Liveblogging World War I: May 30, 1916: Jutland
Andrew Gordon (2013): The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command:
Tuesday the 30th of May started as a routine day in the life of a fleet in harbour. Queen Elizabeth’s men returned from leave, and were set to cleaning their ship and preparing her for undocking. Nine boys in Barham were vaccinated. One of their shipmates, an able-seaman, was sent to the RN Hospital in Queensferry with syphilis. He was accompanied by a boy from Warspite with gonorrhoea, and a midshipman from Princess Royal with German measles. The last-mentioned (later, Admiral Sir Conolly Abel Smith) was to curse his luck for the rest of his life. In the afternoon the usual recreational and marching parties were landed, while off-duty officers were free to please themselves. Few will have bothered to go up to Edinburgh on this early-closing day, but it was a glorious afternoon and other attractions pulled....
At 8.37 (BST) Jellicoe gave Beatty his orders:
URGENT, PRIORITY. AVAILABLE VESSELS, BATTLE CRUISER FLEET, FIFTH BATTLE SQUADRON, PROCEED TO APPROXIMATE POSITION LAT 56 ° 40’ N LONG 5 ° 0’ E [240 miles from Scotland, 100 from Denmark]. DESIRABLE TO ECONOMIZE T.B.D.S’ [destroyers’] FUEL, PRESUME YOU WILL BE THERE ABOUT 2.0 P.M. TOMORROW. I SHALL BE ABOUT [70 miles NNW] BY 2.0 P.M. UNLESS DELAYED BY FOG. I WILL STEER FOR HORN REEF FROM [that position]. IF NO NEWS BY 2.0 P.M., STAND TOWARDS ME TO GET IN VISUAL TOUCH.
This meant that the Grand Fleet would not operate in full cruising array until sometime around 3.30 p.m. GMT on the 31st. Before then, the BCF (with the 5th BS) would be separated from the main body. Thereafter, Beatty would assume his appointed position 15 miles in advance of the battle-fleet....
Later Jellicoe was to tell the Admiralty that he had
felt no anxiety in regard to the advanced position of the force under Sir David Beatty, supported as it was by four ships of the Fifth Battle Squadron as this force was far superior in gun power to the First Scouting Group and the speed of the slowest ships was such as to enable it to keep out of range of superior enemy forces.
But, by that time, words were being chosen carefully....
Barham passed under the Forth Bridge at 10.30. Her midshipman-of-the-watch “could hear much of what was going on, [and overheard] that reports had been received that there was a possibility of an air raid by Zeppelins on Edinburgh”.... As Malaya slid under the bridge, Surgeon-Lieutenant Lorimer and Lieutenant Young, chatting on the upper deck, wondered if the foremast was going to scrape it....
They proceeded at 12 knots to the ‘outer gate’ of boom defences, between Inchcolm and Oxcars, where they increased to 18 for the long pilotage past Inchkeith and May Island. From the bridge of each mass of towering shadows the [dimmed] stern light of the next ahead could be discerned through binoculars, and on these pinpoints they steered. What the flagship steered by, only the little knot of figures on her forebridge knew, the admiral and flag-captain, the navigator and officer-of-the-watch moving mysteriously around the glow-worm arc of light from the binnacle and chart-table. One by one the long black shapes slid through the outer defences, ebon shadows in a world of shades.... There was no moon. Summer lightning flickered like distant gunfire on the horizon astern, lending weight to the buzz in Barham about a Zeppelin raid on Edinburgh. That this theory was still current on the 5th BS flagship’s bridge, two hours after sailing, supports Marder’s belief that Beatty had not troubled to apprise Evan-Thomas of the details of the operation....
They reached the North Sea soon after midnight, when the low black lump of May Island slipped by to starboard. Here, where Lord Howard left off pursuit of the Armada and consigned the Spanish to “the winds of Hell and the wrath of God”, Sir David Beatty’s 52 ships (6 battlecruisers, 4 battleships, 14 light-cruisers, 27 destroyers, 1 seaplane-carrier) took up night-steaming formation, with the “heavy metal” grouped together, the light-cruisers on short rein ahead, and the flotillas close astern. Beatty led to sea that night a combined force which, on its own, could have seen off almost any other navy in the world, and outmanoeuvred all of them. Not since Nelson had so young an admiral commanded so élite an array of offensive power. Nearly 2,700 of its 18,000 men would never see land again.
The Grand Fleet had sailed from Scapa Flow, Cromarty and the Firth of Forth, “four and a half hours before the first units of the High Seas Fleet left the Jade”.
