The Imperial Aircraft Flotilla

Meanwhile, aid for the British Admiralty had come from a wholly unexpected direction: the promise of a Dreadnought by the Federated Malay States (FMS)—an Eastern Protectorate, and not even a Crown Colony directly ruled by Britain, let alone a self-governing Dominion. In November 1912, the FMS Federal Council unanimously passed a resolution introduced by Sultan Idris Shah of Perak, the Malay state with the richest tin deposits, and most of the tin mines which had contributed so much to economic growth and the swelling budgetary surplus. The resolution offered Great Britain £2.5 million from FMS funds for a first-class armoured ship, spread over five years. This was a quite breathtaking sum from the four federated Malay sultanates of the FMS, whose populations at the 1911 census together numbered only 1,037,000:6 a century later it would have a value of about £200 million.7

The Council that had voted the gift was not an elected body. Along with the Sultan of Perak, it comprised the three Sultans (or their representatives) of Selangor, Negri Sembilan, and Pahang. All of them recognised Sultan Idris as the senior-most amongst them by virtue of age, experience, and ability. The remaining members of the Federal Council were the British High Commissioner to the FMS (and Governor of the Straits Settlements Colony, resident at Singapore), Sir Arthur Young; other senior British officials; and ‘unofficials’ as they were then known, nominated by the High Commissioner. The three European non-official members were each selected to represent planting, mining, and commercial interests, and the one Chinese member to represent the general interests of those Chinese resident in the FMS. This was the Perak millionaire Eu Tong Sen (of whom more later in this story, in relation to the personal gift not only of an aircraft, but of a tank).

In London, Parliament greeted the formal announcement of this extraordinary offer of £2.5 million with enthusiastic cheers.8 As The Times of London remarked, even though payments were to be by yearly instalments over a five-year term, this sum represented half a single year’s revenue for the FMS as a whole, and was a generous gift indeed from dependencies of such moderate size and recent development. Yet, although as members of the Federal Council the four Malay Sultans concerned took part in discussing the FMS budget, and in passing the necessary legislation to bring it into effect, unlike—say—the Indian princes, they did not control their own state revenues; and they were obliged under treaty to accept the advice of their respective British Residents in all matters, except those pertaining to Malay custom and religion. When it was tacitly admitted that a senior official—Colonial Secretary E. L. Brockman—had suggested the gift of a Dreadnought to Sultan Idris in the first instance, the status of the ‘gift’ came to look more dubious.9 (A newspaper columnist in Singapore had reportedly proposed the warship idea as a worthy destination for excess FMS funds some years before, planting the idea in the Colonial Secretary’s mind).10

Ever since the American Revolution had popularised the demand for no taxation without representation, Great Britain had refrained from exacting a direct financial contribution towards defence from her Crown Colonies, save where there was a garrison of imperial troops, or where fortifications had been constructed at the expense of the Royal Exchequer. Patently, this was not the case of the FMS, a mere Protectorate. Its flourishing exports, however, did rely on the port facilities of the Straits Settlements (a Crown Colony) at Singapore and Penang; just before the offer was made Sir Arthur Young had accompanied Sultan Idris on a tour of the Singapore Docks.11 The British Royal Navy, it was emphasised in those days, stood guardian over the safety of the seas and of free trade. This argument had some weight in the FMS, which had seen a diminution in piracy on account of the British naval presence in the Straits of Malacca.

In the House of Commons Churchill was asked for assurance that none of the money voted by the FMS should be spent until the House had had the opportunity to debate the matter. He retorted that the offer had been accepted, the contract had been settled, and construction would begin shortly. What lay behind this rather churlish question regarding a patriotic offer, he asked rhetorically: each nation was in reality a sum of its traditions and, if all nations were merged, the result would be a vast and colourless community—the end towards which they would all drift were Britain to curb patriotism either within her borders or on the part of her vast dominions overseas.12 Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lewis Harcourt, maintained that the offer had been spontaneous, and had come as a complete surprise to the Colonial Office.

This was the heyday of indirect rule. British colonial expansion across large areas of the globe in the late nineteenth century had made it all the more expedient for its officials to cultivate the cooperation of local rulers, in the interests of cost-effective and peaceful governance. Lord Frederick Lugard, one of the grandees of Britain’s Colonial Service, later theorised his own co-option of the Emirs of Northern Nigeria and their native administrations, into what was to become British colonial doctrine.13 But other colonial administrators had been following a similar path elsewhere—out of instinct and pragmatic adaptation. Some British administrators were cultivated in their turn by local rulers, and some also found themselves beguiled by the lands in which they lived and worked. In addition, memories of ‘pacification’ campaigns remained in the recent background, to remind rulers of Britain’s long military reach, thanks to her effective navy.

Friendships occasionally developed between colonial administrator and native ruler in which it is difficult to separate sentiment and mutual self-interest. Sir Frank Swettenham, who rose to become British Governor of the Straits Settlements 1901–1904,14 wrote of Sultan Idris Shah of Perak as ‘standing for all that is best in the Malay ruling class, able, energetic, just and high-principled, with great charm of manner and fluency of speech. A very earnest Moslem, without a trace of bigotry, and regarded as a high authority on questions of muslim law and religion.’15 They first met in the context of a punitive expedition that followed on the assassination of the first British Resident in Perak, J. W. W. Birch, back in November 1875. Swettenham acted as deputy commissioner for the advancing British forces shipped in from India and China. Raja Idris, as he then was, was the Malay judge who tried and convicted the three men implicated in Birch’s murder, Swettenham conducting the prosecution against them.16

In 1889 Frank Swettenham himself became British Resident of Perak and settled in a house at Kuala Kangsar (Perak’s royal capital) near to Sultan Idris, a close friend now for many years, who had succeeded to the sultanate two years’ previously: ‘During the next ten years our friendship grew ever stronger, and whilst His Highness’s Authority in Perak was unquestioned, he had great influence in other Western States, and he always used it wisely.’17 Over time, Sultan Idris Shah had become close to the British authorities, and he was awarded the GCMG during the Prince of Wales’s visit to Singapore in 1901. It would not have been difficult to persuade him to add his weight to ratifying Malaya’s gift of a Dreadnought in 1912—a gift that drew the attention of London, if not the world, to this economically successful and helpful corner of the empire, which was by now producing more than fifty per cent of the world’s tin, and nearly half its rubber. In 1913 he was awarded a rare British honour, the GCVO, which was in the gift of the British monarchy.

When war came in 1914, Sir Frank Swettenham was living in retirement in England on the directorships of several rubber companies. He was appointed initially assistant director, then in 1915 joint director, of the Press Bureau in London (operating wartime British ‘news management’). Meanwhile, Sultan Idris continued to take a keen interest in the progress of HMS Malaya, and was privately informed of its completion before his death in January 1916.18 It was one of five new ‘Queen Elizabeth’-class fast and powerful Dreadnought battleships completed since the outbreak of hostilities. At the end of May, HMS Malaya took part in the Battle of Jutland, suffering sixty killed in action and many more injured.

As it turned out, it was to be British seaplanes and aeroplanes that were to become the objects of worldwide private and public generosity in the Great War (as the First World War was known at the time). It was not ships, although in the autumn of 1914 HMS Malaya provided the inspiration for the launch in London of the Patriotic League of Britons Overseas, with as its avowed aim to present a battle cruiser to the Royal Navy. This time, it was British communities resident in foreign countries outside the formal British Empire—from Argentina to the Treaty Ports of China—and estimated to number some three million people, who were expected to dig into their pockets.

The aim was to finance a modern warship (but not a mighty Dreadnought, which would have been too ambitious by far) for what was at first expected to be Great Britain’s decisive battle against Germany on the high seas. But the fundraising campaign did not progress as planned, just as the larger matter of the Great War itself quickly turned into something much more unfamiliar and unwelcome for Britain than the naval dominance and limited imperial army campaigns to which they had become accustomed.19 In a twist of fate, the Patriotic League was to become the main private benefactor for the Navy’s branch of the British flying services instead.

The initiative for the Patriotic League of Britons Overseas had come from F. W. Hayne, an Englishman who had spent much of his life in Chile.20 An impressive Home Committee was formed in London, chaired by Lord William Waldegrave Palmer Selborne, and the King lent his name as Patron of the League. Lord Selborne had been in turn Under Secretary of State for the Colonies 1895–1900; First Lord of the Admiralty; then High Commissioner in South Africa and Governor of Transvaal and the Orange River Colony in the period from 1905 until establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910. As First Lord of the Admiralty (1900–1905) he had overseen important changes in the Royal Navy, and pushed through plans to meet the threat of the new German navy, including those for the first British Dreadnought.21 Lord Aldenham, whose family mercantile house of Antony Gibbs & Sons had made its fortune in South America trade, had been a business partner of F. W. Hayne in Chile, and acted as vice-chairman and treasurer. He approached the Admiralty with the League’s plans to recruit ‘patriotic’ Britons worldwide to subscribe to a fund for a warship of some kind.

In his letter of approval Churchill set out the Navy’s desired shopping list according to the monies that could be raised—upward of £300,000 for a light cruiser, £380,000 for a ‘Town’-class cruiser, £150,000 for a destroyer.22 Sir Edward Grey, who was British Foreign Secretary from 1905 until 1916, lent the campaign the support of those networks at his command, both formal and informal. Albert Earl Grey, his third cousin, was president of the Royal Colonial Institute (RCI), established in 1869 and the oldest of the imperial propaganda societies,23 and the Foreign Secretary supplied the League with lists of the RCI’s members abroad, to enlist their help. More importantly, a dispatch went out under his name to all British foreign missions enclosing packets (520 of them) of the Patriotic League’s publicity material. They were accompanied by a Consular Circular of 17 December 1914 enjoining the British Consular Service to seek out Britons with local influence willing to found a branch of the League and to collect subscriptions for the warship.24

Faced with this directive from on high, those who felt unable to comply with the Circular hastened to explain themselves: British consular representatives in Russia, that it was actually illegal, under a Russian law of 1906 that prohibited organisations with political aims which were controlled by institutions or persons abroad. Excuses rolled in, all of them good. The Consul General in Rotterdam thought it ‘inadvisable’ on his part to take any action in support of the League because of the nearness of hostilities, the delicacy of the situation in the Netherlands, and because the Germans would make capital of it, accusing him of trying to break Dutch neutrality. The Vice Consul in Kansas City wrote personally to Lord Selborne, explaining that local opinion was influenced by the large number of people of German or Austrian extraction there, and was opposed to war armaments. More bluntly, a British Consul in Mexico (in the throws of continuing revolution) informed the Foreign Office that local Britons lacked not patriotism, but money. Given the dire economic situation, and the destitution of many, there was no point in his trying to canvass support for the League, or its aims.

Nevertheless, branches of the Patriotic League were formed in China, which was then a new Republic still in turmoil following the nationalist revolt that ended imperial Manchu rule in 1912. Branches were established in Manchuria; in foreign Treaty Ports like Canton and Swatow; and in the former Manchu capital of Peking; even in Tengyuah (Tengyue), in the remote south-west of China, where the British Assistant-in-Charge of the local Chinese Customs Service (still run by British officials) summoned a meeting of all eight adult male British subjects of the town, and managed to collect £38 for the warship. Shanghai in particular formed a large, active, and financially generous branch of the Patriotic League, headed by the Consul General, Sir Everard Fraser KCMG, as its president; and it continued to gift money throughout the First World War.

Branches were also formed, and respectable sums of money (£500–£1,000) collected in areas of British settlement in Chile and Argentina, and in big cities like Havana and Rio de Janeiro. But progress was hard in some parts of Latin America, where German investment and trade had begun to penetrate regions that had previously been a British preserve. The League’s literature envisaged that its branches would persist after the end of the war, forming a network of ‘patriotic’ Britons across the globe. Quite possibly there was a longer-term aim implicit in this, to capture German trade, or recoup British trade from German companies. The Consul General in Quito hinted as much when he advised the Foreign Office that it was less a question of capturing German trade with a country where pro-German feeling ran high, than of holding on to Britain’s own trade: ‘There are none of the Great English West Coast Firms … with which the Lord Aldenham is connected and acquainted with, the import trade is largely in the hands of Bremen and Hamburg firms and their agents.’25

Despite support from the extensive network of British Consular Officers abroad, by May 1915 the League had managed to collect only £22,000—nowhere near their initial target of £380,000. To his credit, Lord Selborne helped resolve this embarrassing situation by easing the League towards cooperation with John Evelyn Wrench, a newspaperman whose fundraising campaign for aircraft for the Army’s branch of the flying services had met with considerable recent success. Selborne was acquainted already with Wrench’s Overseas Club, and was a speaker at the inaugural launch of its new London premises in May 1914.26 Additionally, Albert Earl Grey—the Fourth Earl of Grey, former Governor General of Canada, third cousin and friend to Sir Edward Grey, and the RCI’s president—may well have commended Wrench, whom he had known well and favoured for a number of years, to Lord Selborne, his in-law.

In June 1915 Wrench became Honorary Secretary of the League, at Lord Selborne’s invitation, and thereon effectively ran it from the Overseas Club, along with his own fundraising campaign. By the time Lord Aldenham wrote to the Foreign Office again on 27 July 1915, to advise them of the results obtained since the issue of their Consular Circular in December, the League had clearly concluded that even the smallest sum of £150,000 needed for a destroyer was unattainable:

I have very great pleasure in informing you that … no less than 105 Branches of the League have already been established in foreign countries and a sum of £35,000 has been handed to the First Lord of the Admiralty for the purchase of a squadron of ten large seaplanes of the latest and most approved type as a first gift to the Navy from our fellow subjects abroad.27

Ten large seaplanes constituted a useful face-saver. The first aeroplane flight from a British warship had taken place at the beginning of 1912: King George V, the ex-naval officer and Patron of the Patriotic League, took a keen interest in naval aviation and had observed the Fleet’s first manoeuvres accompanied by aircraft in May that same year.28 And George V’s interest was not limited to naval aviation—in January 1914 the British aviator Gustav Hamel staged a ‘Command’ flying exhibition before the King and Queen Mary in Windsor private grounds.29 For some years Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty from October 1911 until May 1915, had been a notable enthusiast for naval aeronautics, and underwent pilot tuition on every flight he made.30

The Patriotic League’s July 1915 gift of £35,000 to the Navy—£22,800 of it subscribed by the fourteen branches of the League in China—paid for ten Short 827 seaplanes with 150 hp. engines:31 a gift duly acknowledged on behalf of the Admiralty by its new First Lord, Arthur Balfour (replacing Churchill in the wake of the Gallipoli debacle).32 Certainly the gift of ten seaplanes was a useful addition to the existing inventory, for the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) had no more than thirty-nine aeroplanes and fifty-two seaplanes when war was declared in August 1914.33 Indeed, one estimate has placed the serviceable number initially available at mobilisation at only half that.34 Moreover, those planes that the RNAS already possessed had proved their worth. While it was an arm of the Navy, under the authority of the Admiralty, and flew in support of naval operations, the RNAS had adopted an aggressive attack policy from early in the war (as part of the Navy’s remit for the coastal defence of Britain).

A bombing raid on 13 October 1914 had successfully destroyed a Zeppelin in its shed at Düsseldorf; although another carried out on 21 November on the Zeppelin factory at Friedrichshafen on the shores of Lake Constance was of more limited effectiveness in those early days of aircraft design and engine power.35 On Christmas Day 1914, RNAS seaplanes also made their first seaborne assault from a warship, against Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven. Just a few weeks later, the RNAS went into action off Africa. Three out of the League’s presentation Short 827 seaplanes were in fact used in the East Africa campaign; two of them (Britons Overseas Nos. 4 and 5) being flown by HMS Manica at Zanzibar (see chapter five).

Yet the key attribute of both aeroplanes and seaplanes for donors back then was affordability, perhaps even trumping all other considerations. Essentially an engine encased in a lightweight wooden fuselage, with a wooden propeller, and with wings of treated canvas stretched over a wooden framework, in 1915–16 a biplane with gun cost £2,250 to produce, and without gun, £1,500. Seaplanes had floats instead of wheels, and more powerful engines than aeroplanes in order to aid take-off from water, and these entailed extra costs that brought them up to £3,500 each. But of whatever type, aircraft were a tiny fraction of the cost of any kind of warship: even the cheapest, a destroyer at £150,000 (as against £3,500 for a seaplane), cost the equivalent in today’s terms of more than £10 million.36

Contributions towards the League’s Warship Fund continued to trickle in from abroad, and were also quietly diverted to aircraft for the RNAS. A small sum in Italian lire was gathered by the Maltese community in Tripoli, at their own initiative, and remitted in November 1915 by the British Consul General; he explained that the community was a poor one, comprising mainly fishermen and labourers.37 In July 1916 the Colonial Office in London was bemused to receive money from the Tonga branch of the Patriotic League of Britons Overseas—of which they had never previously heard—with the request that it be paid over to the Warship Fund. Noting dryly that the collection of £113 18s 2d from Tonga would not go far towards buying a Dreadnought, they consulted the Admiralty, who replied citing the squadron of seaplanes already received in order to reassure that the fund was genuine and not a scam, and expressing their entire approval of the League and its Honorary Secretary, John Evelyn Wrench.38

Support for the League was also beginning to permeate beyond the resident British community to some of their Chinese middlemen and interpreters in the Treaty Ports of China. By May 1916 the Patriotic League had handed a further £21,000 to the Admiralty for the purchase of naval aircraft.39 It included ‘a further generous contribution’ from a number of Chinese British subjects at Swatow, who—it may be surmised—found it advisable to make a display of loyalty towards their British employers at a Treaty Port where the German business community was also strongly represented. Clearly, they were well aware of the League’s British Establishment credentials. Their accompanying memorandum in part read:

Now, Gentlemen, the British Government is at present involved in the greatest war in history. The loyal and patriotic Statesmen and Aristocrats of England, supported by His Majesty, the King, have deemed it proper to link us up with all the other British communities scattered throughout the globe in the interests of the British Empire. It is our duty [to do] all in our power to promote the interest and welfare of the Patriotic League of Britons Overseas … If the Empire falls, God forbid it, where shall we all be?40

A further £10,000, subscribed by Britons and British subjects in the United States (US), China, Brazil, Abyssinia, and elsewhere outside the British Empire, and to be spent on seaplanes, was made over to the Admiralty on 21 October 1916: ‘by way of celebrating Trafalgar Day’ according to Flight magazine.41 That same year, the League also transmitted £3,000 to the Secretary of State for War. It was destined for aeroplanes for the British Army’s own flying service, the Royal Flying Corps (RFC).42 In all, the League presented some fifty seaplanes and aeroplanes during its separate existence before it was formally amalgamated with the Overseas Club on the 31st March 1918,43 the very day before a new British air service came into being uniting the flying arms of the Army and Navy respectively: the Royal Air Force (RAF).

One of the Patriotic Front’s 10 seaplanes presented to the Admiralty in July 1915, Short 827 3098 Britons Overseas No. 6 being manhandled in East African waters, courtesy of the National Museum of the Royal Navy

Sopwith 1½ Strutter 9395 Tientsin Britons No. 1 gifted by one of the Patriotic League’s branches in China, flown by 5 Naval Squadron in France 1917, courtesy of the National Museum of the Royal Navy

1 Chapter 1: Introduction—gifts for the Royal Navy, and the Patriotic League

Quoted in Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War, p. 837

2 Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship, p. 78

3 Massie, Dreadnought, p. 832

4 See Mackenzie, ‘Canada, the North Atlantic Triangle, and the Empire’, p. 579

5 The Hong Kong Telegraph (HKT), 21 May 1913

6 There were other Malay sultanates outside the federation at the time, and the population of the Malay states as a whole may have been up to 2.5 million