Admiral Lord Fisher(1841–1920)

John Arbuthnot Fisher was born at Ramboda in the central Ceylon coffee country on the twenty-fifth of January 1841, eldest son of Captain William Fisher of the 78th Highlanders (a planter-soldier of the Ceylon planters' country) and Sophie Lambe. He was sent home to relatives in London at six, was nominated to the Royal Navy in July 1854 at thirteen by the seventy-eight-year-old Admiral Sir William Parker (the last of Lord Nelson's captains), and joined HMS Victory at Portsmouth as a naval cadet in his thirteenth year. He served in the China Wars (Cantonese opium ports 1859 to 1861), as gunnery lieutenant of HMS Excellent the gunnery school at Portsmouth (1869 to 1872, where he wrote the first modern Royal Navy gunnery manual), and across the great seamanship-and-engineering postings of the late Victorian navy that took him from frigate captain to Director of Naval Ordnance in 1886 in his forty-sixth year.

He was Controller of the Navy (1892 to 1897, the period in which the Royal Navy's first armoured cruisers and modern pre-dreadnought battleships were specified), Commander-in-Chief North America and West Indies Station (1897 to 1899), Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet (1899 to 1902, the period of the Fashoda Crisis), Second Sea Lord (1902 to 1903, the period of the Selborne Scheme that he co-authored that reorganised naval officer education), and Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth (1903 to 1904). On the twentieth of October 1904 in his sixty-fourth year he was appointed First Sea Lord, the professional head of the Royal Navy.

His five and a half years as First Sea Lord (1904 to 1910) transformed the Royal Navy from a slowly-modernising Victorian institution into the modern industrial dreadnought fleet that fought the First World War. He scrapped one hundred and fifty-four obsolete vessels in his first three months in office, redistributed the global fleet station system to concentrate strength in home and Mediterranean waters in response to the German naval challenge, commissioned and laid down the all-big-gun fast-armoured battleship HMS Dreadnought of 1906 (the prototype of every modern battleship and the technical leap that obsolesced every existing pre-dreadnought in every navy in the world), and committed the Royal Navy to the long battle-cruiser and submarine programme that followed. He moved the navy from coal-firing to oil-firing across 1908 to 1914, the strategic decision that committed the British state to the Persian Gulf oil-supply infrastructure for the next half-century and secured the establishment of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP) on the British government's controlling stake.

He retired from the First Sea Lordship in January 1910 in his sixty-ninth year, was created Baron Fisher of Kilverstone in November 1909, and was recalled to the office by Churchill at the outbreak of the First World War on the thirtieth of October 1914 at seventy-three. His second tenure ran nine months to May 1915, in which period he ordered the construction of six hundred and twelve new warships in nine months (the most rapid naval construction programme in British history) including five fast battle-cruisers and the first generation of fleet submarines, and laid out the Royal Navy's North Sea blockade and convoy doctrine that strangled the German economy through the next three years. He resigned in May 1915 over the conduct of the Gallipoli campaign, retired to Kilverstone Hall in Norfolk, and died on the tenth of July 1920 in his seventy-ninth year. The Royal Naval College Dartmouth (he founded it in 1905 to replace the Britannia training-ship) continues as the Royal Navy's officer training establishment to this day. The Fisher name in modern naval history carries the weight of the Dreadnought of 1906 and the oil-firing of 1908 to 1914.