EYEWITNESS TO JUTLAND
I KNEW that my wife’s grandfather, as a 21-year-old, was involved in the Battle of Jutland, the 100th anniversary of which falls tomorrow.
But I hadn’t realised Robert Bower had written a contemporary account of it — until last week when my wife’s aunt showed me the letter her father had sent home at the time.
It is a remarkably dispassionate account of an engagement in which more than 6,000 British sailors died.
He tells his parents how one of the British ships ‘had very foolishly got between the lines and stayed there, about 1,000 yards nearer the enemy than our battleships.
‘Suddenly one or two big ships opened fire on him and in about two minutes he was hit. I think the whole salvo must have taken effect, because he simply burst into a sheet of flame, I should say about 500 ft high. It was a most aweinspiring sight.’
Recording how his own ship, HMS Inconstant, had had ‘a very warm ten minutes, being almost scorched by our own side’, Bower tells his parents: ‘If, as I think, we shall have a casualty list of between four and five thousand killed alone, what on earth will it be like on the “day”?’
By this he meant some final encounter between the British and German navies. But after the slaughter of Jutland, the German fleet never again emerged in force from its harbours. And Bob Bower went on to have a son and seven daughters. According to the historian niall Ferguson, Boris Johnson acted ‘shamefully’ in referring to Barack obama’s part-Kenyan heritage when the former London Mayor criticised the U.S. President’s intervention in the referendum debate. Ferguson made this imputation of racism against Johnson while addressing a downing Street meeting of pro-remain historians last week organised by the chancellor, george osborne. Funny, that: back in 2009, Ferguson, in a Financial Times article critical of obama, wrote that he ‘reminds me of Felix the cat. one of the bestloved cartoon figures of the Twenties, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.’ As a result of this most infelicitous analogy, Ferguson was accused — in the normally polite letters pages of the FT — of making an ‘utterly offensive and utterly repulsive’ remark. Pots and kettles.