The year 1908 would usher in a momentous and extremely tense period in Anglo-German relations. As far as the public was concerned, the key issue was the naval scare that broke out suddenly and with great intensity in early 1909 over fears that the German navy was secretly accelerating its construction of new dreadnought battleships in order surreptitiously to overtake the Royal Navy in the number of these vessels. This ‘acceleration’ crisis became a major political event in Britain, dividing both the political parties and the cabinet over the veracity of the claims and the best means of responding to them. The Unionist opposition demanded the immediate ordering of eight new dreadnoughts – a demand epitomised by the famous slogan ‘We want eight and we won't wait’ – while the so-called ‘economists’ in the Liberal Cabinet, led by Lloyd George and Churchill, believed that four new vessels would be more than sufficient. Eight would in the end be ordered, albeit via the face-saving formula of four regular dreadnoughts authorised immediately plus four contingent ones to be laid down subsequently ‘if needed’.

The origins of this crisis have long been controversial among historians. It was fashionable, at one stage, to assume that the clamour for new dreadnoughts had been whipped up artificially by the naval lobby in order to reverse several years of reduced spending on new construction. In a well-known phrase, Lloyd George dismissed the information on which the panic was based as little more than ‘contractors’ gossip’. However, more recent research has suggested that the raw intelligence received by the Admiralty from mid-1908 onwards was genuinely troubling both to the Naval Intelligence Department and the Board, and that the demands of the Sea Lords made perfect sense in the context of the material they had received.

Several documents in this chapter illustrate the dynamic of the crisis as well as shining an interesting light on some of the difficulties of interpreting it. Lloyd George's quip about ‘contractor's gossip’ is partly born out in that, as several documents show [108, 113, 114], one of the people to pass information on to the British government was H. H. Mulliner, the managing director of the Coventry Ordnance works.