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The seizure of the newly-built Ottoman dreadnought Reşadiye by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill on 31 July 1914 is widely held to have spurred the Young Turk regime in Istanbul to contract an alliance with Germany and enter the Great War at its side. This owing to widespread belief (still held by historians today) that it and a second seized dreadnought had been fully paid for by donations to the Ottoman Navy League collected from across the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Drawing on the archives of banks and of Vickers, who constructed the Reşadiye, this article demonstrates that the warships were in fact paid for by funds lent by British, French and German banks—as well as by Vickers itself. Drawing on Ottoman newspapers of the time, it explains how the Navy League myth developed, constraining Ottoman room for manoeuvre in the crucial months of summer 1914.

In his post-war study of the First World War, The World In Crisis (vol. 1, 1911–14) the former First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, observed drily that during the ‘naval scare’ of 1909, ...

Henry Dundas, first viscount Melville (1742–1811), lord advocate in Scotland, MP for Edinburgh and Midlothian, first lord of the admiralty, home secretary and the first secretary of state for war, was one of the most powerful politicians in the eighteenth-century British parliament. His involvement in the gradual abolition of the slave trade after 1792 was amongst the most controversial episodes of his career. His role has attracted much interest in the last few years, although there are two irreconcilable schools of thought amongst historians. This article reassesses Dundas's role in the gradual abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. His contributions in the houses of parliament between 1791 and 1807 are examined and situated in the appropriate imperial context. Memoirs and published pamphlets reveal how contemporaries viewed Dundas's activities and motives at the time and since. His parliamentary activities are compared with new insights from his personal correspondence as well as public and private communications from West India societies, merchants and planters. By overlaying parliamentary events with commercial networks, Henry Dundas's collaboration with the West India interest is revealed, and how this operated and was perceived at the time. This article—the first detailed study of its type—thus illuminates Henry Dundas's role as a great delayer of the abolition of the slave trade.

In October 1911 Winston Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty with a mandate to improve the Royal Navy’s readiness for war. He immediately began a correspondence with ‘Jacky’ Fisher, First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910, and during the last three months of 1911 the two men exchanged ideas on a wide range of subjects, including senior appointments in the navy. This article examines the background to Churchill’s appointment and his approaches to Fisher. It surveys the recommendations which Fisher made with regard to the positions in the fleet and the Admiralty which Churchill had to fill, providing an insight into Fisher’s opinions and the state of the upper ranks of the navy’s officer corps.

The contest between Great Britain and Germany for mastery in Europe and command of the seas shaped the course and outcome of the two great wars of the first half of the twentieth century. In the period before the First World War, Winston Churchill played a leading role in directing British policy and strategy in this contest with Germany. At the Admiralty, Churchill was at the centre of political controversy with regard to naval defence. An examination of Churchill’s tenure as first lord of the Admiralty before the First World War presents an opportunity to explore the politics of defence in an open society. Winston Churchill, who was home secretary from 19 February 1910 to 24 October 1911, went to the Admiralty in the aftermath of the Agadir crisis that embroiled Europe during summer 1911. The crisis showed the imminent danger facing Britain from Germany. War, or so it seemed, could be provoked by Germany with little warning.

Revisionist historians have argued that in July 1914 Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was preparing to implement a ‘Naval Revolution’ based on radical ideas they attribute to Admiral Sir John Fisher. This article examines Fisher’s influence on Churchill in 1911–14. By subjecting the revisionist argument to rigorous scrutiny, it demonstrates that Churchill did not embrace either ‘flotilla defence’ or the ‘battlecruiser concept’, the two central components of Fisher’s supposed radical agenda. On the eve of war, Churchill’s immediate goals were neither revolutionary nor inspired by Fisher. The weakness of the revisionists’ argument undermines their broad interpretation of naval policy during the Fisher era.

In 1902 Second Naval Lord Jackie Fisher and the Earl of Selborne, the First Lord of the Admiralty, announced a scheme which would fundamentally change the way cadets for the engineering, executive and Royal Marine branches were entered and trained. Known as the Selborne Scheme this was designed to give equal status to executive and engineering officers to reflect the increasingly technological nature of the navy. The scheme met with hostility from the established executive officers and the public. This article considers why these reforms were so controversial, using official Admiralty papers, published debate and private correspondence, to examine the scheme against broader changes in society and politics.

Conservative leaders may have had a decisive impact on the decision by the Liberal government to enter the Great War in August 1914. In a seminal article of 1975 Keith Wilson argued that their readiness to fight ‘cut the ground … from beneath the feet of the non-interventionists’ in the Cabinet. Those ministers who had hitherto opposed war now recognised that continued divisions could bring the Government’s collapse, in which case the Unionists, probably in a coalition with pro-war Liberals, would take office and enter the conflict anyway. Since Wilson’s essay important light has been shed on Unionist thinking by works that look at the July Crisis as part of a longer party history. The purpose of this article is to provide a detailed investigation of the actions of Unionist leaders in the days immediately leading to war. In so doing it will seek to resolve some of the main contradictions in the primary evidence, argue that the possibility of a coalition was very real and demonstrate that one key player – the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill – subsequently tried, with some success, to disguise his activities.

Although most of the blame for the disaster at Yorktown fell on the generals, the role of the navy was equally crucial. Had the fleet converged on Chesapeake Bay in sufficient numbers, the army of Lord Cornwallis would have been rescued and the war perhaps ended differently. Responsibility for this failure has never been adequately explained though the station officers across the Atlantic, Admirals Rodney, Parker and Graves, have all been criticised along with their political masters. This article suggests that the fleet commanders did their best to deal with a difficult situation, lacking as they did sufficient ships and information. It was these factors that permitted the French to assemble a much superior force in the summer of 1781 at a critical moment in the American war. For this situation the first Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, and the prime minister, Lord North, must bear primary responsibility, having allowed a dangerous inferiority to develop in the size of the fleet due to a lack of new...

This article challenges claims by revisionist historians that in July 1914 the Royal Navy was on the verge of instituting a ‘naval revolution’ based on the ideas of Admiral Sir John Fisher. Winston Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, was not prepared to rely on Fisher’s concept of ‘flotilla defence’ in the North Sea, as revisionists contend. Nor did he wish to send capital ships to distant waters. He increasingly looked to submarines to protect Britain’s interests in the Mediterranean, a secondary theatre, but he still believed that Britain must maintain a preponderance of strength over Germany in capital ships in the North Sea. Churchill’s strategic views were generally conservative. He hoped that new designs or new technologies would one day allow submarines to supplant battleships, and he actively supported measures that might help to make this possible. But there is no evidence that he and his naval advisers were ready to gamble on a radical departure in force structure or naval strategy on the eve of the First World War.

As the Allied and Axis powers manoeuvred in Scandinavia in 1940, Britain embarked on a series of ill-conceived expeditions to secure the port of Narvik and prevent Norway's occupation. First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, overrode military opinion, bullying members of the War Cabinet into a hasty, ad hoc operation that ceded the strategic advantage to the Germans and led to Chamberlain's resignation – and yet, ultimately to his own appointment as prime minister.

William Waldegrave Palmer, second earl of Selborne, took up his appointment as first lord of the admiralty in the marquess of Salisbury's third administration on 1 November 1900. This was Salisbury's recently acquired son-in-law's first experience of high office. Initially, as will be seen, Selborne regarded France and Russia as constituting the sole threat to British naval supremacy. Indeed, for reasons entirely to do with ‘economy’s, he was prepared to envisage the making of an alliance with Germany. He maintained this stance throughout 1901. At some point in the course of 1902, however, he displayed a dramatic change in outlook, which it is the purpose of this article to describe and, by pinning down the date with more precision than did Selborne himself in correspondence with Arthur J. Marder in 1938, to explain.1

During most of the nineteenth century, coal fueled the world's most technologically advanced economies. Oil began to displace coal at the onset of the twentieth century when the British recognized its military potential. Marcus Samuel, the head of Shell, began campaigning to convert the British Navy from coal to oil (Sampson 1976). Initially, the admirals resisted his proposal, suspecting that it had been motivated by self-interest. They also had doubts about the technical feasibility of using oil. Nevertheless Samuel managed to convince the First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher, of the soundness of his ideas. Whether Samuel's offer of a Shell directorship played a role in his conversion is still a matter of conjecture (ibid.). Fisher found an ally in Winston Churchill, who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1 91 1 . Fearing the growing strength of the German Navy, Churchill wanted to ensure the supremacy of the British fleet in the war that he knew was sure to come. In 1912 he established the Royal Corn

Robert Borden had an interest and involvement in imperial naval affairs that was largely forced upon him with the introduction into law in Canada of the Naval Service Act of 1910. This Canadian legislation was introduced against a background of changing international naval issues. Borden’s interest was heightened by a perceived international naval crisis derived from analysis of the British Government that began in 1909 but developed in the years 1911 and 1912. Winston Churchill’s pronouncements as First Lord of the Admiralty in this period and in particular his increasing interest in the role of the Dominions in issues related to an imperial navy brought Borden to further consider detailed naval matters.

One of the most intriguing of mental pastimes is to ponder on what the result might have been if certain famous happenings had been reversed. For example, if the Spanish Armada had succeeded in its task; or if Hertzog had been successful in his revolt of 1914, but two happenings in quite recent history, both originated by Winston Churchill, make a fascinating study. In 1915, as First Lord of the Admiralty and a member of the War Cabinet, he persuaded his colleagues to stage an invasion of Turkey with a view to opening the Dardenelles and so linking up with Russia. This failed. In 1941 as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, as soon as Germany invaded Russia, he proclaimed the latter an ally and promised her all the support and help the British Empire could give until victory was achieved. This succeeded.

In 1915, the Entente launched naval and land operations to knock the Ottoman empire (Turkey) out of the war with a single decisive blow. The brainchild of the mercurial British First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, the initial plan took advantage of the Entente’s naval superiority. Obsolescent Entente warships were to force the narrow Dardanelles Straits, after which warships could threaten the Turkish capital, Constantinople (Istanbul). An Anglo-French fleet assembled off the Gallipoli peninsula and in February–March 1915 it fought its way up the Dardanelles, in the face of fixed and mobile Turkish and German shore batteries, three shore-mounted torpedo-tubes and minefields. While the larger ships engaged the shore batteries, trawlers swept for mines. This was a slow process, with the capital ships retiring at dusk to return the following day. The naval force made steady progress, passing the outer forts, and was approaching the final set of defences at the Chanak (Canakkale) narrows on 18 March 1915 when it hit a recently laid undetected minefield. The French battleships Bouvet and Gaulois and the British Ocean, and the British battlecruisers Irresistible and Inflexible, were sunk, beached or badly damaged.

British researchers appear finally to have solved a long-standing mystery: whatever happened to HMS Beagle made famous by one of its passengers, Charles Darwin.Darwin said the voyage between 1831 and 1836 was ‘the most important event in my life’, paving the way for his key work, On the Origin of Species. Under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy, Darwin first developed his ideas about evolution.Two years ago, the hunt for the ship began in earnest when the Beagle Ship Research Group was set up by Robert Prescott of the University of St Andrews and Colin Pillinger of the Open University. The group are now convinced that they have at last found the remains under more than 5 metres of mud in the marshes of the Thames estuary.The Beagle was a ten-gun brig, launched in 1820 from the Woolwich Royal Dockyard. After several years' service, it was refitted as a hydrographic survey vessel and subsequently placed under the command of FitzRoy.For the latter part of its life, the Beagle lived modestly as a coastguard watch vessel in Essex to combat gangs of smugglers in the Southern Coastguard District. By 1870, the activities of the smugglers were in decline and the number of watch vessels was cut. The Beagle was taken back by the Admiralty and sold for £525, a surprisingly low figure which prompted one MP to subject the First Lord of the Admiralty to hostile questioning about the squandering of state assets.But the identity of the buyers remained obscure. The sale particulars referred to Messrs Murray and Trainer. Prescott and Pillinger were told that the land alongside a site where the team thought that the Beagle might be buried was owned by a Mr Rainer, which led them to speculate that the sales documents contained a typo. And indeed, the team found a reference to a Mr Thomas Rainer and Mr Murray.From the remote sensing survey the team could see the outline of a dock for the ship, which is suggestive that there is something substantial there, most probably the bottom of the Beagle. Archaeological surveys have turned up fragments of Victorian pottery which may have come from the Beagle. Taken together, the evidence points to its last resting place being a remote backwater deep in the Essex marshes.View Large Image | View Hi-Res Image | Download PowerPoint Slide

Derek Howse, Nevil Maskelyne: the seaman's astronomer . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xiv + 280, £40.00. ISBN 0-521-36261-X. In King Charles II the Royal Society and the Royal (Greenwich) Observatory share the same royal founder. For just short of three centuries they were intimately associated; between 1710 and 1965 the association was established by Royal Warrants that appointed the Society’s President and certain Fellows to serve as Visitors of the Observatory. This arrangement operated admirably, particularly during the time with which this book is concerned. The Observatory had been founded in 1675 to provide the astronomical information required ‘to find the so-much- desired longitude of places for the perfecting of the art of navigation’. Then, presumably because practical results were still lacking, a Longitude Act of 1714 offered huge monetary rewards - for those times - for ‘a proper method of finding the said longitude’. The Act set up a Board of Longitude to administer its provisions. Subsequent Acts modified these, but the Board as such remained in being for 114 years. It was a high-powered body which included the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Speaker of the House of Commons as well as the President of the Royal Society and the Astronomer Royal: another important link between those two persons. Any significant award required the approval of the Commons; in some major cases they were swayed apparently by sentiment rather than science to act against the Board’s advice. It fell to the Astronomer Royal to organize the exacting tests prescribed by the Act. Thus the work of the Board was for long a large additional burden upon him.

In Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta HMS Pinafore, which opened before enthusiastic London audiences in 1878, Sir Joseph Porter, First Lord of the Admiralty, sings: I always voted at my party’s call, And never thought of thinking for myself at all. W. S. Gilbert’s satirical lines touched a nerve of contemporary sensibility. The supplanting of parliamentary government by a more rigid party system appeared to be imposing on MPs the increasingly powerful dictates of cabinet and electorate. In his book Popular Government, published in 1885, a forum far removed from the Savoy operas, Sir Henry Maine, anxious at the advance of democracy, saw MPs being demoted from unfettered representatives to instructed delegates.1 Two comparisons readily illustrate the transition highlighted by Gilbert and Maine: first, the contrast between those differing parliamentary processes which produced the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884; secondly, a comparison of those two great crises of party dislocation, 1846 and 1886.

With war having been declared, one of Chamberlain’s initial moves was to invite Winston Churchill into the Cabinet to serve as First Lord of the Admiralty. But for Beaverbrook there was to be no place; instead, he was sent to the United States to find out what President Roosevelt thought about the war. One of Beaverbrook’s last acts before leaving was to inform Robertson of the need for American support. On 19 September, Robertson replied: ‘A written instruction has been given to Christiansen, Gordon [editor Sunday Express] and Frank Owen, making it clear that Mr Kennedy [the American Ambassador] is not to be criticised in the columns of our papers, but that he is to receive favourable comment. Also that this applied to all Americans.’1

From H. C. Miller, ‘Shaw on India’s Demand’, Hindu, 28 March 1946. H. C. Miller was a member of the London staff of the Hindu. When Labour came into power in 1945, the Attlee government was committed to independence for India; but there remained concern, both in India and Britain, about provinces having independence forced upon them without safeguarding of minority rights. By 1946 Jinnah had the overwhelming support of the Muslim League for the partition of India into Hindu and Muslim states. In March 1946 the British government sent a cabinet mission to Delhi to work out constitutional proposals with the Indian leaders. The members of the mission were Frederick William Pethick-Laurence, 1st Baron (1871–1961), Secretary of State for India and Burma; Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade; Albert Victor Alexander (Alexander of Hillsborough, 1st Earl, 1885–1965), First Lord of the Admiralty; and Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Earl (1883–1950), Field Marshal and Viceroy of India, 1943–7. Sir Stafford Cripps had led an unsuccessful mission to India in 1942.

A CENTURY AGO, Lord Selborne, the first lord of the Admiralty, dismissed the idea of fueling the British navy with something other than coal, which the island nation had in great abundance. "The substitution of oil for coal is impossible," he pronounced, "because oil does not exist in this world in sufficient quantities." Seven years later, the young Winston Churchill was appointed first lord and charged with winning the escalating Anglo-German race for naval superiority. As Daniel Yergin chronicled in The Prize, Churchill saw that oil would increase ship speed and reduce refueling time-key strategic advantages-and ordered oil-burning battleships to be built, committing the navy to this new fuel. Churchill's was a strategic choice, bold, creative, and farsighted. The energy choices the world faces today are no less consequential, and America's response must be as insightful. Energy is fundamental to U.S. domestic prosperity and national security. In fact, the complex ties between energy and U.S. national interests have drawn tighter over time. The advent of globalization, the growing gap between rich and poor, the war on terrorism, and

One evening early in the war, the First Lord of the Admiralty and Mrs Churchill invited the Prime Minister and Mrs Chamberlain to dine. By a happy chance the conversation turned to Chamberlain's early life in the Bahamas. He told the story of the struggle to recruit the family's fortunes by growing sisal on a remote and windswept island in the Bahamas, ‘living nearly naked, struggling with labour difficulties and every other kind of obstacle, and with the town of Nassau as the only gleam of civilization’. Chamberlain described how, for all his exertions, the scheme had failed. In the Chamberlain family, it appeared, it was felt that though they loved him dearly they were sorry to have lost £50,000. ‘I was fascinated’, Churchill recorded after the war, ‘by the way Mr. Chamberlain warmed as he talked, and by the tale itself, which was one of gallant endeavour. I thought to myself, “What a pity Hitler did not know when he met this sober English politician with his umbrella at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich that he was actually talking to a hard-bitten pioneer from the outer marches of the British Empire!” ‘

The majority of men who held the post of first lord of the Admiralty in the middle nineteenth century were usually of mediocre standard, and in the 1840s, significantly or not, were generally ex-governor generals of India. Sir James Graham was an exception; he had a first class mind and only narrowly missed being prime minister. He was also never governor general, although he must have been offered the post more frequently than any other man of his time! Given the dangerous international situation at the beginning of Lord Aberdeen's ministry, and the importance of naval preparedness and planning, it was plain that an experienced man was needed to head the Admiralty. Sir James was the natural choice. He had, after all, been first lord before, from 1830 to 1834, and while there he had been responsible for radical changes in naval administration. It so happened that his reforms were not subjected to the stresses of a large-scale European war until after their originator had returned to the post of his youth, and it will be the main aim of this paper to study how the reformed Admiralty tackled some of the problems of major warfare, and the way in which Sir James interpreted his powers and duties.

To suggest that a historian should explain Cook the Navigator to a scientific body is, if I may use scriptural language, to lay upon a grasshopper the load of a camel. At least the grasshopper, with a proper terror of scientific bodies, may feel it so. Yet Cook was neither a particularly high flight among the higher flights of mathematics—to the modern mathematician he would seem hardly to have got off the ground—nor a singularly complicated chemical equation. It should be possible for the historian, in his biographical moments, to say why Admiral Forbes, at the head of the carefully elaborate paragraphs he composed for the published account of Cook’s third voyage, should refer to the Hero as ‘The ablest and most renowned Navigator this or any country hath produced’; or why Daniel Wray, F. R. S., less sweeping and more homely in his news to the Earl of Hardwicke, F. R. S., in August 1775, should nevertheless write, ‘Cook is returned, and has resumed his seat at the Mitre. He is a right-headed unaffected man; and I have a great authority for calling him our best navigator’. (1)† The Mitre was the tavern where the Royal Society dined; and the implication is that Cook, though not yet a Fellow, dined with it; and that was unusual for a sea captain, and argues some peculiar gift or accomplishment. He was not the only right-headed unaffected man in the naval service; so what was the gift? In fact he had more than one gift. Perhaps the first of them was that he was born in the eighteenth century, which was the right century for the others to function in: it posed the right problems at the right time, put into his hands the right technical equipment for their solution, gave him the right official support. But other naval persons existed in that century and did not attain eminence; and few among them had to begin with as few advantages. I discriminate advantages from gifts. It was an advantage to have among one’s relatives an earl who knew the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Cook’s relatives included no such excellent figure; it was a gift to have—what Cook’s lieutenant James King said Cook had—a strong and perspicacious mind. Well: a strong and perspicacious mind, in the navy in the eighteenth century: not enough, but a beginning.

When the Asquith Coalition Government took office in May, 1915, the new First Lord of the Admiralty was Mr. Arthur James Balfour. His appointment to that particular position at that time was due to a number of influences, among which political exigency was by no means the least important. In the Cabinet reconstruction, Asquith had insisted that Grey at the Foreign Office and Kitchener at the War Office were not to be changed, and these reservations materially lessened the higher Cabinet posts which were available for prominent Conservatives. As a result of this delicate weighing of leaders and offices, Balfour became the most obvious choice for the Admiralty, a position for which he was well qualified on at least two other grounds. He not only held a seat in the Commons, but his experience as an unofficial consultant and member of the War Council during the previous seven months had given him a more comprehensive knowledge of the problems of the fighting services than any of his Conservative colleagues. The suitability of his appointment, moreover, was endorsed by his predecessor, Mr. Churchill, who suggested that inasmuch as Balfour had recently been in unusually close touch with events at the Admiralty, he could take over its duties with very little break in the continuity of the administration.

When it comes to the condition of Cabinet government, Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, is a prime witness. He may find it difficult to remember the names of some of his colleagues around Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet table1 (his dignified bulk rests right opposite the Prime Minister, perfectly placed for catching her eye2) but he has sat at it for sixteen and a half years, a post-war record. He has seen in action Sir Anthony Eden in the dreadful months of Suez (Lord Hailsham was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1956 just below Cabinet rank).3 Harold Macmillan brought him into the Cabinet in January 1957 and there he remained through the Macmillan and Home years till October 1964. He has been on the Woolsack for the duration of the Heath and Thatcher governments. His judgement of the Thatcher style is, therefore, a collector’s item.

A former colonel in the Royal Marines tells of an incident which occurred in Tanganyika in 1964. His men had just taken up their positions along the coastal road when he received a radio call from an obviously worried junior officer: ‘Sir, a journalist has arrived. Shall I arrest him?’1 On this occasion the pressman escaped being clapped in irons, but the lieutenant’s reaction to the media’s presence at a sensitive operational time was far from untypical. Kitchener, both in the Sudan and subsequently, rarely disguised his suspicion and dislike of newspaper men.2 During the First World War, reporters were not allowed to the front until June 1915; and then were kept firmly under the control of the military with strict censorship being applied.3 The Royal Navy refused to embark journalists on warships — Winston Churchill, at the time First Lord of the Admiralty, is quoted as saying ‘A warship in action has no place for a journalist.’4 Similarly in the Second World War, the Royal Navy decided against taking reporters to sea on operations, although this ruling was later relaxed a little.5

In the beautiful weather of the Whit weekend — which in France was being exploited to the full by the German army and air force — Churchill set about the construction of his ministry. By Saturday (May 11th) the first list of ministers had been agreed, and after being approved by the Labour Party’s National Executive meeting at Bournemouth was published: there were the five members of the War Cabinet, Churchill himself and his two former senior colleagues, Chamberlain and Halifax, and also Attlee and Greenwood for the Labour Party; and there was one representative of each party at the Service ministries — A. V. Alexander (Labour) as First Lord of the Admiralty, Anthony Eden (Conservative) as Secretary for War, and Sir Archibald Sinclair (Liberal) as Air Minister. The Service ministers formed a group which Churchill thought congenial to himself, and willing to serve as his subordinates. They were not to be members of the War Cabinet, although Sinclair, in his capacity as Liberal leader, was to attend when important political matters were discussed.1 Sinclair was of course an old friend of the Prime Minister, who had no doubt that the arrangement would work satisfactorily.

Soon after the outbreak of war in September Mr. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, appointed Professor Lindemann, the Oxford physicist, as his personal adviser. At first he was intended to advise mainly on scientific matters, but in October the First Lord asked him to form a statistical branch as well, and within a month or so some half a dozen economists, nearly all in their twenties, had been collected from the universities. ‘S Branch’, as it was called, was to collect and co-ordinate Admiralty and cognate statistics for the First Lord and also to advise him on wider matters with which he was concerned as a member of the War Cabinet. When Mr. Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940 the Branch was transformed into the Prime Minister’ s Statistical Section and the scope of its work greatly enlarged. It remained in being until the change of Government in July 1945. In December 1942 Professor Lindemann (now Lord Cherwell) was appointed Paymaster-General, and the Section was sometimes known thereafter as the Office of the Paymaster-General. An important part of its work was now to advise Lord Cherwell in his personal capacity as a member of the House of Lords, a Minister, an attender at meetings of the War Cabinet and a member of several Cabinet committees.

Control over the Armed Forces by ministers, and associated with them though sometimes in jealous opposition to them, by Parliament, has had a long tradition in the United Kingdom. During the nineteenth century, the prestigious offices of First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary of State for War together with the posts of Foreign Secretary, Colonial Secretary and Secretary of State for India, not to mention the Prime Minister, meant that a significant proportionate effort of the Cabinet was directly involved in defence or overseas defence-related questions.

Although the Admiralty was the senior service ministry, it did not rank above the Home Office in the hierarchy of the government, and so it could not be said that Churchill was being promoted in becoming First Lord. He was, however, moving to a post where rapid reform was expected of him, and this was as usual to his taste. In short order he was as he put it ‘burrowing about in an illimitable rabbit-warren’.1 He found it necessary to work long hours, either in the Admiralty or on the Admiralty yacht, HMS Enchantress. Marsh, who had again followed him as Private Secretary, was placed under the same obligation: he wrote wryly to a friend after the first month: Winston stays until at least 8 every day…. Even Sundays are no longer my own, as I have spent 3 out of the last 4 on the Enchantress. We have made a new commandment. ‘The seventh day is the Sabbath of the First Lord, on it thou shalt do all manner of work.’2

IN MAY, 1940, the mere thought of Churchill as prime minister sent a cold chill down the spines of the staff at ro Downing Street, where I was working as assistant private secretary to Mr. Neville Chamberlain. Churchill’s impetuosity had, we thought, contributed to the Norwegian fiasco,* and General Ismay had told us in despairing tones of the confusion caused by his enthusiastic eruptions into the peaceful and orderly deliberations of the Military Co-ordination Committee and the chiefs of staff. His verbosity and restlessness made unnecessary work, prevented real planning, and caused friction. Indeed, we felt that Chamberlain had been weak in allowing the first lord of the Admiralty to assume responsibilities far in excess of his departmental concerns, and if we had known he was conducting his own telegraphic correspondence with President Roosevelt, we should have been still more horrified by such presumption. Our feelings at 10 Downing Street were widely shared in the Cabinet offices, the Treasury, and throughout Whitehall.

Mrs D. N. Twort has presented to the Society a letter from Sir Joseph Banks, the text of which is reproduced below. The name of the person to whom the letter was addressed is unknown, but its contents are of considerable interest. The following notes may be of assistance in placing the reader in possession of the facts relevant to the circumstances in which the then President of the Society wrote the letter. Charles Philip Yorke, F.R.S., was First Lord of the Admiralty, and the Board of Admiralty had recently promoted Captain Matthew Flinders with the highest seniority possible without a special order from the King in Council, on his release from French captivity. In command of the Investigator , he had, largely at Sir Joseph Banks’s instigation, taken out a scientific expedition to Australia, in 1801. Returning to England in another ship in 1803, his last news was that England and France were at peace. His ship, the Cumberland of 29 tons, was very leaky, and he accordingly put in to He de France (Mauritius) with the additional intention of surveying that coast. Although he was in possession of a French passport, he was arrested by the Governor, who put the worst interpretation on his activities and kept him in confinement for nearly seven years. He was eventually released and reached England on 24 October 1810, four days before the date of the letter.

Meeting of the Society, 27 May I940 T HE solution of the problem of Stefansson Strait was not one of the original objects of the British Graham Land Expedition when it left England in 1934. In the early days of the Expedition the existence of Stefansson Strait was thought to be a fairly well established fact, but at the close of the Expedition it was equally well established that there was no Stefansson Strait on the western side of Graham Land. This simple state of affairs was complicated by the various reports and publications in connection with Lincoln Ellsworth's two long antarctic flights in November 1936. It was in an endeavour to correlate the various descriptions and maps of southern Graham Land that the problem of Stefansson Strait arose; a problem which can be better appreciated if we make a short summary of the sequence of events in this part of the Antarctic. When in January I82I Bellingshausen discovered Alexander the First Land, he assumed that the land east of it was part of an Antarctic continent. Ten years later when Biscoe discovered the Biscoe Islands, he called the high land to the east of them Graham Land after Sir James Graham, then First Lord of the Admiralty. And so for nearly a hundred years from the time of Biscoe the charts represented Graham Land as a peninsula of the Antarctic continent. During this period the country was visited by De Gerlache, Charcot, and numerous whalers, but still there was nothing to suggest that Graham Land was not a peninsula. In December 1928 Sir Hubert Wilkins arrived at Deception Island with the Wilkins-Hearst Antarctic Expedition, and although his major plans never materialized he made one very successful flight down the east coast of Graham Land to a point some 60o miles south of Deception Island. Previous explorers of the east coast had outlined it to about latitude 67? 30' S., or approximately as far as Adelaide Island on the west coast. Beyond this point it was assumed that Graham Land continued until it joined the mainland. Wilkins however claimed to have discovered channels, filled with sea-ice, which broke up southern Graham Land into a series of islands, and on December 20, at I2.50 p.m., he wrote, "We are now quite certain that Graham Land is not connected with the mainland continent. Felt sure before, but at this point it could be clearly shown on a photograph." Three such channels were reported by Wilkins, and in the map which was published to accompany his report they were named from north to south Casey and Lurabee Channels, and Stefansson Strait. To the south of the last lay Hearst Land, and east of it, for the Strait curved round from an east-west to a north-south direction, the land terminated in a point called Cape Eielson. All this was shown in detail on a map called "The Antarctic Archipelago," in which the newly discovered channels ran from the Weddell Sea to Marguerite Bay.

T THE immediate naval operations resulting from the Franco-American Alliance have been the object of careful study and expert criticism on the part of naval historians.' However, the high level formulation of naval policy giving direction and authority to these operations has been neglected, despite the fact that the entrance of France into the war was the main preoccupation of the British cabinet during the spring of 1778. Strong differences of opinion within the cabinet as to the most effective disposition and employment of the available naval forces developed early and continued throughout the spring and early summer of i778. The two ministers most deeply committed during this time of tension and crisis were Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the American Department, and the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty. Each of these two dominating personalities developed a strong policy of his own from which he never wavered. Caught between these formidable and tenacious protagonists, with no far-reaching and firm opinions of his own, or even the technical competence to achieve them, was the First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord North. The King himself became involved in the controversy and exhibited at critical moments a most uncharacteristic indecision. As a result of these serious divisions within the cabinet, British naval