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Fred T. Jane

John Frederick Thomas Jane, who preferred to be known as Fred T. Jane, was the founder of what is now IHS Jane's. His birthplace is variously given as Honiton in Devon or Richmond, with a birth year variously reported as either 1865 or 1870. He trained as an artist; later he went on to be a naval authority, journalist, and novelist. Fred T. Jane was author of "The Port Guard-Ship," "All the World's Fighting Ships " (Naval Annual), "The Torpedo in Peace and War"; inventor of the Jane Naval War Game (Naval Kriegspiel), etc. etc. He was naval correspondent for the Engineer, the Scientific American, and the Standard. He married twice, first in 1892 to Alice Beattie and, secondly in 1909 to Edith Frances Muriel Carr.

His family moved to St Austell, Cornwall, at the age of one after his father, John Jane, became curate. When Jane was nine his father was appointed to the Parish of Bedford Chapel in the center of Exeter and Jane attended Exeter School. Jane was fascinated with maritime matters from an early age and as a teenager conscripted his brother and two sisters to play out complicated Naval maneuvers at the vicarage and on the village pond. Jane was never top of his class but did show a keen interest in rugby and chemistry, although he was banned from the chemistry lab when his teachers discovered that his only real interest in the subject was furthering his knowledge of making explosives.

Pursuing his desire to be a journalist and illustrator, Jane moved to London at the age of 20. His first residence there was an unsavory flat in the, at that time, muddy Greys Inn Road in Holborn. Jane fitted his attic with partitions to represent a ship. It was from here that he produced his first commission for the Illustrated London News. Jane used his experience of the area to write his novel "The Incubated Girl" and various other social articles.

In 1890 Jane experienced the sea for the first time when he joined HMS Northampton to report on naval exercises. He used this voyage to produce a perfect pictorial account of the Northampton's cruise from Torbay to the Azores. The unique aspect of Jane's drawings was that his ships appeared to lie in the water as ships really do, heeling slightly over. It was from this voyage that Jane produced his first published ship sketch, which was reproduced in the July 1890 edition of Pictorial World. Jane was commissioned by Pictorial World to cover naval maneuvers and an inspection of the combined fleets at Spithead by the German emperor Wilhelm II. Jane was able to sketch nearly 100 ships.

He was an accomplished illustrator. "Hartmann the Anarchist: Or, The Doom of the Great City" by Edward Douglas Fawcett was published in 1892, with seventeen Full-Page and several smaller illustrations by Fred. T. Jane. Originally published when Edward Douglas Fawcett was 16 years old, Fawcett's imagination creates "The Attila" from a wondrous new form of lighter-than-air metal, canvas and ships' rigging and has it piloted by Rudolph Hartmann, one of the most fiendish villains in literary history, raining pitiless death and destruction from the skies on Parliament, St Pauls and the City. Some two decades later, Fawcett's apocalyptic vision nearly came true when German zeppelins bombed London. George Griffith's 1893 book "The Angel of the Revolution" has been described as: "A lurid mix of Jules Verne's futuristic air warfare fantasies, utopian vision, and war invasion literature." The internal illustrations are by Fred T Jane - best known for Jane's Fighting Ships.

He also became a successful novelist, specializing in science fantasies reminiscent of the work of Jules Verne, including Blake the Rattlesnake (1895), The Incubated Girl (1896), To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), and The Violet Flame (1899). In 1895 Jane's first novel, Blake of the "Rattlesnake": Or the Man Who Saved England, a Story of Torpedo Warfare in 189-, was published, drawing on his experiences from the Northampton. It was written as a wake up call for the Royal Navy who Jane saw as being slow to adapt to modern naval technology. The Port Guard Ship (1900) is a more down-to-earth tale of navy life; it was followed by Ever Mohun (1901), The Ought-to-Go (1907), and A Royal Blue Jacket (1908), in which Prince Arthur of Devon, the King's youngest son and an honorary naval lieutenant, finds that Princess Margaret of Texxe Lipstadt will have nothing to do with him unless he proves himself a man, that is, a real sailor; he enlists incognito as an ordinary seaman.

In 1899 his novel entitled "The Violet Flame" featured an armament with the characteristics of a nuclear weapon. One review stated "This is a strange and weird tale of a general upheaval about to take place, and culminating in the destruction of the whole human race, except the hero and heroine, who are left behind to start anew the story of Adam and Eve. In spite of the dramatic ending, the book is full of modern lite and humor, and the interest centers in the city of London, in the first years of the coming century. Narratives of this kind have been frequently attempted with varied success, but we must admit that Mr. Fred. T. Jane's text and illustrations (for the author is also the artist) are far ahead of their predecessors. The book is essentially original and thrilling from beginning to end. The cover is exquisite in tone and' design."

An avid miniatures wargamer, Jane devised a naval wargame which was adopted for training the officers of navies worldwide. Fred Jane, pioneer of the series of reference books on military weapons data, created the “Naval Wargame” which was published in 1903 as a military tool. It seems this game had been in limited circulation for some time previously. According to one account "The first publication detailed rules for naval battles that required very detailed ship profiles. Data on only four ships were included with the game, and customers were soon clamoring for more. A game supplement with the needed profiles for all British ships soon followed. Still, playing a wargame between British ships was a little like kissing one’s sister. His next offering provided the needed data for the entire German navy. There was an uproar in the press — “The Germans are our friends”; “How dare he imply our navies may someday fight!” To avoid singling out any one nation, Fred Jane next published Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships. So the entire Jane group that has contributed so much to the reference sections of libraries and to the British balance of payments started with a wargame."

Jane first published All the World's Fighting Ships in February 1898 and sold 1000 copies within the first few days. It served as a supplement to the wargame he had designed. The book identified the warships operated by each country, their armaments, and other details. This was to be used as a ship recognition and intelligence aid by all sides in many future naval conflicts.

The third volume of Jane's cosmopolitan naval annual,' All the World's Fighting Ships,' was published in April 1900. A number of changes were effected. These include the substitution of directly reproduced photographs of all new and important ships, the addition of a hundred new plans, a great increase of the silhouette index system — to which all the subsidized merchantmen in the world that are capable of transformation into armed liners were added — abolition of the four languages, and a substitution of a glossary of technical terms in English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish — a change necessitated by the adoption of the work in all foreign navies. The work had just been purchased by a naval syndicate of which Mr. Fred T. Jane was the managing director; but it continued to be published in London by Messrs. Sampson Low, Marston & Co, as heretofore. It was intended to issue the book at a lower price than the previous year.

The title was shortened to Jane’s Fighting Ships in 1905. By 2013 HS "Jane's Fighting Ships" [$1,044.00, 1020 pages] was "the world's leading open-source maritime defense reference resource, delivering exhaustive profiles of naval platforms in development, in production and in service globally. "IHS Jane's Fighting Ships" provides comprehensive coverage of the world's naval platforms, supporting military and security organizations by delivering reliable technical and program information on current and future naval capabilities, and providing maritime defense market intelligence to enable A&D businesses to carry out successful marketing, strategy and product development activity."

Jane had and has competition. Weyers's Flotten Taschenbuch [Warships of the World, $84.61, 942 pages] handbook has been internationally recognized as a high quality, reliable reference work. Each edition is packed with valuable information on the navies of the world, with facts and figures including numbers and classes, names and designations, displacement figures, measurements and much more. Stripped to the basic facts to save space, all the necessary information is nevertheless there. There are excellent, clear drawings of most classes of warship. Remarkably, and quite unlike competing publications, this one also includes good color photographs of a significant proportion of the categories and classes of the vessels described. Up-to-date and accurate, this excellent reference is both very reasonably priced and easy to use.

Combat Fleets of the World [$250.00?, 1152 pages] is internationally acknowledged as the best one-volume reference to the world's naval and paranaval forces. Updated regularly since 1976, it has come to be relied on for all-inclusive, accurate, and up-to-date data on the ships, navies, coast guards, and naval aviation arms of more than 170 countries and territories. Large fleets and small maritime forces get equally thorough treatment. The new edition 2013, the first in five years, presents timely information on major and even minor developments that could impact the world scene. More than four thousand illustrations and multi-view drawings present the user with the most detailed views available for identification and comparison purposes.

Jane was quickly recognized as an authority on naval matters and in 1899 he was invited by Grand Duke Alexander Mihailovich to Russia to produce a book about the Imperial Russian Navy. Since then the Russian Navy had been revolutionized. The book was almost re-written for a second edition, and stands as the only work dealing with the Russian Navy as it was in the early days of 1904, with over 150 Illustrations from sketches and drawings from the Author and from photographs. The Japanese Government was so impressed by the amount of publicity this generated for Russian sea power that its naval authorities persuaded Jane to write a similar publication for Japan. Jane's account of the Imperial Japanese Navy appeared in 1904, assisted by Officers of the Japanese Navy, with illustrations from Sketches and drawings by Japanese Artists and from Official Photographs. A few months after these books appeared, the Japanese fleet destroyed the Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese War.

When Bleriot flew the Channel in 1909 Jane's head was turned to aircraft and he completed and published Jane's All the World's Airships, later to be renamed Jane's All the World's Aircraft. This first publication gained much media interest and was given the honor of a review column on a leading page of the Daily Mail.

In 1906 successful author, journalist, illustrator and eccentric, Fred T Jane, stood as an independent Navy Before Party candidate for the Portsmouth seat in the general election. He came last. Jane was a supporter of the Boy Scout movement and also a keen motoring enthusiast who drove an 8 liter, 90 horsepower, chain-driven Benz racing car as his daily runabout. On Wednesday 08 March 1916, Fred T Jane died alone in his apartment in at 26 Clarence Esplanade, Southsea, apparently of heart failure brought on by influenza. Two years later, some 40 million people died in the Spanish flu pandemic.