The opening years of the twentieth century are now a controversial period for historians of the Royal Navy; but this was not always so. In the traditional canon of naval history, as first articulated in scholarly fashion by E. L. Woodward in 1935 and by Arthur Marder in 1940, the story was a straightforward one. The appointment of Rear Admiral Alfred Tirpitz as state secretary at Germany's Imperial Navy Office, leading as it did to the passage of the First and, more especially, the Second German Navy Laws – the latter of which was passed in a blaze of highly revealing and very noisy Anglophobia – alerted both the British people and the nation's naval authorities to the hostility and ambition on the other side of the North Sea. The consequences of this revelation were tremendous. Slowly but surely, as the German navy increased in size and importance, the British Admiralty refocused its gaze away from those places that had previously occupied its attention, such as the dockyards of Brest, Cherbourg, Toulon, Kronstadt, Sevastopol and Vladivostok – the main ports of its traditional rivals, France and Russia – and instead gave serious thought, for the first time, to the build-up that was taking place in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, the principal centres of the new, burgeoning and deeply threatening naval power of the Second Reich. In this shift of emphasis, the seeds of the Anglo-German naval race were sown. Although little changed immediately, this new focus ultimately bore significant fruit. In particular, with the elevation of Admiral Sir John Fisher to the post of First Sea Lord in October 1904, the impetus was created, courtesy of Fisher's forceful and determined personality, for a series of wholesale reforms designed to ready Britain to face down the German challenge. Foremost amongst these was the reorganisation of Britain's naval assets. At that point, the Royal Navy's various fleets and squadrons were scattered across the globe with a view to protecting a diverse collection of imperial interests; but with Germany now identified as the main threat and with the locus of that threat placed directly adjacent to the British Isles, a relocation of British forces that positioned more units closer to the domestic heartland became essential.