Malign Neglect? The Collapse of Executive Officers’ Morale

Abstract

The previous chapter looked at the broad management of the executive officer corps of the Royal Navy from the end of the First World War until Admiral Field became First Sea Lord. While some changes would have had little direct impact on the morale of the executive officer corps, the ratings who might have been commissioned would, by not becoming part of the officer corps, have remained unnoticed, and the engineers, while embittered, were financially better off, and no longer in the executive branch anyway. However, the way the changes to the engineering branch were handled was indicative of poor-quality management characterised by the increasing detachment of the Admiralty from the fleet, indeed the whole of the naval service, and in particular, its officer corps. Worse was to come, a mismanaged redundancy programme, a succession of cuts in pay, and disciplinary problems. This chapter looks at them and concludes with a brief ‘Herzberg’ analysis of executive branch officer motivation and by implication their morale at the end of the 1920s.