In some respects, however, the outward impression of blasé serenity was more a matter of form than of substance. In spite, or because, of Britain’s Olympian industrial lead, the Fleet was subjected to a stream of piecemeal advances in metallurgy, ordnance and engineering, which it neither welcomed nor knew how to synthesize into an operational doctrine – a task made harder by the absence, between 1860 and 1895, of homogeneous squadrons of major warships.
