On reading this work's title, one might be forgiven for asking, “Do we need another examination of the Royal Navy during World War I?” After the passage of ninety years, and the attention of scholars of the stature of Sir Julian Corbett, Stephen Roskill, Arthur Marder, Corelli Barnett, and, more recently, James Goldrick, Andrew Gordon, Paul Halpern, Nicholas Lambert, and Jon Sumida, among many others, surely every fact of significance about the war at sea has long since been dredged up and analyzed? And why focus on the Naval Staff, a body condemned by no less an authority than Marder as “merely a nondescript collection of officers … who were as ignorant of the principles of staff work as they were of strategy and operations” (quoted, 15–16)?

Nicholas Black's study not only revises our understanding of the Naval Staff's qualifications and competence: it provides an important reassessment of many aspects of the Admiralty's conduct of the naval war, one that challenges conventional wisdom on several counts. Starting from the premise that contemporary critics of the Staff such as Sir Herbert Richmond, Kenneth Dewar, and Joseph Kenworthy were unreliable witnesses and based their condemnations on a fundamental misunderstanding of its original raison d’être, Black argues that the Staff's personnel were in general “men of ability” (52). Moreover, although it was unprepared for war in 1914 (only two years after its creation), and although much improvisation took place during the early months of the conflict, the Staff's “learning curve” was steep, and by the time the naval crisis of the war arrived in 1916–17, it was up to the tasks demanded of it.

Two noteworthy ancillary points follow. First, as established under Winston Churchill's aegis, the Staff was both denied the power to draw up war plans—its brief was information gathering and assessment—and routinely bypassed or ignored during his stint as First Lord, owing to his chaotic managerial style. Second, perhaps even more important to the smooth functioning of naval administration than the structure of the Naval Staff in particular and the Admiralty in general were the personalities and capabilities of the men who governed the Navy. The best-designed administrative structure is of little use if those running it lack knowledge of its functioning or the will to work in harness with others. Conversely, a less-than-ideal structure can be worked efficiently and effectively if those directing it are intimately familiar with its working and march to the same beat.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Admiralty administration during 1914–18 hinged on its leadership, and Black pulls no punches in his assessment of First Lords and First Sea Lords, the two positions most critical to proper administrative functioning. Of the former, Churchill (First Lord, 1911–15) was a loose cannon of nearly disastrous proportions, Arthur James Balfour (1915–16) and Edward Carson (1916–17) nonentities, and Eric Geddes (1917–19) a talented and thoughtful director. Among the First Sea Lords, Prince Louis of Battenberg (1912–14) lacked the backbone to stand up to Churchill's bullying, John, Lord Fisher (1914–15) had a strong personality but was autocratic and elderly, Henry Jackson (1915–16) was unimaginative and an uninspiring leader, John Jellicoe (1916–17) was capable and perceptive despite much contemporary and subsequent criticism, and Rosslyn Wemyss (1917–18) “of secondary quality” (246).

Indeed, Jellicoe emerges in a much more positive light than in many, if not most, assessments. These focus on his failure to adopt convoying to stem mounting shipping losses to German submarines. Black acknowledges that this lacuna constitutes a “major blot” on Jellicoe's record but argues that he was otherwise much more aggressive than typically depicted, and, rather than being a centralizing micromanager, was precisely the opposite with regard to the Naval Staff, giving it both the manpower and the autonomy needed to function effectively. Thus, although the Staff's most important contributions to the war took place under Geddes and Wemyss, they were the beneficiaries of improvements originating with Jellicoe.

Perhaps Black's most important accomplishment, however, is to explode the myth of the prewar Board of Admiralty and its subordinate departments as a group of amateurs, generally of mediocre ability, who gave little thought to war planning and even less to implementation. That view is simply wrong. Rather, as Nicholas Lambert's recent work also demonstrates, by 1912, the Admiralty had drawn up sweeping plans for all-out economic warfare against Germany. That these plans were not immediately implemented in August 1914 owed nothing to Admiralty shortcomings and everything to opposition from the Foreign Office and Board of Trade.

Although the general thrust of Black's argument is persuasive, as is often the case, some parts are more convincing than others. Those devoted to the chronological narrative are the strongest, although in places, especially when detailing Churchill's reckless and impulsive tenure, the Staff itself tends to get pushed to the periphery of his account. Given Churchill's penchant for working outside official channels and disregard for the chain of command, this marginalization is perhaps inevitable, but it does lend the two chapters focusing on his First Lordship a “Hamlet without the Prince” quality. At the risk of overstatement, these chapters deal with what the Staff might have been doing but was not, and its only significant accomplishment seems to have been negative, that is, slowing or stalling Churchill's harebrained schemes such as seizing “advanced bases” from which to assault the German Navy.

The chapter analyzing the backgrounds and qualifications of those on the Naval Staff during the war is also problematic, although for very different reasons. Owing to deficient record keeping, Black had trouble determining how many officers and civilians actually served on the Staff. He suggests 930 but is compelled to acknowledge that the figure is “almost certainly … an underestimate of the true numbers” (19). Moreover, no information beyond the most basic demographic and professional data—birth, death, promotion, and appointment dates—is known about the majority of those who can be identified. As a consequence, rather than a Namier-esque prosopography of the Staff, Black's analysis is chiefly quantitative, and, although the impressionistic evidence he uses to supplement the numerous tables and graphs supports his contention about the overall fitness and qualifications of the Staff's personnel, it is too scanty to be wholly persuasive. Nevertheless, he has effectively demolished the depiction of the Naval Staff as an asylum for the “nondescript” and “maimed and hurt” (xiii).

Black's research is impressive, and his meticulously documented text is supplemented by more than fifty pages of appendices devoted to Naval Staff personnel. The book's organization is effective, and the presentation is solid. The subject matter, especially when addressing administrative structure and functioning, is almost inescapably dry, but Black does a good job of maintaining the reader's interest. Notwithstanding the limitations imposed chiefly by lack of evidence, this is a fine piece of scholarship, recommended especially to those who focus on operational history to the exclusion of policy, planning, implementation, and logistics.