William Wordsworth Fisher

Admiral Sir William Wordsworth Fisher (26 March 1875 – 24 June 1937) was a Royal Navy officer who captained a battleship at the Battle of Jutland and became Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Arthur Marder wrote that he was "the outstanding admiral of the inter-war period". Naval career Fisher was born at Blatchington in Sussex, the son of historian Herbert William Fisher and his wife Mary Louisa Jackson (1841–1916). He joined the Royal Navy in 1888 and trained in HMS Britannia. As a midshipman he served in , flagship of the Cape of Good Hope and West Africa Squadron, for three years from 1890 to 1893, before joining in the Training Squadron. After examinations and courses, and now a sub-lieutenant, he joined the protected cruiser in the Mediterranean Fleet in January 1896. The ship was a byword for smartness. According to Fisher's biographer "she was remembered as the ship whose stream anchor was kept burnished like polished silver". He left her as a lieutenant with highly appreciative reports from his captains and was selected to qualify in gunnery. He joined the gunnery course, for a first year at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, on 14 September 1898, along with other lieutenants who were likewise to distinguish themselves in later years:, Frank Larken, Tufton Beamish and Ernest Taylor (like Beamish, later also an MP). The second year of the course was at Whale Island and the third and final year on a gunnery school staff, which for Fisher was to be Whale Island. His joined the modern pre-dreadnought battleship , as a gunnery lieutenant in Malta in November 1901. In mid-1903 he was again ashore, on the senior staff of the gunnery school Cambridge at Devonport and this was followed, on 1 January 1904, by an appointment as a senior staff officer at Whale Island. This appointment would normally have led to his becoming first lieutenant of Whale Island but Fisher fell out with Captain Percy Scott, the famous gunnery expert then commanding 'The Island'.