Memories, by Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher — Reading Companion

A Backward Life

Fisher announces that he will “begin my life backwards and leave my birth and being weaned till the end.” This inversion is the book’s governing structure. Instead of a steady chronological march, the narrative loops and backtracks, mirroring how memory actually works. The editor notes that Fisher cared “little for the past and much for the future,” which explains why the early chapters dwell on his mature career and opinions. Only late in the book does the reader encounter his childhood. This arrangement forces attention on the man’s ideas and actions rather than on a simple life story. The effect is disorienting but intentional: Fisher wants the reader to experience his mind in action, not a tidy biography.

The Spoken Word Preserved

Fisher distrusted the printed word. The editor explains that the book is a compromise between Fisher’s wish for no book at all and the public’s desire for an autobiography. The text was dictated during September 1919 and left largely unamended. Fisher’s voice comes through in short, punchy sentences and sudden exclamations. He describes a nickname for his youngest daughter—“The last straw”—and a rule posted over the mantelpiece that it was “défendu” to kiss her. Such details are not polished anecdotes but raw recollections. The editor has added some chapters from Fisher’s private printed papers and letters to Lord Esher, but the core remains Fisher’s unvarnished talk. This gives the book the feel of a long, energetic monologue.

Recurring Images: Leaks, Pumps, and Fountains

One of the most vivid recurring images in the excerpts is that of water leaking into a ship. Fisher describes the old battleship Ocean, whose timbers opened and shut with the sea, “squirted the water inboard” and kept “many fountains playing in the bottom of the ship.” The crew had to man the chain pumps constantly. This image appears not as a metaphor but as a concrete memory, yet it recurs in different contexts—once when a bishop’s sermon on wandering thoughts is interrupted by the sight of a pump handle overhead. The leaky ship becomes a touchstone for Fisher’s style: immediate, physical, and slightly chaotic. It also hints at the constant labor required to keep a vessel—or a life—afloat.

Digressions on Prayer and Providence

Fisher repeatedly returns to the subject of prayer, often through anecdotes. He recalls a bishop in Zanzibar who gave an extempore sermon on wandering thoughts during prayer, using a pump handle as his text. He also quotes a Norfolk parson who told his congregation that praying for rain was useless while the wind was east. Fisher’s own view is pragmatic: prayer must be “absolutely unselfish,” and he cites Dr. Chalmers’s preferred collect. These digressions are not theological treatises but conversational asides. They reveal a man who thinks through stories, not abstractions. The same impulse leads him to remark on Satan’s appearance in the Book of Job, calling it “the most subtle innuendo I ever came across.” The book’s structure allows such tangents to stand without apology.

Readers should expect a memoir that resists easy navigation. Fisher’s backward chronology and digressive style reward those who accept the book on its own terms—as a dictated record of a forceful mind. The index and chapter headings offer some guidance, but the real pleasure lies in following Fisher’s leaps from a leaky ship to a sleeping child to a theological insight. Approach it as a conversation, not a reference work.

It’s funny how some books feel less like reading and more like sitting with someone who talks in spirals. Lord Fisher’s Memories did that to me—starting at the end, wandering through prayer and spite, held together by sheer personality. I found the same lingering warmth in the companion notes for Memories and Adventures — Reading Notes, almost like an old friend’s voice caught mid-thought.