The Officers of the Royal Navy in the 1920s

Abstract

The 1920s were economically and socially a bleak period in British history.¹ A short post-war economic boom was followed by a downturn and significant government cutbacks. After the ‘war to end wars’ not only did the government not see a need for a large navy, it could not afford one. The 1920s saw major cuts both in its number of ships, of infrastructure (e.g. the closure of the not-long-completed dockyard at Rosyth²) and personnel, the ‘Geddes’ axe’ named for the man tasked with being the executioner.³ The personnel reductions will be described in detail in the next chapter as will the almost continuous series of pay cuts that, uniquely, the naval officer corps was subject to through the 1920s and into the 1930s. Taken together these were the major proximate cause of the decline in officer morale. This chapter looks at the broader policy issues, including commissioning from the lower deck, that followed in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and into the 1920s.