ABSTRACT
The First Lord, Albert Alexander, was advised that there were three major candidates for First Sea Lord-Cunningham; his former deputy Jack Tovey, lately C-in-C, Home Fleet and currently C-in-C, Chatham; and Tovey’s former second-in-command, now C-in-C, Home Fleet, Bruce Fraser, well known to Churchill as a very successful Controller and Third Sea Lord. Tovey, a straightforward man, had earned the Prime Minister’s ire and received no further consideration. Churchill also rejected Cunningham on the ostensible grounds that he was still required in the Mediterranean, that he was ‘of the pre-air age’, and that he would be all at sea in the long, tedious and involved meetings of the COS committee.1 Alexander refuted the Prime Minister’s allegations, but the real reason why Churchill ‘did not want Cunningham as his principal naval colleague’ was that Cunningham had argued with him and was suspected of being as brusque and obdurate as Brooke-he would say a firm ‘no’ to the Prime Minister’s hare-brained schemes and brazenly face him down.2
