Reginald Custance

Draft notes in Winston Churchill's papers (Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time) suggest that in late 1913 Custance, who had been unemployed for six years, was considered for the post of Chief of Naval War Staff. Prince Louis of Battenberg, now First Sea Lord but normally subservient to Churchill's wishes, gave what historian Nicholas Lambert describes as “uncharacteristically fierce resistance” to appointing Custance, his former boss. Instead Doveton Sturdee, a former disciple of Custance, was appointed.^[10]

Lord Sydenham of Combe (4 October 1916) and Custance (9 October 1916) complained in letters to The Times that Churchill's recent statements (Churchill was out of office at the time) that the German High Seas Fleet was effectively blockaded and that surplus forces should be used in offensive operations (similar to the views of naval theorist Julian Corbett) ignored the importance of seeking a decisive victory over the German Fleet. Sturdee also complained in a private memorandum (24 Nov 1916) that Churchill's policy was “the exact reverse of what he advocated when in office and expressed in public speeches”. Historian Christopher Bell thinks this not quite fair – Churchill had advocated risking old, near-obsolete ships in the attack on the Dardanelles but had never suggested weakening Britain's superiority over Germany in the North Sea. In articles (The London Magazine December 1916 and January 1917) and in a Commons speech (21 February 1917) Churchill continued to argue that seeking a major naval victory over Germany was unrealistic but that Germany was effectively blockaded even if such a blockade now took place from bases further away from the enemy than in Napoleonic times.^[11]

• Lambert, Nicholas (2012). Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; 1st Edition. ISBN 0-67406-149-7.
• Bell, Christopher (2012). Churchill and Sea Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19969-357-9.