Sea Control - Sea Control 503 - The British Special Service Squadron with Heather Johnson

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Links1. British Special Service Squadron.2. National Museum of the Royal Navy.

Hey, this is Jared. Dr. Ed Salo returns as your host today, and he has Heather Johnson, the Librarian, Special Collections at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, and she's going to be discussing the British Special Service Squadron. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the right for some sec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimbersman.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome to Sea Control. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Heather Johnson, Special Collections Librarian at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, to discuss the British Special Service Squadron Crew's exhibit that they are doing online and working on. So, welcome to Sea Control. Can you tell our listeners a little about your career, background, how you got to where you are? I'm not a historian in any way, which confuses people. I'm a professional librarian.

I graduated in librarianship, and I've been working in libraries of various forms for about 30 years. I have been with the museum here since 2007 in various roles with the library. So can you tell us a little about the museum there? Right, so absolutely. The National Museum of the Royal Navy is actually made up of several museums that have come together over the last 13 years. We actually came together probably in 2009. We aim to be the most inspiring naval museum in the world.

It's a big aspiration. We're working on it. It's always good to have a goal. So our founding collections involve the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton, which specialises in naval flights. We have HMS Trincomalee in Hartlepool, which is an 1816 frigate. We have the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, which is here in Portsmouth. We have HMS Victory here in Portsmouth, the HMS Warrior 1860,

such as the lovely Sail to Steam. We have Explosion, which contains all our naval ordnance collections. So that's another aspect of the Navy we look at. We have the Royal Marines Museum, which we locate if we hold their collections and we're looking towards getting those back out from display. We have HMS Caroline in Belfast in Northern Ireland. So that's actually quite a lot of material we care for. That is a lot and sounds pretty exciting.

Recently, you all published on your website the first of, I'm guessing, many stories about the british special service squadron cruise of 1923 1924 can you tell us a little about that the british special service squadron was referred to sometimes as the empire cruise it was a very large scale political diplomatic and naval exercise which basically went around the world it counted 38 152 miles and was a projection of the power of the navy but was also um a bit of a demonstration which proposed for logistical capabilities so yes there was both the first light cruiser squadron was involved and the battle cruises involving age was hood age was impulse so was this the first cruise of this size there had been a royal cruise in 1901

which was one of the earlier ones which went around was previously in commonwealth states including australia and new zealand there was also a post-war cruise in 1919 actually so not that long before that by mandrelico where he had been in charge of the grand fleet up in the north sea and he went around and he did a lot of early introductions for local navies so regional navies in india and australia and new zealand and canada the australian navy had already started in 1911 where he was kind of coordinating a bit more about how they were nice and trained or finding out how this was going to go so really this is sort of not the first but it was the biggest post-war one as reading the posts on the internet you know and being an american and i

don't know as much about the british navy as i wish but you know it made me start thinking about the great white fleet and president roosevelt's teddy roosevelt's frustration about trying to project power send west navy around the world how did the um empire cruise i'm gonna say that because it's a little easier for me fit into britain's post-war planning or grand strategy in the interwar war period it's a fair analogy for in some ways because where the great white fleet went out and it was testing its new atlantic fleet there to stress test it almost see how it operated logistically there were three primary objectives for the crews which were to follow up any agreements that came out of the first world war conferences there was say to get and see how

the local forces were kind of operating and do joint exercises with that but because a lot of the sailors who were now in the fleet had either joined during the war and hadn't done much long distance operational work they've done a lot of like local home port kind of defense work but they hadn't really been out and it was to give an idea of how they'd bond and train together and how they would cope with overseas crews so going to the logistics side of that yeah on the sort of strategy it was a a lot of sort of again on how we could go on and take trade in possibly future events so i can't deny that we had an empire and they'd looked at how that was changing and how we could still work together and they were looking at developing singapore naval base at that time

But the other, say, we're looking at Australian news by a chip into that and how that might fit with any plans with Japan and the interesting situation we found ourselves in where we hadn't renewed that Anglo-Japanese alliance following the imperial conferences. So there was a lot of how is it all going to work in the 1920s and 30s where this is testing it all out and going and seeing for themselves. The Navy had also obviously paid off quite a lot of men after the First World War. So there was quite a few people in there who had very difficult training. They'd gone from something like 180,000 men at the end of the armistice down to 407,000. That's a massive cut.

So you suddenly got not only very many people left who were in, who were trained on all this. So what were the overall results? It's an interesting one because some of it was more tangible than others. So I think they, particularly afterwards, they didn't go on any big exercises in 1925. They'd obviously just come back in October 1924. The outcomes were just to show what a big ship was really like. caterers who was called the mighty hood and in counterpart with the cruisers it kind of showed that britain still had naval power was still trying to project that and how that would say

be on trade defense that was already there was a big industry in sort of the far eastern malaysia malaysia states picking rubber that crossed off in a lot in the grand tour strange enough discussions on rubber and in parliament discussions about how to pay for it all when they start to develop Singapore Naval Base after the cruiser comes back. Singapore is a key stop on the route. They're taking so much employment possibly from the rubber trade that it's starting to threaten the industry to be able to sit in the naval base. There was a lot of outcomes on that.

Where it sits in the Far East versus why did they choose that versus not developing Hong Kong or any other arrangements they could possibly have done. So let's say Singapore Naval Base was one of the big outcomes. How is the museum playing to commemorate the crews in the virtual world, there in the brick-and-mortar world? So most of this is going to be a digital output, so we're going to do more work on our online catalogs, getting material digitized up over the years as we go through.

Somebody actually very kindly sent some material in to us yesterday based on the back of this, so we're going to hopefully get some more donations in, which we can then share, which will be lovely. we're going to be sort of seeing what we can do with other possibly other museums as well and say i'm going to keep on writing these book pieces which are to show this the grand say that the empire cruise how that went while we've moved several of these museums around they've actually relocated collections so materials just being generated now that we hadn't necessarily know

about so it's all very exciting we'd love to share that online because by showcase the world in the gallery doesn't always work yeah there's always so many um so many fun things that are back one of my internships in graduate school was working at a space museum and it was just like so cool to see the stuff that was back and not in the exhibits what are some of the favorite things that you have in the special collections that you think are really unique that you just really like oh it's really a lot um the oldest thing in our collection goes back to 1640 so and that's a book on ship money which was a debate when charles i was going back to parliament for taxation and that's one of the final triggers of the english civil war so i have that's a really

interesting piece that how that all works and we had lots of lovely rivalry material that's come that through and we have all these bits from the really interesting and challenging periods from the 1780s for example you know the original orders and um bunk hill and kind of going through on the documentation and from that we have so much going through from sales team navy we it is it's really one of those everybody hates that question like which ones would you pick there's every time you go into a box you might find a new favorite but they're some of mine they're definitely some of mine going through does your family have connections with the royal navy or how did you get from being a librarian to this and it can be something as simple as you know i

applied for the job or whatever but i do have i say firstly i had a small boat boat at the time i applied i had to be obviously skip the qualified so i had some practical knowledge of the small boat ownership i was nothing like the royal fleet auxiliary or navy but you know i could look at least a chart and i can understand how it reads the job came up i thought you know that does sound quite interesting i just wanted to come back and i thought well start on a low level and it just got very much bigger and so when i started in 2007 it was only one of the small founding museums in portsmouth and suddenly became in 2009 of this absolute massive organization so yeah the library itself covers about 60 000 items it's not but there's some of our competitors but

it does keep us busy we've got about 11 000 items of these now online in our catalog which is sort of the primary ones we have another collection coming to us called the conningwood heritage collection which is very much focused on naval communications and radar so that's a lot that's now on on part of the catalogue online so it can cover so much and i think people don't always understand and or think how they just think it's maybe it's just a weapon of war it's just a ship and it does things but there's a whole microcosm of society on board and how they operate and the changes that they go through from in ship design the challenges of getting just fresh water aboard When you get to the point where you're sucked into big aircraft carriers,

I mean, in the biggest American world, it won't even fit in our harbour, but you're trying to maintain that. And the engineering behind it, there is so much that people don't think about. And, say, the health, the welfare, the food, safe engineering maintenance, keeping the hull intact. What can you say? There is just so much. You can look at almost any aspect of the Navy and take that away.

And that's one of the things I'd like to do. I'm trying to do with this blog is show not just the crews, but little bits from the people who were there so there was a bigger wider implication but there was a lot of faith there were a lot of men involved here all with their own lives and their own perspectives we want to try and bring through i did my dissertation on ferry boats and it's looking at the regulations the technology the people who operated it what you developed there you can see so much different things out of just a boat that crosses the river you know the political history of the navy but also yeah the technology the changes the people

it's an interesting thought isn't it if we have reduced the anglo-japanese alliance i know the americans you know kind of but if we renewed that would color palmer have happened yeah you never know you know what it's certainly what is what other projects is the museum working on that might be put out there and of course i recommend if anyone's in the british isles to go to these museums i'm going to be in london later this year and i'm hoping to maybe make a trip over to see it so at the moment we're working on our next big one is possibly doing some figureheads we have obviously the older wooden style ships had figureheads and they're very emblematic of almost the ship if i had a soul it would be that shift in the time when sailors couldn't

see read a name board um so we're looking at sea flower and hbs martin possibly hbs asian for HWS Madagascar have all carved, all the restoration processes. We've got the thicker head for HWS Trincomalee, which is a car built out in, say, in Trincomalee by the Wadi family. And we're looking more about them and how we're going to conserve and preserve those going forward, possibly in a better way of understanding them. That one's going to be a two-year project. We expect to be out in September 2025.

So we're going to be working a lot with a digital lab and our communities for that. We put in a project at the end of last year, The World Beneath the Waves, which is about the HMS Chandra and surveying expeditions. That was another one we've just done. We're working on D-Day 80 for June this year. The end of the Second World War was very much a joint effort,

and there's a lot of remembrance and commemoration around that that we're going to be working on, getting our Royal Marine Collections back out into public exhibition spaces as well. Well, that's going to probably take a good couple of years to get those into a space to do them justice. Well, thank you. And we will, of course, make links in our show notes to the exhibit. Thank you so much and appreciate it. And this is E-Control and we are signing out.

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