No one wanted to be shackled to a corpse. An Ottoman alliance would be a liability. The French, British and Germans cooperated in Turkey as they were united against the Russians gaining economic leverage over Turkish financial affairs (the 3 had refused Russian entry to Ottoman Public Debt Administration as the Russians only wanted leverage). The British had refreshed their plans and intelligence to take the Dardanelles in 1906 during the Akaba Crisis. The British attitude at the time was to support a Naval Mission but nothing more. If anything, the Misson identified how far the Turks had to go to be a viable ally.
To restore the Ottoman Navy, the British were invited to send a Naval Mission to Istanbul. Admiral Douglas Gamble arrived in January 1909 to organized the fleet, reduce the number of officers and send some young naval officers to Britain for training. As a part of his reform program, the first maneuver of the active fleet took place in the Sea of Marmara on May 27, 1909 followed by a major maneuver held in the Mediterranean Sea in September the same year. Gamble had a series of clashes with various Ottoman ministers regarding the organization of the fleet and finances. He was insisting that all decision in these matters should be left to himself and he was opposed to battleships for the Turkish navy. Following serious disagreements he resigned on January 26, 1910.
Gamble was followed by Admiral Hugh Pigot Williams (May 1910-February 1911), who went ahead with maneuvers in the Sea of Marmara. However the Sublime Porte was increasingly growing uneasy about the fact that the work of modernizing and enlarging the fleet was laying in the hands of foreigners. Consequently, the Ministry of Navy decided to “appoint an independent and fully authorized Turkish officer who will take over the command of the fleet in case of war” and on January 2, 1911, Col. Tahir Bey was appointed the Vice Commander of the Navy. Admiral Williams, who was in London at the time, resigned in protest. Gamble had also objected to Battleships being included in the naval program but his replacement in August 1912, Admiral Limpus, favored Battleships of a similar type to the ones Austria was building.
A Turcophile, Limpus felt that from a moral standpoint Britain was `bound to help a sorely stricken nation to regain health and reasonable prosperity', yet when foreign assistance was given Turkish officials were suspicious that external advisers had ulterior motives; there existed considerable doubt over whether the Great Powers were actually trying to help Turkey, or let it collapse. Britain, Germany and France, Limpus warned, would gain nothing from this.
It is interesting to note that Limpus was backed by Churchill and they had known each other from their Boer War days. On the other hand, the Greek mission's head, Mark Kerr, was a close personal friend of the 1st Sea Lord, Louis Battenburg. Churchill disliked Kerr while Battenburg disliked the Turks.
Admiral Limpus was assisted by 6 junior officers from the RN, each a specialist in their own branch and 60 petty officers and ratings. They were subject to Ottoman Navy discipline, such as it was, and yet were regarded as a cut or two above their Turkish brother officers and were given inflated ranks, a RN lieutenant becoming a Corvette Captain and the courtesy title 'Bey' after his name. They wore elaborate Turkish rig with outsized epaulettes and gold distinction lace and aiguilettes of gold cord and the traditional fez at all times.
The Minister of Navy, Cemal Paşa (Djemal Pasha), wrote in his memoirs: “It is a moral obligation for me to stress once again that Admiral Limpus, his officers and all of the British engineers and officers, who worked to rehabilitate the shipyards of the Golden Horn, have decently fulfilled their duties."