Simple Biography Of Lord Jellicoe

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 41, 18 February 1939, Page 10

Simple Biography Of Lord Jellicoe

NAVAL OFFICER’S WORK LONDON, Jan. 26. Captain E. Altham has written a book called “Jellicoe,” which has just been published. He is a gunnery specialist who served under Lord Jellicoe on several occasions, and ho is regarded as being in the best possible position to understand the problems which confronted Lord Jellicoe. These he sees and sets out clearly and concisely in a short and simple biography of a great national figure. “At the outbreak of the Great War,” writes Captain Altham, 41Jellicoe had been chosen from the whole Flag list as pre-eminently the most suitable Admiral to command the Grand Fleet. In that position ho had established complete mastery over tho High Seas Fleet. When tho Allies were threatened with defeat because German submarines wero sinking ships faster than they could be built, it was Jellicoe who was sent for and to whom the Government aud the nation again looked to save them from disaster.” Lord Jellicoe was described by Mr. Winston Churchill as “The only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.'’ Captain Altham shows that ho could have lost the war on hundreds of occasions *f he had paid insufficient attention to the happiness and welfare of his crews, cooped up in their ships in dreary Scapa Flow. “Yet,” says the reviewer of the book in the Sunday Times, “Jellicoe was afterwards reviled tor adopting tactics with which the Admiralty had previously expressed itself in the closest pos-