Chapter XII · LETTERS TO LORD ESHER (continued 2)

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1912. August 7th.

I still hate Rosyth and fortifications and East Coast Docks and said so the other day! but what we devise at Cromarty is for another purpose—to fend off German Cruisers possibly by an accident of fog or stupidity getting loose on our small craft taking their ease or re-fuelling in Cromarty (Oil will change all this in time, but as yet we have for years coal-fed vessels to deal with).... I’ve got enthusiastic colleagues on the oil business! They’re all bitten! Internal Combustion Engine Rabies!

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1912. September.

... What an ass I was to come home! but it was next door to impossible to resist the pressure put on me, and then can you think it was wise of me to plunge once more into so vast a business as future motor Battleships? Changing the face of the Navy, and, as Lloyd George said to me last Friday, getting the Coal of England as my mortal enemy!

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1912. Sept. 14th.

This Royal Commission [on oil] is a wonder! We have our first meeting on September 24th, and practically it is finished though it will go on for years and years and never submit a Report! You will love the modus operandi when some day I expound it to you!... In the second week of December we have an illustration on the scale of 12 inches to a foot of producing oil from coal. Twenty-five tons a day will be produced as an example. All that is required is to treble the retorting plant of all gas works in the United Kingdom where there is a Mayor and Corporation, and to treble their “through put” of coal! We get two million tons of oil that way! We only want one million.

I addressed the Directors of the S.E. & Chatham Railway last Tuesday, and hope I persuaded them to build a motor vessel of 24 knots between Calais and Dover, and proved to them they could save an hour between Paris and London—the whole side of the vessel falls down and makes a gangway on to a huge pontoon at Calais and Dover and all the passengers march straight out (“Every man straight before him,” like the Israelites did at Jericho, and the walls fell down before them!) No more climbing up Mont Blanc up a narrow precipitous gangway from the steamer to the jetty in the rain, and an old woman blocking you with her parcels and umbrella jammed by the stanchions, and they ask her for her ticket and she don’t know which pocket it’s in! and the rain going down your neck all the time! A glass roof goes over the motor vessel—she has no funnels, and her telescopic wireless masts wind down by a 2 h.p. motor so as not to go through the glass roof. But all this is nothing to H.M.S. “Incomparable”—a 25 knot battleship that will go round the whole earth without refuelling!... The plans of her will be finished next Monday, and I wrote last night to say I proposed in my capacity as a private British Citizen to go over in three weeks’ time in the White Star “Adriatic” to get Borden [the Canadian Prime Minister] to build her at Quebec. The Building Yard put up there by Vickers is under a guarantee to build a Dreadnought in Canada in May and the great Dreadnought Dock left Barrow for Quebec on August 31st. No English Government would ever make this plunge, which is why I propose going to Canada—to that great man, Borden—and take the Vickers people to make their bargain for building.

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1912. Sept. 20th.

... My idea now is to raise a syndicate to build the “Non-Pareil”! A few millionaires would suffice, and I know sufficient of them to do it. All the drawings and designs quite ready. The one all pervading, all absorbing thought is to get in first with motor ships before the Germans! Owing to our apathy during the last two years they are ahead with internal combustion engines! They have killed 15 men in experiments with oil engines and we have not killed one! And a d—d fool of an English politician told me the other day that he thinks this creditable to us!

Without any doubt (I have it from an eye-witness of part of the machinery for her at Nuremberg) a big German oil engine Cruiser is under weigh! We must press forward.... These d—d politics are barring the way.... “What!” (say these trembling idiots) “Another Dreadnought Revolution!” and these boneless fools chatter with fear like apes when they see an elephant! The imagination cannot picture that “a greater than the Dreadnought is here!” Imagine a silhouette presenting a target 33 per cent. less than any living or projected Battleship! No funnels—no masts—no smoke—she carries over 5,000 tons of oil, enough to take her round the world without refuelling! Imagine what that means! Ten motor boats carried on board in an armoured pit in the middle of her, where the funnels and the boilers used to be. Two of these motor boats are over 60 feet long and go 45 knots! and carry 21-inch Torpedoes that go five miles! Imagine these let loose in a sea fight!15 Imagine projectiles far over a ton weight! going over a mile or more further than even the 13½-inch gun can carry, and that gun has rightly staggered humanity!—Yes! that 13½-inch gun that all my colleagues (bar one! and he is our future Nelson! [Jellicoe]) thought me mad to force through against unanimous disapproval! and see where we are now in consequence! We shall have 16 British Dreadnoughts with the 13½-inch gun before the Germans have one!!! So it will be with the “Non-Pareil”! WE HAVE GOT TO HAVE HER ... I’ve worked harder over this job than in all my life before!16

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1912. Dec. 29th.

... I’m getting sick of England and want to get back to Naples and the sun! and the “dolce far niente!” What fools we all are to work like we do! Till we drop!