On Standards and Scholarship: A Response to Nicholas Lambert

Abstract

This article examines Nicholas Lambert’s criticisms of the article ‘Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution Reconsidered: Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, 1911–1914’ (War in History 18, 2011), which challenged revisionist claims that in July 1914 the Royal Navy was on the verge of implementing a ‘naval revolution’ based on radical ideas attributed to Admiral Sir John Fisher. It demonstrates that Lambert’s criticisms are unfounded, and provides additional evidence to support an alternative interpretation of British naval policy in the period 1912–14. Important changes were undoubtedly under way on the eve of the First World War, but the revisionists exaggerate Fisher’s influence and oversimplify an inherently complex decision-making process. The Admiralty’s plan to substitute torpedo craft for some of the battleships in its 1914 programme was intended to bolster a conservative strategy, and the changes under consideration were essentially evolutionary in nature.