Perhaps the clue lies in his various discussions of the difficulties he had with the press and public opinion (which was not, I think, in those days simply an artifact of the press), who were rather keen on showy activity which took away from the regular and more useful activity. They were also rather keen on second-guessing, agitating for wheezes which the Admiral, with his greater knowledge of his position, had discarded. And it was often the case that he could not explain why in public as this would alert the Germans to the weakness of his position, which alerting could easily spur them on to greater and more effective activity. A tricky business, this getting the press right in time of war. People want & need a free & proper press but there is plenty of stuff which has to be kept out of the press: the press needs to exercise judgement & restraint, while remaining free & proper. A trick that it does not always manage in our times of nominal peace.
One of his minor difficulties with the press, a relic of the courtesies of war now largely extinct, arose from his according a German officer a proper funeral, a response to their having accorded a proper funeral to one of our chaps, a naval aviator. And there were a lot of casualties, with frequent notices of ships and boats lost with all hands. I wonder if, pro rata, there were more than in the rest of the fleet, much of which spent much of the war anchored in Scapa Flow.
Then there was the business of the proper relation between back office and front office. The Admiral might depend on the back office for his men and matériel but he did not want them meddling in his affairs. He did not want committees of officers who spent their days steering desks telling him how to place his mines. He does not give the impression that this was something that the Admiralty got quite right. I associate to Wellington who, given the communications machinery available at the time, was given pretty much a free hand in the Peninsular. On the other hand, he did have to put up with the back office appointing quite unsuitable subordinate commanders whose families had wealth or influence.
A related problem was the fact that most of the new wheezes which the Admiral might dream up worked best the first few times that they were used. The Germans might not have been great at sea but they were not stupid and they were fast enough to dream up counter-measures once a new wheeze had been exhibited. So new wheezes had to be kept back for special occasions so that they did not spoil.
Plenty more coverage of interesting technical matters in this Volume II. There were, for example, the glass balls found to make the best floats for keeping barrage nets afloat. And the fact that the continual motion sometimes imparted to anchor chains by the wind and the waves could result in what looked like heavy duty steel links chafing through in no time at all. Not sure now whether this was in days, weeks or months, but in any event, fast enough to be a problem.
Each chapter is closed with a poem, one of which is illustrated and some of which are oddly poignant. I associate to the amateur newspaper got up by the men of Scott's last expedition while they were holed up for the winter, waiting for the off. Also to the custom of people from MoD of providing entertainment to each other in the bar in the evenings of training courses. Entertainment which was supposed, at least on the occasion on which I came across it, to take the form of standing up and relating a funny story or singing a song to the assembled company, not something that I was much cop at. But I do remember one chap who told a splendid story about his hobby of goat-strangling, a hobby which was practiced at meets at places like Hook Road Arena, now more commonly used for car booters - although they did go as far as donkeys last weekend (see 6th May 2013 for last year's event).
The book closes with some rather tiresome reflections on our island race and its naval traditions. All a bit old-speak for me.
But now I have the problem of what to do with the book. It has been an interesting read, a good book which I am loath to chuck, even to Oxfam. But I rather begrudge the 3 and 5/8 inches of shelf space which it will otherwise occupy. What I need is a better home for it than Oxfam: perhaps I shall investigate prison libraries, books for prisoners having been in the news recently.
PS: I offer a link to another sort of entertainment from a bygone age, picked up for free at the same time as the 'Dover Patrol' and quite possibly contemporary with it. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/undergradstuff.docx
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