The vision of a young British naval warfare enthusiast revolutionized the way in which naval professionals approached learning about all the world's navies and their ships. At the turn of the 20th century, strong-willed Fred T. Jane introduced visual elements to supplement statistics in his reference volumes for easier, more immediate identification.
On 6 August 1865 the wife of a young Church of England curate in the fashionable London suburb of Richmond gave birth to her first son. Baptized John Frederick Thomas, he is known around the world as Fred T. Jane, the founding editor of All The World's Fighting Ships, or more simply, Jane’s Fighting Ships. In his day, he brought an entirely new approach to the study of naval forces. Previously, these had been exclusively the concern of a handful of professionals and politicians. By the end of the 19th century, democratic politics and a technological revolution in warfare had created a more general awareness of defense problems. Fred T. Jane would be one of the first to meet the growing demand for objective and dispassionate analysis of such issues.
Although his father, the Reverend John Jane, was a man of the cloth, Fred’s mother came from a family with a tradition of service in the Royal Navy and Marines. A painting survives of her great uncle. Major Andrew Kinsman, Royal Marines, who shows a remarkable resemblance to photographs of Fred in his 30s. Her grandfather, John Knill Kinsman, saw action in the Napoleonic Wars as a Royal Navy lieutenant in the epic 1805 chase of the Ville de Milan (46 guns) by HMS Cleopatra (32 guns).1 Small wonder that Fred Jane should display an early interest in naval matters. This found practical expression in an act of piracy perpetrated against a friend’s model sailing boat on a duck pond:
My chum was a sportsman, and after punching my head, proceeded to arm his ship also. We took to armour plates made from biscuit tins, and to squadrons instead of single ships. In the battle that ensued our fleets annihilated each other, and depleted finances forbade their renewal.2
In the early 1880s, a nationalist revolution in Egypt was threatening British interests in the Suez Canal, and a squadron of British battleships bombarded fortifications at Alexandria. Subsequently, bluejackets and Marines landed to restore order, with the assistance of Marines from the U.S. ships present. This action, the most considerable undertaken by the Victorian Navy, provided an inspiration for the 17-year-old Jane that changed his life. He compiled an album containing his own drawings of the ships engaged.1 Called Ironclads of the World, this handful of sketches eventually formed the basis of a book still associated with his name.
When Jane came to leave Exeter School in 1884, however, he showed little evidence that he possessed a world-class talent:
... At school I was an awful thickhead. 1 could never understand Euclid. I was whacked. I was called an idiot. 1 was punished in all kinds of ways, but it never got me any further.4
Jane had expressed his talents in other ways. On the football pitch, he had been recognized as a plucky and straight running halfback who always made ground, although he was apt to get too near the scrimmage through over-eagerness: an observation to be borne out in later life.5 Equally significant, Jane had been responsible for the Toby, an alternative school magazine that nearly drove the official publication out of business. It enjoyed great success “by reason both of its illustrations and its disregard of veracity and the law of libel in dealing with the school authorities.”6
Jane’s health prevented his entering the Royal Navy, so he turned to journalism. In the 1880s illustrated periodicals still depended on images worked up from the rough sketches of correspondents by so-called “black-and-white” artists. Only gradually were photographs introduced during the 1890s. “Black-and-white” journalism paid poorly, and recognition came slowly to the young artist. He lived in an attic on London’s unsavory Gray’s Inn Road, close to the home of the newspaper industry on Fleet Street. Jane fitted up his workshop with partitions corresponding to parts of a ship—poop, forecastle, quarterdeck—and slept in the “owner’s cabin.” For 30 consecutive weeks, Jane called at the Illustrated London News, which turned him down each time. On the 31st visit he sold a double-page drawing, and soon the name Jane became a recognized signature in the Illustrated and other “black-and-white” periodicals.7
Much of Jane’s work drew on his experience with naval maneuvers of the 1890s as a special correspondent on board newfangled torpedo-boat destroyers, which he made a specialty. The “long sea picnic of the annual manoeuvres” evidently appealed to some school-boyish streak in Jane’s psychological makeup:
Despite the work, filth and discomfort. . . no-one ever washes or removes clothing in a torpedo boat unless during a harbour spell ... the life has a charm about it that appeals to officers and men alike.8
For all the informality, Jane’s time at sea gave him valuable contacts for the future. He met journalists such as William Laird Clowes, the Times's naval correspondent, and Commander C. N. Robinson, Royal Navy, a contributor to the already prestigious Royal Annual, which continues today as Brassey’s Defence Yearbook. Jane also made the acquaintance of many naval officers and ratings, one of the most significant being Fleet Engineer David Grant, whose service dated from before the 1860 launching of HMS Warrior, the first iron battleship. Jane struck up a close friendship with Grant, gaining useful information about the different ships in which he had served.9 Typical of Jane’s disregard of contemporary snobbery was his cultivation of engineering officers who provided often pungent comments on ships’ performance that graced the early editions of Fighting Ships.
Throughout the 1890s Jane continued to build his collection of warship sketches, partly from personal observation and partly from photographs. By 1897 he was ready to launch an originally designed visual warship atlas. Previous directories of ships had consisted of alphabetical tables of technical information. But none provided visual reference data in any systematic fashion. As an artist, Jane saw the need to categorize ships by their appearance so that lookouts or officers of the watch could identify unknown vessels as they came into sight. Not only were Jane’s drawings arranged according to the configuration of their subjects’ masts and funnels, he also provided a visual index of ship silhouettes. These pointed to the pages where the corresponding vessels could be found. The silhouettes were deliberately “drawn as the vessels appeared at extreme horizon distance, with the slight distortion that this view often produces.”10 In various forms, the silhouette index lasted until the late 1980s, at which time ships were identified by their radar characteristics, rather than their funnels. Although Fighting Ships no longer indexes ships in this way, the approach is still used in the most recent volumes.
As a practical observer of naval operations, Jane also saw the need to integrate illustrations and technical detail, presenting all the information relating to one ship on one page. Although this may seem obvious now, it was an idea that had eluded earlier reference works, such as Brassey's. When the first issue of All The World’s Fighting Ships appeared in January 1898, it was immediately recognized as something out of the ordinary:
. . . One of the most valuable and original naval handbooks which it has been our fortune to examine . . . there is nothing in existence like it. . . . Books such as Brassey's Naval Annual, the Marine Ahnanach, and the Aide Memoire do not give details of such things as number of funnels and peculiarities of rig. Yet it is by those that ships are recognised at sea.11
Jane’s success did not come any too soon for his personal finances. In 1892 he had married Alice Beattie, who bore him a daughter in 1896. Despite Jane’s supplementing his “black-and-white” sketches with journalism and a series of highly imaginative novels, financial security was hard to achieve. Even in 1900 he wrote to his agent in furious terms:
Instead of making the fortune I ought to be making: I’m next door to starving on 500 pounds a year. . . . Yet if you asked the ordinary man in the street who were the top men who expounded ships, he’d mention my name before most to a cert.12
Lack of recognition in practical financial terms reflected a general failure in British naval circles to recognize that naval problems at the time were so complex that they justified full-time study. When a distinguished admiral protested in the Times against Jane’s expressing opinions on naval tactics, Jane defended himself on the grounds that he was “professionally compelled to devote hours and days to the study of points which the average Naval Officer can only spend as many minutes on.”13 Jane’s various attempts to open up debate on naval matters, however, resulted in a series of snubs that demonstrated the unwillingness of the contemporary service establishment to accept outside comment. A quite moderate symposium on battleship design was criticized as rendering the 1901 Fighting Ships too polemical and theoretical.14 Jane himself felt that general articles—written by such distinguished naval commentators as William Hovgaard—were not treated as seriously as they might have been elsewhere.15 Invited to lecture at the Royal United Service Institute in 1902, he suggested warship design should bear a closer relationship to the Navy’s strategic requirements. The latest British battleships he likened to prize gooseberries; very fine to look at, but “in market gardening the wise man does not concentrate all his efforts on a gooseberry to make his neighbours stare, but on a gooseberry for use.”16
On another occasion, Jane proposed to bombard the coast of any country attacking British commercial shipping, a notion greeted with such horror that the institute took the unprecedented step of refusing to publish an account of the lecture in its journal. How far Jane’s proposal was serious and how far he had been attempting to bring some life into the naval deliberations of the institute are unclear. One thing is certain: Jane was too much his own man to have fit easily into the stifling conventionality of Edwardian society in general, and of the Edwardian Navy in particular. He preferred “to drift to the gunroom whenever 1 can and best of all I like to talk to the type of sub. Who explains how much better he could run the fleet than his admiral.”17
Jane was, however, associated with one of the Royal Navy’s major achievements. In 1903, Fighting Ships carried an article by Colonel Vittorio Cuniberti, Constructor to the Royal Italian Navy, entitled: “An Ideal Warship for the British Navy.” His design combined great speed with long-range guns to avoid the threat of hostile torpedoes. These attributes closely resembled those of the revolutionary battleship to be launched in 1906, rendering all existing battleships obsolete, and giving her name to all subsequent big-gun capital ships: HMS Dreadnought. Despite this subsequent vindication by Cuniberti, at the time Jane wished he had not publicized the Italian’s views, “as everybody described the Cuniberti ship as more suitable for the pages of H. G. Wells than for a serious publication dealing technically with matters naval.”18 The Admiralty, however, was already considering such a ship, as was the U.S. Navy, justifying the claim of a later Fighting Ships editor that: “Never before had Jane so clearly attained his ambition of making Fighting Ships the mirror of naval progress.”19 Though he might reflect progress, he could not ensure that officials looked in the glass. In 1909 a crisis erupted when it appeared that Germany might outbuild the Royal Navy in the crucial new weapon system. When a member of the government claimed ignorance of German ability to build Dreadnoughts, Jane was furious:
Anyone who cared to do so could find out German naval progress without the slightest trouble. The Germans made no secret of it. For years in Fighting Ships I have published the number of slips in Germany suitable for building big ships on and the exact rates at which the Germans have turned out warships.20
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 threatened everything Jane valued, personally and professionally. He had always feared that the war he predicted between Britain and Germany would ruin the former, win or lose: ‘“Peace at any Price’ is the motto . . . the price of peace is preparedness for war.”21 Jane never profited personally from World War I as a professional pundit might expect to do in the late 20th century. In the short term, hostilities brought the opportunity to recycle material from Fighting Ships into popular, inexpensive formats, while Jane began to contribute a commentary—with remarkable promptness—on the war at sea to the weekly Land and Water. For Fighting Ships, on the other hand, war was a disaster. Although the German Navy was presumably well equipped with prewar copies, the Admiralty originally refused to allow any information about the Royal Navy to appear in the 1915 issue. So strong was the belief the war would be short that Fighting Ships provided coupons so civilian purchasers could acquire the missing pages after the war.
More insidious than official censorship was the upsurge of public paranoia and “all the music hall twaddle that makes decent men sick.”22 To some extent Jane contributed to this with his articles on German spies and atrocities. On the overall conduct of the war, however, he was entirely out of sympathy with public opinion. Within weeks of the outbreak of war, disappointment was widespread at the lack of a decisive clash between the British and German fleets. In vain, Jane urged that “the object of war is not to provide headlines or interesting reading for the public.”23 The latter were unable to appreciate the slow pace of naval warfare. They blamed those at the head of the Royal Navy for the lack of a new Trafalgar or Tsushima. Jane defended the Admiralty in characteristically paradoxical terms. In answer to the question, “Why doesn’t the Navy do something?” he wrote:
The ridiculous and irritating part of this question is that the Navy is doing something. To adopt a paradox, ‘THE LESS IT DOES THE MORE IT DOES.’24
As long as British ships could bring in food and raw materials and take expeditionary forces overseas, the Navy was doing all that was necessary. To the fury of the popular press, Jane denied that a minor skirmish in the Heligoland Bight constituted a major triumph for the Royal Navy, or that the loss of two old cruisers at Coronel was an equal disaster. With characteristic objectivity, he refused to accept that the war would soon be over: “All these yarns about Germany being played out or fed up with the war are mostly sheer bunkum.”25
Perhaps fortunately, Jane did not live to see his predictions of a long war come true. Despite German newspapers referring to “the well known British naval officer Fred T. Jane,” and rumors that he was a member of the Naval Intelligence Department, he failed to find official wartime employment.25 Instead he undertook an exhausting series of lecture tours to explain his views on the conduct of the war. In October 1915 he was soaked to the skin driving the 100 miles from Portsmouth to Cheltenham in his open-topped racing car. He was stricken by influenza and depression. By Christmas 1915 he seems to have left his second wife, whom he had married in 1909. And the following March, Jane died alone in his apartment, apparently of heart failure.
Although Fred T. Jane must have died a lonely and disappointed man, unable to carry his views with the public or to make a real contribution to the war effort, he left an enduring legacy. Aware of his health problems, he had made careful arrangements for the continued publication of Fighting Ships. Its painstaking tabulations of naval strength continued to fulfill the same role as more recent analyses of missiles and warheads were published. Jane was the original exponent of the strategic analyst’s trade. He remains a key figure in the provision of the technical information required to support the defense debate in a democratic society, in a form at once authoritative and easy to use.
Note: Jane left few letters and apparently no diary. The sources for his biography are mainly newspaper accounts and his own writings, in particular those published in The Hampshire Telegraph, a Portsmouth local paper to which Jane contributed a weekly column from 1907 to 1915.
1 J. Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, Vol. I [ii], (London, 1831) pp. 834-835.
2 Strand Magazine May 1904, p. 161.
3 Fighting Ships, 1947-48 p. vii.
4 The Hampshire Telegraph, 11 June 1915.
5 Exonian, December 1883.
6 “In Memoriam." Exonian, April 1916.
7 Obituary in Army & Navy Gazette 18 March 1916.
8 “The Torpedo in Peace and War," p. 27.
9 Fighting Ships, 1947-48, p. viii.
10 Fighting Ships, 1926.
11 Navy League Journal, March 1898, p. 36.
12 Letter in the Portsmouth City Record Office (832A).
13 The Times of London, 2 June 1902 & 5 June 1902.
14 Army & Navy Gazette, 1901 p. 753.
15 Fighting Ships, 1911, Preface.
16 RUSl Journal, 1903 p. 858.
17 The Hampshire Telegraph, 20 November 1914.
18 “Your Navy As a Fighting Machine," p. 17.
19 Fighting Ships, 1947-48, p. x.
20 The Hampshire Telegraph, 20 March 1909.
21 The Hampshire Telegraph, 5 June 1909.
22 The Hampshire Telegraph, 5 March 1915.
23 The Hampshire Telegraph, 29 January 1914.
24 The Hampshire Telegraph, 11 September 1914.
25 The Hampshire Telegraph, 8 January 1915.
26 The Times of London, 28 August 1915.
Mr. Brooks lives in Hampshire, England, and is the author of a biography of Fred T. Jane, scheduled for publication in 1997.