From orphan of the Empire to Admiral of the Fleet
Discrimination can take many forms. Surprising as it may seem, children of British parents born in Ceylon during colonial times were not looked upon with favour by Britons born in the British Isles.
Portrait of an Admiral: Sir John Fisher (Pic courtesy berryhillsturgeon.com)
Even though they had no ‘native’ genes, the fact that these children were born in such a distant and culturally alien land was enough for them to be regarded as ‘half-caste’.
Possibly the most famous example of these unfortunate children of Empire – although he did make it to the highest military echelon in Britain – was First Sea Lord John (‘Jacky’) Fisher.
Recently fate landed in my lap a copy of Jan Morris’ Fisher’s Face: or, Getting to Know the Admiral (London, 1995).
It’s an intimate portrait of the maverick mariner, who was born in Ceylon, probably in Colombo, but definitely spent his early years at his father’s estates, Wavendon at Ramboda and Dambagastalawa at Kotmale, during the coffee boom.
“The whole placed swarmed with wildlife – monkeys, tortoises, deer, leopards, jackals, elephants, cranes, parakeets,” Morris comments.
“The cicadas were deafening in the afternoon. Glow-worms flew about in showers, butterflies in multitudes, fruit-bats stank in the woods. It was not an easy place to raise a family.”
Indeed it wasn’t. John Arbuthnot Fisher, born on January 25, 1841, was the eldest of eleven children, but just seven survived infancy.
His father was Captain William Fisher of the 78th Highlanders, descendant of a line of rectors in the Church of England.
He arrived in Ceylon as an ensign, was promoted to the rank of captain, and became aide-de-camp to Governor Sir Robert John Wilmot-Horton (1831-1837) and then General Officer Commanding Ceylon, General Sir Robert Arbuthnot (1839-1841).
Captain Fisher married Sophie Lambe, who, according to the Colombo Observer, January 19, 1907, “was keeping house for her brother F. Lambe., of the firm of Lambe, Reynals & Co. and an acknowledged belle in the limited society of Colombo of the time”.
She was the daughter of vintner Alfred Lambe of classy New Bond Street, London, and the granddaughter of John Boydell, a publisher noted for his reproductions of engravings, who became Lord Mayor of London in 1790.
He was responsible for an extensive Shakespeare venture: the establishment of a gallery, the publication of an illustrated edition of the plays, and the release of a folio of prints.
John Fisher was obsequiously given the middle name Arbuthnot: let’s hope Sir Robert was flattered. It happened once again.
William Fisher’s four deceased children are mentioned in his inscription, one being Wilmot Fisher: “Also to the memory of Frederic William Fisher and Wilmot Fisher, who died at Wavendon Estate, Ramboddee, and are buried in the old churchyard of this place.
And of Catherine Emily Fisher and Kate Fisher, who died and were buried at Doombegastalave Estate, all infant children of the above and his wife Sophy [sic] Fisher”.
J. Penry Lewis provides invaluable biographical information on those colonists who died on the Island in List of Inscriptions on Tombstones and Monuments in Ceylon (1913).
One example in William Fisher’s “Serial No. 1387” is from the Colombo Observer, May 7, 1866: “He was a great favourite with Sir Robert Wilmot-Horton, and a very active, energetic hunter and sportsman in his early days.”
What Lewis does not reveal is that in 1834, while hunting elk, Fisher ‘discovered’ Horton Plains, which he unquestioningly named after the governor.
“When coffee planting became the rage,” Lewis quotes the Colombo Observer, “Capt. Fisher sold out of the Army in 1847 and became a proprietary coffee planter, and was well-known in connection with Wavendon Estate at Ramboda, Dambagastalawa in Kotmale, and Raglan [named after Lord Raglan for what reason I am unsure] in Kurunegala.”
However, supporting the swelling Fisher family became such a challenge that in 1847, John, then just six, was sent to live with his maternal grandfather, Alfred Lambe, in London.
This impacted on his relationship with his mother, Sophie. He never saw her again, resisting her suggestion to meet in London in 1870 (he didn’t return to Ceylon until he was in his sixties). “I don’t see why I should as I haven’t the slightest recollection of her,” he wrote his wife Katherine.
Sophie was by then a widow for at 15, John’s father “was killed on the spot by a fall from his horse at Ettampittia [Ettampitiya], near Badulla, May 5th, 1866, aged 52 years” states the inscription on Fisher’s gravestone in the cemetery of Holy Trinity Church, Nuwara Eliya.
“His poor wife was waiting at Ampitia [Ettampitiya] for him; she had to go to fetch his corpse home . . . and Fisher’s case is an instructive one . . . after years of toil he had at last received, or rather was about to receive, a fair increase to his salary.” (After the coffee crash he became a cop and eventually Chief Superintendent of Police.)
Nigel Nicolson sums up John Fisher and his remarkable re-equipping of the Royal Navy admirably – no pun intended – in his review of Morris’ book (New York Times, June 11, 1995): “When Fisher died in 1920, people felt they were mourning the greatest British admiral since Nelson, but today he is so far forgotten that there is no memorial to him anywhere except on his gravestone.
He commanded no fleet in action, experienced only two minor battles as a junior officer, and looked more like a Japanese deckhand than an admiral.
Yet in his lifetime Jacky Fisher was the hero of heroes, the toast of his sailors and the favourite of his King; for it was he who transformed the Royal Navy from sail to steam, from wood to iron, and turned it into the most formidable floating arsenal the world had ever known, just in time to dominate the German Navy in World War I.”
Such was the best of the strange-faced and the almost Napoleonic-short Fisher, whose informative years had been shaped by the overwhelming beauty, grandeur and abundance of Ramboda.
But naturally he had his faults as Morris reveals. “He certainly had no compunction in sacking people, humiliating them, slandering them and plotting behind their backs.”
He also claimed credit for the achievements of others, such as the design of the battleship Dreadnought.
Morris believes that Jacky Fisher’s merits outweighed his manifold faults, but not by much. “On the whole,” she writes, “I would rather love him than be him.”
She loves him for his defiance of authority, his gaiety, his sympathy with his sailors (for instance, by abolishing flogging as a punishment), his love of women, his capacity for hard work, his inventiveness, his dedication and the pleasure that he took in dancing, which was so great that he had the quarterdeck of his flagship re-laid as a dance floor.
“He succeeded because he could be very charming when he wished, and was so professional a sailor,” Nicolson comments.
“While most of his contemporaries hankered for the days of sail, as cavalrymen regretted the advent of tanks, Fisher loved the new technology.
He made himself an expert in ship construction, oil-fueled engines, torpedoes, submarines (which many old admirals considered “unfair”), and eventually radio and naval aviation, and he created a modern fleet that became a symbol of Britain’s colossal self-esteem in the first years of this century.”
Fisher foresaw the war with Germany, and anticipated a ‘super-Trafalgar’ in the North Sea, although the battle of Jutland in 1916 was nothing like as dramatic. Before Jutland he had quarrelled with Winston Churchill.
“Having initially approved the plan to cut Turkey off from its European allies by taking over the Dardanelles and the Bosporus,” Nicolson explains, “Fisher refused to support it when things went wrong, and then resigned, leaving Churchill, his closest friend, to take the blame.
It was an act of gross disloyalty, and a disgraceful conclusion to Fisher’s career.”
Apart from his naval achievements, Morris mentions his coinage of Nelsonian-type phrases such as “Do right and damn the odds”, “Stagnation is the curse of life”, “The best is the cheapest”, “Mad things come off’, “Any fool can obey orders’, and my favourite, “History is a record of exploded ideas”.
Furthermore, in 1917 he was the first to use the initialism OMG (“O my God”), defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “Expressing astonishment, excitement, embarrassment, etc”; and today frequently used in the language of electronic communication. Fisher wrote: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis – O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) – Shower it on the Admiralty!!”
The lad from Ramboda, the orphan of the Empire who became Admiral of the Fleet, The Right Honorable the Lord Fisher, GCB, OM, GCVO, died on July 1, 1920, aged 79, and was given a national funeral.
His coffin was drawn on a gun-carriage through the streets of London to Westminster Abbey and the pall-bearers consisted of no less than six admirals.