CHAPTER 5
During the Great War, Britain’s best-known admiral was not John Jellicoe. It was David Beatty. The youngest British admiral since Nelson, the commander of the famous Battle Cruiser Squadron, and then, succeeding Jellicoe, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, Beatty personified the Royal Navy to the British public. He was everything they liked to imagine in a naval hero: brave, impetuous, eager to attack, driving his ships toward the enemy at maximum speed—and then demanding that they go even faster. Beatty possessed the charisma that the calm and cautious Jellicoe lacked, and throughout the war the younger man—Beatty was twelve years younger than Jellicoe—was the darling of the popular press. It was Beatty’s postcard photo, not Jellicoe’s, that placarded every newsagent’s window and sold in the millions.
Beatty’s aura radiated in part from his genuine accomplishments and in part from successful exhibitionism. He was short and trim, easy to miss in a crowd, until he made himself instantly recognizable on board ship and in photographs by turning himself into a seagoing dandy. He tilted his famous extra-wide-brimmed cap over his eyes at a jaunty, devil-may-care angle; he stuck his thumbs rakishly into the pockets of his blue uniform jacket, which his tailor had been instructed to make with six brass buttons instead of the regulation eight. Like other flamboyantly egotistical and successful warriors—George S. Patton, who wore pearl-handled revolvers and high riding boots while commanding tanks, or Douglas MacArthur sloshing ashore (toward an army cameraman) on a newly captured Pacific island, wearing sunglasses and his self-designed, gold-braided hat, his trademark corncob pipe clenched between his teeth—Beatty used visual imagery to capture popular fancy.
Behind the imagery in Beatty’s case lay a brilliant, frequently controversial career—and a life of private pain. A hero of colonial wars in the Sudan and China, twice promoted far ahead of other men his age, Beatty had attempted to mesh his naval career with marriage to a wealthy woman and, at her insistence, to present himself as a man of fashion in hunting circles and London society. Over the years, this effort took a heavy toll. Sometimes on the bridge of his flagship, Beatty would release his inner tension by making faces. “For no apparent reason,” said an officer who served with him, “he would screw his face into a fearsome grimace and hold it quite unconsciously for a minute or two.” Another peculiarity was his addiction to fortune-tellers: a Mrs. Robinson, a Madame Dubois, and, in Edinburgh when he commanded the Grand Fleet, a “Josephine.”
David Beatty’s wartime fame was fully justified. He was an audacious sea commander, a fighting admiral who gave his country significant victories and who also made significant mistakes. What the man in the street, the popular press, and even many of his colleagues in the navy did not know was how Beatty managed to do this and at what cost. Only a few could look behind the facade and “observe the private unhappiness and uncertainty in that hollow pose.”
David Beatty was born on January 17, 1871, in a country house in Cheshire, but his roots lay in the Anglo-Irish squirearchy of County Wexford. Beatty’s family heritage revolved around the army and the stables. For forty years, his grandfather was Master of the Wexford Hounds. David’s father had served in the British cavalry in India, then left the army and moved from Ireland to Cheshire, where his four sons and a daughter were born. Curiously, this father was six feet four inches tall and had long arms and big hands and feet, whereas his two older sons, Charles and David, were short and had small hands and feet. Life at home was tumultuous; their father was eccentric, irascible, and tyrannical and became a heavy drinker; their mother, famous in her youth for her long, golden hair, died an alcoholic. Nevertheless, everyone in the family excelled on horseback, taking risks to the point of recklessness. David’s parents both rode Irish hunters in pursuit of foxes and then came home to a tame fox kept in the house. David’s three brothers followed their father into the army; his older brother, Charles, fought in the Boer War, earning a DSO, and then became a well-known gentleman jockey and steeplechase rider. During the Great War, Charles rejoined the army and died of wounds suffered in France. David’s younger brother William became an owner and trainer of horses at Newmarket, and his youngest brother, George, like their father, became famous as a gentleman jockey, polo player, and steeplechase rider. David, the second son, shared the family passion for riding, but unlike his father and brothers, he decided to go to sea.
This is the surface history of David Beatty’s early life. There is a deeper layer, rigidly suppressed while Beatty was alive, which helps explain the character and behavior of the famous admiral. He and his brother Charles were born out of wedlock. Their father had stolen the wife of another man and together he and she had produced two illegitimate sons within twelve months. At that time in Britain, legitimacy had as much to do with preservation of landed property as with morality. “Natural children” or “bastards” were banned from inheriting landed estates, which passed from father to the eldest legitimate son. When Charles and David were born—Charles in 1870; David in 1871—their mother was married to a Mr. Chaine. Six months after David’s arrival, Mr. Chaine belatedly divorced his wife, who then married Captain Beatty. After the parents married, two other sons and a daughter, all legitimate, were born; legally, the two later sons became possible heirs as Charles and David were not. From the time the older brothers discovered the facts of their birth, they faced a lifelong apprehension that somebody else would discover the relevant birth and marriage certificates. As his fame grew larger, David, in particular, had to live with the possibility that the secret might come out. As it happened, no one learned the truth, and Charles inherited the family estate, eventually passing it along to his own eldest son.
In 1884, at thirteen, David Beatty left this turbulent, complicated family behind and entered Britannia. His record as a cadet was mediocre; he left eighteenth in a class of thirty-three. When he was a midshipman, influence gained him a three-year appointment toAlexandra, flagship of the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Unsurprisingly, Beatty’s interest outside the navy was riding and he often rode as a jockey on the racetrack and polo grounds at Malta, mounted on horses and ponies belonging to other officers. When he returned to England to take naval courses at Greenwich, his performance continued to be mediocre; the explanation perhaps had something to do with the fact that his cabin at Greenwich was filled with warmly inscribed photographs of London actresses. Thereafter, he served on the royal yacht, in the West Indies, and again in the Mediterranean, where he joined the battleship Camperdown a few months after she rammed and sank Victoria with Jellicoe on board.
In 1896, when Beatty was a twenty-five-year-old navy lieutenant of no particular distinction, he was sent to command a gunboat on the Upper Nile during Kitchener’s march to reconquer the Sudan. Here, in the first major turning point in his career, Beatty’s quick reflexes and instinctive bravery thrust him forward. When a shell struck his gunboat and came to rest unexploded, Beatty, under fire for the first time, calmly picked it up and threw it overboard. In the spring of 1898, Beatty commanded the shallow-draft gunboatFateh, assigned to provide gunfire support for the army’s advance up the Nile. Following Kitchener’s famous victory at the Battle of Omdurman on September 2, Beatty and his gunboat carried the victorious general 400 miles farther up the Nile to Fashoda, where Britain, in the person of Kitchener, met France, represented by Captain Marchand. Beatty was praised by Kitchener—“I cannot speak too highly of this officer’s behavior”—and was awarded a DSO. More important to Beatty, at twenty-seven he was promoted to commander over the heads of 400 lieutenants senior to him. The usual time served as a lieutenant before promotion to commander was eleven or twelve years. Beatty had done it in six.
On returning from Egypt to England, Beatty had four months’ leave, which he devoted to foxhunting. It was in the country, on horseback, that he met a married American woman living in England, Ethel Tree, the only daughter of the enormously wealthy Chicago department-store owner Marshall Field. Riding sidesaddle, wearing a top hat and veil, slim and graceful with a long neck, high cheekbones, and dark hair, Ethel Tree was sophisticated, widely traveled, and, said Beatty’s nephew and biographer Charles Beatty, “free ranging in her affections.” Her fearless riding immediately appealed to Beatty, who noticed not only her beauty and horsemanship, but, being a second son with no inheritance whose naval pay amounted to a few hundred pounds a year, the money behind her. He quickly discovered that her marriage to Arthur Tree was unhappy and that she had a three-year-old son, Ronald. Despite her encumbrances, a strong attraction—perhaps more—sprang up between David and Ethel. For both, the relationship was risky. In Queen Victoria’s reign, a divorced woman could not be received in society; above all, no divorced person could be presented at court. As for Beatty, an officer known to be the lover of a married woman or who married a divorced woman exposed himself to social ostracism and placed his naval career in jeopardy. As it happened, these considerations became moot in April 1899, when Beatty was appointed commander of the battleship Barfleur on the China Station. To Ethel, this separation was shocking; no man she liked had ever walked away from her before.
Beatty was not with the international expedition sent to relieve the besieged legations in Peking, but he was ashore in China, having landed with 150 men from Barfleur to bolster the defense of the beleaguered river port of Tientsin. Nine days after landing, Beatty was wounded twice within twenty minutes, first in the left arm below the shoulder, and then in the left wrist. He emerged from a local hospital with his arm in a sling and was ordered home for surgery to preserve the use of his arm. After the campaign, Beatty was one of four navy commanders who fought in China raised to the rank of captain. He was twenty-nine. The average age for promotion to captain was forty-two, and he had been promoted over the heads of 218 other Royal Navy commanders.
Beatty returned to England a hero, and Ethel Tree moved quickly to reengage his attention. When he first left for China, they had exchanged letters, but during his two years in the Far East, rumors reached him that she was constantly being seen in the company of another man, although she remained married to Tree. Nevertheless, when he arrived in Portsmouth, he received a letter and telegram from her suggesting that they resume their relationship. His first response was to air his grievances: “Some months ago all letters from you ceased absolutely and entirely. And letters came from other people telling me that you and ‘X’ were never seen apart and continually in each other’s pockets and this by people who did not even know what you are to me so what was I to think? . . . I am not easy going and have an awful temper and I landed from China with my heart full of rage and swore I did not care if I ever saw you again.” Then he about-faced and accepted her offer: “So great is the joy at seeing you, to me, the sweetest creature on God’s earth, but you admit you are an awful flirt. . . . Unfortunately I shall go on loving you to the bitter end, and now if this operation does not go right what use to you is a one-armed individual?”
The operation to restore full use of his left arm took place in September 1900. It was mostly successful, but Beatty was left with two permanently crippled fingers. Meanwhile, Ethel had forced her husband to file for divorce in America. “Dear Arthur,” she wrote him, “I have thought over your suggestion that we should live together again and I can never consent to it. There is no use discussing our differences. I shall never live with you again. Yours truly, Ethel F. Tree.” To speed the action, she accepted the charge of desertion, thereby losing custody of her child. On May 12, 1901, the divorce was granted. Ethel’s son Ronald Tree later condemned his “wilful and beautiful mother” for deserting him and his father, and said that the “divorce crushed my father’s spirit . . . he dropped out of the world.”
[In 1914, when her former husband was dying at the age of fifty-two, Ethel, who had not seen her son Ronald for ten years, sent a woman to the hospital to tell the sixteen-year-old boy, “Your mother has sent me to take you away.” Appalled, Ronald sent the messenger away and returned to his father’s bedside. Arthur Tree died the next day.]
Ten days after the divorce, David and Ethel were married in the London registrar’s office. Beatty was thirty; she was twenty-seven.
No one knows how much this couple knew about each other before they married. Beatty had been given a glimpse, but he could not have fully recognized the nature of his new wife. Keenly aware of the power of her beauty and wealth to attract men, accustomed to their constant, devoted attention, she always acted as she pleased and expected to get what she wanted. Beatty’s nephew, on the other hand, is certain that Ethel never knew about her husband’s illegitimacy; had she known, he says, the fact would have placed a formidable weapon in her hands. Even so, their wedding marked the start of a long battle between Ethel and the navy, with Beatty struggling in the middle. She resented the separations that were part of service life and refused to be left behind like an ordinary navy wife when her husband went to sea. What he saw as attention to duty, she saw as deliberate neglect and selfish dismissal of her needs. Recrimination was constant. A pattern evolved: first a storm of rage, then tears, then, on both sides, an orgy of apology. Beatty’s affection for his wife was greater than hers for him, which equipped her with the greater power to hurt. In his constant effort to placate her, his letters became pleading, pitiable, sometimes almost childish.
At first, these problems were submerged in the early joys of marriage, aided by the fact that David remained ashore. Two years passed between his being wounded in China and an Admiralty medical board passing him as fit for duty at sea. During these years, he learned to live as she preferred him: a gay, extravagant man of fashion in hunting circles and London society, posing next to his wife. Nevertheless, the reckoning came; once certified fit for sea duty, he was posted to three years in the Mediterranean Fleet. At first he tried to confront his wife’s anger. She was staying at the Bristol Hotel in Paris when he wrote, “You have done a great deal of grumbling in your letters of late. Of course you have been brought up differently and like all American wives do not understand why their husbands should be anywhere else but with them.” Then, succumbing to his own ambition, he turned to her for help, making a distasteful appeal that she use her charms to help him advance his career. “My darling Tata,” he wrote,
I had hoped that by going to Dunrobin you would have made a friend of the old Duke and that therefore in the future, should I ever require any outside assistance, he would be more likely to take an interest in someone he knew than someone he knew little about, and therefore might be of the utmost assistance to me. One has to think of these things when one lives a public life and if one wants to get on and not throw a chance away and no one can afford to let slip opportunities of making friends with those who can assist you.
Eventually Ethel followed him to Malta, where the Mediterranean Fleet was based, and there, in 1905, their first son, David, was born. Their relationship seemed close; when he was with her, he indulged her whims; when he was away, they wrote or telegraphed every day. He always wanted more. “Well, love, you might be a little more communicative,” he wrote to her. “It’s only twopence a word. Give me a shilling’s worth and say how the weather is. It brightens me up.” Most of his letters pleaded for signs of attention and affection; he asked endless questions about her feelings and activities. Her letters to him were less frequent, less intimate, more gossipy, and filled with tart, derogatory opinions of the navy and navy people. Professionally, he always did well: he commanded the cruisers Juno, Arrogant, and Suffolk; he was a strict, forceful, efficient captain, not overly popular, but his ships routinely won prizes in weapons competitions. Among his fellow captains and other officers, however, his youth and wealth stirred jealousy; and Ethel’s behavior sometimes caused embarrassment. She never completely lost her Chicago accent, and her habit of shouting for her husband in a piercing voice—“J-aaack!”(her nickname for him)—grated on English ears. Once when Beatty drove Suffolk too hard returning to Malta, thereby damaging her engines, there were rumors of disciplinary action. A story passed around the fleet that Ethel had said, “What? Court Martial my David? I’ll buy them a new ship.” She never gave up urging him to leave the navy. Even in 1905, while she was making an effort to please him, she wrote, “I have thought for a long time that your abilities where you are, are wasted. I am sure you would succeed in another trade and would, I am sure, satisfy your ambition quite as much, if not more, and our life would certainly be much happier. Sometimes I feel as if I really could not stand the strain of these terrible partings very much more.”
As the years went by, Beatty struggled to balance his ambition and the burden of his unusual marriage. He had made an almost Faustian bargain: Ethel’s wealth had brought him mansions in London, halls in Leicestershire and Scotland for shooting, and a private yacht. She helped his career by enabling him to enter higher political and social circles—although still not the court circle—but she often reduced him to private despair. Shane Leslie, a Beatty biographer, who knew both Beattys well, wrote that she was “beautiful, opulent, ambitious and unhinged by her hereditary fortune and by an insane streak. She brought him many gifts; great beauty, a passionate and jealous love, sons, wealth, houses, and a personality he could not conquer, for against him was arrayed a distraught spirit which brought their home life to utter misery.” Beatty told Leslie that he was “the most unhappy man in the world”: “I have paid terribly for my millions,” he said.
At the end of 1905, he returned to London, where, to Ethel’s delight, he settled down for three years as Naval Adviser to the Army Council. In December 1908, he went back to sea as captain of the predreadnought battleship Queen, in the Atlantic Fleet, which was commanded by Prince Louis of Battenberg. In his letters to Ethel, he attempted to please her by belittling the officers around him: “We have eight admirals and there is not one among them, unless it be Prince Louis (who is lazy and has other disadvantages) who impresses one that he is capable of great effort.” Ethel was scarcely interested. The Atlantic Fleet was based at Gibraltar, a socially barren place. When the fleet spent Christmas week in that harbor, she did not come to join him. Instead, chagrined by his absence, she began seeing other men. These relationships, she insisted, were innocent: “As you know, ‘Lion’ and I were a great deal together and I became very fond of him . . . although not the way I care for you, dear. I honestly say I like the companionship of other men but that is because most women bore me.” In reply, Beatty blamed himself: “I felt as if I was an ogre dragging you to some fearful place that you dreaded. You see, dear, your happiness is the one thing I have to live for and if only you are happy and contented, so am I. But I fear I am making a hash of it somehow.” Nevertheless, he went on, “If you have come to the decision that you want to go your own way without interference from me, as apparently is the fashion nowadays, would it not be fairer to say so? I have many faults. No one can see them more than you. Won’t you in kindness point out where I fail and in what I upset you, as it would appear I do at times?”
His marriage wobbled, but Beatty’s career continued to prosper and by the end of 1909, he had reached the top of the list of captains. But because of the periods spent ashore, first when he was recovering from wounds and later when he served on the Army Council, he had not served the time at sea required for promotion to admiral. Jacky Fisher intervened and, on his recommendation, an exception was made. On January 1, 1910, by a special Order in Council, David Beatty became, at thirty-eight, the youngest British admiral since Nelson. “Rear Admiral Beatty,” The Times pointed out, “will not only be the youngest officer on the flag list, but will be younger than over ninety percent of the officers now on the captains’ list.”
None of this gave Ethel what she really wanted. Her husband’s spectacular success and the presence of her two sons were not much good to her as long as she was barred from the summit of society.
[On April 2, 1910, a few months after Beatty became an admiral, a second son, Peter, was born. In his infancy, Peter’s eyelids stuck together when he slept, a condition called ophthalmia neonatorum. This condition, probably acquired from his mother during the process of birth, suggested meningitis. Treated by frequent eye irrigation, the infection cleared up, but, according to Beatty’s nephew, complications over the years indicate that the problem may have been of venereal origin. An even more surprising statement by Charles Beatty is that “David must have known that he could not have been the boy’s father. This was generally accepted in later years and I was told who the other man was: [he came from] a well-known family of the British aristocracy.”
As a mother to David Junior and Peter, Ethel was little better than she had been to the abandoned Ronald. When Peter was two, Ethel left him and went to gamble in Monte Carlo. Beatty, remaining with the boys in London, wrote her that Peter kept saying, over and over, “Mum, Mum, come!” As he grew older, Peter became practically blind, and “meningeal symptoms made it difficult for him to control the nerve reflexes of his head and neck, making him slobber and appear uncouth.” He lived into adulthood, but Ethel, says Charles, “made no secret of her embarrassment at his conspicuous disability in company and in private she often ignored or even mocked him.”]
Her wealth had opened many doors, but her status as a divorced woman had kept the highest door firmly closed. Now Ethel fixed on this new objective: she was determined to be presented at court; if she was not, her husband would quit the navy. As Beatty explained his situation to another officer, “My little lady likes the good things of this world including the gay side of it. She has a nice house in town and is sufficiently supplied with the necessary to be able to live in London and enjoy the entertaining and being entertained that a season produces. And it has undoubtedly struck her that my being in the service precludes her from participating in what to her provides something of the joy of life.” Their friends saw the situation more baldly. “David was threatening to leave the Navy,” said Eugenie Godfrey-Fausset. “Ethel was putting on one of her hysterical acts . . . she would force David to leave the Navy unless she was received at Court.” In 1911, Eugenie’s husband, the naval aide-de-camp and close friend to the new monarch, George V, arranged that Ethel Beatty, formerly Ethel Tree, be formally presented to the King of England.
Even as Ethel triumphed without forcing her husband to leave the navy, Beatty was risking his career on his own. He already had imperiled it by marrying a divorced woman; now he risked it again by refusing a major sea command. In 1911, as a new rear admiral, he was offered the respectable assignment of second in command of the Atlantic Fleet, a command that Jellicoe before him had automatically accepted as a necessary rung on the ladder of promotion. Beatty turned it down. The Atlantic Fleet was based at Gibraltar; Beatty had asked for the Home Fleet, which was more likely to be involved in any coming war with Germany—and which was based closer to home and to Ethel. His refusal, once known, stirred bitterness. Sea commands were scarce; to turn one down seemed almost unthinkable. Many officers senior to him also preferred the Home Fleet and were waiting in line for an appointment. The Sea Lords were shocked by Beatty’s effrontery and Captain Ernest Troubridge, the First Lord’s naval secretary, wrote to him, “The fact is that the Admiralty view is that officers should serve where the Admiralty wish and not where they themselves wish.”
Beatty’s friends thought his behavior foolishness, a reckless gamble with his whole future; others described it as insufferable arrogance. Despite his physical courage in the Sudan and China, Beatty’s rapid promotions had not endeared him to his seniors and contemporaries. Many dismissed him as merely a dashing officer suddenly endowed with great wealth whose heart was not in the service. It was said that he had too many interests ashore—a millionaire wife, a place at society dinner tables, polo and foxhunting. Everyone was aware that, without his wife’s money, he could never have challenged the Admiralty. Now, despite his record, he appeared to have gone too far; it was rumored that Beatty would never be offered another assignment. Indeed, for almost two years after his early promotion to admiral, Beatty remained unemployed.
Then, once again, Fortune handed him a prodigious gift. In 1911, when he refused the Atlantic Fleet appointment, Reginald McKenna was First Lord of the Admiralty. In October of that year, Asquith reshuffled his Cabinet, McKenna moved on, and Winston Churchill arrived at the Admiralty. Beatty still had no assignment when Battenberg suggested to the new First Lord that the prickly young admiral had talent and might be useful. Churchill had heard the prevailing gossip that Beatty preferred the life of a wealthy socialite to service in the navy. But the new First Lord was familiar with Beatty’s exploits and navy record and invited the rebellious admiral in to see him. According to Churchill, this was not their first meeting. In his book My Early Life, he recalled that fifteen years before, on the eve of the Battle of Omdurman and his own extravagantly self-publicized charge with the 21st Lancers, he was strolling along the west bank of the Nile when he was hailed from a white gunboat anchored twenty or thirty feet from the shore. “The vessel was commanded by a junior naval lieutenant named Beatty. We had a jolly talk across the water while the sun sank. Then came the question, ‘How are you fixed for drinks? Can you catch?’ And a large bottle of champagne was thrown from the gunboat falling into the river near the shore. Happily, a gracious Providence decreed the water to be shallow and the bottom soft.” Churchill promptly “nipped into the water up to my knees and bore the precious gift in triumph back to our Mess.”
Beatty did not remember the episode, but before their late 1911 meeting at the Admiralty, he had no high opinion of Winston Churchill, whom he considered a flamboyant, irresponsible political maverick. In 1902 he had written to Ethel: “You are quite right, Winston Churchill is not nice; in fact, he is what is generally described as a fraud.” His point of view had not changed in December 1909 when it seemed that Churchill might be named to lead the Admiralty: “I see in the papers that Winston Churchill will become First Lord of the Admiralty. No greater blow could possibly be delivered to the British Navy.” Now, at their meeting in Churchill’s office, the thirty-seven-year-old politician and the forty-year-old admiral appealed to each other. (There is an apocryphal story that when Beatty entered his office, Churchill looked up and said, “You seem very young to be an admiral.” Whereupon Beatty is said to have replied, “And you seem very young to be First Lord of the Admiralty.”) In any case, Churchill immediately set aside the Sea Lords’ opinions of Beatty. “My first meeting with the Admiral,” he said, “induced me immediately to disregard their unfortunate advice. He became at once my Naval Secretary.” Privately, Beatty still regarded Winston as an enthusiastic amateur. Writing to Ethel, he said, “I had two hours solid conversation with W.C. . . . I think he had rather a shock at first but in the end he saw things with my eyes.” In April 1913, he wrote, “I hope to be able to squeeze some sense into him.”
Beatty’s new position gave him plenty of opportunity to influence Churchill. By tradition, the First Lord had at his disposal the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, a 4,000-ton miniature ocean liner with an exceptional wine cellar, which allowed the political head of the navy to act as seagoing host to any persons he chose. During a Mediterranean cruise in May 1912, Churchill’s guests included Asquith, Asquith’s daughter Violet, Prince Louis of Battenberg, Kitchener, Jacky Fisher, and other senior politicians and military officers on board to participate in decisions about Britain’s strategy in the Mediterranean. Beatty, with unparalleled access to the political and military chieftains of the British empire, nevertheless wrote to Ethel,
Oh dear, I am so tired and bored. Winston talks about nothing but the sea and the Navy. Old Asquith spends his time immersed in a Baedeker Guide and reading extracts to an admiring audience. Prince Louis is, of course, charming but not terribly exciting . . . that old rascal Fisher never stopped talking and has been closeted with Winston. . . . I find this wretched party on board getting duller and duller. Mrs Winston is a perfect fool. Old Asquith is a regular common old tourist. . . . On shore it makes one ashamed to have to introduce him as the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Churchill, of course, did not know what Beatty was writing to his wife, and over the next fifteen months, the young First Lord decided that Beatty “viewed naval strategy and tactics in a different light from the average naval officer; he approached them, it seemed to me, much more as a soldier would. His war experiences on land had illuminated the facts he had acquired in his naval training. His mind had been rendered quick and supple by the situations of polo and the hunting field.” In addition to winning Churchill’s favor, Beatty’s work positioned him splendidly to help himself. It was his duty—as it had been Troubridge’s—to keep track of appointments, to know what posts were becoming vacant, and to supply the First Lord with suggestions in assigning flag officers. From this vantage, a naval secretary could virtually arrange his own next post. In the spring of 1913, command of the Battle Cruiser Squadron, the most coveted appointment possible for a rear admiral, became available, and everything fell into place. “I had no doubts whatever,” Churchill wrote of Beatty later, “in appointing him over the heads of all to this incomparable command, the nucleus as it proved to be of the famous Battle Cruiser Fleet—that supreme combination of speed and power, the strategic cavalry of the Royal Navy.” On March 1, 1913, David Beatty hoisted his admiral’s flag in Lion, flagship of the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron.
Command of these fast, powerful ships perfectly suited David Beatty; he led them with the dash and flair that characterized him in the saddle. In war, his tactic was to attack; in peacetime, he burned his restless energy in riding, hunting, or tennis—he played until darkness made the ball invisible. His Flag Captain—the captain of his flagship—Ernle Chatfield, described him as having “a love of doing everything at high pressure and high speed.” His ships and squadron began exercising at 24 knots rather than the usual 14, and firing at 16,000 yards rather than the customary 9,000. His tactics, pushing the offensive and courting risk, differed greatly from those of the Home Fleet commander, Sir George Callaghan, whom Beatty described to Ethel as “a nice old thing, full of sound common sense.” Nor did Beatty wish to keep the image of himself and his squadron hidden from the public. Less than two months after taking command, he invited a well-known naval journalist, Filson Young, to visit Lion and observe the battle cruisers exercising at sea. Young took a long walk with Beatty over the Scottish hills, dined with the five captains of Beatty’s force, watched the battle cruisers firing at long range, and was given plenty of time to observe the admiral controlling everything from the flagship’s bridge.
Ethel, whatever the distinction of her husband’s new command, did not change. She continued trying to adjust his schedule to accommodate her own. At one point, Beatty discovered that she was suggesting to the First Lord and to Admiralty officials whom she met in society that the battle cruisers be shuttled from one place to another to suit her own convenience. This time, Beatty’s letter was sharp: “You must not bother Prince Louis or Winston by asking them where we are going and to send them here or there because you want to spend Whitsuntide with me. It won’t do. The Admiralty have a good deal to do without having to consider which port will suit the wives best.”
Nevertheless, Ethel was very much a part of David Beatty’s greatest social triumph when together in St. Petersburg they acted as host and hostess to the Emperor and Empress of Russia. At the end of May 1914, the Admiralty decided to display British naval power in the home waters of the German and Russian empires. In June, Vice Admiral Sir George Warrender led four new dreadnought battleships, King George V, Ajax, Audacious, and Centurion, into Kiel at the time of the annual yacht races attended by the kaiser. At the same time, Beatty took the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron, including Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary, and New Zealand, farther up the Baltic, to St. Petersburg. Because the head of the Gulf of Finland was too shallow to permit the big ships to come up to the city, they moored in the naval harbor of Kronstadt, twenty miles from the mouth of the Neva River. And no sooner were the four giant ships swinging on their moorings than a smaller vessel, a 200-ton yacht, appeared and dropped her anchor within shouting distance ofLion. It was Ethel’s yacht Sheelah. During ten days of ceremonial lunches and banquets and visits to the theater, opera, and ballet, Ethel never left David’s side. When Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their four daughters came to lunch on Lion, the tsar was shown through the gun turrets and magazines while his daughters were escorted around the deck by four British midshipmen. When Beatty and his captains lunched with the imperial family at the country palace at Tsarskoe Selo, Ethel accompanied them. His own hospitality, Beatty decided, had been too meager, so he invited 2,000 Russian guests to a ball on board the British warships. As this number of guests was beyond the capacity of Lion’s broad quarterdeck to accommodate, New Zealand was made fast alongside. Her deck provided space for dancing, while the flagship’s deck, covered by red-and-white-striped awnings, was set with 200 circular supper tables. Covered gangways joined the two ships, which were hung with bunting and colored lights. With the help of the British embassy in St. Petersburg, 1,200 bottles of champagne were wrested from diplomatic cellars all over the city. Twenty whole salmon weighing twenty pounds apiece were set in blocks of ice on the serving tables. For Ethel, it was a culmination: here was Ethel Field Tree Beatty of Chicago acting as hostess to the representatives of a 300-year-old imperial dynasty. Nor was this the last of Beatty’s successes that summer. On returning from Russia, he was knighted and on August 2, with war imminent, he was promoted to the rank of acting vice admiral.
Jellicoe and Beatty presented such immense contrasts in temperament, dress, style of life, professional experience, and command behavior that it is difficult to imagine them working together. Jellicoe was a consummate professional, calm, deliberate, and meticulous, with a thorough mastery of his ships and guns acquired over a long career afloat and ashore. As a result, he was always greatly admired in the navy. He had come up the traditional way, and in his steady upward progress there was never any question that he was bound for the top. As for Beatty, the navy was not so sure. In many ways, Beatty was the antithesis of Jellicoe. He was brave, high-strung, impatient for action. His career had advanced in fits and starts. Brilliant performance under fire had led to rapid promotions, leapfrogging him over his contemporaries—but then he had held himself back by his own unorthodox and, many thought, arrogant behavior. Jellicoe had been at the top of every class; Beatty had scraped through with Second and Third Class certificates. Beatty’s meteoric career was due to forceful, almost instinctive action in moments of crisis; seizing these opportunities, he had bounded up the ladder of promotion. A commander at twenty-seven and a captain at twenty-nine, he was promoted so quickly that he outstripped his technical education and had performed no particularly distinguished service to the navy on shore or in routine assignments at sea. The difficult technical issues and decisions that dominated Jellicoe’s naval career never much interested Beatty, and he never became deeply involved in any particular branch of his profession. He lacked Jellicoe’s knowledge of the vulnerability of British ships to enemy weapons; indeed, this information burst on Beatty suddenly at Jutland when two of his six giant battle cruisers blew up under German shellfire, each explosion killing a thousand men. Beatty’s response was “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.”
In intellectual ability and professional knowledge, Jellicoe stood far above Beatty. The naval journalist Bennet Copplestone made the point that Jellicoe would have risen to the top in peace or war, whereas Beatty’s success was likely only in wartime; his qualities needed battle to bring them out. Nevertheless, war came, and when it did Beatty, like Jellicoe—both placed in their respective commands by Winston Churchill—seemed to be in the right place. After the war, Admiral Sir William Goodenough, whose light cruisers fought every battle alongside the battle cruisers, said of David Beatty:
I have often been asked what it was that made him so preeminent. It was not great brains. . . . I don’t know that it was great professional knowledge, certainly not expert knowledge of gun or torpedo. It was his spirit, combined with comprehension of really big issues. The gift of distinguishing between essentials and not wasting time on non-essentials. The spirit of resolute, at times it would seem almost careless, advance (I don’t mean without taking care; I mean without care of consequence) was foremost in his mind on every occasion.