The stand taken by these two respected naval men had probably been influenced by the Controller of the Navy, Rear-Admiral Arthur Wilson who is alleged to have said, " Underwater weapons they call 'em. I call them underhand, unfair and damned un-English. They'll never be any use in war and I'll tell you why: I'm going to get the First Lord to announce that we intend to treat all submarines as pirate vessels in wartime and that we'll hang all the crews". It also transpired that Sir William White had once taken a journey in the French submarine Nautilus which got stuck in mud and was held fast for some considerable time, prompting all occupants to fear for their lives before the boat was freed and rose to the surface. Fortunately, Admiral Jackie Fisher saw submarines in quite a different light and supported and advanced their cause behind the scenes, resulting in the Admiralty reversing their position declared just three months earlier that they were not going to have anything to do with these "products of a weaker, defensive maritime nation".
Continuing in Captain Bacon's own words, "I knew nothing about submarines; nor did anyone else, so the first thing to do was to sit down and think out what were the difficulties that we were likely to come across, and arrive at methods by which they could be forestalled. The result was rather peculiar; for all the problems that I originally considered to be difficult turned out to be simple, and several of those that appeared to be simple gave, in the end, an infinity of trouble".
Hazard - the base for a bunch of 'pirates'
As soon as the first 'Holland' boat neared completion, Captain Bacon asked for a vessel to be stationed at Barrow as a mother ship, and for the first crews to be selected. HMS Hazard, a former gunboat now fitted as a sea-going tender, was selected by the Admiralty, commissioned and stationed at Barrow. A headquarters named Hazard was no doubt deemed eminently suitable by the Admiralty of the day as the base for a bunch of 'pirates'.
