Castles of Steel (147 page)

In the winter of 1915, when the Admiralty first moved the battle cruisers to a permanent base in the Firth of Forth, Ethel Beatty established a residence for herself and her husband on shore. The place she chose was Aberdour House, a comfortable old stone and stucco house with a tiled roof on a hill overlooking the Firth from the north, about six miles from the fleet landing at Rosyth. Beatty promptly ordered construction of a clay tennis court, where, when his ships were in harbor, he played every fair afternoon. Usually, he came ashore in his admiral’s barge for lunch, being met by his automobile and driven the fifteen minutes up the hill to Aberdour House. Beatty loved tennis, “because it is exercise in concentrated form and you don’t waste valuable time chasing a miserable, helpless ball over the hills.” On the court, he played as if he were at war. He slapped his partner on the back, cheered good shots, and exhorted greater effort when they seemed to be losing. “Here, we can’t let it stand like this!” he would cry. “It will never become us to be beaten.” When it rained, Beatty and his guests—admirals or captains from the fleet—took long walks over the hills or joined the party dancing before a huge open fireplace in a large hall at nearby Aberdour Castle. Beatty seldom danced but he liked watching, enjoying the warmth, the music, and the presence of women. Reluctantly, he left to return to his ship for dinner, in obedience to his own order that all hands be back aboard by 7:30 in the evening. When he took command of the Grand Fleet and moved to Scapa Flow, this pleasant routine was interrupted, but the lease on Aberdour House and its tennis court was continued.

The truth was that most of the activities centered on Aberdour House were a charade. Beatty was miserable in his marriage. His wife and her “utterly unpredictable moods” dominated his thoughts; Beatty described some nights with Ethel as “worse than Jutland.” Lady Beatty had always considered her husband selfish because he was so consumed by the navy and went off to sea, leaving her alone. As long as he commanded only the battle cruisers and they were based in the Firth of Forth, she could have him around and could play the grand hostess at Aberdour House. When he moved to Scapa Flow, in the far north, she felt herself abandoned again. Her response was renewed promiscuity, a matter that was common knowledge in the couple’s intimate society, but never mentioned. Beatty, however, was constantly reminded. Once, he left Aberdour House to return to his ship and then, remembering that he had left his cigarette case behind, returned to collect it. He found his wife in bed with one of his officers. Yet he never considered divorce. He continued to write to “Darling Tata,” and signed himself “Ever your devoted David.” He blamed himself for her moods and behavior. “Tata,” he wrote on one occasion, “you accuse me of being cross, bad-tempered, saying cutting things which indeed were far from my thoughts or intention.” A month later, he wrote again,

You must give me a little more time to get accustomed to the new conditions and your changed feelings. You see, in the past you have spoiled me horribly and given me so much love and sympathy that it is difficult to realise that I must do without it or without so much of it. . . . Let me impress upon you that I am really tumbling to the altered conditions, that I in no way wish to monopolise your entire life, that I have no wish to be the orbit, against your will, round which everything will revolve, to be the center of your efforts to live, which, as you put it, makes me a horribly selfish, egotistical person. I truly am not that, really. . . . I realise you like to be more independent and indeed am thankful for it. All I ask is that you should do exactly as you wish at all times. All I truly care for is that you should be happy and contented.

Rejected and lonely, Beatty found consolation. During the last two years of the war, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet was deeply involved in a love affair with Eugenie Godfrey-Faussett, a woman in her early thirties with much-praised long golden hair. Eugenie’s husband, twenty-one years older than she, was Captain Bryan Godfrey-Faussett, of the Royal Navy, the intimate friend and equerry of King George V who had arranged Ethel Beatty’s presentation at court. Eugenie initiated the correspondence with Beatty, writing to him in June 1916 to congratulate him on his role at Jutland. His reply, addressed to “Dear Mrs. Godfrey,” noted properly that he had been glad to see her husband “looking so well” when he had visited the fleet with the king, and concluded, “Yours ever, David Beatty.” Through the remainder of 1916, Eugenie kept writing. After becoming Commander-in-Chief, Beatty replied that, “exiled” to Scapa Flow, he appreciated “your letters more than ever, so will you write and tell me all the news?” Formality began to erode and Beatty wrote, “Bless you my dear (is that too familiar?) for your delightful letters, the best I ever get.” In January 1917 he began calling her Eugenie—“because Godfrey told me to”—and asked her to stop calling him
Sir
David. Boldly, Eugenie sent him a new mattress for the bed in his new flagship’s cabin and he replied that he would “dream all the pleasanter now that I know you tried it.” When she began doing volunteer hospital work, he wrote that he was “sure you look delicious in your hospital garb. I wish I could see you. Is that asking too much?” By April 1917, it was “Eugenie, you are a darling and I love you and your letters more than ever.” On April 17, he came to London for two days of Admiralty conferences and a private lunch with Eugenie. Returning to the fleet, Beatty wrote, “Eugenie, dear, was it a dream? That one perfectly divine day . . . three very short hours of intense pleasure.” At the beginning of May, he told her that he read “the nicest parts” of her letters “over and over again,” and, “I wish, how I wish, that it were possible for you to do all the nice things you said you would like to do.”

In August 1917, Beatty brought the major part of the Grand Fleet down to the Firth of Forth and persuaded Ethel to invite Eugenie to come and stay at Aberdour House. (“Tata loves having you,” Beatty assured her.) Eugenie stayed a month; Beatty later wrote, “for four weeks I was able to see you almost every day.” Captain Godfrey-Faussett had remained on duty in London and Ethel was often away; as a result, says Beatty’s most recent biographer, “the indications are that Bryan was well and truly cuckolded.” Thereafter, Eugenie became Beatty’s “dearest comrade of Dreamland.” He reprimanded her when she told him that she had burned a letter written to him at midnight “because it was not respectable. There is nothing that could be ‘not respectable’ between us and I should have adored it and I don’t like respectable things of any sort anyway. . . . I love you all over from your glorious hair to the tips of your toes.”

Meanwhile, Beatty’s private relationship with his wife continued unchanged. On September 4, soon after he and Eugenie left Aberdour—he for Scapa Flow, Eugenie for London—he wrote to Ethel, “You must know that I am quite unhappy when you are not with me. I know, dear heart, that I am rather an impossible person, difficult to get on with and moody and peevy at times. I know also that it has cost me some change in your feelings towards me. But you must believe me when I say that I just worship you today as I have ever done from the moment I first saw you.”

After another short meeting in London in October 1917, Eugenie asked Beatty by letter, “Did anything that happened when you were here make some of your thoughts come true?” He answered, “They all came true [and] the reality was sweeter and more divine than my ‘thoughts.’ My visit to London was a visit to fairy land with a beautiful golden-haired Fairy Queen.” In January, she sent him a collection of erotic fairy stories she had written, set in an imaginary land of the Arabian Nights. Beatty wrote back that he could “administer love potions just as successfully” as her characters. In April, when she wrote saying she wanted to see her “Comrade in Dreamland,” he replied, “It would not be a case of a Comrade in Dreamland for I would never let you sleep—unless you swooned and then I would bring you to with caresses.” The admiral then produced a literary effort of his own:

Here’s to you and here’s to Blighty,

I’m in pajamas, you in a nighty,

If we are feeling extra flighty,

 
Why in pajamas and Why the nighty?

Beginning in April 1918, when the entire Grand Fleet was permanently based in the Firth of Forth, Beatty and Eugenie often met in the afternoon at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh. Eugenie would take a room; Beatty would arrive and go straight up. That summer, she sent him a book about techniques of lovemaking. “What an amazing book!” he wrote to her. “To learn that all the Troubles in Domestic Life are due to the fact that the man is too quick and the lady too slow. What a tragedy! I am sure that the man should do all he could to prolong the thrills, they are so damnably short, but how is it to be done?” In his next letter, he proposed his own solution: to “kiss you from the tips of your toes upwards and take some time about it,
Adorata Mia
.”

Despite his affair with Eugenie, David and Ethel continued exchanging gossip and belittling people they didn’t like; it was as if they realized that denigrating common enemies brought them closer together. Beatty wrote that Lloyd George was a “dirty dog” and “a demagogue, pure and simple.” Geddes was another “dirty dog,” “weak as ditch water.” Edwin Montagu, minister of munitions—the man who had taken Venetia Stanley away from Asquith—was “the Jew Montagu.” “Yes,” Beatty wrote to his wife, “he is appalling to look at with that immense conceit and self-confidence common to the Hebrew tribe.” Ethel called Churchill “a dead dog” and “a disappointed blackguard.” When the war ended, Beatty left the Grand Fleet and returned to London with Ethel. He now had two women in the same city. As he and Ethel were expected to present the picture of a happily married hero and his devoted wife, he and his “Golden-Haired Comrade” had to reconsider their relationship. Eugenie took the lead, asking what their future would be. Beatty replied that he was “a selfish beast,” who “ought to say that I must not trouble you more and ought to retire gracefully out of your life”—the implication being that he hoped she would say that he did not have to. He explained his feelings for his wife as those of duty and gratitude, not passion: “I am truly devoted to Tata, so much so that I efface myself in my desire to see her happy. I cannot forget all that she has been to me for the last twenty years, all that she has done for me, all that she has given me.” But once the war began, he said, he had “looked for love and sympathy and did not get them . . . until you came along and gave me both.” Nevertheless, the signature on this letter, written in April 1919 as Beatty was leaving for France with Ethel, told Eugenie much. He had written: “Heaps of love, Ever Yours, David.”

[In 1920, when Ethel had the first of a series of nervous breakdowns, Beatty, desperate, wrote to Eugenie, asking for help. His wife’s “perpetual black despair,” he said, made his own “present dog’s life not worth living.” In 1924, at Beatty’s request, Eugenie accompanied Ethel on a trip to the Riviera. Ethel became “quite impossible,” telling Eugenie that she hated her, and Eugenie left her in the hands of “an interesting young man available to wait on her”; Beatty, past caring about infidelity, hoped only that Ethel would not come home.]

In July 1917, Sims accompanied Jellicoe to Scapa Flow and, on returning to London, relayed to Washington the First Sea Lord’s urgent request that the U.S. Navy send its four strongest coal-burning battleships to reinforce the Grand Fleet. The reason for Jellicoe’s appeal was that the Royal Navy was short of manpower; there simply were not enough trained seamen to man the new British light cruisers, destroyers, and submarines about to be commissioned. The Admiralty’s proposed solution was to take five of the Channel Fleet’s predreadnought
King Edward
–class battleships out of commission and use their crews—each of these old ships carried 1,000 men—to provide officers, gunnery and torpedo ratings, and other personnel for the new warships. The
King Edward
s, whose task had been to guard the eastern approaches to the Channel, would be replaced by four
Superb
s, the oldest dreadnoughts in the Grand Fleet. The
Superb
s in turn—if the Americans agreed—would be replaced in the Grand Fleet by four U.S. Navy dreadnoughts.

Despite Sims’s endorsement, the Navy Department in Washington at first rejected Jellicoe’s request. One reason was doctrinal: most American admirals were disciples of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the apostle of sea power, who had decreed that a battle fleet must remain concentrated. Already, the American admirals felt that they had compromised their fleet’s integrity by giving up the destroyers needed to screen their battleships; now they were resolved not to dribble away the battleships themselves. Behind this decision also lay the long-range concern that, should the Allies lose the war, the United States alone might have to face the German fleet. In addition, there was the deep American suspicion of Japan and fear of a two-ocean conflict. On top of all this, there was a practical reason for refusing to send the battleships to Europe. The fleet had been providing gun crews to scores of armed American merchant vessels, so the gunnery complement of many warships, including battleships, was sadly depleted. Until new men could be trained, the ships were not ready to fight.

No officer felt more strongly that American battleships should remain in American waters than the navy’s senior admiral, Chief of Naval Operations William S. Benson. In May, a month after America entered the war, a British government mission including Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had tried to convince Benson and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to postpone the American 1916 dreadnought-building program in favor of building more destroyers for escort work. Their views had not changed. “The future position of the United States must in no way be jeopardized by any disintegration of our main fighting fleet,” Daniels said. Benson concurred: “The U.S. believes that the strategic situation necessitates keeping the battleship force concentrated and cannot therefore consider sending part of it across.” Refusing to give up, Sims replied, “I cannot see that sending a division of ships would be any disintegration of our fleet, but merely an advance force interposed between us and the enemy fleet.”