Kenneth Dewar
Kenneth Gilbert Balmain Dewar, CBE was an officer of the Royal Navy. After specialising as a gunnery officer, Dewar became a staff officer and a controversial student of naval tactics before seeing extensive service during the First World War. He served in the Dardanelles Campaign and commanded a monitor in home waters before serving at the Admiralty for more than four years of staff duty. After the war ended he became embroiled in the controversy surrounding the consequences of the Battle of Jutland. Despite this, he held a variety of commands during the 1920s.
In 1928 he was at the heart of the "Royal Oak Mutiny", when as captain of the battleship Royal Oak he forwarded his executive officer's letter of complaint about their immediate superior, Rear-Admiral Collard, to a higher authority. This came in the wake of a series of incidents aboard ship. All three men were ordered back to Britain, and Dewar and his executive officer requested Courts-martial so that they might defend themselves. The trials were held in Gibraltar and garnered widespread media coverage.
Dewar, though found partially guilty, survived with a severe reprimand. His executive officer was found guilty and resigned, while Collard was compelled to resign his commission for provoking the situation. Having then commanded successively the two oldest capital ships in the fleet, Dewar retired on promotion to rear-admiral. His memoirs, published as The Navy from Within in 1939, were a vitriolic indictment of the Navy's practices.
Early life and career
Dewar was born in Queensferry on 21 September 1879, the son of Dr. James and Mrs. Flora Dewar. In July 1893 he was nominated as a naval cadet, passed the entrance examination and joined the training ship Britannia, where he studied for two years. Two of his brothers joined the navy; Alfred Charles who was promoted to captain on the Retired List and was appointed Head of the Historical Section of the Naval Staff, and Alan Ramsay who achieved Flag Rank in 1938. Dewar performed so well in Britannia, that upon graduation, he was appointed Midshipman straight away, which normally required a year's service at sea and passing an examination. He joined the protected cruiser Hawke on 20 August 1895. The following year he was appointed to the battleship Magnificent on 30 October 1896. Promoted acting sub-lieutenant, Dewar was confirmed in that rank on 15 February 1899 and promoted to lieutenant on 15 February 1900. Following promotion he was posted to the Devonport destroyer Osprey on 15 March, and on 12 June that year he was appointed to the torpedo-boat destroyer Fervent.Gunnery officer
Following this period at sea, Lieutenant Dewar was selected to specialise in gunnery duties. His time training at HMS Excellent, the gunnery school at Portsmouth, coincided with that of the captaincy of Percy Scott, the renowned gunnery expert. His performance on the two-year course was so impressive that on graduation he was given command of a ship. In 1903 and 1904, Lieutenant Dewar was lent as the officer commanding the Chatham-based destroyer Mermaid during the summer Naval Manoeuvres.Dewar became the gunnery officer of the armoured cruiser Kent on 24 August 1905, where he remained until 1908. Dewar's dedication and standard of training became evident when his ship led the Fleet in battle practice firings and gunlayer's-test. He was reassigned to Excellent on 19 January 1908 for instruction duties. Soon he was sent to sea again, being made gunnery officer of the battleship Prince George on 8 February 1908. He rejoined Excellent on 22 December that year. On 11 June 1909 Dewar was "lent" as gunnery officer to the protected cruiser Spartiate for the annual fleet manœuvres. Once the manœuvres were finished, Dewar was made assistant to the Inspector of Target Practice, an important gunnery position at the Admiralty on 17 July. In the same year, he was asked to lecture on the Imperial Japanese Navy, which he had previously had experience of, at the Royal Naval War College at Portsmouth. During his talk, he exhibited an unpalatable forthrightness by saying that the Royal Navy needed more intellectual officers like Togo Heihachiro, implying that there was a dearth of such officers. The President of the College, Lewis Bayly, abruptly terminated his lecture.
On 1 January 1910, Dewar was once more given sea duty as first lieutenant and gunnery officer of Dreadnought. Dreadnought was still one of the most prestigious postings in the fleet despite the growing number of newer dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers entering service. It was Dewar's misfortune during this service to be taken in by the Dreadnought hoax on 10 February, in which he escorted a party of practical jokers, that included Virginia Woolf, pretending to be Abyssinian royalty, on an official visit to the battleship. However, Dewar befriended the captain, Herbert Richmond, who acted both as a friend and a mentor to him in the following years. With Richmond's encouragement, Dewar began a thorough study of naval tactics and strategy which would later continue at the Royal Naval War College.
Promotion to commander
Dewar was reappointed to Dreadnought on 28 March 1911, was promoted Commander on 22 June and on 14 December he was appointed for duty at the Royal Naval War College, Portsmouth as an instructor. The next year, he was selected to join the newly formed War Staff at the Admiralty, created on First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill's orders in 1912. He was consequently reappointed for duty at the War College on 2 April 1912. On 4 March 1913, it was announced that Commander Dewar had been awarded the Gold Medal and Trench-Gascoigne Prize by the Royal United Service Institution for his winning essay on the question "What is the war value of oversea commerce? How did it affect our naval policy in the past and how does it in the present day?" The final chapter of the paper was suppressed from publication by the Admiralty; in it Dewar advocated a "distant" blockade in a war with Germany at a time when the Royal Navy was still contemplating a "close" blockade of the German coastline. In the event, a distant blockade was imposed. Dewar was then and remained unsympathetic to the removal of his concluding chapter;Dewar's reputation as an intellectual within the Navy was confirmed when in 1912, he became one of the founder members of The Naval Review, an independent journal of Royal Navy officers. That year Richmond had formed a "Naval Society" with a dozen friends, Dewar among them. After Richmond went abroad on active service, Dewar decided that instead of being a society of purely discussion, it ought publish a journal, to which end he "raised subscriptions for the first issue from some forty or fifty officers of all ranks".
In 1914, Dewar was appointed commander of the battleship Prince of Wales, then flagship of the 5th Battle Squadron in the 2nd Fleet. On 28 July, Dewar married Gertrude Margaret Stapleton-Bretherton, the sister of Evelyn, Princess Blücher, in a service at St. Bartholomew's Church in Rainhill on Merseyside. The service was conducted by the Archbishop of Liverpool and the Bishop of Portsmouth. Dewar's best man was the Honourable Reginald Plunkett, who later became known as Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, and would go on to achieve high rank in the Navy. Dewar and Gertrude had one son together, Kenneth Malcolm J. Dewar.
First World War
In August 1914, Britain went to war with Germany, and later that year with the Ottoman Empire. Prince of Wales remained in the 5th Battle Squadron until 1915, when with a number of other pre-dreadnoughts she was sent to the Eastern Mediterranean to support the Gallipoli landings, the goal of which was to capture the strategically important Dardanelles Straits, take Constantinople and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. As second-in-command of Prince of Wales, Dewar was present for part of the naval operations in the Dardanelles Campaign against the Turkish positions. Following aborted attempts to lend heavy-gunfire support to the troops at ANZAC Cove, Dewar wrote an unofficial memo to the Rear-Admiral commanding the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, with suggestions for the employment of indirect fire to attack Turkish targets. Dewar heard nothing of his proposals, and it was not until November 1915 that indirect fire was used with good effect by the bulged cruiser Edgar. Following the campaign, in October Dewar was given command of HM Gunnery School, Devonport. It was an important position as large numbers of Reserve and Volunteer Reserve officers either re-qualified or qualified in gunnery duties. After a year Dewar returned to sea in command of the Abercrombie class monitor Roberts, and joined the Dover Patrol in August, 1916.In response to the German battle cruiser raids on the British coast, a visible response was called for to quell public anxiety. On 27 May 1916, Roberts arrived at Gorleston to act as a guard ship for the port of Yarmouth, in effect acting as a coastal defence battery. Roberts fulfilled such duties at Tyneside and in the Thames Estuary for the rest of the war. Once again, Dewar was rotated back to shore, and was appointed to the Operations Division of the Naval Staff under first the Jellicoe, and then the Wemyss Boards of Admiralty. Dewar was promoted to the rank of captain on 30 June 1918 in the Half-Yearly lists and then became Assistant Director of Plans in the Plans Division. On 17 October 1919, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire "for valuable services at the Peace Conference, Paris."
Post-war commands
Jutland controversy
While still at the Admiralty, Dewar became embroiled with the controversies surrounding the aftermath of the Battle of Jutland. The manner in which the battle had been fought had come under criticism, with a line drawn between those who supported Sir John Jellicoe, who had commanded the Grand Fleet at the battle; and those who fell-in behind his then-subordinate and successor, Sir David Beatty. Dewar followed the Beatty school of thought espoused by his former captain, Herbert Richmond, that the battle had been lost by the staid admirals of the battleship squadrons. In November 1920 he and his brother Captain Alfred Dewar were entrusted with compiling the Naval Staff Appreciation of the battle, which was completed in January 1922. The two brothers had produced a body of work which favoured Beatty, for whom the Dewars' "capacity for original thinking and literary talents always held an appeal." Even Richmond, who intensely disliked Jellicoe and was a confidant of Beatty, agreed with the Committee on Imperial Defence's official naval historian, Sir Julian Corbett who wrote that Dewar's "facts were, I found, very loose."The Appreciation, which had originally been intended for distribution around the Royal Navy, was deemed so full of "far-reaching and astringent criticism of Jellicoe" and of a new and therefore irrelevant tactical theory that Beatty and his Board of Admiralty were compelled to decide against its publication. Indeed, Admirals Roger Keyes and Ernle Chatfield were moved to write to Beatty that if published the Appreciation "would rend the service to its foundations". The final straw had been the very public heckling of Dewar when he lectured from his Appreciation to the twenty students of the Senior Officers' War Course at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. It was decided to expurgate the existing document, which had been removed from circulation and release it. It was published as The Narrative of the Battle of Jutland in 1924.
All copies of the original Appreciation were ordered destroyed in 1928 and before the "Narrative" had been published Dewar and his brother had already been barred access to the original. However, he continued to have a major impact on the historiography of the Battle of Jutland by serving throughout the 1920s as Winston Churchill's naval consultant on submarine-warfare. Churchill wrote an anti-Jellicoe tract in his World Crisis, Volume III which in large measure shared Dewar's views on tactics and even some diagrams. Although Dewar would later become a supporter of the Labour Party, after Churchill was passed over for a cabinet position in 1931 Dewar wrote to him on 16 November, "I am very sorry to see that you are not in the new Cabinet. I had hoped you would go to the Admiralty and do very necessary work for the Navy."