John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher
British Admiral of the Fleet, modernizer of the Royal Navy (1841-1920)
Also known as: Fisher, Lord Fisher, Admiral Fisher, John Fisher, Jacky Fisher
Admiral of the Fleet John Arbuthnot Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (1841-1920), was First Sea Lord (1904-1910 and 1914-1915) and the architect of the Royal Navy's pre-First World War reorientation toward the German threat — the Dreadnought program, the scrapping of obsolete ships, the redeployment of the fleet to home waters. Quigley refers to him as one of the figures behind Britain's reorganization of strategic capability around the 1904 entente with France.
First Sea Lord and the Dreadnought revolution
Fisher served as First Sea Lord under Balfour and the subsequent Liberal governments from 1904 to 1910. His tenure produced HMS Dreadnought (1906), the all-big-gun battleship that rendered every previous battleship obsolete, and the corresponding strategic concentration of the Royal Navy in home waters to face the rising German High Seas Fleet. Quigley discusses the Dreadnought race as a recurring theme in his analysis of pre-1914 naval competition, with Fisher as the British protagonist. He was First Sea Lord again under Churchill from October 1914, resigning in May 1915 in disagreement with Churchill over the Dardanelles campaign.
Quigley's framing
Fisher appears in AAE largely in the lists of important Edwardian figures and Fellows of All Souls (AAE 27, 42, 45). Quigley does not treat him as a The Milner Group member but as a representative of the parallel imperial-defense reform circle around Esher and the Committee of Imperial Defence — the technocratic-military current that the Group worked through but did not control. Quigley refers to Fisher in the context of the broader account of inter-imperial naval competition between Britain, Germany, France, and Russia that he develops in Weapons Systems and Political Stability.
Cited in
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 27 Quigley
Edward Grey, Lord Haldane, Hugh Cecil, John Simon, Charles Oman, Lord Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Gilbert Murray, H. A. L. Fisher, John Buchan, Maurice Hankey, the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, Lord Lansdowne, Bishop Henson, Halifax, Stanley Baldwin, Austen Chamberlain.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 594 Quigley
the anti-Bolsheviks, including D'Abernon, Smuts, Sir John Simon, H. A. L. Fisher (Warden of All Souls College), were willing to go to any extreme to tear down France and build up Germany.