The Royal Navy in Action: Art from Dreadnought to Vengeance

By John Fairley

At the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries, with the British Empire encompassing the globe, the Royal Navy indisputably ruled the waves. Times change but the magnificence and drama of warships at sea, whether in peace or war, remain an inspiration to artists. This fine book brings together a collection of superb art works which bear witness to the majesty of these mighty ships in action and, at the same time, are a memorial to the dangers, heroism and victories at sea. The reader is treated to a feast of the finest maritime paintings depicting the Royal Navy’s dramatic confrontations of the last 120 years. Masters such as Norman Wilkinson, Richard Eurich and William Wyllie cover the two World Wars. Other works illustrate the crucial role of the Navy in the Falklands War and the latest aircraft carriers are also represented. The author draws on his own naval service experience to describe the background to, and significance of, the ships and conflicts that these paintings so vividly record.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399009508

John Fairley

John Fairley has written numerous books on equestrian art including The Art of the Horse, Racing in Art and Great Racehorses in Art and is joint author of The Monocled Mutineer, which became a celebrated BBC television series.A noted documentary and sports television producer, he was Director of Programmes at Yorkshire Television.Born in Liverpool, within sight of the Grand National course, he served as an RNVR officer aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Albion. A scholar of The Queen's College, Oxford, he is married, with three daughters, and lives in the Yorkshire racing town of Malton.

Book preview

Part I

The First World War

Chapter 1

Early Encounters

W.M. Wyllie, The Battle Cruisers arrive in the nick of time.

William Wyllie, in the Great War, was at pains to document and immortalize some of the heroic encounters of those four years, often involving many warships.

With the Royal Navy’s panoply of vessels almost universally painted grey, Wyllie was aware that however full of impact his paintings might be, they required elucidation. His picture shows the battle cruisers arriving, as he put it, in the nick of time at the Battle of Heligoland Bight.

Wyllie had sailed with the Royal Navy and he felt it necessary to accompany this work with a detailed written narrative:

My picture shows the situation of the Fourth Division of the Third Flotilla. Lapwing has now come to the assistance of the seriously damaged Laertes, she has passed a wire hawser on board and is trying to tow her consort out of danger. As luck will have it, the hawser parts, but just at this moment Admiral Beatty, in Lion, with the rest of his battle cruisers, comes rushing up out of the mist, firing salvos with 13.5 inch guns at the distant enemy.

The crew of Lapwing are cheering, for they know that the whole position is now changed, the weight of metal is at last on our side, and victory safe.

Mainz is in flames fore and aft, only a funnel and a mast are still standing; very much down by the head, she will soon turn on her side and sink. Lysander is lying in the line of fire, and beyond her, the splashes show that the gunners are slowly getting the range. Fearless is coming up at full speed from the south and will tow the lame duck into safety.

Both Wyllie and Charles Pears were to be frequent contributors to the illustrated newspapers of the day, their works invariably accompanied by written copy and reporting of the events they painted.

The Great War was only two days old when the Germans sent the first flotilla of submarines out from their Baltic port to reconnoitre the British fleet, for it was assumed by the German war scenarios that in the case of hostilities the British Grand Fleet would immediately make a massive assault on the German coast.

But as the ten U-Boats felt their way across the width of the North Sea, they encountered nothing. After two days, one of the submarines, U-15 under Commandant Pohle, found itself off Fair Isle, when three of the pride of the British fleet, the battleships Ajax, Monarch, and Orion, came into periscope view, blithely engaged in exercises. As Monarch hove into his sights, Pohle leased off the first torpedo of the war – if not the first torpedo ever fired at a warship. It missed.

The British ships saw a periscope and realized what had happened. They were joined by the Iron Duke and the Dreadnought in turning to try and run down the attacker, but U-15 dived successfully and escaped. Pohle, however, had perhaps become, too complacent. The next morning at dawn, he had U-15 on the surface when suddenly the cruiser Birmingham came into view. She hurtled directly at the U-Boat and sliced her in two.

The conflict was hardly a week old, and the template for the next four years of the war at sea was already set. The other U-Boats returned to base but were soon sent out again and reported activity off the Scottish coast, without any actual incident. Within a fortnight, however, Commandant Hersing in U-21 displayed astonishing bravura, taking his boat into the Firth of Forth, right up to the bridge, and penetrating the confines of the greatest fleet base in the whole British Empire. But it was clear that he had been sighted, and so he retreated safely back to the open sea.

Only three days later, Hersing made his mark on the history of naval warfare. William Lionel Wyllie’s dramatic painting shows what happened. Off St Abbs Head in Northumberland, Hershing and U-21 ran across the British destroyer HMS Pathfinder. Their torpedo hit Pathfinder amidships, and she blew up in flames. In a matter of minutes her stern reared out of the water and she went down bow-first with her entire crew of more than 250 men. She was the first ship ever destroyed by a submarine’s torpedo.

Arthur Burgess’s picture of the duel between HMS Sydney and the German cruiser Emden shows the conclusion of one of the most celebrated actions of the war.

Thanks to the worldwide telegraph system, war came to the China station as quickly and, as it turned out, as dramatically, as in any of the oceans. Emden, forewarned, had in fact slipped out of the German enclave of Tsingtau on the Chinese coast two days before the actual declaration of war. She then set off on a two-month cruise of destruction as far as Ceylon and the Cocos Islands, before being finally hunted down and destroyed in two hours of manoeuvring and constant gunfire.

It was still 1914 when she sank. But within a matter of months the details of her career became well known, thanks to an extraordinary and widely reported public lecture which one of her surviving officers, Lieutenant Mucke, gave in Vienna. Mucke was able to convey, amidst his pride in Emden’s destructive achievements, the gentlemanly courtesy and appreciation of a civilized enemy, ideas which had not yet been extinguished by the dreadful years to come:

There was great enthusiasm as we left Tsingtau with the band playing ‘Wacht am Rhein’. By early September we were in the Bay of Bengal looking for prey. On the 11th a large steamer was sighted ahead. Assuming we were a British man-o’-war, she hoisted a large British flag to signify her joy at our presence. I regret I did not see the foolish face of her skipper when we hoisted our ensign and politely signalled her to join us. She was splendidly equipped to carry troops from Colombo to France. During the last few days our supply of soap had run out, and it was therefore a particularly pleasing feature to find that, owing to the undeniable love the English people have for cleanliness, she was carrying enough soap to last a year. Her crew were shipped in our ‘rogues’ depot. For this purpose we always kept one ship with us, retained until she was overfull with the crews of captured vessels, then dismissed.

During the next few days our business flourished. As soon as a steamer came our way, she was stopped. One of our officers and, say, ten men went aboard and made her ready to be sunk. There was no need to hurry. At times we had five or six vessels collected on one spot.

On the behaviour of the English, most of them were quite sensible, and with one exception, offered no resistance to their ship being sunk.

Mucke then offered his audience an account of seeing a ship sink:

After flooding, she would roll as if uncertain what to do, then gradually sink lower and lower till the upper deck reached sea level. Then the whole ship appeared as though drawing its last breath. The bow would settle down, the masts would touch the water, the propellers would stand up in the air, the funnels would blow out the last steam and coal dust, for a few seconds the ship would stand upright, and then, like a stone, shoot vertically down to the bottom. The compression of the air burst the bulkheads, like a fountain, the spray rises, and no more is seen.

Finally, Mucke could not resist a peroration:

As a last greeting from the depths, about half a minute later, spars, boats and other objects come shooting up, long spars come dashing to the surface like arrows. Finally a large spot of oil.

It was still only two months into the war, and after disposing of a Russian frigate and a French naval ship, along with two dozen merchant vessels, Emden arrived at the Cocos (Keeling) Islands with a mission to destroy the British telegraph station there. Mucke went ashore with an armed party and found the technicians disinclined to interrupt his work. Emden remained a mile offshore. But then there was the sound of gunfire from the sea, and Emden departed at high speed. She had been tracked down by His Majesty’s Australian Ship Sydney.

Arthur Burgess’s picture shows the ensuing contest, which lasted a couple of hours. Mucke could only hear or glimpse it from the beach. He and his men, however, were able to appropriate a small boat and then make contact with a German ship. Within a couple of months, his account of Emden and her exploits was to be a worldwide saga.

W.M. Wyllie, HMS Pathfinder.

Arthur Burgess, Emden beached and done for, 9 November 1914.

Arthur Burgess, HMS Prince of Wales, 1907.

Dreamed up by an Italian, puffed in print by an English magazine and forever to be denounced as one of the prime causes of the First World War, the Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought, built in scarcely a year in 1906, almost immediately became a media star, with picture postcards flaunting her new magnificence as she tore at record speeds along the south coast of Britain.

The Italian was Vittorio Cuniberti who, having had his ideas rejected at home, was happy to accept an invitation by the editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships to contribute an article to their 1903 edition. Cuniberti simply asserted that if you built a ship with lots of the biggest guns available – 12-inch at that time – put them inside the newest armour plating together with the new steam-powered Parsons turbine engines, you would have a ship which literally no other could get near and which could blow all opposition out of the water from four miles away.

Dreadnought, almost overnight, made all previous battleships appear obsolete. Even ships like the Prince of Wales, shown in Arthur Burgess’s painting, and only launched a matter of months before Dreadnought, seemed feeble by comparison – several knots slower, carrying only a few big guns and less threatening small-calibre weapons, and with more frangible armour.

The British Admiral of the Fleet ‘Jackie’ Fisher had been the fiercest advocate of building the new ships. The context was the increasingly intense rivalry between Britain and Germany, with the Kaiser determined to challenge Britain’s domination of the high seas, and intent on protecting and commanding the growing German trading and colonial empire around the world. Within a year, Germany was building battleships with similar capacities to the Dreadnought. Britain, too, forced the pace. At the height of the ‘naval race’, the Royal Navy had more than twenty battleships, some, like the Orion class, with even bigger guns.

As it turned out, there was never ‘a battle of battleships’, though several were present at the Battle of Jutland. As for Dreadnought herself, she had a moment of glory when, as the painter Henry Morgan recorded, she steamed in to Portsmouth in 1907 past Nelson’s Victory. But she was never to be brought to trial in anger. In 1915 she rammed and sank a U-Boat in the North Sea, and she was for a time the Royal Navy’s flagship. But a combination of circumstances, including her being in dock for refit at the time of Jutland, meant that her great broadside of guns was never put to the test. The theory of massive armament survived in the Royal Navy, however, right up to the Second World War and the building in 1941 of its last great battleship, HMS Vanguard.

Prince of Wales, by contrast, was part of the Mediterranean and Atlantic fleets until the outbreak of the 1914–18 war. She was in the Channel right at the start, protecting the British Expeditionary Force troops as they crossed over to France. She went to the Dardanelles to support the Gallipoli landings, and she was summoned back to the Adriatic at the Italians’ request, to help bottle up the Austro-Hungarian fleet, which it was feared might break out and threaten Allied shipping. Finally, at the end of the war she was summoned home to be sold off and broken up in 1920.

After more than a century in which the Royal Navy had fought no major engagements, the outbreak of war on August 1914 produced almost instant action and a flurry of excited schemes to get at the foe. William Wyllie’s painting of the aftermath of the Battle of Heligoland Bight shows the encounter which took place less than a month after the outbreak of war,