Jellicoe’s professional experience and powers of concentration and organization were exceptional. He brought to his command an almost unparalleled technical knowledge and a lifelong, deeply ingrained confidence in himself. Beyond this, Jellicoe possessed something else rare among the hundreds of conventional officers on the Navy List: he had an original mind. It was not the mind of a dreamer and genius like Fisher, whose ideas ranged across the whole spectrum of naval affairs. Jellicoe’s was the practical, realistic mind of an engineer. Fisher asked Why? and Why not? Jellicoe asked How? and How much? When he found the answers, he understood, better than anyone else in the British navy, the difficulties the navy faced. He was aware of the technical achievements and rapid progress of the German navy. He knew that German ships were superior in armor protection and that German shells, torpedoes, and mines were more reliable than British. He was familiar with German skill in gunnery, in which he was himself an expert. As he warned Churchill on the eve of war, it was highly dangerous to assume, as Churchill did, that British ships were superior to German as fighting machines.
Jellicoe was not without weaknesses. Sometimes, loyalty to old friends blinded him to their limitations and made him slow to relieve them of command. A more serious flaw was his tendency to do everything for himself—his difficulty in delegating responsibility. Because of his own immense capacity for work and extensive grasp of technical detail, he often dealt with matters that might have been left to subordinates. During his rise to the top, one of his superiors noted that he “really does too much. He must learn to work his captains and staff more and himself less. At present he puts himself in the position of, say, a glorified gunnery lieutenant. This will not do when he gets with a big fleet. He must trust his staff and captains and if they don’t fit, he must kick them out!”
This advice did not change Jellicoe’s nature. As he rose higher and his responsibilities grew greater, his reluctance to delegate never left him. He had what he considered a powerful reason: knowing better than anyone else the strengths and weaknesses of his fleet, he did not want a subordinate’s monumental mistake to place that fleet in jeopardy. In sum, he did not want the war to be “lost in an afternoon” by somebody else. As supreme commander, with a consuming sense of the vital importance of the Grand Fleet to Great Britain, he remained fundamentally cautious. Accordingly, his knowledge of the flaws hidden within his ships produced a careful, undramatic strategy. No temptation, however glittering, was to be allowed to place the supremacy of the British Grand Fleet at risk. While John Jellicoe was Commander-in-Chief, the war would not be lost in an afternoon.
John Jellicoe, whose family and friends always called him Jack, was born into an English middle-class family in Southampton on December 5, 1859. His father, a captain in the Royal Mail Steam Packet Service, rose to become marine superintendent of the line and, eventually, commodore and a company director. Jack, the second of four sons, grew up in a harbor world where the primary events were the comings and goings of ships. Unsurprisingly, at twelve, in the summer of 1872, he joined the Royal Navy training ship Britannia as a cadet. He was small, almost diminutive, at four feet six inches, but he did well from the beginning; the head of the school called him “one of the cleverest cadets we have ever had.” When he left as a midshipman two years later, Jellicoe was first in his class of thirty-eight and had also managed to grow two inches. Outside the classroom, he was courteous, friendly, unassuming, and enthusiastic at sports: a model young man. These qualities earned him a rare prize, described by Commodore James Goldrick, a present-day historian who is also a serving officer in the Royal Australian Navy: “Jellicoe was admired not only by his seniors and subordinates, but also by his contemporaries, that most critical of audiences.” Yet Jellicoe never forgot his ultimate objective. On the flyleaf of one of his Britannia notebooks, a childish hand proclaims the book to be the “Property of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe.”
Britannia was the beginning of a lifetime of “Firsts” in seamanship, navigation, gunnery, and torpedoes. Jellicoe went to sea in sailing ships and coal-burning vessels; he sailed around the world, and in a single year, at the age of sixteen, he grew another five inches—up to five foot one. By 1886, the year he turned twenty-seven, he was five foot six—as tall as he would ever be. As a lieutenant on the battleship Colossus anchored at Spithead, he showed his strength, quick reflexes, and instinctive bravery when, in a high wind and with a strong tide running, a seaman fell overboard and was swept astern. Jellicoe saw what was happening and immediately jumped in. Colossus’s captain was watching: Jellicoe “swam with extraordinary vigor . . . [and] succeeded in reaching the man before he sank and in keeping him afloat until a boat picked them up. The bluejacket was brought aboard in-sensible but soon recovered. Lieutenant Jellicoe smilingly received my congratulations and walked quietly to his cabin to put on dry clothes.”
Jellicoe’s close connection with Jacky Fisher began in 1884, when Jellicoe was on the staff at HMS Excellent Gunnery School at Portsmouth, of which Fisher was captain. Thereafter, Jellicoe adopted Fisher’s beliefs in reform, efficiency, and readiness; in technological change, personnel management, and the importance of big guns and gunnery. In addition, from that time on, Jellicoe swam in the “Fishpond”—the pool of junior officers whom Fisher considered promising, whom he worked to promote, and who, like Jellicoe, would go on to higher command and fame. Fisher’s sponsorship sometimes carried penalties as well as rewards, but Jellicoe’s qualities were always so obvious that he managed to avoid the charge that his rise was due to favoritism. In September 1889, when Fisher became Director of Naval Ordnance, he brought Lieutenant Jellicoe along as his assistant. When Fisher went home at night, Jellicoe would still be at his desk, working sometimes until eleven p.m.
In 1891, Jellicoe, at thirty-one, was promoted to commander and sent to the Mediterranean Fleet as second in command of the battleship Victoria, flagship of Admiral Sir George Tryon. It was an assignment he was lucky to survive. When, on the afternoon of June 22, 1893, Tryon made an inexplicable blunder that sent Victoria into a fatal collision with Camperdown, Jellicoe was lying in his cabin with a fever of 103 degrees; he had been there a week, ill with dysentery. “I felt the shock,” he wrote to his mother,
and put on a pair of trousers and a coat and went on deck to superintend the launching of boats. I found the Camperdown had cut right into us and although we closed all the watertight doors, we seemed to be sinking fast. I had hardly started before the ship heeled right over, capsized, and went down eight minutes from the collision. As she went over, I climbed down the side and after being sucked down some way came to the top again. Any amount of men were killed by the propellers which kept on working as the ship went over as they fell onto them. It must have been an awful sight from the other ships. I was picked up. The curious thing is that my temperature today is normal so the ducking did me good.
Victoria went down with 358 of her 649 officers and men, including Tryon. Jellicoe was one of 291 survivors.
Returned to England and promoted to captain, Jellicoe again was working with naval ordnance when he happened to meet Sir Charles Cayzer, a self-made, wealthy shipowner. At Cayzer’s house, the guest was introduced to the host’s second daughter, Gwendoline. The navy captain was thirty-nine; the young woman was nineteen. There was an attraction, but Jellicoe’s career intruded. In 1897, Jellicoe was invited by Vice Admiral Sir Edward Seymour, Commander-in-Chief of the China Station, to serve as Seymour’s Flag Captain on the battleship Centurion. For three years, the assignment was routine. In Hong Kong and other Far Eastern ports, Jellicoe met and became friendly with the kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, then in command of the German East Asia Squadron, and with Captain Henning von Holtzendorff, later Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet and Chief of the German Naval Staff, and with other German officers. A closer bond between the British and German squadrons was forged in the summer of 1900 during the dramatic international effort to relieve the besieged Western legation
s in Peking. When the legations, surrounded and threatened by thousands of Boxer rebels, appealed for help, an international naval landing force of more than two thousand men was hastily assembled. Seymour, the senior Western naval officer, took command of the relief column and named Jellicoe his Chief of Staff. Setting off by train to reach Peking, seventy miles away, the force was blocked and attacked by thousands of Chinese. Jellicoe commanded troops under fire until one day he was hit by a bullet on the left side of his chest. The impact spun him around and left him spitting blood. A doctor, injecting morphine, told him that the wound was probably mortal, whereupon Jellicoe wrote his will in six lines, leaving everything to his mother.
While he lay stretched out in the bottom of a river sampan, heavily bandaged, his place as Seymour’s chief aide was taken by Captain Guido von Usedom, commander of the 500-man German contingent. Somehow, even in this unpromising place, Jellicoe’s medical prospects began to improve. The prospects for the international column, now in retreat, were not as bright. At one point, an English journalist tried to cheer him by concocting good news. Later the journalist wrote, “I don’t think I shall ever forget the contemptuous flash of the eyes Jellicoe turned on me or the impatient remark, ‘Tell me the truth. Don’t lie.’ ” Jellicoe recovered, but for the rest of his life, he carried the Chinese bullet in his lung.
Home in England after an absence of four years, Jellicoe found Gwendoline Cayzer waiting. He was forty-two; she was twenty years younger; they married in July 1902. Their age difference followed a pattern established by many career officers of the Victorian British army and navy. Some did not marry at all; Kitchener and Admiral of the Fleet Arthur Knyvet Wilson were examples. Others first established their careers up to the level of colonel or captain, then came home in their forties to marry much younger women and begin a family. In Jellicoe’s case, marriage was a pleasant and entirely conventional buttress to his career. His wife’s money from her father enabled them to live in a larger house than his navy pay could provide. In time, five daughters were born and eventually, when Jellicoe was fifty-nine and had retired from the navy, a son.
In October 1904, when Jacky Fisher became First Sea Lord, he summoned Jellicoe, as “one of the five best brains in the navy,” to help design Britain’s revolutionary all-big-gun battleship HMS Dreadnought, the ship that made all existing battleships obsolete and gave her name—dreadnought—to all subsequent battleships. This achieved, Jellicoe embarked on a steady climb up the ladder of promotion and responsibility, alternating between duty at sea and assignments at the Admiralty. For two years, he was Director of Naval Ordnance, responsible for the design and supply of all guns and ammunition for the navy. In 1907, he was promoted to rear admiral, knighted, and sent to sea as second in command of the Atlantic Fleet, based at Gibraltar. In 1908, Jellicoe returned to the Admiralty for two years as Third Sea Lord and Controller, where his task was the design, building, fitting out, and repairing of all ships of the Royal Navy. During these years, first at Naval Ordnance and then as Controller, Jellicoe’s growing knowledge of the technology of shipbuilding raised in him a concern about the Royal Navy’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. With Germany building the High Seas Fleet, he studied the comparative designs and capabilities of British and German warships and realized that in many respects his friends across the North Sea were building better ships. One German advantage, he wrote, “was that of far greater protection both in the way of armor above and below water, and in more complete water-tight subdivision below water as protection against torpedo or mine attack.” By extension, he realized that the superior hull subdivision in German capital ships was made possible by their greater beam. “Our vessels,” he said glumly, were “being limited in beam by the width of existing docks and the difficulty of persuading our government to construct newer and wider docks.”
Jellicoe also worried about the effectiveness of British heavy-gun shells fired at long ranges. To test his fears, he arranged trials, which demonstrated that the standard British naval shell was effective when fired at close range across a flat trajectory and hitting armor at a 90-degree angle. But when these same shells were fired at long range and struck armor at oblique angles, they often failed to penetrate and thus also failed to burst in the vitals of the target ship. Concerned, Jellicoe requested the Ordnance Board to design and produce a new armor-piercing shell effective at the ranges at which future sea battles were likely to be fought. Before the matter was resolved, he departed, and subsequent Controllers allowed it to drop.
Jellicoe’s desire to renew ties with some of the German naval officers he had known in China led him to accept an invitation to visit Germany in the summer of 1910. “I had a decided admiration and considerable liking for German naval officers and men,” he later wrote. “I knew personally a great many of the senior officers and I felt a great respect for the efficiency of the German navy.” Persuaded to come to the Kiel Regatta by his old comrade in arms Guido von Usedom, now an admiral in command of the naval base at Kiel, Jellicoe also saw Prince Henry, the kaiser’s brother, as well as William himself, who asked Jellicoe to race with him on his sailing yacht Meteor. The Royal Navy benefited from this German visit when Jellicoe subsequently obtained Admiralty approval for construction of two wide floating dry docks capable of lifting the largest battleships out of the water. “On my way to Kiel,” he later explained, “I passed through Hamburg where several large floating docks were in use for commercial liners. I visited the largest of these and discussed their use with Germans.” Besides their greater size, these docks had an additional significance, which became apparent during the war. “All our existing dock accommodation was in vicinity of the English Channel and the south of England,” Jellicoe explained. With no naval base on the North Sea where the Grand Fleet was based, he, as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, arranged for one of these floating docks to be towed to Cromarty Firth, where it was used seventy times by battleships and battle cruisers, saving them the longer voyage and the need for a destroyer escort passing back and forth to the permanent docks at Plymouth and Portsmouth.
It was as controller at the Admiralty that Jellicoe had his first unpleasant experience with a politician. The Welsh firebrand and Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, struggling to limit government spending on armaments, vehemently opposed the allotment of large sums to the Royal Navy to counter the growth of the German fleet. In February 1909, Jellicoe pointed out that in the construction of gun mountings, a key factor in the time required to turn out completed battleships, the Germans had recently become more proficient; therefore, prudence demanded that Britain increase naval spending even more. At a meeting at which Jellicoe was present, the chancellor walked up and down, venting his anger. “I think it shows an extraordinary neglect on the part of the Admiralty that all this should not have been found out,” he said. “I don’t think much of any of you admirals and I should like to see Lord Charles Beresford at the Admiralty, the sooner the better.” Reginald McKenna, who was then First Lord, reacted quickly. “You knew perfectly well,” he said to Lloyd George, “that these facts [increased German skill in making gun mountings] were communicated to the Cabinet at the time and your remark was, ‘It’s all contractors’ gossip’—or words to that effect.”
In December 1910, Jellicoe left the Admiralty to become Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet. He was at sea when he learned by wireless that his five-year-old daughter, Betty, had died of a mastoid infection; she had come to the dock perfectly healthy a few weeks before to see him off. In 1911, he became second in command of the Home Fleet and in 1912 was promoted to vice admiral and returned to the Admiralty as Second Sea Lord. By this time, few in the navy questioned Fisher’s wisdom in grooming Jellicoe for supreme command. Captain Wilhelm Widenmann, the German naval attaché in London, informed Tirpitz on January 11, 1912, “If one asks English naval officers which admiral would have the best chances for a brilliant career on the basis of his capability, one almost always receives the sa
me answer: besides Prince Louis of Battenberg, unquestionably Sir John Jellicoe. Sir John possesses the absolute confidence of his superiors as well as his subordinates.”
During his two years as Second Sea Lord, Jellicoe and his family lived in a large, comfortable house in Sussex Square. Every morning, he walked two miles to the Admiralty, and every evening the two miles back. At the Admiralty, he found the new First Lord, Winston Churchill, fifteen years younger than himself, to be brilliant, assertive, and, he thought, dangerously self-confident. “It did not take me very long,” Jellicoe wrote later,
to find out that Mr. Churchill was very apt to express strong opinions upon purely technical matters. Moreover, not being satisfied with expressing opinions, he tried to force his views upon the Board. His fatal error was his entire inability to realize his own limitations as a civilian. I admired very much his wonderful argumentative powers. He surpassed the ablest of lawyers and would make a weak case appear exceedingly strong. While this gift was of great use to the Admiralty when we wanted the naval case put well before the government, it became a positive danger when the First Lord started to exercise his powers of argument on his colleagues on the Board. Naval officers are not brought up to argue a case and few of them can make a good show in this direction.
In May 1913, Sir John and Lady Jellicoe were invited to Berlin on the occasion of the marriage of William II’s only daughter. The guests included King George V of England and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia; the ceremony became the last meeting of prewar European monarchs before the outbreak of hostilities fifteen months later. Jellicoe, a minor figure among the royalty, nevertheless had a busy schedule. He was given a two-hour ride in a zeppelin; he was invited to lunch by the German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, and then to dinner by the kaiser. After dinner with William, Jellicoe had a long conversation with the emperor and Tirpitz about the different methods used to select naval cadets in the two countries. Tirpitz, charmed by the Jellicoes, invited them to tea to meet his daughter, who had just returned from two years at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Before leaving, Jellicoe asked the founder of the German navy to return the visit by coming to England and staying at his own house. “He thanked me,” Jellicoe said, “but said that he would certainly be murdered if he were to visit England, as the British objected so strongly to his naval policy.” While in Berlin, Jellicoe attended the annual dinner of the German naval officers who had served in China and, in the course of conversation, asked who were the rising men of the German navy. He was told that “certainly one of the future leaders” was an admiral named Reinhard Scheer.