very early age into the Naval Air
Service; some of them were entered as commissioned officers, and were
paid fourteen shillings a day at an age at which the regular sea service
officer was being paid one shilling and ninepence a day, less threepence
for the naval instructor. It is not to be wondered at that the high
spirits of some of these untrained youths, and their festive behaviour,
exposed them to the criticism of older officers who cared for the high
traditions of the navy. The expansion of the Naval Air Service was too
rapid to admit of that slow maturing process which makes a good sailor.
When, at the end of May 1915, Mr. Winston Churchill vacated his
appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty, he remarked on the rapid
expansion of the service during his period of office. 'At the beginning
of hostilities', he says, 'there were under a hundred officers and six
hundred men. Most of these were transferred from the Navy proper, a
small percentage only being civilians. At present there are over fifteen
hundred officers and eleven thousand men.... We had at the beginning of
the war a total of sixty-four aeroplanes and seaplanes. This of course
represents a very minute proportion of our present numbers, of which all
that I can publicly say is that they total more than one thousand.'

During the first winter of the war a short course in gunnery was
arranged for young officers at the naval gunnery school at Whale Island,
Portsmouth, where they were instructed also in drill, discipline, and
the handling of men. This was a beginning, but it was not enough. The
pioneers of the Naval Air Service had had an uphill task; they had
worked untiringly in the cause of naval aeronautics, to achieve progress
in the new art, and to get recognition for it from the Sea Lords. The
recognition, when it came at last, was overwhelming. The navy claimed
the Royal Naval Air Service as its own, and absorbed it into itself. The
immediate motive for this was disciplinary, but the thing was a
compliment, none the less, to the work of the air service. In the summer
of 1915 the German submarine menace in the Channel became serious, and
the officer in command of the Dover Patrol, who was responsible for the
Straits, knew that for the work to be done from his bases at Dover and
Dunkirk aircraft were essential.

In July the whole question was brought before the Board of Admiralty,
and regulations for the reorganization of the Royal Naval Air Service