2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth Read Free

that is, because Spicer-Simson was actually in disgrace. And there was a good reason—several good reasons, in fact—why a trained naval commander had spent the first eight months of the War in a dusty office containing two chairs, two desks piled with papers and litle else, except a stone fireplace without a fire.
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    Born in Tasmania in 1876, Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simson was one of five children. Formerly in the merchant navy, their father Frederick Simson was a dealer in gold sovereigns in India who eventually setded in Le Havre, France, at the age of 31. There he met 18-year-old Dora Spicer, daughter of a visiting English clergyman,↓ and on marrying changed his name to Spicer-Simson.
    ≡ William Webb Spicer, the rector of Itchen Abbas, near Winchester.
    In 1874 they moved to Tasmania, having some family there, and ran a sheep farm for five years. Dora didn’t care for the colonial life, however, and in 1879 they returned to France. The children were sent to schools in England. The eldest, Theodore, became an artist, moving between France and the United States. The youngest, Noel, eventually joined the British Army.
    Geoffrey Spicer-Simson entered the Royal Navy at the age of 14, embarking on what for a considerable time would be a disastrous career. This was partly due to the eccentricities of his character. Boastful and vainglorious, by the time war was declared he was well known throughout the officer corps. They generally avoided him. One reason for this was that he took every opportunity to show off his arms and upper torso, which were heavily tattooed with depictions of snakes and butterflies. He liked to brag, too, about his individual bravery in many dangerous adventures. Recounted with a distant, rhapsodic look, most of these tales were lies.
    An expert on every subject (even in the presence of genuine experts), Spicer also enjoyed telling jokes (nobody laughed at them) and singing (he was invariably off-key). It is not surprising that his fellow officers thought of him as at best peculiar, at worst downright dangerous. It didn’t help that he spoke in a curious manner. Nor that he tended to swagger and throw his weight around. In his groundbreaking history The Great War in Africa (1987), Byron Farwell describes Spicer as ‘a large, muscular, round-shouldered man with thin, close-cropped hair, a Vandyke beard, and light grey eyes, he affected a nasal drawl…He indulged in a proclivity for browbeating waiters and others serving on lower rungs of life than his own.’
    Spicer had always wanted to be a hero. After joining the training ship Britannia in 1890 as a cadet, he advanced some way through the ranks, serving in the Gambia and on the China Station, where he made the first hydrographic survey of the Yangtse River. But a series of bumbling errors and catastrophic misjudgements had left him stuck in the naval hierarchy, the oldest lieutenant commander in the Navy.
    There was, for example, that time during the Channel manoeuvres of 1905 when he suggested it would be a good idea for two destroyers to drag a line strung from one to the other in a periscope-hunting exercise. He nearly sank a submarine. Or there was the time when, in an exercise intended to test the defences of Portsmouth Harbour, he drove his ship on to a nearby beach. He was court-martialled for that.
    He was also court-martialled for sinking a Liberty Boat in a collision, after smashing his destroyer into it. Someone was killed. The incident was reported in the local papers. Lieutenant Commander Spicer-Simson had something of a reputation for disaster.
    In August 1914, at the start of the War, Spicer was put in charge of a coastal flotilla consisting of two gunboats and six boarding tugs operating out of Ramsgate. He felt confident enough of the anchorage of his gunboats to come onshore and entertain his wife and some lady friends in a hotel. He could see HMS Niger , one of the ships in question, well enough from the window, could he