Room 40's mishandled Jutland intelligence

Could better intelligence communication have changed the outcome at Jutland?

Yes; a staff officer's poorly framed intervention caused accurate Room 40 knowledge to be converted into misleading information for Jellicoe.

Room 40 understood that Admiral Scheer used different call signs ashore and at sea. The German arrangement was intended to cause confusion, but British signals intelligence had penetrated it. A rear admiral asked for the location of one particular call sign instead of asking what the German fleet was doing. He received a technically correct answer about the call sign left in harbour and independently passed misleading information to Jellicoe. The distinction was raised roughly half an hour later, after the message had already gone out. The failure lay in the question and its interpretation: accurate intelligence lost its operational meaning when an intermediary separated it from the analysts' wider knowledge.