“Far removed from the stereotypical image of the crimson-faced military authority figure of the day, he was emollient, cultivated and charming, with a lifelong passion for sailing in small boats — and a penchant for his hobby as a metaphor.”

By Christopher Sandford

ONE-TIME Royal Navy admiral, prolific writer and sometime politician, Sir William Milbourne James, GCB (1881-1973) ought to be to be better remembered. Sadly, few today have ever heard the name. A century later, however, his many feats continue to astound.

James was executive officer to the legendary naval intelligence master William Reginald “Blinker” Hall. He ran Britain’s secretive Great War code breaking operation where he had a hand in decrypting the infamous Zimmerman Telegram, a coup which proved instrumental in bringing the United States into the First World War. A generation later, James helped save nearly 200,000 Allied troops in France from capture by the Germans, an accomplishment exceeded in its importance only by the Dunkirk evacuation. Along the way, he became an acclaimed author and Tory MP, a tireless charity organizer and fundraiser.

Yet despite all of this, he remains unknown to most.

Perhaps most surprisingly, to his contemporaries — both military and civilian alike — James was also noteworthy for his appearance in a famous 19^th century portrait. The eminent pre-Raphaelite artist and James’s own grandfather, John Everett Millais, painted a picture of a rosy-cheeked, five-year-old William clad in a ruffled shirt and velvet suit and gazing dreamily upward at a soap bubble.

Nothing more might have been heard of the painting until it was sold to the proprietor of the-then popular weekly magazine The Illustrated London News, who licensed the copyright for £2,200 (which translates to roughly £90,000, or $112,000 today) to the Pears soap company. The firm in turn enthusiastically used it to promote their wares.

As James himself was later to ruefully observe of his childhood: ‘The life of a small boy whose portrait is on nearly every hoarding in the country, in nearly every theatre and station lavatory, and on vast numbers of postcards, is unlikely to be a bed of roses. Mine certainly was not.’

The work earned James the unlikely and lifelong nickname “Bubbles,” which, much to the admiral’s credit, he took in good spirit. Indeed, it was a measure of James’s popularity, and for that matter his success as a rising young officer in the navy, that he could simultaneously be known as Bubbles while still commanding the unerring respect of his subordinates.

Far removed from the stereotypical image of the crimson-faced military authority figure of the day, he was emollient, cultivated and charming, with a lifelong passion for sailing in small boats — and a penchant for his hobby as a metaphor.

Before coming into the orbit of Blinker Hall and the intelligence world as a whole, he served as executive officer aboard the battlecruiser HMS Queen Mary. An administrative snafu saw him transferred from the ship two months before the Battle of Jutland, where the vessel went down with all 1,266 save for 19 ratings who miraculously survived to be picked up by British ships, and two others rescued by their German attackers.

In a second, equally providential close call of the sort no writer of fiction would dare contrive, James went on to decline a commission as commander of the cruiser HMS Defence in order to take up a top-secret position at the Admiralty in London’s Whitehall. Defence, too, was sunk at Jutland, with the loss of all 903 souls aboard.

From May 1917, James, though notionally under Hall’s command, was in effective control of what was known in official circles merely as OB (Old Building) 40, the cryptography department concerned with cracking the German military and diplomatic codes.

Colloquially called “Room 40,” in reality it was a maze of interconnecting “cubby-holes, dens and barrack-like typing pools” of various shapes and sizes. At peak capacity it employed some 800 wireless operators and 90 other technical specialists.

As with their spiritual successors at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, the staff of Room 40 was a distinctly mixed crew. There was, for instance, a “siren-voiced” Presbyterian minister and biblical authority-tuned-codebreaker named William Montgomery; the more diffident Nigel de Grey, an Eton-educated book editor so mild-mannered he was popularly known as ‘the dormouse’ but who liked nothing better than to “casually deconstruct” seemingly impossible ciphers for his own relaxation; Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, a classics scholar and papyrologist who once absentmindedly forgot to invite two of his brothers to his own wedding, and who was said to have done some of his best wartime work while lying in the bathtub he had installed in his Admiralty office; and Alastair Denniston, a former Scottish Olympic field-hockey player and a world-renowned expert on German literature who would still be working as a British intelligence analyst in the next world war.

Surveying this collection of British eccentrics, mathematicians, linguists, chess champions, anthropologists and crossword fanatics who filled out the ranks of his new posting, James would later observe: “Entering the room for the first time was a bewildering experience. Around me were a number of civilians and fellow Navy officers all talking in a strange language and doing strange things.”

Essentially, James’s superlatively important role was that of translating the raw data his subordinates had successfully extracted from intercepted German signals, and then to convey this as a form of action (or sometimes inaction) to be taken by the various commanders of the British fleet on the high seas. The delicate trick was of course to use the decrypted material to save Allied lives, but not to over-use the information so as to arouse the enemy’s suspicions. It is surely a tribute to James’s judgement in the matter that the Germans themselves never seriously considered that their system of codes had been compromised, a misapprehension on their part that would come to be echoed by the successful use of the Enigma machine by the pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing and others a generation later at Bletchley.

One of James’s singular accomplishments in Room 40 wasn’t some act of brilliant spycraft per se. Rather it was his devising of new and vital procedures governing just how secret intelligence was to be analyzed and passed along, something sorely needed in the Admiralty and throughout the upper echelons of the British war effort at the time.

On assuming executive control under Hall, James was shocked to discover that the naval brass often sent freshly decrypted enemy signals directly to individual seaborne frontline commanders most affected. Remarkably, little or no attempt was made to flesh out the material into any broader operational context before passing it down the chain of command. This same tactic of transmitting raw information, all too often in the form of a few disconnected words which offered little or nothing of practical value to the recipient, had led to distressing results.

In one such case, the boffins in Room 40 had been able to accurately deduce the course of the German High Seas Fleet on the eve of Jutland. Tragically, the information reached Admiral John Jellicoe, the British Grand Fleet commander in the next day’s engagement, in a wholly incomprehensible, stream-of-consciousness format. In this case, the data, which already lacked clarity and precision, was further muddled after hours of intense impromptu parsing by Jellicoe’s own staff.

In 1917, James put a stop to the practice of transmitting such signals, characterizing them as being “as much a hindrance as an asset” to their recipients, insisting that all outgoing traffic be in the form of “a clear and instantly intelligible report, with all pertinent contextual information given.”

Jutland might well have ended more decisively for the Allies, with several thousand lives conceivably saved, had James been in a position to impose his reforms on the endlessly creative but sometimes chaotic operations of Room 40 even a few months earlier than he did.

Perhaps Room 40’s greatest single coup under James was to intercept, contextualize and rapidly disseminate German signals traffic with the salient technical details of their U-boat Kapersnest — or “Pirate’s Lair” — based around the captured Belgian coastal towns of Ostend, Blankenberghe and Zeebrugge.

“None of these redoubts [were] natural ports,” James noted. “Although their mischief-making potential [as] naval bases [and] havens, capable of inflicting material loss on our side, and securing propaganda gains on the other” was “significant.”

James was correct, so much so that early in 1918 the Admiralty began to devise an audacious plan to send a convoy under cover of darkness across the English Channel to knock the enemy’s Belgian coast ports out of the war.

Under the plan, one contingent would break off to attack the enemy defenses at Ostend and the other continue on to Zeebrugge with the intention of sinking three concrete-filled blockships at the narrow entrance to the harbour mouth, thus preventing any further U-boats from leaving it to attack British shipping in the Channel.

Military historians are divided to this day as to whether the principal ensuing raid of April 23, 1918 was a measurable tactical success, or, perhaps, more an act of undoubted ingenuity and courage on the raiders’ part that, much like the RAF’s Operation Chastise or Dambusters Raid that followed it 25 years later, could best be counted a sort of spectacular conjuring trick.

What no one doubted was the drive and efficiency of James’s enterprise in translating raw enemy intelligence intercepts into clearly intelligible prose, nor the wisdom of his resulting recommendations on the merits of the actual attack on the U-boat lair that transpired, an assault that, whatever else, greatly enhanced German respect for British war-making capabilities and significantly contributed to the enemy fleet’s disinclination to again venture out in appreciable numbers before their nation’s surrender just over six months later.

Even before these events, James and his subordinates at Room 40 had a far more seismic impact on the outcome of the war.

In January of 1917, the unit intercepted and decrypted the infamous Zimmerman Telegram, so named after the German foreign minister who had dispatched it to Heinrich von Eckardt, his country’s ambassador to Mexico. The explosive cable informed Eckardt that if the United States should enter the war on the Allied side, he was to promptly begin negotiations with the Mexican government, who would be encouraged to “recover” a large portion of their former “purloined territories” in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Thanks to Room 40, the full text of the note was published to some incredulity in the American press on March 1, 1917. While some of the country’s more isolationist groups dismissed it as a British-made fake, others considered it the last nail in the coffin of U.S. neutrality.

Zimmerman himself soon settled the issue of the telegram’s authenticity when, whether in a case of a Teutonic blunder or one of laudable candour, he admitted at a press conference in Berlin two days after the wire’s publication, “I cannot deny it. It is true.”

The United States joined the war against Germany just five weeks later on April 6, 1917. President Wilson, who had only recently won re-election on a pledge to keep America out of the fighting in Europe, informed Congress and the nation of his intention to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Remarkably, this was far from William James’s final service to his country.

He went back to sea in 1932, at the age of 50, commanding the battlecruiser group led by the ill-fated HMS Hood. Later, he’d be appointed a Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty and Commander-in-Chief of Britain’s principal naval base at Portsmouth.

In so far as there were heroes of the wholesale Allied rout at Dunkirk in late May and early June 1940, James was conspicuously among them.

As the scale of the growing calamity became known, May 26 was declared a national day of prayer in Britain. The King and royal family attended a solemn service to that end in Westminster Abbey.

James himself was unavailable for any of it, having sailed post-haste first to the inferno of Dunkirk before moving his centre of operations 200 miles further west along the French coast to Le Havre. There, thanks to a supreme feat of logistics under constant enemy fire, some 190,000 further British and French troops were successfully evacuated just before the jaws of the Wehrmacht snapped shut around them.

The contemporaneous letter to James by the Chief of the General Staff, Sir John Dill, perhaps best expresses the true debt the Allied side owed him for its continued ability to put men in the field in future campaigns against the Axis:

“I feel that I must write to you personally to let you know how immensely we in the Army admire and appreciate the immense and gallant efforts made by you and all those under your command to rescue our troops from their dangerous position in and about Havre,” wrote Dill. “That you managed to save so many under the conditions prevailing is little short of miraculous. If you can find any way of expressing my gratitude and that of the Army to the officers and ratings under your command I would be most grateful if you would do so.”

William James retired from active duty in 1944, by which time he was already serving as the elected Conservative member of parliament for Portsmouth North. He went on to write a dozen well-received books, including an edited collection of his celebrated grandfather’s letters that righted a longstanding injustice to his grandmother Effie Gray (whose earlier marriage to the art critic John Ruskin he was able to prove had been annulled due to non-consummation), and was active in maritime charities.

James died, full of honours, in August 1973, at the age of 91. Having been born in an era when Britain could still dispatch gunships to quell disturbances in the most far-flung outposts of her empire, he had lived long enough to see a time of lost certainties and swingeing defence cuts that had reduced Britain’s navy, once the envy of the world, to sadly Ruritanian levels.

Another quite important military figure, Field Marshal Montgomery, once told me in terms that were unusually striking coming from one generally so sparing of praise.

“Getting the troops out at Le Havre mattered as much as the escape at Dunkirk,” said Monty. “And obviously you cannot think about that whole programme without thinking about William James. I am not sure that sufficient men could ever have returned home without him. It could rightly be said of him that he was one of those who helped Britain to continue the war against the Germans, and those of us who knew the facts of the matter never forgot it.”

Montgomery summed up his praise of James succinctly and with some emphasis: “Plainly stated, Admiral James was a hero.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christopher Sandford is the author of many books, among them Zeebrugge: The Greatest Raid of All (Casemate, 2018). The story celebrates the iconic British seaborne action of April 1918 in which the author’s ancestor, Richard Sandford, Royal Navy, won the VC. His most recent publication is 1964: The Year the Swinging Sixties Began (The History Press).