The new social order that many hoped would emerge from the First World War failed to materialize in interwar Britain. The nation's political, professional, and commercial elites continued to be recruited predominantly from families that could afford expensive public school educations for their sons.Footnote ¹ The national education system was maintained in a manner calculated to buttress the existing social structure rather than to foster upward mobility. State-funded education allowed, even encouraged, a modest number of working-class children to move from elementary to secondary schools, thus enabling them to rise into the lower rungs of the middle class, but access to the nation's elite public schools, and thence the professional and higher middle classes, was virtually closed to the working and lower-middle classes.Footnote ² Critics of the educational system were increasingly vocal throughout the interwar period, but the succession of Conservative and Conservative-dominated governments, supported by like-minded officials at the board of education, successfully defended the autonomy of the nation's public schools and blocked any significant reform of the secondary school system.Footnote ³

A parallel struggle was waged during this period over the right of access to royal naval colleges. Unlike the British army, which recruited nearly all its officers after they had completed a public school education, the navy entered the majority of its officer cadets around the age of thirteen and a half. The state thus assumed the responsibility to provide not only professional training to these boys but also the equivalent of a secondary education. The fees charged at naval colleges approximated those of a public school, effectively barring a youth of humble origins from the path to commissioned rank. The admiralty's admission policies, one Labour MP charged, were “hide-bound, snobbish, reactionary and unfriendly, and worthy only of a lot of Admiral Blimps.”Footnote ⁴ As late as the eve of the Second World War, a disgruntled naval rating legitimately complained that the “control of the fighting services is in the hands of a caste which endure irrespective of the government in power and chooses its own successors. It is natural that they will not favour any scheme which, though it would mean an immeasurable increase in efficiency, would mean their losing control of such a long held prize.”Footnote ⁵

It has long been assumed that the First World War struck a dramatic blow to the power and status of Britain's mainstream elites. This view has been challenged by William Rubenstein, who maintains that the nation's elites were not significantly weakened during the interwar period.Footnote ⁶ However, most studies of social mobility and recruitment to British elites during the twentieth century have ignored the naval officer corps.Footnote ⁷ The ability of this group and its supporters within the “establishment” to control access to the officer corps lends support to Rubenstein's argument. In the aftermath of the First World War, the admiralty recognized that some democratic reform was needed to satisfy public demand for change. Naval leaders were not opposed to a limited degree of social mobility within the service, provided it did not extend too far down the ranks of the middle class, but they recoiled from the idea of genuine “democratization.” When external pressure made change unavoidable, they moderated its pace and channeled reforms into what they deemed to be acceptable directions. Two decades of cautious and reluctant experimentation convinced the upper ranks of the officer corps that fundamental reform must be detrimental to the efficiency of the navy. They believed that the service's unique professional requirements were ultimately incompatible with demands for social change and that in view of the navy's critical role in the defense of the nation and the empire, the efficiency of the service must trump all other concerns. The Labour Party's assaults on the status quo were both sporadic and weak, providing ample opportunity for a self-confident and culturally cohesive officer corps to stifle democratic reform throughout the interwar period.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British naval officer corps was drawn almost exclusively from the upper levels of British society. To be sure, the nation's traditional landed establishment—the titular aristocracy and landed gentry—no longer enjoyed the same dominant position in the naval profession as in previous centuries, for the introduction of competitive entry in the nineteenth century had opened the navy to sections of the middle classes that could afford expensive preparatory schools for their sons. Boys from this group joined the service in growing numbers and were largely indistinguishable from their patrician colleagues.Footnote ⁸ The Victorian navy ensured that officer cadets met its social criteria by setting high fees for the cadets admitted to HMS Britannia, the navy's training establishment for executive officers. In 1906 Admiral Sir John Fisher, the first sea lord, calculated that no boy whose parents’ annual income was less than £700 could afford the cost of a naval education, which meant that financial considerations effectively barred over 95 percent of Britain's male population from ever obtaining a commission in the navy.Footnote ⁹

Fisher, one of the few high-ranking officers of this period to hold genuinely democratic views, believed this situation was indefensible. “Democratic sentiment will wreck the present system in the long run if it is not given an outlet,” he predicted. “But let us take the far higher ground of efficiency: is it wise or expedient to take our Nelsons from so narrow a class?”Footnote ¹⁰ The first major reform of this system was the Fisher-Selborne scheme of 1902, whereby cadets for the executive, engineering, and marine branches of the navy would be drawn from the same social classes and undergo an initial four years of common training at the new Royal Navy colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth. Fisher, the principal architect of the scheme, hoped that this measure would eventually eliminate the social barriers that relegated engineering officers to second-class status within the service.

Other important reforms were implemented during Winston Churchill's initial tenure as first lord of the admiralty. Promotion from the lower deck, which had virtually disappeared in the early 1800s, was reopened in 1912 through the institution of the “mate scheme,” which allowed for petty and warrant officers to receive a commission at a relatively early stage in their careers rather than at the end, as had previously been the case.Footnote ¹¹ The following year, the admiralty also adopted a “special entry” scheme, whereby the annual intake of thirteen-and-a-half-year-old cadets to Osborne College was supplemented by another group of cadets, age seventeen and a half to eighteen and a half, who had completed a public school education.Footnote ¹² The objective of this scheme, also known as “late entry” or “public school entry,” was to expand the number of new officers rapidly, in order to keep pace with the dramatic surge in warship construction. The navy thus ensured that the prewar expansion of the officer corps did not entail any deterioration of its social exclusiveness.

The First World War created a huge demand for new officers in the British army, which expanded nearly tenfold during the early years of the conflict.Footnote ¹³ But the navy did not experience the same need for new personnel and consequently could draw most of its temporary officers from the same narrow class background as in peacetime. As the war progressed and manpower became increasingly scarce, the admiralty was also compelled to become more flexible in its approach to officer recruitment and training. The end of the war did not immediately signal a return to business as usual for the navy, however, as the prolonged conflict heightened popular awareness of inequities in Britain's social structure and stimulated demands for the state to sponsor greater social mobility. “Democracy has come to stay in the Navy, as it has in civil life,” one officer cautioned in the pages of the Naval Review. “The wise policy is to meet it and use its great power to increase naval efficiency. … Naval reform must keep pace with civil reform; if this is not done the results may prove even more disastrous than those of the mutiny in 1797.”Footnote ¹⁴

The officer corps’ response to these challenges, as to later ones, was shaped by a combination of deep-rooted class prejudices, instinctive resistance to change, and basic assumptions about the requirements of the naval profession. Naval officers of this period, confident that they were the finest in the world, were reluctant to tamper with the system that had produced them, a system they felt had proven itself time after time, both in peace and in war. Moreover, it was widely held that the system worked because of its social inequities, not in spite of them. Social superiority was thought to endow the “officer class” with natural powers of command and confer upon it the instinctive respect of the lower deck. As one senior officer remarked in 1937, it was “well known that an Able Seaman will take and obey an order given by a half-witted scion of nobility in better spirit than one given by a super-efficient ex–Lower Deck officer. In our people there is always to be found a certain degree of snobbishness.”Footnote ¹⁵ The British naval officer was therefore expected to be, above all else, a gentleman, possessing the characteristics that clearly marked him as a member of Britain's upper and upper-middle classes. These traits, usually referred to collectively as character or officer-like qualities, were held in higher esteem than natural intelligence and educational attainment. The professionalization of the naval officer corps during the nineteenth century had produced a culture in which even “gentlemen” were expected to achieve and maintain a high level of professional competence, but there remained a strong element of anti-intellectualism with the service. Officers from any social background who exhibited marked intellectual abilities were often derided as “book men” or “chasers.” The navy's preoccupation with matériel considerations during the Fisher era was discredited in the eyes of many by the service's record during the First World War, bolstering the historical school of thought within the navy, which held that the British naval officer's real genius lay in seamanship, leadership, and aggressive spirit rather than in technical proficiency.Footnote ¹⁶ Officers in the nonexecutive branches who achieved a high level of technical expertise were thought to lack the authority and leadership skills naturally possessed by executive officers.

There was also a conviction within the naval profession that the ways of the sea were so esoteric that they could only be acquired through constant exposure from an early age. Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Oliver, for example, wrote that before an officer reached the rank of lieutenant “he must have sufficient sea experience to become a seafaring man and develop the qualities required of one. His senses must be intuitively trained to be alive to sea conditions.” It was this well-developed sea experience, in his view, that gave British naval officers an edge over their foreign counterparts: “The essential difference in training between our Officers and French and German Officers [during the First World War] was that the great majority of our Officers went to sea as young Midshipmen at a much younger age than the foreign Officers and grew up in sympathy with the men and imperceptibly imbibed sea conditions. If not why did not the more highly educated French and German Officers produce better results in the war?”Footnote ¹⁷ In the late nineteenth century, most cadets were sent to Britannia at around age thirteen. When this was altered by the Fisher-Selborne scheme, officers insisted that officer education ashore must still begin at a comparable age, if only to allow time for recruits to absorb the traditions of the service and learn the specialized skills needed by a naval officer. As a result, the special-entry scheme established in 1913 generated little enthusiasm among naval officers. However, some were prepared to admit that junior officers who had entered the service through the special-entry scheme had proven themselves to be equal or superior in all respects to those produced by Osborne and Dartmouth.Footnote ¹⁸ A committee charged with examining naval education in 1918 supported this view, and a minority report by Captain (later Admiral) Herbert Richmond, one of the navy's leading intellectuals, recommended that in the future all cadets should be admitted from public schools and that Osborne and Dartmouth be shut down entirely.Footnote ¹⁹ These views received a mixed reception. Even though an influx of public-school-educated officers would not have noticeably altered the social composition of the officer corps, most naval officers would not abandon their opinion that cadets could only become efficient officers if their training began at an early age.

Opinion was generally hostile to the proposals to open the special-entry scheme to members of the lower deck or others from outside the traditional officer class. The idea did receive some support during the final year of the First World War, however. The navy's director of training, for example, noted in early 1918 that “some excellent young material” was available on the lower deck, and he urged that “this action be taken now before it is forced upon us as it will surely be. It is a war measure and a democratic one. Many a lower deck rating has a brother or relative who is an officer leading his men at the front.” Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, the most aristocratic first sea lord of the period, also declared himself to be “heartily in accord with the idea of getting a percentage of officers from the lower deck.”Footnote ²⁰ The second sea lord, Herbert Heath, suggested that this course might be superior to the mate scheme because it removed the rating from the lower deck at an earlier age and thus provided greater opportunity for molding him into an effective officer. “Why put him through all these un-officerlike surroundings?” he asked. “If these boys are expected to become good officers, the sooner they are separated from the non-officer class the better.”Footnote ²¹ He did warn, however, that the current practice of accepting special-entry candidates from the public schools should not be entirely, or even largely, superseded. “To be a good officer,” he insisted, “it is necessary also to be a gentleman.”Footnote ²²

Even as a wartime expedient, officials were wary about broadening the social basis of the officer corps. Richmond, for example, spoke out strongly against the idea. His main concern was that special-entry candidates from the lower deck would be selected almost solely on the basis of written examinations. As these applicants would not have “had the advantages which a public school education confers upon character,” their potential for developing into effective leaders was entirely uncertain.Footnote ²³ In 1918 he recommended relying on the mate scheme for lower-deck entry to commissioned rank, as this would at least provide the navy with a body of officers who had demonstrated genuine leadership ability.Footnote ²⁴ Historian Barry Hunt mistakenly identifies Richmond as a proponent of democratic reform.Footnote ²⁵ In fact, his primarily concern was to ensure that entrants to the officer corps possessed the best possible leadership skills, which meant that children with more expensive educations would have a natural advantage. Hunt, like most historians of the Royal Navy, also wrongly implies that there was a straightforward split within the officer corps between those who favored democratic reforms and those who opposed them. This issue rarely arose because officers broadly agreed that the wholesale induction of the working classes would have disastrous results for the navy. The real debate within the service, both during the First World War and after, was over how to modify the existing system of officer recruitment so as to cause the least damage to the efficiency of the navy. No consensus ever emerged on this question, so that even when there was a measure of genuine support for progressive measures, as there was near the end of the First World War, significant opposition generally emerged to even modest proposals.

Admiralty officials never denied that financial barriers blocked many suitable applicants from obtaining naval cadetships. The main challenge from their perspective was to broaden the pool of applicants as far as possible without providing commissions to individuals whose social background would preclude them ever becoming effective officers. The high fees at naval colleges were the leading obstacle for many potential applicants. But suitable candidates were also hindered by their lack of a public school education, which left them deficient in some of the subjects that formed part of the special-entry examination, most notably Latin. Similarly, the entrance exams for Dartmouth were strongly biased in favor of boys educated at the more expensive preparatory schools, who belonged, one committee noted, “to the upper and upper middle classes, and have had all the advantages of careful upbringing, good feeding and systematic education.” “With candidates of this type,” it concluded, “the sons of poor parents who have not had these advantages are not mature enough to compete on even terms at the early age of 1312 years.” As a result, “the sons of many middle class parents—professional and business men, Officers, clergy, &c. without private means—are debarred from coming forward for entry. The evidence before us is that boys of this class as a whole compare very favourably in all respects with those who go to Preparatory Schools.”Footnote ²⁶

The admiralty was also prepared to admit that some suitable candidates for the officer corps might even be found on the lower deck. In November 1919, for example, the head of the naval branch remarked that “exceptional talent, and even genius, is not the exclusive possession of any grade of society, and the lower grades on account of their big numerical superiority, must always contain a large number of individuals of unusual ability.”Footnote ²⁷ A committee investigating whether to encourage “Boy Bluejackets and young seamen” to apply for commissions through the special-entry scheme observed that “boys of such exceptional qualities as would provide a type of Officer not inferior to that obtained through the present sources of entry, [do] occasionally enter the service through the Training Establishments.” However, it remarked that the number of such individuals was likely to “be very small indeed.”Footnote ²⁸

There also appeared to be serious practical barriers. Most naval officers questioned whether candidates from this sphere could ever overcome their social background in order to become effective leaders. The best means of achieving this, most felt, was to ensure they were removed from the lower deck at the earliest possible time. As the director of training and staff duties remarked in 1919, “Time spent on the Lower Deck must be detrimental, for the boys would imbibe Lower Deck tradition, and in my opinion it is that tradition which has been the chief factor inimical to the success of the Mate system.”Footnote ²⁹ An admiralty committee considering the expansion of the social background of the office corps in 1930 demonstrated the prevailing pessimism about the prospects of any individual who originated from the working and middle classes. Admiral Richmond doubted that individuals from secondary schools could be expected to develop into effective officers because “the best officers are those most ready to take responsibility and certainly in all my experience I have found that the people prepared to take responsibility come from—I do not want to use a snobbish term—the higher ranks in life. … I think most strongly that you find in the higher ranks more power of taking responsibility.”Footnote ³⁰ A presumed lack of initiative on the part of the lower classes was also noted by other witnesses, including a civilian, F. S. Orme, headmaster of the Reigate Grammar School, who informed the committee that “the ex-elementary school boy, owing to his home circumstances and other such points of that kind, is not very anxious to undertake such responsibility as he might have in the Royal Navy. I am inclined to think that, and he would therefore shirk admission from a subconscious feeling, perhaps you might call it an inferiority complex in a way, but from that point of view I doubt if you would get many candidates from that source.”Footnote ³¹ Naval opinion also doubted the ability of the naval colleges to purge these recruits of lower-class characteristics, which were regarded as fatal to the successful exercise of command. The following exchange, from an interview with Rear-Admiral H. E. Dunbar-Nasmith, is illustrative of naval sentiment at this time:

Naval officers also instinctively recoiled from the idea of social engineering. The “efficient [French] Navy created by Choiseul was destroyed,” one officer warned in 1933, “by the doctrinaires of the Revolution, in an attempt to force facts into conformity with their theory of equality.”Footnote ³³ They objected to any measures that would potentially undermine the efficiency of the service. The head of the naval branch, for example, remarked that the admission of candidates from the lower deck would only serve to decrease the educational attainments of the whole officer corps. “But though poverty is not a crime,” he wrote, “neither is it a virtue, and I can see no reason whatever for accepting a lower standard of education in the case of sons of parents of limited means.”Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, in view of the navy's vital role in national and imperial security, officials warned of potentially serious consequences if the pace of reform moved too quickly. For example, Rear-Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax asserted in 1930 that rapid modification of the existing system of officer recruitment would only result in “injury to every class in the land and to the security of the Empire.”Footnote ³⁵

Reforms took place sporadically during the interwar period and usually only in response to external pressure. The end of the First World War prompted the admiralty to reexamine its methods of obtaining officers in peacetime. A committee under Sir Alan Anderson, the controller, was only willing to consider cosmetic changes to the existing system. Its final report, issued in February 1919, claimed that the entry examinations for Keyham College, where special-entry cadets were trained, did not necessarily debar suitable applicants from less privileged classes and indeed provided a good “opportunity for giving a chance to native ability at present excluded from the Navy.” The only barrier to lower-class applicants was the cost of their training, a problem it believed could be mitigated by providing scholarships and bursaries to suitable candidates. The committee warned, however, that “trial and error” was the “the only road to an assured judgment whether the Navy would be improved by admitting this fresh blood and how many of these candidates can be absorbed in each year.”Footnote ³⁶ The Board of Admiralty deferred consideration of this report until May, by which time it had been carefully examined by another committee headed by the second sea lord. This body rejected the proposal to modify the entrance examination at Osborne, on the dubious grounds that such changes would “not have any appreciable effect in widening the field of selection at the early age at which boys are entered for Osborne.” The only proposal endorsed by the board was for the provision of financial assistance to individual candidates.Footnote ³⁷

Discussion would probably have ended there, if not for the intervention of the financial secretary of the admiralty, Dr. T. J. Macnamara, a Liberal member of Lloyd George's coalition government and an ex–elementary school teacher.Footnote ³⁸ Like most educationalists of this period, Macnamara favored the widest possible access to the education system, and this sentiment shaped his views on naval recruitment. He was clearly unsatisfied with the board's decision and hoped to obtain at least a token measure of democratic reform at this juncture.Footnote ³⁹ He succeeded in establishing a new committee, headed by Vice-Admiral A. D. Ricardo, to examine means of broadening lower-deck access to the special-entry scheme. This body reported in November 1919 that the service should provide opportunities for suitable boys to obtain commissions.Footnote ⁴⁰ When naval opinion rejected this proposal, Macnamara warned his colleagues that the “statesmanlike policy” would be to meet the pressure for democratization “half way and lead it in advance along lines that will be of the greatest advantage to the Service. If that is not done,” he warned, “the Board may wake up one fine morning to find that Parliament has determined upon immediate opportunities being given which it may not then be possible in the time at our disposal circumspectly to handle.”Footnote ⁴¹

The matter was ultimately settled by the first sea lord, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty, who pointed out that the Ricardo scheme would only affect a small number of boys and did little to meet the public's desire for increased facilities for promotion from the lower deck. He proposed that the best way to satisfy public opinion would be to overhaul the mate system. The problem with the existing scheme was that the individual received his commission at such a late age that he was unlikely ever to advance beyond the rank of lieutenant commander. This could be overcome, Beatty concluded, by removing the stipulation that ratings must have seven years time in the navy before becoming eligible for mate. If a man could apply on becoming a leading seaman, at age nineteen, he might expect to advance to lieutenant by age twenty-two, thus opening up the higher ranks of the service. This would have the added advantage of removing the mate from the lower deck at a much earlier stage in his career, which could only improve “his future Officer-like qualities.”Footnote ⁴² The Board of Admiralty endorsed Beatty's recommendations in February 1920 and agreed that there was no further need to consider the Ricardo committee's proposals. The financial secretary, although pleased with Beatty's plans for the mate scheme, continued to hope that the existing system of recruitment through Osborne and Keyham might also be reformed.Footnote ⁴³ To this end, the board agreed to continue pressing the treasury for discretion to provide financial assistance to parents of disadvantaged boys. In June 1920 the treasury granted this request but only for cadets entering through the special-entry exam from the lower deck.Footnote ⁴⁴

The first lord of the admiralty, Sir Walter Long, boasted to Parliament in March 1920 that the new scheme of promotion from the lower deck “would ensure to all the opportunity, which is their right, of reaching a high rank in his Majesty's Service.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The admiralty was content to let matters rest here, and there was little external pressure at this time to do more. The navy thus met the early postwar demands to improve opportunities for social mobility within the service by constructing a narrow ladder of opportunity by which a small number of highly capable candidates from outside the traditional officer class might hope to obtain a naval commission, in much the same way as the nation's grant-assisted grammar schools were obliged to reserve 25 percent or more of their capacity as free places for elementary schoolchildren.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was hoped that this approach, which was effectively employed during the interwar period to blunt attacks on the state-funded education system, would forestall demands for more genuinely democratic reform within the navy, while preserving the elitist nature of the officer corps.

The navy had little trouble fending off attacks to the system during the 1920s. The only member of Parliament who regularly took an interest in the subject was a retired naval officer, Lieutenant-Commander Joseph Kenworthy (later Lord Strabolgi), who entered the House of Commons as a Liberal in 1920 and joined the Labour party in 1926. Kenworthy regularly pressed for the abolition of fees at Royal Navy College, Dartmouth, during the 1920s. At this time, the parents of most cadets paid annual fees of £150. However, four King's Cadets—the sons of officers killed in the First World War—paid no fees, while 10 percent of cadets paid annual fees of £70, and another 10 percent were reduced to £40. With additional expenses such as books and uniforms, the annual cost for the majority of students was around £200.Footnote ⁴⁷ Kenworthy complained that the current system was “undemocratic,” but his primary objection was that it excluded middle-class boys of “good family and breeding” and, in particular, the sons of naval officers. “At the present moment,” he complained in 1924, “a great many naval officers whose families have been for generations represented in the Navy are unable, through financial difficulties, to put their sons in the Service. Taxes are so high, the cost of education is so great, and the expenses are so heavy that they cannot do it. To-day only the rich can afford to put their sons into the Royal Navy.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Even after joining the Labour party, Kenworthy's attacks on the system of recruiting naval officers reflected the interests of the middle classes, eager to maintain their social position in a period of perceived decline, rather than those of the working class.Footnote ⁴⁹ “It is simply a question of money,” he lamented in 1927. “The plutocrat's son, the war profiteer's son, can become an officer in the Navy, but the sons of British naval officers who have not large means, cannot go into our Navy.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The Labour party took little direct interest in the composition of the naval officer corps during the early 1920s. Its members were committed to breaking down class barriers in British society, but it was generally assumed that this could only be achieved gradually through the reform of the education system as a whole. Some favored the replacement of the nation's grammar schools with a comprehensive, state-funded system of secondary education, but many, including most of the party's leaders, were content to preserve the existing hierarchical system, provided all segments of society enjoyed equal access to the best institutions.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1922 the party adopted the goal of a free, universal secondary education for all children. “The Labour ideal of education,” Philip Snowden, a future Labour chancellor of the exchequer, wrote in Labour and the New World, “is the broad and open highway from the elementary school, through the secondary school, to the university.”Footnote ⁵² The party's position on the navy followed the same principles. It never wished to eliminate distinctions of status between the upper and the lower deck but to ensure, as with the nation's secondary schools, equal access to all segments of society. Labour therefore rejected the ladder-of-opportunity model adopted by the navy, and held out instead for a “broad and open highway.” However, the relatively small numbers admitted to the officer corps each year meant that the navy offered little scope for social engineering and raised comparatively little interest until the following decade.

The formation of Ramsay MacDonald's first Labour government in 1924 placed democratic reform back onto the admiralty's agenda, but naval leaders had little cause for concern. The new first lord of the admiralty, Lord Chelmsford, informed the Board of Admiralty in April 1924 that he wanted to “see a system established under which no boy, however poor, would be debarred from becoming an Officer in the Navy.” Chelmsford, an Oxford graduate and former viceroy of India who had been appointed to the admiralty from outside the ranks of the Labour party, was quick to reassure his naval colleagues, however, that he was not looking to achieve this goal by compelling interview committees to relax their standards “in regard to the essential qualities which are looked for in a Naval Cadet” but rather by reducing or abolishing the fees for boys from low income families.Footnote ⁵³

A report was duly prepared by the second sea lord and the parliamentary and permanent secretaries, recommending that the first lord be given discretion to remit either the whole or a portion of the fees and the cost to outfit candidates entering Dartmouth from families whose annual income did not exceed £250 and that similar powers be granted for needy candidates matriculating through the special entry. To ensure that boys who had not been through an expensive preparatory school were admitted to Dartmouth in the first place, applicants should not to be required to write a Latin paper, and the interview committee would be instructed that candidates were not to “be rejected merely on account of obvious effects of their different upbringing, which would in all probability be corrected during the period of training at Dartmouth.” To help reduce class prejudice, the interview committee was also to include “a man who has had experience of one of the many well-known schools at which a proportion of the boys is drawn from ex-elementary and secondary school sources, and who therefore should know by experience the latent possibilities in such boys.”Footnote ⁵⁴

These recommendations were approved by the Board of Admiralty in June 1924 without any dissent being recorded. Over the next decade, the number of Dartmouth cadets assigned reduced fees gradually increased. However, the early demise of the first Labour government ensured that no additional measures were taken. Kenworthy's pleas to abolish fees at Dartmouth were easily brushed aside on financial grounds during Stanley Baldwin's second government. “If everyone was to get free education at Dartmouth,” William Bridgeman, the Conservative first lord, informed Parliament, “that would be a very expensive thing for the country.” Nor did he see any need to do so. Bridgeman clearly echoed the views of his naval advisers when he stated that he was “not satisfied that the present system is not working well enough and giving us what we require.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The Conservative party, a majority of whose MPs had been educated at public schools and typically came from the same social background as naval officers, shared the admiralty's desire to buttress the existing social structure. The only Conservative MPs to raise questions regularly about recruitment to the officer corps during these years were those representing naval ridings, who guarded the interests of their lower-deck constituents by pressing the government to preserve and expand opportunities to obtain commissions through the mate scheme.

When the Labour party returned to power in 1929, the question of democratic reform was again thrust on the admiralty, this time in a more serious form. Shortly after taking office, the new first lord, A. V. Alexander, inquired into the system of promotion from the lower deck. A report by Sir Oswyn Murray, the secretary of the admiralty, painted a favorable picture of the current scheme, even though the number of applications for commissions through mate had decreased in recent years. According to Murray, interest in the scheme had declined because of the high rate of pay received by men on the navy's relatively generous 1919 pay scale and the improved living conditions prevailing on the lower deck. As a result, he maintained that the “great majority are satisfied with their present position and prospects as ratings and have no desire to become Officers.” Moreover, many of those who did hope for a commission preferred to seek promotion through warrant rank, as this would normally allow them to serve up to age fifty, whereas officers advanced through the mate scheme would in most cases retire at age forty-five unless promoted past the rank of lieutenant commander. There was, therefore, no need for the admiralty to increase the number of candidates for mate, particularly if they could only be obtained by lowering the existing standards.Footnote ⁵⁶

The Board of Admiralty considered Murray's report in October 1929. The naval members of the board countered the first lord's desire to democratize the officer corps, assuring him that “the door was open to the best boys from secondary schools without any class distinction to enter Keyham [i.e., the special-entry scheme] by competition, and thus to be trained as Officers from the start; and the same was true of other branches of the Service.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Alexander accepted this verdict for the time being, but he was clearly not convinced that the ladder of opportunity was sufficiently broad. In March 1930, during the annual debate on the naval estimates, he announced Labour's intention to pursue far-reaching reforms at the admiralty.

We are now bringing in a new system of national education, under which we hope, sooner or later, there will be a free educational road right through from the elementary school up to the secondary school period, and, if possible, on to the university; and, whatever branch of the public service is available, I want those who go through the national system of education, as apart from private and public school education, to have an equal opportunity of entering that Service. I believe that my inquiries will show that there is room for extending the special entry system, and for its including a larger number of candidates of the secondary school type than we have had in the past, and that we shall really democratise, if I may use the term, the officer ranks.Footnote ⁵⁸

The following week, Alexander sent a lengthy memorandum to the first and second sea lords, outlining the case for reform. He accepted that the expansion of the mate scheme might not be to the navy's advantage but also questioned whether entry to the officer corps was really established “on a basis which admits of candidates presenting themselves and being judged on their merits without reference to anything in the nature of class distinction.” He admitted that this might be “true in theory, and, so far as the Special and Direct entries are concerned, it may be very largely true in fact. But turning to Dartmouth, I cannot help being reminded of Lord Darling's dictum, ‘Justice is open to all—like the Ritz.’” Alexander's hopes centered on the special-entry scheme, which appeared to offer fewer obstacles to working-class entrants than Dartmouth, and he proposed improving access for applicants from the nation's secondary schools. These boys, he asserted, would have had “an opportunity of becoming as educated, in a liberal sense, as a public school boy.” Furthermore, the secondary-school graduate would probably perform better in the admission interview at the more mature ages of seventeen and a half to eighteen and a half. At the time, approximately 120 cadets entered Dartmouth annually, but only thirty-five were admitted to Keyham. The first lord suggested that these figures might be gradually adjusted until special entry provided half of the navy's new cadets.Footnote ⁵⁹

Alexander's principal naval advisers offered an impassioned defense of the existing system. Vice-Admiral Sir Michael Hodges, the second sea lord, asked whether the “present Naval Officers” had failed in any way. “If not (and I maintain that they have shewn themselves to be as a class extraordinarily efficient, extremely loyal and zealous, and to command the entire confidence of the Lower Deck), it would appear to me most unsound to experiment with what must at least be a doubtful alternative, to in fact cast away the substance in order to grasp at the shadow.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Admiral Sir Charles Madden, the first sea lord, charged that “it would be a mistake to risk the impairment of the efficiency of our Officer cadres and the Service by a considerable democratisation. We are obtaining now excellent material, and to experiment on a considerable scale is not sound.”Footnote ⁶¹ To emphasize the potential dangers of democratization, Madden drew the first lord's attention to other modern navies that had attempted it. In the Soviet navy, he noted, the “discipline is poor, and such as it is, is maintained by very heavy punishments, including the death penalty.” As a result, the efficiency of the Soviet fleet was “very low.” The situation in the U.S. navy was considerably better, although Madden still maintained that the “results, judged from our standard, are not good.” “In considering their punishments,” he continued, “which are an indication of good or bad discipline, allowance must be made for the fact that the United States Naval Officer has to deal with short service men, and that the British temperament is more readily disciplined than the American, still there is a great difference between our results and theirs.” Madden also argued that one of the problems with the Australian navy was that its officer cadets were “definitely not of what we term the Officer Class, i.e., a class distinct from the Lower Deck.” He admitted that Australian naval officers were technically proficient but reported that they failed “to come up to the required standard, lack initiative, and are disinclined to exercise proper authority over their subordinates.”Footnote ⁶² In light of these reservations, the only concession Madden would accept was a slight increase in the number of special-entry cadets. Such a change would, he concluded, if “applied in moderation, say 5–7% of entries,” probably do less damage than “an extension of the Mate Scheme, which is, in the Executive line, a failure.”Footnote ⁶³

The board discussed these issues in July and, under pressure from the first lord, agreed to set up two special committees, one to consider the admission of naval cadets and another to examine promotion from the lower deck.Footnote ⁶⁴ The former, chaired by the Labour MP Sir Ernest Bennett, began its work in November 1930.Footnote ⁶⁵ Its interviews were dominated from the outset by the two naval members, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Osmond Brock and Rear-Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, who attached great importance to the continued use of interview committees to examine prospective cadets. They argued that selection interviews did not necessarily present an insurmountable barrier to special-entry candidates but did offer the means to weed out unsuitable applicants. As Brock remarked, the interview “does result in the rejection of candidates who do not speak the King's English and those who definitely by appearance and manners are in the opinion of the Interviewers unlikely to become suitable officers.” This inevitably meant that some “boys belonging to classes other than those from which officers have come hitherto fail in the interview.” However, eliminating the interview would only allow unsuitable boys to enter, and he was “definitely opposed to any such steps as being a retrograde measure and not in accord with the requirements of the Service.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The committee's report, issued in June 1931, accepted Alexander's view that secondary schools could provide suitable cadets for the special-entry scheme but insisted that the interview system must be retained in its current form, to serve as a “proper test and a desirable safeguard against the acceptance of unsuitable candidates.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This meant, in practice, that naval officers would continue to have the final say over which candidates were admitted to the naval colleges.

As long as the interview system remained unaltered, there was very little in the report for officials to object to. In July, the board agreed to approach the treasury for approval to implement the financial recommendations of the Bennett report, which called for greater state assistance to candidates from humble backgrounds.Footnote ⁶⁸ The timing was hardly propitious, however, as Britain was then suffering from a severe financial crisis. The treasury, acting on the advice of the Economy Committee under Sir George May, proposed that the normal annual fees for Dartmouth be increased from £150 to £200.Footnote ⁶⁹

Alexander was not convinced that the Bennett Committee's proposals would open up the officer corps to all classes of the community. The essential problem, he felt, was that the navy did little “to catch the main outfall of the national system of education.” He therefore pressed his naval colleagues to modify the existing system to allow entry to the large number of secondary schoolboys who normally finished their education at age sixteen, well before the usual age for admission through the special entry and after that for Dartmouth.Footnote ⁷⁰ Predictably, this proposal met strong opposition.Footnote ⁷¹ Alexander later claimed that he “personally went to Dartmouth and interviewed the Captain Superintendent and the Headmaster with a view to getting an alternative to the report of the Bennet Committee, and I was able to persuade both of them that my views on the reconstruction of the curriculum and the mode of entry into Dartmouth were workable and sound.”Footnote ⁷² With more time, Alexander might have forced this scheme through. However, the formation of the national government in August 1931 removed him from office before the proposal could be approved by the board.

Alexander had more success in reforming the mate system. The reforms to the scheme initiated by Beatty in 1920 had helped to overcome some of the shortcomings that had plagued the program since its inception, but ex-mate officers and ex-cadet officers were still not competing for advancement on equal terms. The admiralty regarded this as perfectly natural since in most cases the mate would be at a disadvantage as regards both age and education. Given the number of qualified ex-cadet officers who were regularly passed over for promotion, it seemed neither just nor wise to increase the number of less qualified ex-mate officers who were advanced. When this state of affairs was denounced in the service press and Parliament in 1929, admiralty officials privately denounced the agitators for expecting mates “to be ‘spoon-fed’ from start to finish.”Footnote ⁷³ Many felt that ratings had often advanced to mates because of the encouragement and assistance they received from their commanding officers; once they had obtained their commissions, however, their natural lack of initiative and ambition set back in, and they failed to advance as fast as their ex-cadet colleagues.Footnote ⁷⁴

Ex-mate officers took a different view and complained that their prospects for promotion were poor, that they were routinely relegated to second-rate appointments, that they were unable to qualify for specialist courses, and that they tended to be “segregated” from their ex-cadet colleagues.Footnote ⁷⁵ A committee set up by Alexander under the chairmanship of Admiral Sir Frank Larken proposed several remedies to level the playing field for ex-mate officers. The problem, it concluded, was not that these individuals were actively discriminated against but that they were unable to compete successfully for promotions and access to specialized courses because of their educational shortcomings. Moreover, it suggested that fear of failure left many ex-mates reluctant even to apply for specialist courses. The committee's solution was to select mates at an earlier age so that they might begin their naval education sooner. In addition, it recommended that the title “sub-lieutenant” be used to replace “mate,” a term that mates felt stigmatized them and led “to segregation and to undesirable social distinction.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The Board of Admiralty approved this report in principle in June 1931.Footnote ⁷⁷

The impetus for democratization virtually disappeared with the demise of the second Labour government. The shock of the Invergordon mutiny in September 1931 ensured that personnel issues began to receive the admiralty's full attention for the first time since the end of the First World War, but lower-deck commissions and the method of entry for naval cadets were overshadowed for the next several years by other issues.Footnote ⁷⁸ Debate over the social makeup of the officer corps did not resume until the mid-1930s, at which time it became increasingly politicized. Alexander was angered that his scheme to admit secondary schoolboys to Dartmouth at age sixteen had been abandoned the moment he left office, but he and his Labour colleagues were more concerned that subsequent governments appeared to be “sabotaging” the new mate scheme. For the remainder of the interwar period, the Labour party carefully monitored the commissions awarded through various sources and the rate of advancement of those promoted from the lower deck. As rearmament increased the demand for new officers, the party became increasingly vocal in denouncing the stable or declining numbers of commissions granted to the lower deck. The leaders of the national government, however, consistently adhered to the admiralty position, defending the system as both highly efficient and reasonably democratic. Conservative MPs with an interest in naval affairs voiced cautious support for the principle of lower-deck promotions but were quick to denounce Labour's claims that any deficiencies in the existing system were the result of class considerations. Lady Astor, for example, denied that “class consciousness exists very much in the Navy.” The problem, she claimed, was that it was “very difficult to change the Navy.” She hinted that this conservatism owed more to gender than class: “I have tried for years and years to change [the navy] from top to bottom, for all the men in the Navy are very much alike, and there is little difference in the consciousness of an admiral and a lower-deck man.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The only discordant view from the Conservative benches during the debates of the late 1930s came from Commander Arthur Marsden, who maintained that the problem was not with the mate system, which provided ample opportunity for men of the lower deck “whenever they were worth it. The fact is they did not make good enough officers. That is the truth.”Footnote ⁸⁰ This candid remark accurately reflected the views of most naval officers. By the late 1930s, just as external pressure for change was beginning to revive, a consensus had emerged within the upper ranks of the service that the limited reforms undertaken since 1918 had failed.

The most strident criticisms were directed at the revised mate scheme. The reforms implemented following the Larken Committee were generally successful in improving the promotion prospects of officers drawn from the lower deck, but even the admiralty had to admit that the overall numbers admitted through this channel remained low. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, a future first sea lord, noted that there was “a certain lack of interest and in some cases distaste for the system on the part of many officers, who have known some officers of inferior standard promoted from the lower deck, and are inclined to label the whole system as unsuccessful; and are, therefore, unlikely to make special efforts to bring forward, encourage and help young ratings.”Footnote ⁸¹ A variety of reasons were adduced for the shortage of applicants for lower-deck commissions. Several senior officers stressed that there was simply a shortage of genuinely suitable candidates. Admiral William Fisher insisted that test results alone provided little indication of a rating's suitability for a commission. “As a Wardroom messmate,” he wrote, “or an officer of influence on the Lower Deck I would sooner see a man able to appreciate and talk about good plays, good books and everyday matters as given in the press.”Footnote ⁸² Others emphasized the serious difficulties that ratings had in passing the requisite exams, a problem best overcome not by reducing the standards, they felt, but by providing greater facilities for applicants to prepare for them.

Officers also emphasized the deterrents that faced ratings who considered commissions. First, it was noted that ratings were often hostile to officers advanced from their own ranks and even toward regular officers of working-class origin.Footnote ⁸³ This observation is confirmed by Christopher McKee's research on the lower deck.Footnote ⁸⁴ Ross McKibbin notes a similar tendency in British industry, where frequent clashes took place between workers and office staff of working class origin.Footnote ⁸⁵ Second, potential candidates believed that they would encounter serious social and financial difficulties after receiving their commissions. A committee appointed by Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse in the navy's home fleet, for example, noted that a “fear of future unhappiness owing to being cut off from their own sphere of life both on board and on shore, and of economic difficulties also exist [sic]. This includes the difficulty of finding a wife from another sphere of life, or one in his old sphere who will fit in with his new life as an officer.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The basic problem, in the view of the deputy chief of the naval staff, Vice-Admiral William James, was that successful lower-deck candidates were required to “suddenly shoot up from insignificance to a position of power and responsibility. We are expecting a bluejacket to become officer of the watch in the [battleship] nelson in a couple of years. There is no parallel to that transformation (I almost wrote miracle) in any other walk of life.”Footnote ⁸⁷ This view was endorsed by Commander P. B. R. W. William-Powlett of the Training and Staff Duties Division, who observed that James's memorandum

justly refers to the transformation from Blue Jacket to officer as a miracle, but does not go on to discuss the effect of this magic wand waving on the subject himself. Should he be born of parents who were of some social standing then it could be like the proper fairy story—the fairy godmother replacing him in his old sphere. Unfortunately in the majority of cases this is not the case, the man comes from working class parents and the magic wand literally puts him like a fish out of water—completely cut off from his old friends, even his own parents and this point is seldom realised by those who suggest that the numbers promoted should be increased.Footnote ⁸⁸

An upsurge of parliamentary pressure for reform of the mate scheme in the later 1930s demonstrated that after nearly two decades of experimentation, the admiralty's bag of tricks was empty: officials could produce no fresh ideas about how to modify the mate system. Admiral James revived the idea that recruits might be obtained from the lower deck at an earlier age—to draw them “out from the herd”—before it was too late to mold them into proper officers. The difficulty with this idea had been noted by earlier investigations: the selected individuals would not have had time to demonstrate genuine leadership ability before being promoted. James suggested as an alternative that the navy might grant more commissions to warrant officers who had proven themselves on the lower deck and had enjoyed more time to adjust to their higher status.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, this suggestion would be considered a step backward in most quarters, as commissions would again go primarily to men already near the end of their naval careers.

The admiralty was also at a loss as to how to modify the special-entry scheme. By 1937 the government could boast that approximately 25 percent of special-entry cadets came from state-aided secondary schools.Footnote ⁹⁰ Senior naval officers, however, were alarmed by the social background of these individuals. The head of the navy's gunnery school at Portsmouth, for example, complained that many cadets “have so pronounced an accent that they cannot be said to be capable of speaking ‘The King's English.'”Footnote ⁹¹ His immediate superior, Admiral the Earl of Cork and Orrery, did not feel this was an insurmountable problem, but Chatfield noted that he had also heard complaints that special-entry cadets “cannot speak the King's English. The ability to do so,” he remarked, “should be an essential quality for a boy who is to become an Executive Cadet.”Footnote ⁹²

Opponents of reform insisted that the Labour party's focus on educational qualifications lost sight of the fact that the most important quality of an officer was the ability to take command, something that could not be measured through examination. Admiral Best, a former chairman of the Dartmouth interview board and senior naval member of the special-entry interview committee, complained in 1938 that the special-entry system placed too much emphasis “on book knowledge (and that frequently ‘crammed') and too little on potential officer-like qualities.” This allowed “the educationally clever candidate” to obtain entry in spite of very low interview marks.Footnote ⁹³ To remedy this problem, Best proposed to allocate a higher proportion of marks to the interview and raise the age limit for the special-entry scheme to create additional difficulties for graduates of state-funded secondary schools.Footnote ⁹⁴ In December 1936, Captain Fred Noble recommended a nomination scheme for at least half the entrants to the special-entry scheme, to ensure that the navy “get the best type of all round Boys to mix with the clever National School type.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Chatfield shared this desire to ensure that the navy obtained “leaders of good family, education and gentlemanly training … from our public schools as well as at Dartmouth, rather than to have the Navy too strongly manned by clever boys who lack those characteristics.” He dismissed a nomination scheme as politically impracticable, but he privately considered stacking the system in favor of boys from better schools by lowering entry examination standards “in Lower Mathematics and Chemistry—two of the subjects in which the public schoolboy has the greatest difficulty in competing”—and by increasing the number of marks awarded for the interview.Footnote ⁹⁶ An investigation into the subject by another senior admiral, Sir Frederic Dreyer, produced a recommendation that the system not be altered.Footnote ⁹⁷ Discussion within the admiralty during the final months of peace was thus confined to tinkering with the interview system so as to produce fewer anomalous results and attempting to devise a means to penalize applicants who attended coaching establishments (popularly known as “crammers”) prior to the special-entry examinations.Footnote ⁹⁸ The admiralty continued to rely heavily on the interview process in 1939 to weed out “clever” applicants who were deemed unacceptable because of their social background, but this critical safeguard of the status quo, which had been so easily defended in peacetime, was swept aside early in 1940 by Winston Churchill, first lord of the admiralty in Neville Chamberlain's war cabinet.Footnote ⁹⁹

Class barriers began to break down within the navy during the Second World War, when large numbers of men from the working and middle classes obtained temporary commissions and served with distinction.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, systemic obstacles to the entry of the working classes into the naval officer corps were not removed until after the war. In September 1939, naval officers could be satisfied that they had preserved the essential characteristics of a system they felt was unbroken. Two decades of cautious experimentation and cosmetic reform only confirmed their fears that extensive changes to the existing structure would result in a deluge of officers from unsuitable social backgrounds who, whatever their intellectual accomplishments, would be deficient in essential powers of command. The officer corps held firm to the conviction that its members must be distinguished from the men of the lower deck by a body of officer-like qualities. And while these qualities were never precisely defined, the traits most frequently noted were the willingness to assume responsibility and demonstrate initiative—the same characteristics in which the lower strata of British society were held to be naturally deficient. These concerns were a by-product of the officer corps’ class prejudices, although most individuals would have denied being motivated by snobbery. Officers believed that they alone possessed the professional qualifications to judge what was required of a naval officer, and they were confident they were acting for the good of the service and the nation. More important, they believed that their concerns merely reflected the true state of British society and that however undemocratic and unfair it might be, the upper classes were more natural leaders of men than the lower classes. Given the pronounced class divisions within British society at this time, there was some truth in this: the rapid and complete democratization of the Royal Navy would have made the service less rather than more of a reflection of the society it served.

The demands of the First World War inspired a brief phase of voluntary reform within the navy, but within a few years resistance set in. Most interwar reforms were consequently the result of political pressure, but this pressure was both intermittent and weak. The Labour party gradually emerged as the main proponent of change, but it was not in office long enough to achieve its goals and seldom raised the issue from the opposition benches before the late 1930s. This allowed the admiralty to control the pace and nature of change. It modified the system of officer recruitment so as to admit a modest number of applicants from the working class and lower sections of the middle classes, in the belief that a small quantity of the very best candidates from outside the traditional officer class could be absorbed without diluting the overall quality of the officer corps. But the goal was always to ensure that the ladder to the upper deck was both narrow and steep. Some genuinely new opportunities were created for middle- and working-class applicants during the interwar period, and the admiralty succeeded in meeting many of the demands for lower-deck commissions that emanated from the lower deck as against politicians. But the interwar navy remained an essentially class-ridden institution, although one of high quality. Far-reaching and fundamental reform of the social composition of the officer corps would only begin in the aftermath of the Second World War and the advent of a majority Labour government with the political will and popular support needed to overcome the navy's obstructions.