Sea Change Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World

In October 1843,

100,000 people gathered on the streets of London.

A grand memorial to their greatest hero was about to be unveiled.

Nelson's column, built with donations from an adoring public,

their gift to a man who had paid for victory with death.

His granite figure stands 50 metres up, facing south towards the site of his last and greatest victory,

Trafalgar.

The turning point in the titanic struggle against France,

a war from which Britain had emerged as the world's only super-power.

But this was so much more than just a statue.

Situated here in the heart of London, between Parliament,

Buckingham Palace and the City,

Nelson's column was the totem of the British state,

and a clear expression of the central role of the Royal Navy within it.

After Trafalgar, the Navy took control of the world's sea lanes,

driving Britain's pursuit of trade and empire.

New technologies extended its lead over other navies.

And more than ever, British ships and sailors were the symbols of the nation.

But Britain's dominance would not go uncontested forever, and by 1914 she faced her greatest challenge yet.

Once again, Britain found herself vying for global supremacy,

this time against a backdrop of unprecedented upheaval and the emergence of a dangerous new enemy.

The Navy, which had been the instrument of Britain's success,

now took her to the very brink of defeat.

Early one January morning in 1841,

12 British warships sailed up to the mouth of the Pearl River,

gateway to the southern Chinese port of Canton.

As the 19th century unfolded, the navy had built on Nelson's legacy.

They had pushed British interests further afield than ever before.

Algeria, Egypt, Burma, New Zealand.

Now, it was China's turn.

The Royal Navy was here to open up China for business,

but this was no polite trading mission.

This was war.

For years, British merchants had been buying Chinese tea and paying with opium.

They smuggled in six million kilograms a year.

The Chinese authorities had been appalled by the devastating affect of the drug on their people.

They clamped down on the trade, and threw the British out of China.

Retribution was to be brutal and effective.

The Navy was sent to re-open the Chinese market by force.

Among the fleet that day there was a new ship.

She hadn't yet been tested in battle.

She was called Nemesis.

For the Chinese, that's what she turned out to be.

Nemesis went into action against 15 war junks.

As soon as she opened fire, she immediately set one alight.

From the deck, her captain, William Hall, viewed the scene.

"The smoke and flame and thunder of the explosion,"

he said, "were enough to strike awe, if not fear, into the stoutest heart that looked upon it."

Armed with antiquated guns and spears,

the junks were no match for the Nemesis and her evil weapons in a modern world.

They turned and fled up narrow river channels.

At this point, the large traditional sailing ships of the Royal Navy would have had to give up the chase.

But the Nemesis was able to set off after the junks in hot pursuit

because deep within her hull roared a steam engine.

Revolutionary new technology that drove a ship through the water

no matter what the wind, tide or currents were doing.

And every single junk the Nemesis chased, she captured or destroyed.

Never before had a steam-powered ship played such a decisive role.

The astonished Chinese called her a demon ship.

Britain was shaping the future of warfare and China,

the world's oldest empire, suffered a crushing defeat.

In the past, people put the extraordinary success of the British Empire in this period

down to divine favour or racial superiority,

or even a particular kind of valour, but none of this was true.

It was Britain's industrial lead that lay at the heart of this triumph.

The Navy, once dominant, had now become untouchable.

But the British didn't claim huge swathes of mainland China as their spoils of war.

Instead, she merely demanded the right

to trade through Chinese ports, and the Navy took its own prize -

a Chinese island with a deep, sheltered harbour -

Hong Kong.

CAR HORNS BEEP

It's hard to believe this was once the quiet beach front of Hong Kong,

and this road here was actually a towpath that was used by the crews of junks.

Beyond it was the sea, and in January 1841

British Naval officers disembarked and landed at this very spot.

They planted a flag in the ground and drank a toast to Queen Victoria,

and then, with three cheers, took possession of Hong Kong.

The mastermind behind the occupation of Hong Kong was Royal Navy Captain, Charles Elliott.

He was Britain's Chief Superintendent for Trade in China,

and he had grand plans for the island.

Elliott didn't just see Hong Kong as a naval base, but as the perfect place

from which British merchants could conduct all their trade with China.

Within months, Elliott started selling small plots of land and invited merchants in to trade.

But back in London, the British government didn't see it the Navy's way.

Hong Kong was dismissed as a barren island with hardly a house upon it.

Elliott was sacked.

But despite his departure, Elliott's plans had a momentum of their own.

A small fleet of six Royal Navy vessels was kept anchored in the harbour.

With the security of knowing their warehouses

and cargoes were protected, British merchants kept investing.

Captain Elliott's successor predicted, "Within six months of Hong Kong being declared

"a permanent colony, it will be a vast emporium of commerce and wealth".

In 1842, Hong Kong was formally ceded to the British Empire, in perpetuity.

From then on, the warships stationed in the harbour became a potent sign of the force

that would come crashing down on the Chinese if they reneged on the deal.

It was the advent of what became known as "gunboat diplomacy",

British interests secured down the barrel of a gun.

This was central to the so-called Pax Britannica, peace enforced by worldwide naval domination.

By 1848, 129 British warships were posted on 55 foreign stations.

The Navy's bases on Gibraltar, Malta and Aden guarded the key routes to India.

The Falklands protected British interests in South America.

And in the middle of the world's oceans,

supply stations on islands like Ascension

kept naval ships steaming from port to port.

World trade flowed like never before, nearly doubling in the 1850s alone.

Riding high on the back of her dominant navy,

Britain had the lion's share,

twice as much as her nearest rival, France.

People think that Britain was rich and powerful because of her vast Empire,

but actually, you can forget the big open spaces of southern Africa, Australia and Canada.

The source of her wealth was control of the territory that really mattered, the sea.

Back at home, the Navy was celebrated like never before.

Over the summer of 1863, the best family day out was

a trip to see the Navy's ships as they went on a tour around Britain.

1.5 million people, 7% of the population, turned out to see their splendid fleet.

It was all part of an elaborate PR exercise,

designed to highlight the central role of the Navy in public life.

This was the star of the show.

HMS Warrior, the largest, fastest, most powerful battleship anywhere in the world at the time.

She is famous for being Britain's first ironclad.

In fact, she's more than just clad in iron, she's iron throughout,

making her one of the most revolutionary ships of all time.

The Warrior was the embodiment of the industrial revolution, at sea.

Inside, people could marvel at some of the greatest inventions of the era.

The engine room.

240 tons' worth of machinery down here.

It's when you come right down here into the bowels of the ship,

away from the masts and rigging up there,

that you realise just how far we are now from Nelson's navy of wood and sails.

This new navy needed men with different skills.

The crew included 12 engineers to operate the engines, and up to 66 stokers to shovel coal.

At full pelt, they could make the Warrior go faster than any sail-powered battleship.

The Armstrong guns were a brand new design.

The first thing we do when we come to fire something like this, 110 pounder,

is we need to slacken off the breach group.

The 110 pound breach loader could propel shells over a range of 2.5 miles.

They were laid out in a single gun deck within an armoured citadel.

The most powerful guns of the day couldn't pierce these iron walls, even at point blank range.

There were no set visitor hours, so people could just drop by

any time of day, but that meant that they saw whatever was going on on board at the time.

On this deck alone, 450 sailors might be taking their lunch at these tables, or cleaning the decks,

or repairing parts of the ship.

Or, if they were off duty, perhaps they'd just be fixing up their uniforms

or just reading the newspaper.

It was a unique opportunity for the public to gain a glimpse of the realities of life on board.

And they were amazed by it.

Not just the weapons, but the state-of-the-art domestic touches.

Bathing was a rare event for many Victorians, but the Warrior had private bathroom facilities.

And ladies were astonished by the first-ever onboard washing machines.

The Admiralty had pulled out all the stops to show the Navy in the best possible light.

It reassured the public that Britain still ruled the waves.

Because Warrior had been built in response to a terrifying new reality.

For the first time in over 100 years, another nation had stolen a march

on Britain's technological lead.

The surprising thing about the idea for this kind of ship

is that it didn't come from Britain at all, but from her oldest enemy, France.

It was the French who had launched the world's first ironclad battleship in 1859,

called La Gloire.

Now, this was a wake up call to everyone at the Admiralty,

a reminder that the French threat was still alive and well.

La Gloire had been a crushing blow to national pride.

Prince Albert had fumed, "The war preparations of the French are immense.

"Ours are despicable.

"What have we got to meet this new engine of war?"

The answer was Warrior,

1.5 times bigger, and twice as powerful as La Gloire.

No ship in the world could compete with the Warrior.

Britain had yet again established its naval supremacy,

but the shipbuilding revolution did not stop here.

Instead, it accelerated.

Britain and France both desperately strove to outdo each other and produce new and more powerful ships.

A new term was coined to describe this intense rivalry - an arms race.

And the pace was incredibly fast.

Ships were outdated as soon as they were launched.

Ten years after the Warrior, the most powerful ship on earth, was commissioned, it was obsolete.

The building of Warrior marked the start of a battle between Britain and her rivals

that would be decided not by combat, but through a never-ending game of technological one-upmanship.

And over the next 20 years, it was Britain's navy which appeared to be winning the arms race.

The question was, could the men inside the navy keep up?

In October 1881, the Navy's latest ship arrived in Malta,

home to the Mediterranean fleet, the largest and most important fleet in the Navy.

In command, her newly appointed captain, Jacky Fisher.

When Fisher entered this harbour, he must have thought that he'd arrived.

He'd been given his most prestigious posting yet,

command of HMS Inflexible, the most advanced, powerful battleship in the Royal Navy.

He would have known that all the eyes in the fleet were on him and his new ship.

Jacky Fisher was enthralled by the latest inventions of his age.

He'd made a name for himself pioneering a new type of weapon, the torpedo.

For him, the Inflexible was a wonder, with the thickest armour, the biggest guns,

the largest of everything.

Beyond any ship in the world.

Above all else, she was modern.

As well as two colossal steam engines to drive the propellers,

there were 39 smaller engines to power electric lighting, ventilation,

steering gear and hydraulic pumps.

Captain Fisher immediately set to work, making Inflexible ready for the Admiral's inspection.

Fisher did everything he could to get the Inflexible up to a full state of battle readiness,

but despite all his hard work he didn't receive any official credit,

and the reason for that was very simple.

Fisher and his men were no good at sailing.

Well, they were good sailors, but they just couldn't use the sails.

Incredibly, Inflexible, which was state of the art in every other way,

had masts, rigging and hundreds of feet of canvas sails.

Although traditional sailing skills were now irrelevant to modern warfare,

the top brass at the Admiralty still believed that sailors were nothing without sails.

The old guard clung to their traditions.

They regarded the use of the engine as unseaman-like, and there could be no greater insult.

But Fisher said that sails had, "As much effect upon the Inflexible

"in a gale of wind, as a fly would have on a hippopotamus."

He was alienated by what he called the "bow and arrow party" in the Admiralty.

He saw that future battles would be decided by the speed of engines and the power of guns.

But the modern machines Fisher celebrated were despised.

Those who operated them, the engineers and stokers with their

dirty uniforms and technical know-how, were treated as interlopers.

Even when masts and sails were gradually phased out,

sail drill was replaced by an obsession for cleanliness.

There were even reports of ammunition being dumped overboard

to avoid the mess caused by gun practice.

Battleships were becoming showpieces, not weapons of war.

Appearance was more important than function.

The old guard were failing to get to grips with the new technologies that were revolutionising war at sea.

There was an expression around at the time to describe this attitude.

It said that when the ships were wood, the men were iron.

Now that the ships were iron, the men were wood.

Fisher was convinced that in the hands of the traditionalists,

the Navy was lagging dangerously behind in the arms race.

When he returned to London in 1884, he fought back.

His tactics would be instantly recognisable today.

He leaked sensational stories of arms shortages to the press.

He found an ally in WT Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette,

and pioneer of a new kind of shock journalism.

Dramatic exposes designed to whip his readers up into a storm of indignation.

Ah, here we go. Front page. A headline that will get everybody reading.

"The Truth About The Navy, by One who Knows the Facts.

"Britain is short of everything from battleships to torpedo boats,

"there are not enough trained men able to fight,

"and the guns aren't good enough.

"Our guns actually fitted are inferior both in weight and in power to those of France and Italy.

"And the conclusion is very simple.

"I have shown that on almost all important points the truth about the Navy is that our naval supremacy

"has almost ceased to exist."

But to the Victorians, this would have been absolutely shocking.

They were raised on the idea of British maritime invincibility.

Fisher's propaganda played on the nation's fears and had exactly the impact he wanted.

The suggestion that Nelson's heritage had been squandered was a horrifying concept,

one that was picked up by the national newspapers.

The public went up in arms.

The Daily Telegraph called it,

"A cry of patriotic anxiety to which no minister can close his ears."

The Pall Mall Gazette articles prompted a new sense of fear and insecurity

and the British people reacted by seizing on to a new, more aggressive form of nationalism.

As one popular music hall song put it at the time,

"We don't want to fight, but by jingo, if we do, we've got the ships, we've got the men,

"and we've got the money too."

Jingoism was born, a response to the British anxiety about losing their dominant world position.

And what was the symbol of this new mood? Well, the navy, of course.

The navy was used to advertise everything from mustard to chocolate.

Sailors were emblazoned across cigarette packets

and "ironclad" became the brand name of choice

for anything British made.

Eventually, the Government crumbled under public pressure.

In 1889, they invested an astonishing £21 million in the navy.

Enough to make it more than twice the size

of her two greatest rivals, France and Russia.

This was such an important victory for public opinion

in what was fast becoming a modern democratic society,

a society with mass circulation newspapers and journals,

their column inches filled by talk of the Navy,

its commanders, its weapons and its men.

The Navy may have secured more money for its fleet but it had yet to deal with another problem.

Since Trafalgar, its men had had little experience of full scale conflict.

The skills that had made Nelson's navy great were slowly being lost.

Henry Capper joined a training ship in 1869, aged 14.

He started on the very bottom rung of the ladder, as a rating.

A uniform was introduced for the first time to the lower ranks in 1857,

and it hasn't changed much since.

The square collar was copied from the sailors' suits worn aboard the Royal Yacht, and it's still in use.

Despite their smart appearance, Capper thought these uniforms

reinforced what he described as a caste system.

He said that nothing could more clearly indicate the wide gulf

that existed between himself and the officers,

and Capper noticed this gulf because his lifetime ambition was to become an officer.

Yeah, go on, not far to go now. Come on. Take over him.

We do not want to lose this, guys.

Stretch it, you can reach that now.

Off you get. Next one just go.

Good effort, Tayloridge. Good, Cooke, well done.

Today, ratings can advance through the service based on individual merit.

Come on, let's go!

Drive it on, come on...

In Capper's time, the only way men could prove themselves was through acts of gallantry in battle.

With no major wars to fight, these opportunities were so rare, that in 80 years,

only two men from the lower ranks made it into the officer class.

Capper wrote this account of his life in the navy, and he describes all the snubs and humiliations

that he was forced to endure during his attempts to become an officer.

Summed up by this passage here, when a mother of a lieutenant says to him,

"You've chosen the wrong service.

"The Navy belongs to us, and if you were to win the commissions you ask for,

"it would be at the expense of our sons and nephews whose birthright it is."

The message here is clear.

If you began life as a rating, you had no chance of reaching the top.

Capper called the lack of incentive "soul deadening".

The navy was beginning to stagnate, and it was losing what had always been one of its greatest strengths,

a rough and ready meritocracy where anyone could get ahead.

In wartime it had been easy for talented men to shine.

In peace, the entrenched hierarchy was everything.

The class system and rulebook were smothering any spark of initiative.

The flaws of this mindset were about to be revealed, with tragic consequences.

Admiral Sir George Tryon was one of the most famous commanders of his era.

Charismatic, larger than life, the embodiment of an old seadog.

In 1893, he held that most prized role in the Navy, Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet.

Tryon liked to test his crews by ordering them to carry out intricate manoeuvres.

MAN: Can't see anything out at 11 miles.

Watch reported at six.

On one evening in June, he was leading 11 of his finest warships

off the coast of Tripoli in southern Lebanon.

In order to get his fleet into a position where they could anchor for the evening,

Tryon decided to carry out a particularly complicated manoeuvre,

but he didn't tell anyone what it was.

He just sent out a series of flag signals from the deck of his ship.

First, Tryon, aboard HMS Victoria,

instructed his fleet to form two columns steaming parallel to each other.

Then he ordered the two columns to turn inwards

so that they would end up heading in the opposite direction.

The problem was that big ships like this need a huge amount of space to turn.

Tryon's two lines of ships needed to be about a kilometre and a half apart

in order to carry out the manoeuvre safely, but they weren't.

Admiral Markham, who was leading the second column, knew this, and he hesitated,

but Tryon sent him another order, saying, "What are you waiting for?"

Markham decided to follow his orders and turned his ship.

Markham forged forward towards Tryon's flagship.

At the last minute, both desperately tried to reverse but it was too late.

With sickening inevitability, the two ships ploughed into each other.

Markham's battering ram pierced the side of Tryon's ship.

Within just a few minutes, the foredeck was submerged.

Even though their ship was sinking under them, many of the 600 men on board

fell in to their neat ranks, waiting for orders.

Only when they were commanded to do so, did they jump overboard.

From a nearby ship, one eye witness reported what happened next.

"As HMS Victoria went, the boats and weights on her port side fell over to leeward with a terrible crash.

"The ship then turned keel up, and something after a minute after this, she sank out of sight."

Half the crew, 358 men, were drowned.

Some were trapped on board, some dragged under, others couldn't swim.

Tryon went down with his ship.

His last reported words were, "It was all my fault."

The news that HMS Victoria had been sunk by another ship in Her Majesty's Navy

was received with shock and amazement.

It was the worst naval disaster in decades.

With the death of Tryon, Britain had lost a national hero.

As one newspaper put it, "the angel of sorrow hovered over the land."

Key officers involved in the accident were to be court-martialled.

To get away from the media spotlight, the trial was held out here in Malta.

It was an old three-deck wooden warship called HMS Hibernia which

was moored up just there, on the other side of Valetta Harbour.

The question at the heart of the enquiry

was whether Tryon was to blame for issuing a dangerous command,

or whether it was Markham's fault for blindly obeying an order that he knew could lead to disaster.

And that was an issue that split not just the Royal Navy but public opinion back in Britain.

On the third day of the court-martial, Markham appeared in the witness stand.

Markham tried to defend himself.

He claimed that he'd been convinced that Tryon would have something else

up his sleeve and order a further change of course.

But for many people this was an inadequate excuse.

Markham was a rear admiral with 40 years of experience in the navy.

He was second in command of the Mediterranean fleet,

responsible for some of Britain's finest ships and thousands of her men.

Surely, he should have realised how dangerous Tryon's signal had been and disobeyed the order?

The Victorian sailors had been indoctrinated by a culture

that placed enormous emphasis on discipline.

Orders must be obeyed.

For many, Markham had simply been doing his duty.

Commenting on the trial, the Queen herself wrote in her private journal that to say that inferiors should

disobey in the event of anything very dangerous taking place would never do.

After ten days, the verdict was delivered.

This is a copy of the conclusion of the trial, and it says that the court finds,

with the deepest sorry and regret, that the collision was due to an order

given by Sir George Tryon, clearly placing the blame for the loss of the Victoria on his shoulders.

Now, about Markham it says that it would be fatal to the best interests of the service

to say he was to blame for carrying out the directions of the Commander in Chief,

letting him off the hook.

The sinking of the Victoria could have been an opportunity to fix

some of the problems that afflicted the Victorian navy,

but this verdict showed that obedience was valued higher than thinking for yourself.

From now on, it was even more important to do what you were told than to do what was right.

Nothing could have been more different to the career of the man who naval officers regarded

as an icon, Horatio Nelson, whose name they remembered

but whose qualities for risk taking and initiative they had forgotten.

Nowhere was this blind worship of Nelson more apparent than at an important new barracks back at home.

They were built in Portsmouth in 1903.

This is the mess, the officers' mess, the canteen, if you like,

where all the officers that lived and worked in Portsmouth would have eaten,

and sitting here amongst your brother officers, there was no doubt as to what was expected of you.

It certainly does not feel like a canteen.

It feels like a religious space, a shrine to Britain's naval greatness.

Take the ceiling, for example, these massive oak beams.

That is actually the shape of HMS Victory's hull, the most famous battleship in British history.

And then on the walls, these incredible murals on an epic scale,

depicting all the greatest moments in British maritime history.

Of course, down here, we have Nelson,

the greatest admiral of them all.

This room tells you so much about the Royal Navy

at the start of the 20th century, the way its officers were surrounded by images of a glorious past.

But the problem was, these victories were 100 years old, and the world had moved on.

Britain was no longer the only modern industrial power.

The technological lead that the country had enjoyed for so much of the 19th century had been lost.

As the industrial revolution spread, a new era of aggressive national rivalry dawned.

As a boy, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany had dreamt of one day building a fleet

to match that of his grandmother, Queen Victoria.

By the turn of the century, Germany had a fleet of 38 battleships planned.

To the British, this could mean only one thing.

As the First Lord of the Admiralty wrote in 1902,

"the new German navy is being built up for war with us."

A radical overhaul of the navy was now an urgent matter of national security,

and the man the Admiralty turned to in this crisis

was acting as Commander in Chief down here in Portsmouth.

The man of the moment was Admiral Jacky Fisher.

Fisher had come a long way since his days on the Inflexible.

He'd tirelessly worked his way up to the rank of admiral, and in 1904

he landed the top job in the navy, First Sea Lord.

Fisher was well aware of the magnitude of the task that he faced, and he spent the months before

taking up office down in Portsmouth writing this, a manifesto of everything he hoped to achieve.

He had it bound up and called Naval Necessities, and this is a copy here.

It's a wonderful document, because it's a direct transcription of Fisher's actual handwriting,

and they've replicated all the underlinings, the capitalisations,

the italics, and particularly the exclamation marks, and the entire text is littered with them.

You really get a sense of Fisher the man, his enthusiasm,

his eccentricity, and above all his energy and his passion for the navy.

There's one essential passage here that I think really gets the heart of Fisher's world view.

He writes, "The British Empire floats on the British navy,

"so we must have no doubt whatever about its fighting supremacy and its instant readiness for war."

He wants to call back all of Britain's obsolete ships from

every corner of the Empire and sell them for scrap.

And then there's a raft of other measures like defending naval ports, and a complete shake up in the

way that ships signal to each other at sea.

Fisher called this "The Scheme."

This was nothing less than a root and branch reform of the navy, and he writes here,

"We must have the Scheme, the whole Scheme, and nothing but the Scheme."

It's easy to see why some people thought that Fisher was a bit of a warmonger.

I mean, one of his favourite expressions was, "Hit first, hit hard, and keep hitting."

But actually he saw himself as a man of peace.

His guiding principal is carved here above the door.

"Si vis pacem, para bellum."

That means, "If you want peace, prepare for war."

His idea was to build the navy up into such an unassailable force

that no-one would dare to take it on.

It was peace through deterrence.

Fisher also had a plan to build a ship.

It would be the largest ever produced in one of Britain's dockyards.

It would be the centrepiece of what he liked to call "the fleet that Jack built".

And he warned people to get ready for a shock.

These plans are very beautiful. I love all the different

colours they've used to shade in the different compartments and boats.

The Admiralty used the scale of a quarter inch to one foot for all its plans, and

with brilliant consistency they never changed this, so as the ships got bigger

the plans got bigger as well. This one's absolutely gigantic.

This wonderful profile here allows us to see what was so

revolutionary about the ship, and that was its fire power.

It was appropriate that the British, who had done so much to develop

the use of guns on ships, should now bring it up to this great crescendo.

No other ship in the world had more than four 12-inch guns.

This one mounted ten of them in five turrets, here.

When this ship fired its broadside, it sent over three tonnes of steel

and high explosives towards the enemy.

These thick black lines along the outside of the hull are actually armour plates.

This ship had 5,000 tonnes of armour, 800 more than any other ship in the world.

And the hull was divided up into all these compartments here, which were watertight.

In fact, they're even called watertight compartments here.

This ship really was intended to be unsinkable.

It's the culmination of around a century of unprecedented innovation in ship design.

Fisher chose the name of this new ship with great care.

He wanted something that would invoke the glorious tradition of the Royal Navy,

and he decided on Dreadnought.

Elizabeth I had named one of her ships Dreadnought, and had fought against the Spanish Armada.

There had been a Dreadnought with Nelson at Trafalgar.

Now there was a new Dreadnought.

It was a name with history.

Construction began on 2nd October 1905.

Under top secret conditions, 3,000 men worked 11 hours a day,

six days a week, in the Portsmouth royal dockyard.

With record-breaking speed, the first Dreadnought was completed just a year and a day later.

Dreadnought was designed to give Britain an unassailable lead over her enemies.

But in a world where other nations now had the shipbuilding capacity to match Britain,

one radical new ship was no longer enough to guarantee the navy's advantage for long.

The problem was the Dreadnought was so powerful and it made every other battleship in the world obsolete.

Britain had effectively wiped out its own naval advantage by creating a new level playing field.

Now all a rival had to do to overtake Britain was start building its own Dreadnoughts.

One nation seized on this opportunity - Germany.

The Dreadnought, far from deterring the enemy, actually ignited a new

arms race, and this time the stakes would be higher than ever before.

The Germans could build six Dreadnoughts a year.

Not to be outdone, Fisher drove a vigorous campaign to

double Britain's construction from four to eight Dreadnoughts per year.

The Liberal government under Herbert Asquith had been determined to reduce

naval expenditure in favour of social reform.

But in 1909, he caved in to Fisher's demands for eight Dreadnoughts

because Europe was in the grip of Dreadnought-building fever.

Austria was planning three of the mighty battleships. Italy, four.

The threat was seen as so dangerous that by 1910 a quarter of all public expenditure

was going to the Admiralty.

Fisher finally retired after five tumultuous years at the very top of the navy, but he'd won his battle.

As the last of the Dreadnoughts that he'd planned rolled off the slipway,

it was clear that Britain had trumped Germany.

By 1914, Britain had 42 Dreadnoughts built or planned to Germany's 26.

The Germans gave up on their plans of overtaking Britain.

Fisher's policy of peace through deterrence seemed to be working.

On 20th June 1914, a fleet of British Dreadnoughts headed to Germany.

The Royal Navy had been invited to attend a sailing regatta on the north German coast.

The event, called Kiel Week, is still held today.

Kiel Week is yet another example of the Kaiser's obsession with all things British.

Having borrowed the design of ships and uniforms in the Royal Navy, he even imported a week-long

sailing regatta, modelled on Cowes Week, the highlight of the British sailing calendar.

But things here were a bit different because Kiel was the home of the Imperial German navy and, unlike

relaxed Cowes, this event was a bit more formal, a bit more militaristic.

The arrival of the Royal Navy ships caused a sensation.

Flotillas of boats sailed out to greet the fleet.

WHISTLE BLOWS

The German navy laid on a week-long programme of entertainments,

banquets, dances, garden parties and football.

Eyes to the right.

One German officer observed everyone mixing at close quarters.

Now we are 176.

-Yes.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

They were very soon good friends.

We enjoyed the Kiel Week.

At all the balls and dinners the young English officers could

be seen getting on famously with the German officers and flirting zealously with the German ladies.

But the British weren't just here to have a good time.

The night before the fleet left Britain, the admiral in command issued a secret memorandum

from his flagship.

He said that all the officers were to obtain all the information they can

about the latest German weapons systems and state of the art equipment. It's a fascinating list.

He says to particularly look out for gunnery fittings, torpedo fittings, signalling and wireless telegraphy.

Clearly, this mission was about a lot more than diplomacy.

The British, of course, were here to spy and the Germans knew it.

They had spies of their own.

But it was clearly no reason to stop the regatta.

WHISTLES SOUNDS

In fact, nothing, it seemed, could end the fun.

Then, on 28th June 1914, as the Kaiser was racing his yacht,

The Meteor, just out there, a messenger approached on a boat, bearing bad news.

Earlier that day, the Kaiser's friend and ally, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

had been shot and killed in Sarajevo.

The British ships stayed for another day of festivities.

When it was time for them to leave, their hosts issued a signal wishing them a pleasant journey.

The British replied, "Friends today, friends tomorrow, friends for ever."

Cheers.

Cheers.

Yet, just six weeks after making this promise,

the British navy would be at war with their German hosts.

The fleet that Jack built was about to be tested in battle for the first time.

HMS Caroline is a cruiser, and one of the last ships to survive form the First World War.

She was built in record time and launched in September 1914.

Three months later, she headed to Scapa Flow in Orkney

to join Britain's grand fleet under the command of John Jellicoe.

He was the man Fisher had chosen to be, as he put it,

"Admiralissimo when the battle of Armageddon comes along."

That day finally dawned on 31st May 1916, when the German high seas fleet

steamed out of their ports, hoping to lure one of Jellicoe's squadrons into battle.

The British intercepted enemy signals and knew about the trap.

HMS Caroline and the rest of the fleet left their bases to meet the Germans.

The two fleets would finally clash in the North Sea, near Denmark, just west of Jutland.

When the war began, the British people expected their beloved navy to fight and win another Trafalgar.

Even though it had been 100 years before, it was still the only benchmark they had

for a naval battle of this kind.

The trouble was, since Trafalgar, war at sea had changed beyond all recognition.

No-one, not even Jellicoe, had any experience of fighting on ships like this.

One German officer recounted seeing the British fleet for the first time.

"Suddenly, my periscope revealed some big ships, black monsters, six tall broad-beamed giants,

"steaming in two columns, and even at this great distance they looked powerful, massive."

But, despite first impressions, things very quickly began to go wrong for Jellicoe.

For centuries, admirals have signalled their orders to their fleet using these, signal flags.

Now, each have a separate meaning, both individually and when used together.

Now, this is fine at the Battle of Trafalgar when the ships were just a few metres apart,

but at Jutland, Jellicoe was commanding over 100 vessels spread over tens of miles of ocean.

To make matters worse all the smoke from these funnels would have obscured the flags

and made it really impossible to read what the admiral was ordering.

It was an outdated system in a modern world.

One admiral, Evan Thomas, couldn't read the signals of his commanding officer.

Unthinkingly, he led his squadron off in the wrong direction.

Although he eventually turned them round,

four of the most powerful ships in the world were unable to get

close enough to the action for the opening critical encounter.

The problems could have been solved by a brand new invention.

Radio sets had recently been installed on the ships and they

should have helped with communication but, like many forms of new technology,

they also caused a lot of confusion, and some commanders simply didn't bother using them.

Battle commenced at 3.20.

Throughout, Jellicoe was left in the dark.

He later said, "the whole situation was difficult to grasp, and we could hardly

"see anything except flashes of guns, shells falling and ships blowing up."

At 4 o'clock, the first British battle cruiser was destroyed.

20 minutes later, Queen Mary exploded with tremendous force,

debris soaring hundreds of feet into the air.

1,200 men were killed instantly.

But this wasn't caused by some German super-weapon.

This was an avoidable error.

Protective doors had been installed to prevent fire spreading from one area of the ship to another.

But to decrease the time it took for ammunition to be passed up from the magazines to the guns,

British sailors kept the doors open.

What happened was that German shells would hit the upper deck, cause an explosion.

It would send a white sheet of flame tearing through the middle of the ship until it ignited

the magazine down here.

Three British battleships in particular were blown apart in this way.

One ship had only two survivors and 1,000 men killed.

For part of the battle, HMS Caroline was in the thick of it.

As the fighting raged, the helmsman would have been sent below.

Down here, deep below the water line,

where eight of the strongest men on board would have steered the ship, that hatch would have been locked.

Their only connection with the outside world was this mechanism here,

which transmitted the orders of the officers in command of the ship high up on the bridge,

telling these men which course to steer.

If the ship was hit, they had absolutely no chance of escape.

These low lights would have just died, it would have been pitch black.

Water would have started to come in through these joins in the steel plates.

When you come down here, you realise that warfare was just as terrifying,

just as deadly, out here at sea, as it was in the trenches on the Western Front.

By dawn the next day, the British had lost three

fast, powerful battle cruisers for only one of Germany's, and the British had lost twice as many men.

Many British shells had broken up rather than penetrate German armour,

and British use of intelligence had been woeful.

When Jacky Fisher heard reports of the battle, he said, "They failed me.

"I've spent 30 years of my life preparing for this day, and they failed me."

In the end, Jutland would be considered a British strategic victory.

The sheer size of Jellicoe's fleet stopped the Germans from ever

attempting to take on the British in the same way again.

But the Germans had exposed weaknesses in that British fleet.

Jutland had not been the knockout blow the British public had hoped for.

After Jutland, the Kaiser exultantly declared, "The spell of Trafalgar is broken."

And, in a way, he had a point.

The Navy had failed to land the knockout blow that they'd achieved

100 years before, but he was also right unintentionally in another way.

There would be no more Trafalgars.

Jutland was the last battle decided by big-gunned warships alone.

Below the waves and in the skies above, new weapons would now decide

the outcome of war at sea, and help defeat Germany.

But the dominance of battleships, so long a symbol of national might, was over.

Britain emerged from the war victorious but exhausted and broke,

and her navy was finally forced to give up its determination

to maintain by far the world's largest fleet.

In time, other nations eclipsed Britain.

It was the end of centuries of naval supremacy.

Four centuries before, the navy had set a tiny impoverished kingdom on the path to greatness.

In time, it had transformed Britain into the most powerful empire in

history, with enormous consequences for the rest of the world.

There was slavery, conquest, and war on a titanic scale.

But the navy also ensured that Britain would preserve its

independence and its unique economic and political systems.

Its ships protected a vast trade that made Britain wealthy and

sparked revolutions in agriculture, industry and finance which changed Britain and the world for ever.

The navy pioneered new sciences and reinvented our understanding of the world we live in,

and they made the sea and seafaring an integral part

of our culture and national identity.

And today, just as they've done for centuries,

the ships of the Royal Navy continue to defend Britain's shores and protect her sea lanes.

Everywhere I go, I see evidence of what the navy has left behind.

Its ships allowed this country to have an impact far beyond the confines of the British Isles.

The modern world is built on foundations laid by the Royal Navy.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail: [email protected]