He had no difficulty pinpointing the date, the name of the British admiral, and the name of the battle in which Britain’s future would be decided. “Jellicoe to be Admiralissimo38 on October 21, 1914 when the Battle of Armageddon comes along,” he wrote in 1911. Fisher’s premise and most of the details of his prediction were correct. He picked the date because it corresponded with the probable completion of the deepening of the Kiel Canal, which would permit the passage of German dreadnoughts from the Baltic to the North Sea. War did come on a bank holiday weekend, although it was in August, not
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