Customer Reviews

Fisher's Face; or,: Getting to Know the Admiral

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This book is a delight. It does not fit easily into the categories of history, biography or psychology, and yet it has elements of all of them. The author has obviously written it for sheer personal pleasure and this sense of fun - of which the splendid Jacky Fisher himself would have thoroughly approved - is communicated to the reader. It is no fault of the writer that Fisher remains an enigma at the end of it, a man of vast contradictions, enthusiasms, energy, genius and simplicity, but the journey is enjoyable on every page. Fisher was a force of nature who tackled every challenge, regardless of size, with zest, verve and originality and the story of his whirlwind career, and his transformation of the Royal Navy has much of the epic about it. Few men can have had greater vision, or a greater gift for grasping the potential of technology for transforming organisations and national destinies. Much of what he did and said could serve as a textbook for today's business schools - while the rest might have marked him for a straitjacket. For all his greatness however, he was diminished by his last years and by Churchill's disastrous decision to recall him to the Admiralty soon after the outbreak of the First World War. Old, and by now unstable, his tenure was marked by huge miscalculations and personal behaviour that swung erratically between the inspired and the lunatic. Those who enjoy this unique book will be no less delighted by Fisher's idiosyncratic memoirs - entitled "Memories" - which are an eccentric and haphazard collection of ideas, reminiscences and dictums (slogans might be a better word). This is long out of print, but well worth the seeking.

I'm reading this book for the second time now and its every bit as fresh as during the first go round. Morris brings history alive as few others and has chosen a wonderfully exciting subject to biography. God, how we need more leaders like Jacky Fisher these days! And more writers like Morris. Well done, I'm searching the back list for your other titles.

For those of us who are thoroughly rapt with the Royal Navy; following Mr. Massies "Dreadnought", Mr. Manchesters volumes on Churchill, and Winstons volumes on himself; this book will make your day.

Jan Morris via the wonders of surgery can take magnificently opposite points of view. In the same paragraph she/he can be the disgruntled fellow officer and a breath later the wife of that same affronted officer, enraptured by the demon Admiral Fisher; who has just put her husband down. Fisher was a man who would destroy many a career without compunction , but in such a way that the victims would name their first male child after him. Go figure.

Winston-O-Files will find little here but two characters so similar, so individual, and so revolutionary, that they could have been twins.

Ms. Morris writes this book in the second person taking us into Admiral Fishers quarters on board the "Renown" and letting the effusive and entertaining and somewhat comedic Admiral lead us on a tour of his life. Morris is clearly in love with Jacky and through attention and sensitivity writes a gripping and compassionate biography.

Wedge this book in next to your Manchester and Churchill and, oh'ya, your James Morris

I read this book in Cyprus, and there, Fisher's adventures whilst Admiral of the Mediterranean fleet seemed strangely poignant. The book is so unusually written that I actually thought that I was about to meet him at any point. I wish that I had, because as a life long lover of the navy, I find Fisher to be a most compelling character. There can be few people in this century that would be a more interesting correspondent. I wish that I could write to him now on the Web instead of writing this. If there is a more revealing (and one always feels, only slightly speculative), colourful and fun biography about anyone at all, pray tell me about it because this book was truly superb!

Sir John (Jacky) Fisher was the driving force behind the modernisation of the British Navy in the late 19th and early 20th Century. At the time the British Navy was the defining power of the Worlds largest Empire. Fisher was responsible for a change over from coal to oil, for introducing turbine engines, encouraged submarine warfare, great fire power, greater gunnery practice and so on. He retired before World War One, but was recalled during it. His career had been helped by his energy, his audacity, his willingness to overturn convention, and brook no oppostion. He had favourites, but many rivals. He largely failed the test of active warfare and resigned in humiliation after the failure in the Dardenelles and the draw in Jutland. He died in 1920.

Jan Morris was born in 1926 and says in the book that she has been haunted by Fishers face (hence the title) since her childhood. In the 1950's she gathered material to write this book, but did not do so until 1995. She feels guilty about this, in that she corresponded with a large amount of people who knew Fisher, but they did not see the end result.

The book is more a trawl through the artefacts - letters, pictures- which she has accumulated, than a strict history. She has visited a number of places that were important in Fisher's career, and she imagines what it must have been like to be Fisher or to be with Fisher during major events. I found this a bit disconcerting, as I found it hard to know what was documented fact and what was Morris's imagination. Nonetheless Fisher's story is told well, and something of the challenge of his character and the impact of his leadership is conveyed. There is a fascinating story of taking an organisation of the size, scope and impact of the British Navy and changing it fundamentally and quickly. I read Robert Massie's Dreadnought, a number of years ago and it tells this story rather better.

Massie does leave out the World War One story, in which Fisher's reputation - until then compared favourable with Nelson - is shattered, upon combat. Morris's tale seems to indicate that Fisher and his staff had invested so much money and reputation in putting the most powerful fleet together, that they refused to take risks which might have entailed its destruction. This ensured their caution in the major Naval or amphibious engagements of the First World War and was a major embarrassment at the time.

I picked up Morris' book because I had read Massie's Dreadnought, and I wanted to know more about Fisher. It definitely added to my knowledge of how Fisher ended up, but I could have done without the interpretive elements which Morris grafted onto the story.