John Frederick Thomas Jane
John Frederick Thomas Jane, known widely as Fred T. Jane, (6 August, 1865 – 8 March, 1916) was a well-known British author, journalist, and illustrator. He is best remembered today for his publication Jane's Fighting Ships.
Life and Career
Jane was born John Frederick Thomas in Richmond, Surrey, on 6 August 1865, the eldest of four sons and three daughters of the Revd John Jane, later vicar of Upottery, Devon, and his wife, Caroline, daughter of the Revd James Frederick Todd, vicar of Liskeard. The family had a nautical ancestry: in the sixteenth century the merchant John Jane sailed with the navigator John Davis to the Arctic; Captain Henry Jane commanded HMS Seahorse during the war of 1739–48.
At Exeter School, Jane demonstrated a liking for practical jokes that was to endure for his lifetime, and also a socially unpopular talent for manufacturing explosives. His father intended him for an army career, but that and a project for farming in the colonies came to nothing; by 1885 he was living hand to mouth in Holborn as an illustrator and journalist.
In August 1889 Jane was commissioned by Pictorial World to cover a month of naval manoeuvres, preceded by an inspection of the combined fleets at Spithead by the German emperor Wilhelm II. Jane was able to sketch nearly one hundred ships, as well as paying off his mess bill by painting decorative panels in his host ship's wardroom. From then onwards, ‘Fred. T. Jane’ became a recognized signature on bold black and white illustrations in a number of books and magazines; so realistic was the picture in the Illustrated London News of the torpedoing of the ironclad Blanco Encalada in the Chilean Revolutionary War of 1891 that a legend grew that Jane had been present at the action.
Aircraft, television, and laser holograms were recognizably foreshadowed in a series of Jane's drawings, ‘Guesses at Futurity’, in the Pall Mall Magazine, 1894–5. Jane became a successful novelist with Blake of the ‘Rattlesnake’ (1895), followed by science-fiction titles The Incubated Girl (1896), To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), and The Violet Flame (1899), which featured an armament with the characteristics of a nuclear weapon. Jane was married twice: first, in 1892, to Alice (c.1870–1908), daughter of Hamilton Beattie; they had a daughter. In 1909 he married Edith Frances Muriel (b. 1882), daughter of Lieutenant Henry Chase Carré RN, and the marriage produced another daughter.
As early as 1882, inspired by the Mediterranean Fleet's bombardment of Alexandria, Jane had conceived the idea of a warship sketchbook, provisionally entitled ‘Ironclads of the world’. This bore fruit in 1898 with the publication of Jane's All the World's Fighting Ships (shortened to Jane's Fighting Ships in 1905), with details of all major surface warships; this was to be used as a ship recognition and intelligence aid by all sides in many future naval conflicts. The edition of 1903 contained an article, ‘Invincible: an ideal warship for the British navy’, by Vittorio Cuniberti, which foreshadowed the main features of the dreadnought class of battleships. In 1909 the first edition was published of what became Jane's All the World's Aircraft. Jane is credited with inventing the rules of a naval war game complete with scale models of warships.
In 1906 Jane stood unsuccessfully as an independent ‘navy before party’ parliamentary candidate for Portsmouth. The years 1908–9 were dramatic: on the look-out for spies, Jane abducted a German who seemed to be acting suspiciously in Portsmouth, and deposited him in the duke of Bedford's animal park at Woburn. The publicity generated by this exploit produced letters denouncing other suspected spies which Jane handed to the War Office, thus assisting what was to become MI5. As a practical joke, he kidnapped by car the socialist MP Victor Grayson, who was due to address a Portsmouth meeting; a similar plan to kidnap Winston Churchill failed when travel arrangements were altered.
To his chagrin, Jane was not appointed to any official position during the First World War, and had to be content with privately supporting naval recruiting and propaganda. Fred T. Jane died of a heart attack following severe influenza at 26 Clarence Esplanade, Southsea, on 8 March 1916, and was buried at Highland Road cemetery, Southsea, two days later. Publications carrying his name still provide authoritative data on the production of military equipment throughout the world. The word ‘Jane’ features in the Collins English Dictionary as a noun indicating completeness and reliability.
Wealth at death £4681 17s. 4d.: probate, 19 June 1916, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
