman was done to death. The building and its yard no longer exist, having been demolished in the early 1970s to allow the Black Eagle Brewery, now the Old Truman Brewery, to extend along the entire north side of Hanbury Street. So this is almost certainly the last (perhaps the only?) footage of the murder site.
“Supersperm”: it’s 1991, and the late, legendary Jim Bowen is master of all he surveys on the set of Central Television’s darts-based game show Bullseye. (Bowen is one of only two acts I’ve ever been to see at the Edinburgh Festival, and he was superb.) He is introducing the contestants, but he hasn’t reckoned on civil servant Dave from Whitley Bay. Clearly, Bowen had been prepped to ask Dave about a nickname his wife had for him, but the answer wasn’t the one he expected… what is even more amazing is that Dave continued to give the same response as they tried again and again to film an exchange which would be suitable for broadcasting on a Sunday afternoon. Was he winding Bowen up, or could he simply not adjust to a more family-friendly anecdote? Far be it from me to insult the good people of Whitley Bay, but if Dave’s shirt is any indicator, we are bound to have questions about his judgement.
“Play Away”: yes, that’s Jeremy Irons. The Jeremy Irons. Yes, he’s singing. Yes, that shirt is way too tight. Look, I don’t know what to tell you. It was 1975 and those were different times. Irons appeared on the BBC’s Play Away, which was the slightly more advanced counterpart to Playschool, with a vague hint of an end-of-the-pier or music hall show, all frenetic activity, jokes and songs. It ran from 1971 to 1984, broadcast on Saturday afternoons on BBC2, and the ringmasters of this particular circus were the heavyweight pros of children’s programming: Griffiths, Benjamin, Ball and, of course, the daddy of them all, Cant. Irons was in his mid-20s, building a solid theatre career but he had yet to appear on films and his television appearances had been fleeting roles in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Pallisers and Notorious Woman (in which he’d played Franz Liszt). Even the greatest thespians have to pay the bills.
Jukebox jury: 90s women singer-songwriters
I don’t know why, that’s where my listening led me this week, and I apologise for nothing.
“Silent All These Years”, Tori Amos
“You Were Meant for Me”, Jewel
“Hands Clean”, Alanis Morissette
“If It Makes You Happy”, Sheryl Crow
“Adia”, Sarah McLachlan
It doesn’t really matter…
… Tom Rath tells himself in Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Here goes nothing. It will be interesting to see what happens.
It was the best and most loving advice I have ever been given. I do still try to abide by it, and remain a grateful recipient all these years later.