The Heroic Record of the British Navy: A Short History of the Naval War, 1914-1918

It was early on the morning of July 20, 1914, that a couple of guests, who had courteously been invited to be present in the gunboat Niger for the King's inspection of the Fleet, made their way through the sleeping streets toward Portsmouth Dockyard. There were to be no manoeuvres this year since, as had already been announced in March, a test mobilization of the Third Fleet was to take their place. This Third Fleet consisted of the older ships of the navy, and depended for a large proportion of itspersonnel upon the Royal Fleet Reserve—a body of ex-naval seamen and other ratings, brought into being under Lord Goschen, and afterward strengthened and reorganized by the Selborne administration of 1902 onward. To man this fleet had necessitated the calling of about 10,000 seamen and 1,500 marines—all of them volunteers from civil life; and its assemblage at Spithead with the First and Second Fleets had secured, between the Hampshire coast and the Isle of Wight, the greatest exhibition of naval power that the world had then seen.

Since Wednesday, July 10th, the various units and squadrons had been gathering to their appointed stations, in some places eleven lines deep; while, upon the same occasion, and for the first time, there had been a full mobilization of the naval air forces. Less dramatic than the usual manoeuvres, and unaccompanied by any of the splendour that had attended most previous Royal reviews, this test mobilization—this bringing into being of the full fighting power of our naval reserves—was so valuable an exercise that, as Mr. Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had said in his announcement of it, it was a matter for some surprise that it had never before been undertaken. Nevertheless, as a national spectacle, it had attracted but little public attention, as the blinded windows and empty streets of Southsea and Portsmouth testified.

Grey as steel from vault to horizon but for a single wavering streak of blue, there seemed little prospect in the sky overhead of the fine day that the sailors had foretold; and nothing could have been more sombre than the early morning scene when, without ceremony and almost unnoticed, the Royal Yacht, with the King on board, left her berth in the Dockyard. Picking her course slowly past the Sally Port, so beloved by Marryat, she steamed through the choppy waters to her place at the head of the great fleet; and it was not until she reached Spithead, unsaluted by flag or gun, that the clouds up above began to break, and the sun to shine down on that floating city, now beginning briskly to awake to life.

Long before the little Niger, indeed, was herself out in the Solent, all the long lines were fully astir. Trim picket-boats, scattering spray, were plying up and down with mails and provisions. Cables were rattling till only a single anchor held each of the great ships in her proper position. Flags and semaphores were busy with final instructions. Veils of smoke began to wreathe in the air; and then, at the Admiral's signal, and with no other pageantry than that inherent in its own latent might, the vast assembly, with deliberate precision, began to get under way and out to sea.