Remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Vice-Chancellor
The Open University
Ladies and Gentlemen:
You do me a great honour by asking me to say a few words and propose this toast this evening. I am well aware how rare it is for a civilian to be given this singular duty on Trafalgar Day and I thank you.
As you have heard my connection with the Royal Navy began when I was invited by Sir Herman Bondi to join the Advisory Committee for the Royal Naval Engineering College at Manadon some years ago. When Manadon closed the Navy decided to keep the group together and broaden its remit. So I now have the honour of being chairman of the Advisory Forum on the Development of Royal Navy Personnel. The Forum brings together distinguished people from various walks of life and we try to provide useful insights to help the Navy with the recruitment, training and professional development of all its people.
As with my membership on other similar bodies, I often think that the members of the Forum derive at least as much personal benefit from their association with the Navy as the Navy does from their professional advice. We make it a habit to hold each of our meetings in a different establishment so that we can see the reality of training and development in the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines at first hand. These visits are enormously rewarding and we have been greatly impressed by what we have seen.
Two weeks ago, for example, we met at HMS RALEIGH and I had the honour to take the salute at the passing out parade. All my colleagues on the Forum were amazed at what the Navy can do in only eight weeks to transform a diverse group of recruits into a body of sailors proud to be joining the service. The shy gain confidence, the gawky become co-ordinated, the inarticulate learn to speak up, the purposeless become purposeful. It is a remarkable achievement that we in civilian establishments of education and training can only envy and admire.
The same goes for other Naval establishments that have hosted a visit from the Forum. We went to HMS DRYAD and had the very real, although virtual experience of taking a ship out of Portsmouth harbour and refuelling it at sea.
We went to HMS NELSON and saw the powerful work of the Royal Naval School of Educational and Training Technology and some of its brilliant use of computer-based training.
I particularly remember our visit to HMS EXCELLENT where we saw leadership training and damage control exercises. The picture is still vivid in my mind of ratings trying to bash wooden wedges into leaking bulkheads as the water rises and rushes from side to side with the movement of the ship. That made me realise, more than anything else that what distinguishes a top class fighting force is not the preparations it makes for a set-piece battle but how it reacts and responds once the plan goes awry and the fog of battle closes in.
In all these visits I know that my colleagues on the Advisory Forum felt immensely proud of the Royal Navy and the quality of its people and their training. Indeed, there have been many times when we have wondered what we, as civilians, could possibly contribute to an organisation that knows its business as well as the Navy does and is so good at doing it.
Of course there are important ways in which civilian and military training can complement each other and we hear about one of them at most of our meetings. I refer to the Engineering Sponsorship Scheme at Southampton University. I am delighted that Professor Rice, Southampton's Dean of Engineering is here this evening, along with Commander Peter Hadden who runs the scheme. This has been a real success story. While I am sure there are many here who regret the closing of Manadon I do believe that the Navy and Southampton University have together developed a very successful alternative that will produce officers who combine the best professional training with the long traditions of the Royal Navy.
It is those traditions that we celebrate this evening as exemplified in one man, Horatio Nelson. Perhaps I should say two men, because we are here at HMS COLLINGWOOD and it was Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood who commanded the other line of ships at the Battle of Trafalgar that we commemorate today.
We are not yet at the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar but this month does mark the 200th anniversary of the liberation of Malta. It was in October 1798 that Nelson sent Captain Ball to take over Malta so as to secure the route to Egypt. The French had only been in Malta for two years but I understand that there are Maltese people alive today who, when they were naughty as children, were threatened by their parents that "Buonaparte will get you". Such is the terror from which Nelson delivered the world by sending Napoleon packing.
The memory of Lord Nelson has been revered at thousands of dinners like this for nearly two hundred years. It would be inappropriate for me, as a civilian, to try to say anything new. I am an academic and academics are still busy arguing over the history that Nelson made. I understand, for example, there is a dispute over whether Nelson's message before Trafalgar was "England expects every man to do his duty" or the more assured "England confides every man to do his duty". But I leave such debates to the scholars.
What intrigues me and worries me as a civilian is how Nelson would have fared in today's Royal Navy. Would this one-eyed, one-armed man, of indifferent health, upright ethics, insubordinate habits and a scandalous lifestyle, ever have survived in the service to take senior command today?
Things began well. He was a Captain at age twenty - barely more than the age of today's recruits. Then he fell out of favour because he did his job and enforced the Navigation Acts in the West Indies which reduced, for some important people, the opportunity for graft and smuggling. He could have been invalided out of the Navy when he lost his eye in 1794 or when he lost his arm in 1798. Then he disobeyed an order to go to Minorca and although events proved him right he was ordered home. Later, of course, he disregarded the signals to disengage at Copenhagen, and once again won a battle that might have been lost.
Could today's Royal Navy have tolerated this man?
We have to hope so because here was the man who created your modern service. He revised the tired strategic and tactical doctrines of the eighteenth century. He taught officers to think for themselves - so I consider him the godfather of our Advisory Forum on the Development of Royal Navy Personnel.
He was a supreme leader of men who had compassion for those he commanded. When he spoke of his officers as a band of brothers it was a meaningful term. He was a brilliant tactician and master of the unexpected, as when he took his shallower draught ships through an unexpected channel at the Battle of Copenhagen. He placed great emphasis on sheer professionalism with the result that his men and his ships could shoot more rapidly than those that came against them. And getting more shots in, quicker, is in the end what warfare is about.
These are the qualities that will always be needed in the Royal Navy. We always try to assemble overwhelming force to ensure a short and successful engagement. But the real world doesn't always allow that.
In the real world the Royal Navy needs the tradition of Horatio Nelson. Leadership, delegation, compassion, intelligence, cunning, training, and professionalism: these are the qualities we emulate and celebrate.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Please by upstanding. I give you the toast:
To the immortal memory…