The Keyes Papers at the British Library

Michael St John-McAlister

The Keyes Papers,1 acquired by private treaty in 1978, having previously been on deposit at Churchill College, Cambridge, are a fascinating insight into one of the twentieth century’s most important naval figures. The papers are a fitting addition to the Library’s impressive holdings of the papers of naval figures, including Nelson, Viscount Cunningham, Sir Arthur Power, and Keyes’s contemporary, Jellicoe. The first half of the twentieth century saw Britain struggling to maintain its long- established naval supremacy. In the years before World War One Germany asserted her naval strength. In the immediate post-war years, whilst Germany was no longer a threat, Britain had to contend with the growing naval power of Japan and the United States. By the mid- 1930s Germany had rejoined the band of naval powers threatening Britain’s hegemony and her naval building programme, despite being banned by the Treaty ofVersailles, had reached such a level that Britain felt the need to reach an accommodation with her erstwhile enemy.2 Roger Keyes was a central figure through all the vicissitudes of Britain’s naval affairs in this period. He was a senior officer in the early days of the service, served with distinction in several theatres in World War One, was Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) Mediterranean during an extremely tense period in the 1920s, fought to maintain the ’s control of its own aircraft, and was instrumental in the development of commando forces for use in combined operations during World War Two. Roger John Brownlow Keyes was born in October 1872 at Tundiani Fort on the north west frontier of India. He was the second son of Gen. Sir Charles Patton Keyes, the commander of the Punjab Frontier Force. Keyes’s mother, Lady Katherine, was the sister of Field Marshal Sir Henry Norman. Keyes enrolled at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, aged thirteen and joined his first ship, HMS Raleigh, on the Cape of Good Hope and West Africa station before he was even fifteen. He saw active service in East Africa and during the Boxer Rebellion, during which he led two daring raids to capture four Chinese and a fort.3 These exploits set the pattern for Keyes’s career.

1 Add. MSS. 82373-82578. The papers have only recently been incorporated and are not yet foliated. References are either to entire volumes on one subject, to individual letters arranged by date in volumes of special correspondence, or to items found in the alphabetical general correspondence sequence. Other papers relating to Keyes can be found at Add. MSS. 81080 C, 81277 C, and 82579-82580. Several other institutions hold material relating to Keyes: see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/ for details. 2 The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935 permitted Germany to maintain a navy 35% as strong as Britain’s (45% for ), effectively condoning German rearmament. 3 These and the following biographical details are derived from a number of sources. Keyes wrote an autobiography covering the period to 1906, Adventures Ashore and Afloat (London, 1939), two volumes of Naval Memoirs (London, 1934 and 1935), The Fight For Gallipoli (London, 1941), and Amphibious Warfare and Combined Operations, Lees Knowles Lectures (Cambridge, 1943). He is the subject of a biography by Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, Roger Keyes (London, 1951). Many of the letters and papers in this collection have been published by the Navy Records Society in three volumes, The Keyes Papers, ed. Paul G. Halpern (London, 1979, 1980, and 1981). See also Paul G. Halpern, ‘Keyes, Roger John Brownlow, first Baron Keyes (1872–1945)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34309.

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A post at the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty gave Keyes a major role to play preparing the Admiralty’s case for the International Court of Enquiry following the Incident. During the Russo-Japanese war, the Russian Baltic fleet sank a Hull trawler having mistaken the fishing fleet for Japanese torpedo boats.4 There followed three years as naval attaché in Rome, covering Vienna, Athens, and Constantinople, as well as the Italian capital. Keyes returned to England in 1908 and after two years commanding HMS Venus in the Atlantic Fleet was appointed Inspecting Captain of Submarines, and was promoted Commodore in charge of submarines in 1912. During his tenure he broke Vickers’s monopoly on submarine construction and instigated detailed research into foreign submarine design and construction, including visiting overseas manufacturers and witnessing trials of foreign submarines. All of these aspects, as well as papers on submarine defences, their limitations, exercises, co-operation between submarines and seaplanes, and the role of submarines in World War One are covered in the papers.5 Keyes saw active service in World War One, firstly in the submarine service and then, from February 1915, as Chief of Staff to the Vice-Admiral commanding the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron during the Dardanelles Campaign. He played a major role in planning the naval operations including support for troops landed on the beaches. As the campaign bogged down, he opposed evacuation preferring instead a renewed naval attack forcing the fleet through the Straits, but he was over-ruled. It was another glimpse of the pro-active stance Keyes had displayed in China. The papers cover all aspects of the campaign and include intelligence reports, operational orders and memoranda, landing orders, signals, the situation on the beaches after the troop landings, supplies and logistics, evacuation of the troops and Keyes’s alternative plan for forcing the Straits, the Malta Conference to discuss the division of the Mediterranean into Allied zones of operation, and maps and plans. There is also a large amount of material relating to the Royal Commission into the Dardanelles campaign at which Keyes gave evidence.6 Keyes’s wish to carry out an offensive action in the Dardanelles had been stymied but he was soon to get his wish to strike a direct blow against the enemy. Keyes, now a Rear-Admiral, was given a desk job as Director of Plans in the Admiralty in 1917.7 He hated it. He hated anything that kept him from the sea. He did not want to miss a chance to get at the German fleet should it venture out again (Keyes had missed the , the war’s only full-scale engagement involving battleships, as he was in the eastern Mediterranean at the time). Ironically it was this desk job that led to the action that made his name. A fundamental difference of opinion between the Admiralty and Vice-Admiral Bacon of the Patrol over how best to prevent German U-boats from passing through the Dover Straits resulted in Keyes replacing Bacon.8 It was this appointment that led to Keyes’s finest hour. He devised a plan to use blockships to block the mouths of the canals at Zeebrugge and Ostend which German U-boats used to access the North Sea from their Bruges bases. Carried out on St George’s Day 1918 and opening with Keyes’s iconic signal ‘St George for England’, to which Capt. Carpenter on HMS Vindictive replied ‘May we give the dragon’s tail a damn good twist’, Operation ZO was a bold move. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded and Keyes was created a KCB.9 The operation was a partial success at Zeebrugge, but it failed at Ostend.

4 Add. MS. 82452. 5 Add. MSS. 82455-82465. 6 Add. MSS. 82466-82488. 7 Add. MS. 82494. 8 Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers (London, 1979), vol. i, pp. 410-11. 9 Knight Commander, Order of the Bath. The Order of the Bath is England’s second highest order of chivalry.

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Not only did Germany have both bases operational again in a short space of time, but casualties were high.10 Even so, news of the raid ‘electrified’ Britain, as Paul Halpern puts it, and it did succeed in raising morale and the profile of the Navy which was used to working out of the public eye. At Zeebrugge and Ostend the Royal Navy had taken the initiative and carried out an offensive action against heavily defended enemy territory.11 Contained in the Keyes Papers is material covering all aspects of Operation ZO, including papers on planning, preparation and personnel; operational orders, progress reports from the course of the operation, and details of casualties; congratulatory telegrams, maps and plans, and papers on honours awarded. It also contains a large amount of printed material inspired by the operation, including commemorative postage stamps, poetry, publicity brochures for films based on the raid, and guides to the Zeebrugge Museum.12 With the glory of Zeebrugge and Ostend attached to his name Keyes continued his rise up the naval ladder. He was awarded a baronetcy in 1919, and appointed to command the Battle Squadron, including a spell guarding the German fleet at Scapa Flow.13 In 1921 he was promoted Vice-Admiral and that same year became Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff (DCNS) where he became embroiled in a struggle with the newly-created Royal Air Force over control of the Fleet Air Arm (FAA). Who should run the FAA was a subject which had exercised him since the earliest days of naval aviation, and would continue to occupy his thoughts for the rest of his life.14 His tenure as DCNS coincided with the realization that the world economic situation would mean military retrenchment and a consequent accommodation with Britain’s naval rivals. To this end, the Washington Naval Conference was held with, amongst other powers, the United States and Japan and limited the naval power of its signatories. Keyes was also DCNS when the Lausanne Conference formulated a new peace treaty with Turkey, recognising that the assumption of power of Turkish nationalists under Kemal Ataturk had changed the realities of the situation on the ground in the eastern Mediterranean. The Lausanne Conference demilitarized the Dardanelles and allowed free passage for warships in time of peace. Papers relating to both of these major international conferences are included.15 Turkey continued to be one of Keyes’s chief concerns when in 1925 he was appointed C-in-C Mediterranean and was promoted Admiral whilst in post. Under Ataturk, Turkey was growing in strength and could no longer be seen as a defeated power. There were fears of a clash over oil-rich Mosul which the League of Nations had awarded to Iraq, then a British protectorate. It was feared that a resurgent and confident Turkey might attempt to seize the region by force and Keyes, as C-in-C Mediterranean, prepared plans for a naval response should such an event occur. Appreciations of the situation in Turkey, intelligence reports, potential responses to any Turkish attack on Iraq, and Keyes’s plans for a naval assault are included, as are detailed records of fleet exercises that could very easily have turned into crucial training for a war.16 Keyes returned to England in 1929 to assume the position of C-in-C Portsmouth and was appointed Admiral of the Fleet in 1930.17 He retired from the service in 1931 and in 1934 was elected Conservative MP for Portsmouth North, a fitting constituency for a career

10 Add. MS. 82504 D gives the casualties as 176 dead, 412 wounded, and forty-nine missing (of whom thirty- five were believed dead), out of 1780 men who took part. 11 Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers (London, 1979), vol. i, pp. 413-15. 12 Add. MSS. 82499-82507. 13 Add. MS. 82508. 14 Add. MSS. 82517-82519. 15 Add. MS. 82509. Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers (London, 1981), vol. ii, pp. 6-7. 16 Add. MSS. 82510-82512. Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers (London, 1981), vol. ii, pp. 119-20. 17 Add. MS. 82513.

3 eBLJ 2007, Article 5 The Keyes Papers at the British Library sailor. He held his seat until he was elevated to the peerage in 1943, as Baron Keyes of Zeebrugge and of Dover.18 With the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 Belgium maintained its policy of neutrality but requested that an unofficial emissary to the British government be appointed. Keyes was given the role and travelled to Belgium in October 1939, November 1939, and January 1940. In May 1940 Churchill appointed Keyes as his personal liaison to the Belgian monarch, King Leopold III. Keyes was in Belgium when the Germans overran the country and escaped as Belgium surrendered. As a result of his few weeks in Belgium Keyes defended Leopold for the rest of his life. To some, the King surrendered with unseemly haste; French premier Reynaud blamed the Belgian army for the fall of France. Others argued that what resistance the Belgians did put up delayed the German advance just long enough to make the evacuation of possible. Leopold no doubt suffered through the inevitable comparison with his father, King Albert, who had fought in the trenches in World War One. The Keyes Papers contain his diaries from this period, memoranda by Keyes on the Belgian situation, reports of his meetings with King Leopold, texts of telegrams and signals, and maps of the military situation in Belgium.19 As far as Keyes was concerned his age was not an obstacle to playing an active role in World War Two. He cited St Vincent’s and Howe’s successes at a similar age as precedents for his being given a role and doubted ‘either of them possessed such a spare and healthy body’.20 He had been restored to the active list in March 1940 and felt he still had much to offer. Despite being sixty-seven years of age Keyes wanted to lead a special force to attack Trondheim. Germany had seized a number of Norwegian ports in April 1940 but their hold was tenuous until more German forces could reach the area. Keyes felt a quick Allied response could push the Germans out but his plan was rejected. The failure to prevent the German occupation of Norway led to the debates which ultimately resulted in the fall of the Chamberlain government. Keyes played a key role in this when, in the full dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet complete with six rows of medals, he launched a blistering attack on the Government’s handling of the naval war. This attack, coming as it did from a decorated naval hero, had a huge impact.21 Keyes continued to seek a role and peppered Churchill with requests. He attempted to obtain a posting to Dunkirk, but Churchill refused.22 Keyes’s letters to Churchill of the time contain phrases such as ‘for God’s sake put your trust in me’ and ‘let me do this for you’.23 On 30 April 1940 he asked ‘when am I going to be allowed to take a hand in the conduct of the Naval War?’ On 4 July 1940 he asked Churchill whether the country was ‘so flush of people with the experience I possess’ that he could afford to overlook Keyes at such a crucial time.24 Churchill relented and in July 1940 Keyes was appointed Director of Combined Operations (DCO) with a brief to organize and carry out raids on specific targets in German-occupied Europe using specially selected and trained men from all of the services. They were to become known as commandos. It was the type of role Keyes believed he was made for: offensive, effective, direct action.

18 Add. MSS. 82520-82524. 19 Add. MSS. 82449-82450, 82525-82526. The story of Keyes’s Belgian mission and his relationship with the Belgian royal family, which dated back to World War One, is told in a book by his son, Roger Keyes, Outrageous Fortune: The Tragedy of Leopold III of the Belgians (London, 1984). 20 Add. MS. 82380, Keyes to Churchill, 22 Dec. 1940. Add. MS. 82381, Keyes to Churchill, 22 Aug. 1943. Admiral of the Fleet John Jervis, later Earl of St Vincent, defeated the Spanish in 1797, aged sixty-two; Admiral of the Fleet Richard Howe defeated the French in 1794, aged sixty-eight. 21 Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers (London, 1981), vol. iii, pp. 4-7. 22 Ibid., p. 7. 23 Add. MS. 82379, Keyes to Churchill, 17 Apr. 1940, 29 Apr. 1940. 24 Ibid., Keyes to Churchill, 30 Apr. 1940, 4 July 1940.

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However, Keyes soon sought to expand his remit. He envisaged larger scale actions such as Operation Workshop, the capture of Pantelleria, an Italian island sixty miles south west of Sicily. The frustration at seeing his plans ruled out or repeatedly postponed, the obstacles caused by a lack of men and equipment, and inter-service rivalries and competition for equipment resulted in constant tensions. Relations with the Chiefs of Staff broke down and in October 1941 Churchill accepted a Chiefs of Staff proposal to reorganize the planning of combined operations. Keyes was offered what he saw as relegation to an advisory role and when he refused it he was relieved of his duties and replaced by Capt. Louis Mountbatten. The papers include details of Keyes’s appointment, remit, and eventual departure; detailed plans for commando operations; Chiefs of Staff committee minutes and memoranda; memoranda by Keyes proposing operations and commenting on decisions made by the Chiefs of Staff; notes made by Keyes during his tenure as DCO; some reports on operations carried out by commandos under Col. R. E. Laycock; and papers relating to the formation, organization and training of commando units, and the equipment and material required for their operations. Specific operations referred to in detail include Workshop, Claymore (the Lofoten Islands), Yorker (Cagliari), Irrigate (deployment to Freetown, Sierra Leone), and Pilgrim and Puma (both of which were concerned with Gran Canaria).25 After his removal as DCO Keyes was largely ignored. He failed to obtain either a post in the Middle East as an adviser on combined operations or a senior position in Northern Ireland.26 Keyes felt Churchill was ‘shunning [him] as if [he] had the plague’, his ‘only value, apparently, being to induce people to invest in War Savings!’27 This rupture in their relationship hurt Keyes deeply. Their friendship dated back to 1911 when Churchill was the pro-submarine First Sea Lord at the time Keyes was in charge of the submarine service. ‘I certainly never expected such a knock-out blow from you’, he wrote, whilst claiming Churchill had treated him ‘abominably’.28 Keyes still felt he had a role to play and asked ‘How much longer are you going to leave me to eat my heart out in idleness?’ But Churchill was resolute and did ‘not think it likely that any fighting post will be open to an officer now over seventy.’29 Keyes’s pleadings came to nought and he sat out the last years of the war concentrating on his parliamentary duties, making slacking, inefficiency, and absenteeism in the war industries and naval dockyards a particular crusade.30 Once elevated to the peerage in 1943 he continued to use his position to defend the Royal Navy’s control of the Fleet Air Arm against the criticisms of his old adversary Lord Trenchard (who was Keyes’s brother-in- law).31 His last major public duty was a goodwill tour of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in 1944 and 1945. Even on this tour he could not be kept from the sea and he

25 Add. MSS. 82527-82530. 26 Add. MS. 82381, Keyes to Churchill, 16 Oct. 1941; Churchill to Keyes, 17 Oct. 1941, 26 Oct. 1941. 27 Add. MS. 82389, Keyes to Maj.-Gen. Sir Hastings Ismay, 14 Nov. 1941. Add. MS. 82381, Keyes to Churchill, 29 Oct. 1942. 28 Add. MS. 82381, Keyes to Churchill, 8 Aug. 1943, 22 Aug. 1943. 29 Ibid., Keyes to Churchill, 8 Aug. 1943; Churchill to Keyes, 14 Aug. 1943. 30 Add. MS. 82520. 31 Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers (London, 1981), vol. iii, p. 222. Trenchard married Katherine Bowlby, the sister of Keyes’s wife, Eva, in 1920.

5 eBLJ 2007, Article 5 The Keyes Papers at the British Library took part in his last active service, on board the USS Appalachian during the invasion of Leyte in the Philippines.32 Keyes was by now seventy-two and in poor health. He had lost the sight of one eye, following a failed operation to fix a detached retina, he had been accidentally gassed on board the Appalachian, and the long hours flying at altitude without oxygen during his Pacific tour were affecting his heart. He died in his sleep on 26 December 1945. His funeral service was held at Westminster Abbey with six Admirals of the Fleet, a Field Marshal and a General acting as pall-bearers. He was buried in Dover alongside sixty-six of the men who died at Zeebrugge.33 The 206 volumes of the Keyes Papers cover almost his entire career in detail, although the pre-1910 papers are somewhat scant. The major events and positions Keyes held are covered in depth. Papers on Gallipoli, the Dover Patrol, Belgium, and Director of Combined Operations loom large and give a first-hand insight into naval and military tactics and strategy in both world wars. The correspondence sequences in the collection form a veritable Who’s Who of the military and political worlds in the first part of the twentieth century. There is correspondence with Clement Attlee, Stanley Baldwin, Arthur Balfour, Austen and Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill (four volumes of correspondence with Churchill alone), Anthony Eden, and Kings George V and VI. There are important sequences of correspondence with David Beatty, Douglas Haig, John Jellicoe, Louis Mountbatten, and many other senior naval and military figures, Admirals of the Fleet and Generals amongst them. Much of this correspondence is written during and about some of the key events of the twentieth century. The papers also contain smaller amounts of correspondence with foreign leaders, military officers, and diplomats including Ataturk, Foch, Horthy, Mussolini, MacArthur, Nimitz, F. D. Roosevelt, Smuts, and two Kings of the Belgians. Before World War One Keyes made contacts and formed friendships with naval officers in the service of other European powers, some of whom would soon become enemies of the Royal Navy. These letters give a valuable insight into pre-war relations among Europe’s great powers. Some of this correspondence resumed after World War One. By far the greatest part of the correspondence is with Keyes’s wife, Eva, whom he married in April 1906.34 Keyes wrote hundreds of letters to Eva, sometimes writing several letters a day or starting a letter late at night, and adding to it over the course of the following days. He was a devoted husband and saw her as his closest confidante. As a result his letters to her are not only love letters to a wife he missed enormously, often written from thousands of miles away whilst on active service, but are also first-hand sources of information on the major naval, military, and political figures and events of a quarter of a century. Like all MPs Keyes received a bulging postbag of constituency correspondence, and his high profile in the military ensured he received his fair share of letters from both sycophants and those who were less than complimentary. Cards stating ‘well done, Sir. You spoke for England’ were received along with anonymous letters attacking Keyes as a ‘boisterous, out- of-date old gasbag … You are long overdue for a wooden ship enshrouded with a Union Jack and loaded with weights as thick as your head.’35 During World War Two he even received a letter which seemed to ask whether a coup, led by Keyes, might be staged in Britain.36 There is no record of Keyes replying to this potentially treacherous entreaty.

32 Add. MSS. 82531-82534. 33 Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers (London, 1981), vol. iii, pp. 223-6. 34 Add. MSS. 82391-82396. Another sequence of correspondence with Eva Keyes, acquired separately, is at Add. MS. 82580 A. 35 Add. MS. 82446, anonymous letters to Keyes, 27 May 1931, 8 May 1940. 36 Add. MS. 82422, A. M. Hagreen to Keyes, 9 May 1940.

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Nor was Keyes short of letters from would-be inventors and armchair tacticians. His place at the centre of power prompted civilians and ex-military types alike to offer prototypes of torpedoes and submarines, or plans for military operations, in the belief that Keyes could exert his influence to have their ideas carried out. P. H. Edwards (who had served under Keyes in Operation ZO and also happened to be the family solicitor) sent Keyes an ingenious scheme involving a hand-drawn map of Korea which when turned upside down became Schleswig-Holstein, the Koua River became the Kiel Canal, and so on. Edwards even took the precaution of sending the key setting out which German towns were represented by which numbers on the map under separate cover.37 Despite his phenomenally heavy workload Keyes always had time for charities, usually naval, and he rarely turned down invitations to become an honorary, or in some cases more active, official, give a speech, or make a financial contribution. A large amount of this material is contained in the papers.38 The organizations with which Keyes was involved were often high profile, such as the Navy League, but he was just as likely to make some contribution of money or time to a local or non-naval charity. He signed a £1 note for auction for the Theatre Royal, Coatbridge – it raised £15 – and donated to the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals. However there were times when he did have to decline, sometimes quite forcefully, as with a Battersea Sunday School with whom Keyes’s patience ran out after they continually troubled him for donations for three years, despite his telling them that he had no connections with Battersea.39 There were also honours from, and roles in, less obvious organizations. Worshipful companies such as the Grocers and Patternmakers, the Ancient Order of Smilers, even the Mark Twain Society, honoured him. The Honorary Vice-Presidency awarded by the latter put him in the company of Mussolini, Ramsay MacDonald, Marconi, and Amundsen.40 Keyes was an extremely complex character and all his attributes, as well as his failings and foibles, are brought to life in his correspondence and papers. He was a national hero; even Churchill equated him with Nelson at Keyes’s funeral service, as did many lesser known poets and correspondents.41 Yet, because he was in the public eye he received his share of vilification as well. He was a devoted husband and father to five children; the eldest son, Geoffrey, died leading a raid on Rommel’s desert HQ in 1941, and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Keyes often went out of his way to help charitable causes and took a personal interest in the men who served under him and their families, many of whom fell on hard times after World War One. He endeavoured to obtain recognition and honours for those who served and died under him.42 Keyes was a career sailor; he operated in a world where rank and seniority were everything. He respected seniority – he was so desperate to avoid having to criticize his superiors that he did his utmost to avoid giving evidence at the Dardanelles Commission. Yet his respect for seniority had its limits. When he felt he was right and his seniors were wrong he would kick

37 Add. MS. 82417, P. H. Edwards to Keyes, 21 Sept. 1939, 6 Oct. 1939. 38 Add. MSS. 82497, 82539-82543. 39 Add. MSS. 82408, 82413, 82436. 40 Add. MSS. 82406, 82422, 82430, 82435. 41 Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers (London, 1981), vol. iii, p. 226. Keyes’s naval exploits provided a rich seam of inspiration for the nation’s amateur poets. The papers contain many examples of patriotic verse celebrating Zeebrugge, comparing Keyes with Nelson, and proclaiming Britain’s continued ruling of the waves. See Add. MS. 82506, C, J, and R, and Add. MS. 82560. Other examples can be found scattered throughout the General Correspondence sequence, Add. MSS. 82406-82446. 42 Add. MSS. 82482, 82503. Geoffrey Keyes’s story is told in a book by his sister, Elizabeth Keyes, Geoffrey Keyes (London, 1956).

7 eBLJ 2007, Article 5 The Keyes Papers at the British Library against such restrictions as rank. He directly contravened orders on several occasions during World War One by going out to sea having been expressly forbidden to do so.43 Nor was he beyond sending intemperate letters to his superiors. Despite claiming to be devoted to Churchill, Keyes was quick to blame him and his ‘pusillanimous, self-satisfied, short sighted Naval advisers’ for the failure of the Norwegian campaign.44 Churchill occasionally had to put Keyes in his place. ‘I do not think you ought to write me letters of this kind on matters which affect those under whom you are serving … You and your Commandos will have to obey orders like other people’, Churchill wrote.45 On more than one occasion Churchill had to remind Keyes that the conduct of the war took precedence over their long friendship and he would not always be able to accommodate Keyes’s wishes.46 In summary Keyes was a man of action with a taste for adventure. He was always prepared to use his initiative and was impatient to get things done. China, Gallipoli, Zeebrugge, and his ideas for the commandos all bear witness to this. He hated desk jobs, hated the internal politics, hated being on shore away from the action, and hated being sidelined or inactive. His letter to Eva after the cancellation of what would have been a particularly dangerous air raid by seaplanes on the Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven says it all. In it he writes that the Admiralty has ‘something else in view. I only hope that includes me. I am very sick of this inaction.’47 On 10 December 1914, a day before the Cuxhaven raid was due to begin, Keyes wrote to his wife. Aware of the dangers he faced whilst on active service, and the very real risk that he might not survive, he annotated the envelope ‘Eva. Please do not open this until you hear of my death’. He wrote ‘My darling Eva, I don’t quite know why I am writing this – but one never knows one’s luck and one can’t say that one is certain to come back from an enterprise such as the one I hope to take part in on Sunday morning’. He goes on to say that if they ‘are to part company, for a bit, I want to tell you before I go on my long journey how blissfully happy I have been with you’ and urges her to show a ‘gallant front and live for those sweet babas – and the other to come’. He recognizes it is ‘proper and right to be ready to die at such a time and I know you will give me credit for going out very confidently and buoyantly to meet my fate.’48 If one letter can sum Keyes up, it is this one. In it he encapsulates the recurring themes of his long career: the dangers faced by serving seamen, his love for his wife and children, his sense of duty, and the courage with which he carried out those duties.49

43 Paul G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers (London, 1979), vol. i, pp. 2-4, 327. 44 Add. MS. 82379, Keyes to Churchill, 16 Apr. 1940, 29 Apr. 1940. 45 Add. MS. 82380, Churchill to Keyes, 24 Jan. 1941. 46 Add. MS. 82379, Churchill to Keyes, 24 Apr. 1940. Add. MS. 82380, Churchill to Keyes, 4 Oct. 1941, 14 Oct. 1941. 47 Add. MS. 82391, Keyes to Eva Keyes, 11 Dec. 1914. 48 Ibid, Keyes to Eva Keyes, 10 Dec. 1914. 49 Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Charles Keyes and Mrs Josa Young, two of Admiral Keyes’s grandchildren, for permission to quote from the Admiral’s letters.

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