The Royal Navy is about to pay a high price for its neglect of airpower …
Front cover of E. F. Spanner, The Broken Trident (London: E. F. Spanner, 1929).
I just like this picture for some reason. Spanner was a retired naval architect who evidently had at least one bee in his bonnet, for he wrote about half a dozen books on various aviation matters (including the inadvisability of the government’s Imperial airship scheme — well, he was right about that), and what’s more, he published them all himself! The Broken Trident was originally published in 1926, and the cover above is from the 1929 “cheap edition” (price: 2/6), so either the first edition sold enough to warrant going down market, or probably more likely, he wanted to get his message out to a wider audience. There was also a German edition (1927), which I’m sure would have sold relatively well, given the effortless ease with which, in the novel, a supposedly downtrodden Germany bests a smug and complacent Britain.
Update: I was looking at another book of Spanner’s today, Armaments and the Non-combatant: To the ‘Front-line’ Troops of the Future (London: Williams and Norgate, 1927), which is a non-fictional rendition of many of the ideas in The Broken Trident. So obviously not all of his books were self-published (as I stated above), at least the first editions, contrary to what the cover of The Broken Trident suggests. In Armaments and the Non-combatant, Spanner notes (p. 295) that he wrote The Broken Trident (among other books) as a novel because ‘in that form I thought it easy to present facts and probabilities so that they might gain the attention of technical men of all shades of thought and also the attention of ”the man in the street”’, and appends excerpts from its favourable reviews. The title page also notes that he’s the ‘Inventor of the Duct Keel system of Ship Construction, the “Soft-ended Ship” system of Bow Construction, the “Spanner” Strain Indicator, etc’.
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Unexpected flashes of humour No.1: Group Captain Harris to Captain Tom Philips, JPC July 1936 – ‘When you are on the bridge of your flagship and you are struck by a bomb, you will say to your captain that was a bloody big mine we struck.’ (Gaines Post, Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defence 1934-1937, (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1993), 322. Sure you’ve come across that one before, but just read it and thought that it was particularly relevant to your post!
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I didn’t know that one, thanks! Sounds like “Bomber” and Spanner would have got on famously, though ultimately the latter’s loyalties still lay with the Admiralty. (Spanner had this idea that bombs could be made to strike and explode well below the waterline, where the hull was very thin, which would have been just like a mine or torpedo. Barnes Wallis’ dambusting bombs could be used for this, eg against the Tirpitz, but it was nowhere near as easy as Spanner assumed it would be …)
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There’s an update (from Post’s footnote) which makes me wonder about the authenticity of this quote. Philips went down with the Prince of Wales in 1941. That just makes it all a bit too neat, doesn’t it?
Can’t help thinking that Spanner should have invented a nut adjusting device: the patented Spanner Spanner. -
Even better, if a bunch of sado-maschochists in the north-west used one for some foul purpose in the late 1980s, and it was admitted as evidence in the subsequent controversial Old Bailey trial, we could have had the Operation Spanner Spanner Spanner. Who says that we live in the best of all possible worlds?
Philips was known as a big gun man in the 1930s, and when director of plans he was a Captain and thus of equal rank to Harris, who was in flying boats in the early 1930s. So the exchange is possible but, as Dan said, it still sounds rather too good to be true. Is it just another bit of ammo from the anti-historians?
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Post’s footnote gives the source as ‘General Sir Ronald Adam, letter to the author, 30 June 1974′, and the context is the discussion over ‘ownership’ of the Fleet Air Arm/shore based aircraft in the JPC. Personally, I found Post’s book extremely useful and convincing in its interpretation (if not always brilliantly written). Not a salvo from the anti-historians, then, but perhaps a piece of evidence which was improved with memory? I’m happy to believe that Harris said it at some point, even if not to Philips, and it does seem to convey something of the emotional tone of the arguments at the time.
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I grew up with much of this stuff but it is just the tip of the iceberg. My grandfather was far from being a retired naval architect as one of your commentators suggests, these books were just ‘pot boilers’ to help family finances. He held admiralty contracts on merit (he was not impressed by by their lordships) and fought his corner as an inventor and inovator vigorously. always having to prove himself the hard way. The broken trident shows his viewpoint from 1926. and he eventualy became an advisor on naval construction stuff to WSC himself-a man who had been drawn similar conclusions about Germany in those times. He predicted the R101 crash based on structural stress calculations and was unfortunately for the crew not many miles out. His pre flight prophecy and warning earned him immediate loss of Admiralty contracts and a front page headline in The Times. They had to print an apology and retraction of course (went against the grain) and he had his admiralty contracts restored. He always shunned the limelight preferring the world of naval engineering and architecture. The company he founded was taken over by Babcocks in latter years and I understand many of his (and his sons) patents are still valid. This is just a small snapshot of the man.
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Thanks for your comment! Your account of your grandfather fits pretty well with the image I’d formed from reading The Broken Trident and Armaments and the Non-combatant — inventive, tenacious, blunt — though of course adding a number of details I was unaware of. But what you say also raises some further questions!
- You say he was ‘far from being a retired naval architect’. Do you mean he wasn’t retired, wasn’t a naval architect, or that he was more than the sum of those descriptions? I don’t have a good account of his career, but he signed the preface of The Broken Trident ‘E. F. Spanner, M.I.N.A., Royal Corps of Naval Constructors. (Retired.)‘, where MINA is presumably ‘Member of the Institution of Naval Architects’.
- You also say his books were ‘just ‘pot boilers’ to help family finances’. Do you mean that he didn’t mean them to be taken very seriously — that he had no strong opinions on the subject of airpower and was merely writing what he thought would sell? Or — and reading your comment again, this seems to be more likely — that these were indeed his opinions on the subject, but that he wouldn’t have published them if not out of financial necessity?
- A follow-up to the previous question: did they in fact sell well? Do you have any idea as to how many copies were sold?
Again, thanks for taking the time to comment, and I appreciate any further information you can provide!
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