MEMORIAL TO ADMIRAL OF THE FLEET EARL JELLICOE. (Hansard, 12 December 1935)

§ The PRIME MINISTER (Mr. Baldwin)
I beg to move: That this House will, To-morrow, resolve itself into a Committee to consider an humble Address to His Majesty, praying that His Majesty will give directions that a monument be erected at the public charge to the memory of the late Admiral of the Fleet Earl Jellicoe, as an expression of the admiration of this House for his illustrious naval career and its gratitude for his devoted services to the State. I think it might be for the convenience of those who have not been long in the 1120 House if I remind them, as I reminded Members on that occasion six years ago when I moved a similar Resolution with regard to Lord Haig, of what it is that this Resolution effects. In effect the House pledges itself to honour the Estimate which will in due course be presented for the work sanctioned by the House under the Resolution. When that Estimate is presented the full amount involved will be shown to the House, and according to precedent the figure that comes in the Estimate will be one somewhere in the neighbourhood of £6,000; it may be rather more or it may be rather less.
1121 With those preliminary words on business I would desire to take a short time this afternoon in moving this Motion and justifying it to the House and to the country. As I observed six years ago, these occasions are no occasion for estimating or attempting to estimate the ultimate position which may be held by the great man whose memory we desire to perpetuate. As I have often said, whether a man be a soldier or a sailor or a statesman the position he may ultimately occupy in the view of historians or in the regard of his countrymen is not one which can be estimated even approximately in his lifetime. But it is the duty of each generation, surely, to pay its tribute to those who, in their view and so far as they are able to judge, may deserve well of the State; and such a one—I say it without fear of contradiction as I said it of Lord Haig—was Lord Jellicoe.
Again, this is not the occasion to dwell at any length on his professional career, beyond saying that his whole life, viewed in the light of later events, seemed to have been a fitting preparation for what he had to do and what he accomplished. His whole life was devoted to the service of his profession, and for that service he kept both body and mind in training and in subjection, so that when the time came and at whatever age it might find him he at any rate, so far as all he could do, would be ready to respond to the call, and would respond
It is not for me to estimate how much that modern Navy, as it was when the Great War began, owed in its technical development and its efficiency to Lord Jellicoe and to the men with whom he worked. The country at large knew little of what went on in those pre-War days in the Services. Suffice it for us to remember that Lord Jellicoe was working long with Lord Fisher on those reforms both in materiel and in personnel which left so strong and deep a mark upon the senior Service. Suffice it for us to remember that Lord Jellicoe was working with Sir Percy Scott at the time when they were attempting to concentrate so much of the effort of the scientific Navy to improving the gunnery of the whole Service. He was with Sir Percy Scott at the time of the introduction of director firing, and he himself in the natural course of his duties raised the Atlantic Fleet three years before the War from the lowest place to the highest place in 1122 the Navy in its gunnery, and he performed the same service a year later to the Battle Squadron of the Home Fleet.
Then came the Great War. Most of us have hardly yet begun to realise how infinitely remote the problems of that War were from the Napoleonic wars whose history was so familiar to us, whose romantic history must have appealed to all of us older men in the days of our youth. The kind of work that was done in the Napoleonic times by so many ships and by fleets was work that in the Great War fell much more to smaller portions of the Fleet and to the smaller ships. The great task of the Commander-in-Chief was to take over, as he did, the whole fleets of the Empire and to weld them together into one great homogeneous unit, on which the whole fate of the Empire and of these islands depended for four years. He obtained and maintained the undisputed command of the sea before, during and after the Battle of Jutland. His was the controlling and directing mind of the greatest assembly of naval power that the world has ever seen, and very possibly that the world will ever see. The trust reposed in him was a tremendous trust. The responsibility was perhaps the greatest single responsibility on any man in the War. All of us who were at home at that time were sheltered behind the Grand Fleet, and we were able to go on with our work as no other people in Europe were, without any fear or apprehensions lest our soil might be the soil on which the invader fought our own people. We had our cares, our sorrows, our troubles, and from that anxiety, from which no people in Europe was free, we were free, and we were free because of the Grand Fleet.
It was a Grand Fleet which, in spite of innumerable difficulties and innumerable perils, succeeded in keeping this country fed, and the measure of these things is the measure of the burden that lay upon the shoulders of the man who was in command of that Fleet. We ask much more of our seamen in our island home than is asked of their seamen by any other country in the world, and that which we asked was given to us, and the trust we reposed in our seamen and in their great leader was justified from the first day of the War until the Armistice. In him we are honouring a worthy successor of the great and immortal line of British seamen.
1123 Now let me remind you, if you have forgotten it—it leads me naturally to what I want to say about the man—that when the Lord Mayor of London went up in his official capacity to visit the Grand Fleet on behalf of the citizens of London he made an observation which I would like to bring back to the recollection of the House. He said that he went up in what he described as one of the grimmer phases of the War, and he added: Fogs and rough seas surrounded our physical presence, but Jellicoe himself was a beacon of hope and confidence. Those were great words to write of any man at that time, and I would ask you to remember with them some words which I read in a letter by a distinguished Naval officer who was a midshipman in the Fleet in 1916. He wrote this: My lasting impression is of the personal influence diffused by the Commander-in-Chief. None of us had ever spoken to him; many of us had never seen him; but so closely had he identified himself with the day-to-day duties of every man in the Fleet that we all felt as if we were serving in the Flagship. Jellicoe was the Grand Fleet. That is an amazing thing for a lad to say. How does it come about? No one can explain it. It is that God-given gift of personality which is a form of manifestation of genius and is inexplicable, for it cannot be taught by book learning, it cannot be acquired merely by a desire to obtain it. A man has it or he has not; and that great gift was Jellicoe's. Perhaps it may help to explain it when I remind the House that Jellicoe was a man of deep religious conviction. He was a man of wonderful understanding of the human heart. He was kindly and thoughtful to everyone of every kind, in every rank, with whom he was brought into contact, and he had in full measure that gift of inspiring with affection all who worked with him and for him, and with that, and an absolutely noncomitant part of it, a flawless sincerity and complete selflessness. He was loved by every officer and man who served with him.
There is only one observation I would make in conclusion. It has often seemed, in reading history, that perhaps the happiest death, and the death that helps to secure immortality for a man, is the death that comes to him in the moment of his greatest achievement. Such were the deaths of Wolfe and of 1124 Nelson in the hour of victory, and no less famous the death of Richard Grenville in the hour of defeat, and the names of those men will live as long as stories of human achievement and chivalry and daring can stir the human heart. But for Haig and for Jellicoe it was reserved to see many years of life when the peak of their achievement was passed, and surely, if ever, those are the testing years of character. With neither of those men, in those last years, was there the slightest deviation from the lives they had always led, lives in which duty always came first, the duty that lay to hand.
Jellicoe, as Haig, passed from one of the most prominent positions in the whole world to the position of a private citizen. From neither of them did you ever hear a word of criticism or reproach of anything connected with themselves, their own careers, what people said about them. They had played their part, and they were content to leave history to judge. They devoted themselves as long as they had strength to the service of the men who had worked side by side with them through those years of the War, and to both of them came a merciful and peaceful end. They were allowed some years of peace, but years in which they enjoyed health to work. Each was called away in the full possession of his powers after a short and comparatively painless illness. And so, in our controversial life in politics, in the strenuous work of trying to govern successfully and happily our common country, it is well, I think, to turn aside on such an occasion as this, if it be only for a moment, that we may think of Lord Jellicoe and all that he stood for to the nation, and all that he stands for as an example to every man that loves his country, a man whose single aim through life was the public service and the service of his fellow men and who, throughout his life, worked with a fine resolution and with a lovely humanity, and whose passing we now mourn. A great sailor, Sir, and a great man.

§ Mr. ATTLEE
I rise to associate myself and my colleagues on this side of the House with the Motion which has been so very eloquently moved by the Prime Minister. There is little, indeed, to be added to what the right hon. Gentleman has said. Most of us of a 1125 younger generation never had perhaps the privilege of meeting Lord Jellicoe, though we could view him from afar as a lonely figure in the War holding a supreme responsibility. Since the War we have known him as one of the great survivors of that struggle, as one quietly taking his place in public life and not figuring in public controversy. The impression that one has, first of all, of Lord Jellicoe is, I think, of a man who had to stand up to a most tremendous responsibility, and a man who discharged that responsibility, and always preserved the highest possible standards of a British sailor. It is not for us, as the Prime Minister has said, to estimate all his qualities. Those who know tell me that, quite apart from that gift of controlling a great fleet in war, he was remarkable for the amazing ability with which he organised all that was behind that fleet. Sometimes people are apt to think of a fleet as something that can be assembled ready to fight, and do not remember the immense amount of careful organisation that lies behind. In that Jellicoe was, I believe, supreme. He was animated by a great sense of duty, and I believe the other quality which endeared him so much to all who knew him was his great modesty. He spas a man who never put himself forward, who never thought of himself, and I believe he would think of this memorial which we now propose less as a tribute to himself as an individual than to himself as typifying the spirit of the officers and men of the Fleet, and I think that in his sense of duty and his selflessness, he stands there as a typical embodiment of the very best qualities of the British sailor.

§ Sir FRANCIS ACLAND
In the absence of my right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Sir A. Sinclair) owing to illness, it is a privilege for me to support the Motion now before the House on behalf of my hon. Friends. Lord Jellicoe has, I think, been described as a great sailor, a great gentleman and a great Christian. Any of us would surely be well content if only one of those three things could truly be said of him after his death, for one of them alone would be a worthy epitaph, but when all three of them apply to the same man, as I firmly believe they do to Lord Jellicoe, that is so rare and presents 1126 so splendid a picture of what a man of our race can attain, that we should delight to honour him. I wholeheartedly support the Motion.