The Officers’ Nadir and the Inflection

Abstract

While this chapter’s title draws on astronomical terminology, the affairs of men lack the precision of the stars in the heavens. There was no one single point that marked the nadir and inflection (or turning point) for the officer corps. Roskill takes it as being marked by the mutiny at Invergordon, but, as will be seen, some aspects were improving before it. While the mutiny and the earlier Lucia mutiny are reasonable markers of the navy’s lowest point between the two World Wars, some matters continued to worsen after it; the publication of the 1932 Naval Estimates also might reasonably be taken as the lowest point and inflection as the accompanying statement to parliament included some long overdue reforms.