Craddock, David Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon

Driving Change in Naval Technology 1900–1918

Reginald Bacon was no Drake, Hawke or Nelson, but in a naval career spanning four decades and marked by decisive changes for the Royal Navy, he was a central figure among Admiral Jacky Fisher's five best minds in the navy who revolutionised British naval warfare between 1900 and the end of the First World War. This biography traces Bacon's remarkable career, from his service as a fifteen-year-old midshipman aboard Sir Geoffrey Hornby's flagship in the Mediterranean to his three years as commander of the Dover Patrol. A specialist in mines and torpedoes, he was alternately the father of submarine service, the first captain of HMS Dreadnought, and Director of Naval Armaments at the Admiralty before leaving the Royal Navy for five years to head the Coventry Ordnance Works, whose fortunes he fundamentally changed. Having ended the war as Controller of Munition Inventions with the rank of admiral, he reinvented himself as a writer for the next twenty-five years, dividing his time between his homes in Hampshire and Italy. No stranger to controversy after unwittingly becoming embroiled in the bitter feud between Beresford and Fisher in 1909, he vigorously defended Sir John Jellicoe as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet against accusations that his weak and defensive tactics had deprived the nation of a resounding victory at Jutland. He wrote highly acclaimed biographies of Jacky Fisher and Earl Jellicoe, as well as two novels and two layman's guides to new technologies, the automobile and the radio. His account of his service as commander of the Dover Patrol is considered a classic of naval memoirs and reveals underlying currents of controversial naval doctrines that continue to have an impact today. As war loomed again in the 1930s, he wrote two more books advocating the role of the Royal Navy in wartime. This biography does justice both to the man the most capable and intelligent officer I have ever known, wrote Fleet Admiral Sir Henry Oliver and to his remarkable contribution to so many aspects of naval development at a time of exponential change.