There had been no news overnight from Spain about his daughter, and he was not the sort of man who treated no news as good news when the principal object of his concern was pretty much the light of his and his dear wife’s life these days. He liked to think he loved, and had treated all his offspring fairly, equally with the devotion and care that they were due but Henrietta had always been different. Perhaps, it was because she was the youngest, born around the time that his wife, Diana, had first been diagnosed with the early symptoms of the rheumatoid arthritis which had so cruelly blighted her days these last few years.
Henrietta had been their last, not accidental although certainly unplanned child and they had forever cherished and protected her in ways her elder brothers and sisters had probably occasionally resented, possibly misunderstood because in retrospect they had never been quite as close to the others as they had been, briefly with Hen, especially since she returned from University in England three years ago.
It sounded so sentimental, so gushing when put that way; it was no less the truth for that. There was something special about their daughter that he and his wife had nurtured, wondering how that vital spark might express itself in later life. Now their precious treasure might already be dead, or in the murderous hands of some madman inquisitor…
The Royal Marine Band of the Atlantic Fleet struck up the first notes of God Save the King, rescuing De L’Isle from his darkest fears.
But for his presence the dockside church parade would have long been over and done with and the crew of HMS Achilles would have been getting on with its duties. Instead, over five hundred officers and men were still standing in the bloody rain!
Just to honour him…
He hoped to be able to board the cruiser and wish her Captain, Francis Jackson, a man he had first met nearly forty years ago leading a contingent of Naval Volunteers in Alexandria in a short, sharp, bloody little action that no historian would remember in fifty years’ time. Their paths had crossed a dozen or more times over the years and their wives were regular correspondents. He had made a point of commending the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet on the Navy’s ‘style’ in so ordering affairs that his old friend might conclude his career flying his own flag in command of the Jamaica Station.
‘If Francis hadn’t been having such a jolly good time at sea, he could have been First Sea Lord just like his old mater!’ Admiral Lord Collingwood had retorted.
Jackson had spent most of the last twenty years in command of ships the Lords of Admiralty considered otherwise ‘problematic’, specifically, vessels often serving on foreign stations with a history of poor morale or low efficiency. In this respect Achilles was a notable exception, re-commissioned eighteen months ago, after a major refit with a new crew by Francis Jackson. Without exception, Jackson had earned a reputation as the best man in the Fleet to ‘turn around’ any ship. To be rewarded with his commodore’s pennant upon the day Achilles docked in Kingston, Jamaica, was the least a grateful service could do to reward him.
The C-in-C had had a covered saluting platform erected when the weather had turned bad; De L’Isle had led his grumbling entourage out of it onto the wet concrete of the dockside when the rain had set in. The King might occasionally avoid the weather when he was with Queen Eleanor, Bertie worried terribly◦– albeit with very little real cause◦– about his wife’s constitution, but Philip Sidney had no intention hiding away in the dry when so many good men were getting a soaking just because he was there!
His aide-de-camp, a nephew of Sir George Walpole, quickly took his dripping coat and hat as soon as the party retired into the sheltered warmth of the Operations Complex.
Lord Collingwood and Rear Admiral Sir Anthony Parkinson, Flag Officer, Task Force 5.1, had been deep in conversation when the Governor arrived. De L’Isle had not had the opportunity to renew acquaintance with Parkinson in the weeks since his appointment in January.
Task Force 5.1 had been created as part of the Royal Navy’s root and branch battlefleet re-organisation necessitated by the commissioning of the new Ulysses class of fleet carriers.
The days of the line of battle were numbered.
Going forward, instead of ‘battle fleets’ there would be ‘task forces’ assigned to specific roles in peace and in war. Henceforth, the ‘task’ would determine the ‘composition’ of each ‘force’.
Parkinson flew his flag on HMS Princess Royal, one of the fifty thousand-ton battleships attacked on Empire Day 1976. Together with the new fleet carrier Ulysses, two heavy and two light cruisers, half-a-dozen destroyers and a fleet train of auxiliaries, Task Force 5.1 was focused not around the guns of the Princess Royal and the cruisers but the seventy to eighty aircraft and in due course, up to eight helicopters, carried by the Ulysses.
The coming of the new generation of big◦– forty thousand ton plus nearly one thousand feet long◦– carriers had prompted the most radical re-think of the tactics of naval warfare for a generation. In the mid-years of the century the introduction of ELDAR and of new long-range communication technologies had revised the calculus of global fleet operations; now, the advent of the new, so-called ‘strike carriers’ meant that future battles could be fought at ranges of hundreds of miles. The Fleet’s reach was no longer determined by the effective range of its biggest guns◦– around twenty-five miles◦– but by the range of its seaborne Combat Air Wing (CAW).
Task Force 5.2 was presently forming, working up to combat worthiness, around the Princess Royal’s sister ship HMS Tiger and the second of the Brooklyn-built Ulysses class ships, HMS Perseus, while in British waters the Home Fleet would soon be forming the first three of five such Task Force’s with one Canadian, and two Scottish-built Ulysses class ships.
Inevitably, when last year the Admiralty had proposed to de-commission and to place in reserve as many as five, six or seven of the older battleships and battlecruisers◦– nearly a quarter of the big gun battle fleet◦– to crew the giant, manpower hungry carriers, there had been an unholy storm of protest.
The wind of change often blew cold…
Philip De L’Isle was unlikely to have been the only colonial governor who wondered how the commissioning of the new carriers and the radical re-design of the Royal Navy’s age-old Fighting Instructions and deployments would be received in Germany, whose admirals had doggedly resisted the latent, now very real, possibilities of naval air power because they well understood that their aging, ailing Kaiser◦– and more importantly, his rambunctious son Prince Frederick◦– was a confirmed ‘big gun man’.
The Governor stood over the situation table of the New England, and the Jamaica and Gulf of Spain Stations with the two admirals, each man nursing a cup and saucer in his hands. If Englishmen abroad ever started to neglect the proprieties, the Empire would surely fall and more important, in times of trial there was nothing quite so guaranteed to sooth a fevered brow than a nice cup of tea taken in convivial company.
“I’m worried about our dispositions in the Caribbean,” Lord Collingwood admitted. “Achilles is a damned good ship but when all is said and done a single light cruiser armed with eight 6-inch guns is really here nor there in the bigger picture. All this loose talk about the Germans pushing the Spanish in Cuba, Santo Domingo and New Granada into declaring some kind of Triple Alliance gives me pause. I’m damned if I know how that would work in practice but if it did, at any level, with von Reuter’s ships in the region it might well embolden the hotheads in Havana, Port au Prince and in Mexico City. If that happens my ships down there on the Jamaica Station will suddenly be out on a limb!”