Providentially, the margin could be enlarged at a single decisive stroke.

From Castles of Steel by Robert K Massie. Page 21.

Winston Churchill was confident that by sending the Grand Fleet into “the enormous waste of water to the north of our islands” he had guarded it against surprise attack; he worried, nonetheless, about its strength relative to that of the High Seas Fleet. On paper, the ratio of dreadnoughts—twenty-four to seventeen—looked reassuring. But for the First Lord, it was not enough. “There was not much margin here,” he wrote later, “for mischance nor for the percentage of mechanical defects which in so large a fleet had to be expected.” Providentially, the margin could be enlarged at a single decisive stroke. For years, British shipyards had been building warships for foreign navies. Sometimes, depending on the specifications required by the various admiralties, these ships were more powerful than vessels the same shipyard was building for Britain. In 1913, for example, Vickers completed Kongo, then the finest battle cruiser in the world, for Japan. Mounting ten 14-inch guns, lavishly armored, and capable of 27 knots, she was superior in almost every respect to the latest British battle cruiser, Tiger, still, in July 1914, undelivered to the Royal Navy. When Kongo sailed for home, she left behind, under construction in British shipyards, four other foreign superdreadnoughts, all equal to Britain’s best. Two were being built for Turkey and two for Chile. Now, in the summer of 1914, as the European crisis worsened, the Turkish ships—Reshadieh, modeled on the Iron Duke class, and Sultan Osman I, carrying fourteen 12-inch guns, were nearing completion and preparing to sail for the Bosporus. At this point, the First Lord insisted that the Turks must not be permitted to take physical possession of their ships.