David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty

There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.

David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty (17 January 1871 – 11 March 1936) was an admiral in the Royal Navy. From 1914 onwards he commanded the British battle cruiser fleet stationed at Scapa Flow as a component of the British Grand Fleet.

Quotes

• A white gunboat, seeing our first advance, had hurried up the river in the hopes of being of some assistance. From the crow's nest its commander, Beatty, watched the whole event with breathless interest. Many years passed before I met this officer or knew that he had witnessed our gallop. When we met, I was First Lord of the Admiralty and he the youngest Admiral in the Royal Navy. "What did it look like?" I asked him. "What was your prevailing impression?" "It looked," said Admiral Beatty, "like plum duff: brown currants scattered about in a great deal of suet."
  • His view of the Battle of Omdurman (2 September 1898), as quoted in Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930) ch. 15

• There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.
  • On the British battlecruiser losses in the early portion of the Battle of Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916), as quoted in Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (2005) p. 120