Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

by Andrew Gordon

In the longest perspective, the Royal Navy’s habits of tactical initiative had turned through an immense 200-year cycle. From the low of around 1700 they had risen, amid countless knocks and bruises, to the famous battle-wise high of the early 1800s; and then, in the century of maritime peace after the Napoleonic War, they had slipped insidiously down back to the original hidebound point of departure. The 1900s found the British Fleet’s outlook firmly regressed to the age when the sacred Signals and Instructions held sway. And while the British public of 1914 took for granted that another Trafalgar was imminent – indeed was their birthright – the professional conditioning of the officers in command of the Royal Navy’s mighty dreadnought squadrons made it more likely that a clash with the High Seas Fleet would be a repeat of (say) Verez Malaga in 1704 rather than of Trafalgar in 1805.