Genesis of the Grand Fleet: The Admiralty, Germany, and the Home Fleet,
1896-1914 tells the story of the prewar predecessor to the Royal Navy's
war-winning Grand Fleet: the Home Fleet. Established in early 1907 by
First Sea Lord Sir John Fisher, the Home Fleet combined an active core
of powerful armored warships with a unification of the various reserve
divisions of warships previously under the control of the three Royal
Navy home port commands. Fisher boasted that the new Home Fleet would be
able to counter the growing German Hochseeflotte. While these boasts
were accurate, they were not the sole motivation behind the Home Fleet's
establishment. The Liberal Party's landslide victory in the 1906 General
Election made fiscal economy on the part of the Admiralty even more
important than before, and this significantly influenced the Home
Fleet's creation. Subsequently the Home Fleet suffered a sustained
campaign of criticism by the commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet,
Lord Charles Beresford. This campaign ruined many careers including
Beresford's and resulted in the assimilation of the Channel Fleet into
the Home Fleet in 1909. From 1910 onward the Home Fleet steadily evolved
and became the most important single command in the Royal Navy, and the
Home Fleet's successive commanders-in-chief had influence on strategic
policy rivaled only by the Board of Admiralty. The last prewar commander
of the Home Fleet, Admiral Sir George Callaghan achieved this influence
by impressing the civilian head of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. A
driven reformer, Churchill's influence was almost as important as
Fisher's. Against this backdrop of political drama, Genesis of the Grand
Fleet: The Admiralty, Germany, and the Home Fleet, 1896-1914 explains
how Britain maintained its maritime preeminence in the early twentieth
century. As Christopher Buckey describes, the fleet sustained Britain
and her allies' path to victory in World War I.
