Fred T Jane - Founding editor: 1909 - 1915
John Frederick Thomas Jane, who preferred to be known as Fred T Jane, was the founder of what is now IHS Jane's. Born in Richmond in 1865, he 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 centre 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 manoeuvres 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 unsavoury 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 the 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.
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 and drew 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.
In February 1898 the first edition of Jane's Fighting Ships was published and sold 1000 copies within the first few days. Jane also devised a naval wargame which was adopted for training the officers of navies worldwide. Jane was quickly recognised 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. 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.
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 honour of a review column on a leading page of the Daily Mail.
Jane was a supporter of the Boy Scout movement and also a keen motoring enthusiast who drove an 8 litre, 90 horsepower, chain-driven Benz racing car as his daily runabout.