urces. They would all
have died to save England, but they held that she was to be saved in the
old way, on the sea. One gallant and distinguished admiral, when he
first saw the _Mayfly_, said, 'It is the work of a lunatic'. The
consequences of the failure were soon apparent. The president of the
court of inquiry recommended to the First Sea Lord (Sir A. K. Wilson)
that the policy of naval airship construction should, for the time, be
abandoned. At a conference held on the 25th of January 1912, in the
First Sea Lord's room at the Admiralty, it was decided, in accordance
with this recommendation, that the airship experiments should be
discontinued. Moreover, the special section, the nucleus of a naval air
service, was, by the decision of the Admiralty, broken up, and Captain
Sueter and his officers were returned to general service. When the
construction of rigid airships was at last taken up again early in 1914,
they were too late for the market; the heavy demands of the war delayed
their completion, and no British rigid airship was in use at the time of
the battle of Jutland.

It is to the credit of the pioneers of the Naval Air Service that when
they were faced with this disaster, after years of fruitless effort,
they did not lose heart or hope, but held on their course. Time was on
their side. In the later autumn of 1911 the Committee of Imperial
Defence, as shall be explained in the next chapter, appointed a
technical sub-committee to give advice on the measures which should be
taken to secure for the country an efficient aerial service. On the 5th
of February 1912 Captain Sueter gave evidence to this body of experts,
and sketched in broad outline his ideas for the development of a naval
air service. Airships and aeroplanes, he said, were both required, and
neither of them should be developed at the expense of the other. An
airship had the great advantage that she could carry long-distance
wireless apparatus, and could send or receive a message over a space of
three hundred miles. She could stop her engines and drift over suspected
places, for the detection of submarines and mines. The seaplane, he
maintained, should also be developed, and he saw no insuperable
difficulties in devising a machine that should be able to alight on
either water or land and to rise again into the air from either. 'I
think you have got a certain amount of intellect', he said, 'in the Navy
to do it, and I think you have got a certain amount