British admiral, born on the 25th of January 1841, and entered the navy in June 1854. He served in the Baltic during the Crimean War, and was engaged as midshipman on the “Highflyer,” “Chesapeake” and “Furious,” in the Chinese War, in the operations required by the occupations of Canton, and of the Peiho forts in 1859. He became sub-lieutenant on the 25th of January 1860, and lieutenant on the 4th of November of the same year. The cessation of naval wars, at least of wars at sea in which the British navy had to take a part, after 1860, allowed few officers to gain distinction by actual services against the enemy. But they were provided with other ways of proving their ability by the sweeping revolution which transformed the construction, the armament, and the methods of propulsion of all the navies of the world, and with them the once accepted methods of combat. Lieutenant Fisher began his career as a commissioned officer in the year after the launching of the French “Gloire” had set going the long duel in construction between guns and armour. He early made his mark as a student of gunnery, and was promoted commander on the 2nd of August 1869, and post-captain on the 30th of October 1874. In this rank he was chosen to serve as president of the committee appointed to revise “The Gunnery Manual of the Fleet.” It was his already established reputation which pointed Captain Fisher out for the command of H.M.S. “Inflexible,” a vessel which, as the representative of a type, had supplied matter for much discussion. As captain of the “Inflexible” he took part in the bombardment of Alexandria (July 11, 1882). The engagement was not arduous in itself, having been carried out against forts of inferior construction, indifferently armed, and worse garrisoned, but it supplied an opportunity for a display of gunnery, and it was conspicuous in the midst of a long naval peace. The “Inflexible” took a prominent part in the action, and her captain had the command of the naval brigade landed in Alexandria, where he adapted the ironclad train and commanded it in various skirmishes with the enemy. After the Egyptian campaign, he was, in succession, director of Naval Ordnance and Torpedoes (from Oct. 1886 to May 1891); A.D.C. to Queen Victoria (June 18, 1887, to Aug. 2, 1890, at which date he became rear-admiral); admiral superintendent of Portsmouth dockyard (1891 to 1892); a lord commissioner of the navy and comptroller of the navy (1892 to 1897), and vice-admiral (May 8, 1896); commander-in-chief on the North American and West Indian station (1897). In 1899 he acted as naval expert at the Hague Peace Conference, and on the 1st of July 1899 was appointed commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean. From the Mediterranean command, Admiral Fisher passed again to the admiralty as second sea lord in 1902, and became commander-in-chief at Portsmouth on the 31st of August 1903, from which post he passed to that of first sea lord. Besides holding the foreign Khedivial and Osmanieh orders, he was created K.C.B. in 1894 and G.C.B. in 1902. As first sea lord, during the years 1903–1909, Sir John Fisher had a predominant influence in all the far-reaching new measures of naval development and internal reform; and he was also one of the committee, known as Lord Esher’s committee, appointed in 1904 to report on the measures necessary to be taken to put the administration and organization of the British army on a sound footing. The changes in naval administration made under him were hotly canvassed among critics, who charged him with autocratic methods, and in 1906–1909 with undue subservience to the government’s desire for economy; and whatever the efficiency of his own methods at the admiralty, the fact was undeniable that for the first time for very many years the navy suffered, as a service, from the party-spirit which was aroused. It was notorious that Admiral Lord Charles Beresford in particular was acutely hostile to Sir John Fisher’s administration; and on his retirement in the spring of 1909 from the position of commander-in-chief of the Channel fleet, he put his charges and complaints before the government, and an inquiry was held by a small committee under the Prime Minister. Its report, published in August, was in favour of the Admiralty, though it encouraged the belief that some important suggestions as to the organization of a naval “general staff” would take effect. On the 9th of November Sir John Fisher was created a peer as Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, Norfolk. On relinquishing the office of First Sea Lord in January 1910, he remained in retirement until 1912, when he was appointed chairman of the royal commission on oil fuel. He was a firm believer in oil as fuel for the navy, with its corollary the internal combustion engine. He foresaw its effects on the design of war vessels, and the far-reaching tactical results to be derived from the employment of capital ships that would show no funnels or smoke, have immense sea-keeping powers, and be fuelled at sea from tankers.
After the outbreak of the World War, the retirement of Prince Louis of Battenberg, in November 1914, from the post of First Sea Lord, led to Lord Fisher’s being again installed in that office at the Admiralty. His presence was immediately felt in the dramatic and brilliant piece of strategy which resulted, under Adml. Sturdee, in the destruction of Adml. von Spee’s squadron off the Falklands. Fisher then, with the cooperation and hearty support of Mr. Churchill, initiated a great building programme of cruisers, monitors, destroyers and small craft to the number of some 600 keels, pressing the American shipyards into the service, necessarily at an enormous cost. Everything had to be subordinated to haste, and in fact most of the craft were actually delivered within six months. Although primarily designed for a great strategic move into the Baltic, which Lord Fisher had himself drawn up in detail, this vast armada was gradually diverted from its original purpose to various other uses—among them the naval attempt to force the passage of the Dardanelles; and it was the War Council’s decision to proceed with this that ultimately (May 1915) led to Lord Fisher’s resignation of his post as First Sea Lord. In the following July he was appointed chairman of the Inventions Board, and in 1917 gave important evidence before the Dardanelles Commission. In 1919 he published two books—Memories and Records. These collections of unconventional and more or less fragmentary utterances taken down in shorthand inevitably suffer from a lack of sequence and coherence, and they are of little value as a guide to their author’s actual achievements. After some months of illness Lord Fisher died on July 10, 1920, his last public act being a press campaign in favour of economy. He was then in his eightieth year.
It was still difficult in 1921 to form a just estimate of the value to his country of Lord Fisher’s long and arduous service. In some ways the results of his strenuous life were disappointing to himself and to those whom his strong and rugged personality impressed with a sense of almost superhuman genius and power; as well as to those, such as the journalists whom he knew well how to flatter, who took him exactly at his own valuation. It needed an experience like that of the late King Edward to see the weak and unprotected places in the strong man’s armour, and to understand where what was fine in him needed support and protection. Like so many men in his service, Lord Fisher suffered from the disadvantages of an incomplete education—a defect not likely to be felt in actual fighting service, but apt to become more and more of a handicap as a man advances in his profession and deals with wider and more complex problems than those involved in merely technical developments. Lord Fisher was temperamentally as well as by training unable to make use of a staff, in the modern sense of that term; he thought alone, formulated his large but vague conceptions of war and strategy alone, and attempted practically alone to work them out—with inevitable results. It is remarkable that so powerful and in some ways attractive a personality neither produced any school nor influenced any notable group in the navy; and even of the men whom he selected and furthered, practically none except Lord Jellicoe came to great distinction or achieved any signal success. Many of the schemes with which his name is most closely associated—Osborne, the training of the engineering branch, the system of the “common entry” for example—proved failures and had to be abandoned or completely remodelled. Although he was sponsor while First Sea Lord for the Dreadnought principle of design, and for such infinitely important technical developments as water-tube boilers, turbines, etc., his theory that “speed is armour,” as applied to North Sea warfare, proved to be dangerous, and the battle cruisers designed in accordance with it were to some extent at a disadvantage as a result of reliance on aphorism rather than on the logical and thought-out harmonization of means, conditions and end. Some of the more extreme examples of this class, still under construction on his retirement from the Admiralty, had to be abandoned or altered or adapted to other uses. On the other hand, in his large conceptions of warfare, in his prevision of the war with Germany and its date, in his concentration of the navy in the North Sea as a training ground, in his strategical strokes, such as the destruction of the von Spee squadron, and his conception of a Baltic campaign early in the war (never carried out), and in his untiring advocacy of an offensive policy (also overruled), Lord Fisher showed a true genius and grasp of the essentials of naval warfare which alone would make him a memorable figure in British history. His character was a combination of strength, ingenuity and simplicity; by some mysterious throwback he had, both physically and mentally, a strong oriental strain in his composition; and the Bible was his favourite and most familiar book. He read, however, not so much to educate and enlarge his mind, as to seek and find confirmation of his own views and conceptions of things. In that respect he was like a great artist, who assimilates everything in life that will contribute to the endorsement and magnification of his own genius, and rejects the rest. He was sometimes ruthless and violent in his methods, although rather less so than he would have the world believe; there were indeed veins of beauty and modesty in his character, and he came nearest to true greatness when he was most simple. His were a life and character essentially of the kind to provoke violent controversy and sharp divisions between his admirers and accusers; but when these have died away his figure will stand out, even among the strong men of his day, as that of an enemy to shams and pretences, to sloth and incompetency, and as a passionate lover and defender of his country.
