Cochrane the Dauntless

by David Cordingly

  Cochrane’s description of his wife and family plays down the troubles they had gone through since they settled back in London. The marriage, which had survived the long absences every seaman’s family had to endure, came under increasing strain now that they were living under the same roof for longer than a few months at a time. Cochrane, who was sixty-four in 1839, was no longer the glamorous naval hero who had swept Kate off her feet when she was a girl in her teens. He had put on weight and seems to have lost the charisma which had impressed Maria Graham in Chile. The writer and journalist Cyrus Redding, who had met Cochrane in Plymouth when he was in his prime as a successful frigate captain, recalled seeing him more recently at the Temple Bar: ‘Alas! What ravage time had made in his once handsome and active figure. Such changes tell painfully in the history of our fleeting humanity…’

  Kate, who was twenty years younger, was still a good-looking woman who enjoyed society life and shone in company. Her love for Lord Auckland must have put a strain on the marriage but his work and her travels had kept them apart. Any hopes she may have had of resuming their relationship were ended when, in 1835, he went abroad for six years as Governor-General of India. Meanwhile, she was increasingly exasperated by Cochrane’s obsession with steam engines and was concerned that his inventions were draining the family finances. Their financial problems were exacerbated by the extravagant behaviour of their children. While serving in the army in Canada, Tom had run up huge bills, obtained money on false pretences and returned in 1836 with debts of more than £5,000. Cochrane agreed to settle his debts and arranged for him to take up a five-year posting with the army in Hong Kong. Horace had been forced to resign his army commission after embarking on a life of gambling and riotous living which had forced him to borrow large sums from a moneylender. He was now living under an assumed name to escape his creditors. Lizzie made an unsuitable marriage in 1840 which would soon lead to her abandoning her husband and fleeing to France with another man.

  Whether it was the difference in their ages and their interests, their financial problems, Kate’s ill health or her disillusionment with Cochrane and her resentment at the time and money he was spending on his scientific projects, the strains proved too much. Towards the end of the 1830s they separated and Kate moved to France, initially taking up residence at Boulogne but later moving to Paris. He offered her a generous financial settlement and they continued to see each other at regular intervals but they never lived under the same roof again. Hanover Lodge was eventually sold in 1845.

  Cochrane worked harder than ever on his inventions and in January 1843 a patent was granted to him for important modifications he had made to the boilers used for steam engines, and for his improved version of the screw propeller for ships. The Admiralty was sufficiently convinced by the experiments on the Firefly to order the construction of the Janus, a steam frigate which was designed by Cochrane and was to be fitted with his rotary engine and his improved boilers. The ship was built at Chatham dockyard and by 10 July 1844 he was writing, ‘The Janus is now completing – that is, being coppered – and having the part of her deck laid down which was left off for the purpose of getting the boilers on board.’17 On 24 October he reported that the First Lord of the Admiralty Sir George Cockburn, accompanied by Sir John Barrow, the Admiralty Secretary, and Lord Brougham, had seen his engine, ‘all of whom were well pleased with my explanation of its principles’.18 During a nine-day trial towards the end of 1845 the Janus performed successfully in calm water. ‘Nothing can exceed the beauty of her passage through the water, without even a ripple, far less the wave which ordinary steamboats occasion.’19 But a serious miscalculation in her design caused her to lie too low in the water, making her dangerously unseaworthy in bad weather. Other faults developed and work on the vessel was abandoned amidst complaints from some quarters about the waste of public money.

  A diagram showing Cochrane’s rotary steam engines driving two paddle wheels. An illustration from ‘The steam engine simplified’, by the Earl of Dundonald.

  Cochrane, meanwhile, continued to keep up unrelenting pressure on those in power to restore him to the Order of the Bath. He had put his case in letters to a succession of prime ministers, presidents of the Privy Council and his friends in government. To add further ammunition to his cause, in April 1847 he published a remarkable document which he entitled ‘Observations on Naval Affairs, and some Collateral Subjects including Instances of Injustice experienced by the Author with a summary of his Navy Service and a copious appendix’. This was the forerunner of his later autobiographies – a selective and strongly argued defence of his naval and parliamentary career designed to show himself in the best possible light at the expense of those he regarded as his enemies. The document also included details of the sums of money which he believed he was still owed by Chile and Brazil, the legal expenses he had incurred for the Stock Exchange trial, his claim on the Royal Navy for eighteen years’ back pay, the loss of Culross Abbey and estate valued at £50,000, and the sum of £15,000 which he had spent on scientific research and inventions and for which he expected to be reimbursed.20 In spite of the controversial nature of much of the contents the document was generally well received. ‘I hear from all quarters that the pamphlet has made, and is making, a great impression and I have every hope that all will end well.’21

  The timing was right for the final rehabilitation of the man Anthony Trollope would later describe as ‘that indefatigable old hero Lord Dundonald’. He had outlived most of his opponents and, thanks to the support of friends in high places, and the writings of Captain Marryat, Maria Graham and others, he was now widely regarded as a brave liberator of oppressed nations and a heroic survivor of the Nelson era who had been unjustly treated by his country. The Tory government of Robert Peel had recently been replaced by a Whig administration led by the reforming and liberal-minded Lord John Russell. Two of Cochrane’s friends were in the Cabinet – Lord Lansdowne was President of the Council and Lord Auckland was First Lord of the Admiralty. And crucial for Cochrane’s cause was the fact that the young Queen Victoria was on his side. She told Lord Lansdowne on 6 May that, with or without the approval of her Privy Counsellors, she would confer on Lord Dundonald the next vacant Order of the Bath. On 25 May the announcement appeared in the London Gazette that ‘The Queen has been pleased to appoint Vice-Admiral the Earl of Dundonald to be a Knight Grand Cross of the most Hon. Order of the Bath.’22 Prince Albert, who was Grand Master of the Order, arranged for him to wear the insignia at the birthday drawing room of the Queen on 27 May.

  ‘Today there was a grand muster at the palace of all the Knights Grand Crosses, and many inferior Crosses,’ Cochrane wrote on 12 July, ‘and I was installed. Lord Ellenborough was one of my sponsors, and the Duke of Wellington shook hands with me, and expressed his satisfaction at my restoration to the Order.’23 That the son of the judge who had sent Cochrane to prison should have been one of his sponsors was a sign of the times, although the grandson of the judge would insist that this unexpected gesture had no particular significance.

  Six months later Cochrane received a letter from Lord Auckland inviting him to become commander-in-chief for the North American and West Indian stations. ‘I am satisfied that your nomination will be agreeable to her Majesty, as it will be to the country – particularly to the Navy.’24 On 17 March 1848 Cochrane had the satisfaction of hoisting his flag on the foremast of the 74-gun ship HMS Wellesley. He was now a Vice-Admiral of the Red and was able to appoint his son Arthur as his flag lieutenant. They set sail with a squadron of ships from Plymouth on 25 March and reached Bermuda on 3 May. From there they sailed north to Halifax, Nova Scotia. From the naval bases of Bermuda and Halifax they made extensive cruises and during the course of the next three years they visited the West Indian islands of Barbados, Trinidad, St Lucia, Antigua and Jamaica, as well as Louisbourg, Nova Scotia and St John’s, Newfoundland.25 After his miserable experiences in Greece it was good to be back on a British ship among British sailors, a
nd the men much appreciated his easy style of command. Thomas Branton, who was a member of the crew of the admiral’s galley (the boat used for taking him ashore) later wrote,

  I was never tired of hearing of the fine old fellow’s exploits when, as young Lord Cochrane, he fought the French and Spaniards in Nelson’s days. He was a fine old man with typical Scottish features. He was an ideal officer, and was so beloved by the men that his name on the lower deck was ‘Dad’. He would not allow flogging, greatly to the disgust of some of the other officers, who considered that leniency was bad for discipline. When he was in the galley he would talk to the coxwain and the crew as though we were his equals.26

  Cochrane took extensive notes wherever he went and sent back detailed reports to Lord Auckland. He recorded the decline of the Newfoundland fisheries; he was impressed by the civil administration in Bermuda but thought conditions in Kingston, Jamaica, were lamentable; he recommended a number of improvements for the naval hospital at Port Royal; and he took samples of bitumen from the famous lake of pitch at Trinidad and experimented with a mixture of bitumen and coal as fuel for the steam vessel Scourge which was part of his squadron. The overseas posting ended in April 1851 and Sir George Seymour was appointed to succeed him. As so often in the small world of the navy the two men had served together in the past. While in command of the 16-gun Kingfisher in 1806 Seymour had come to Cochrane’s aid when the Pallas had been severely damaged in her action with the Minerve off the Ile d’Aix. Seymour had later commanded the Pallas during the fireship attack at Basque Roads and had been openly critical of the delay in sending in the fleet when he gave evidence at Lord Gambier’s court martial. Cochrane and his squadron set sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 14 May 1851 and arrived at Portsmouth on 10 June. The following day his flag was hauled down and for the last time he disembarked from a British warship as a serving officer. He was seventy-five years old.

  21

  The Last Years

  1851–1860

  On 1 May 1851, a few weeks before Cochrane stepped ashore at Portsmouth, Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The exhibition, the brainchild of Prince Albert, was an astonishing display of the latest achievements in engineering, manufacturing and the fine and decorative arts. It was housed in a soaring structure of iron and glass which was three times the length of St Paul’s Cathedral and tall enough to house three of the park’s large elm trees. Designed by Joseph Paxton, the friend and former gardener of the Duke of Devonshire, it was initially derided by The Times as a ‘monstrous greenhouse’ but proved as great an attraction as the displays and became known as the Crystal Palace. The exhibits ranged from the Koh-i-noor diamond and the finest products of the Wedgwood pottery to a thirty-one-ton steam locomotive and the hydraulic presses used to build the supports of the railway bridge over the Menai Straits – an engineering marvel designed by George Stephenson’s son Robert which had been completed the previous year.

  The Great Exhibition attracted six million visitors during the five months that it was open and was a showcase for Britain’s technical ingenuity and manufacturing prowess. There is no record in his letters or journals of Cochrane visiting the exhibition in Hyde Park but he did pay a visit to the Crystal Palace a few years later after it had been moved and re-erected in Sydenham. In April 1857 he told Arthur that he proposed to take his brother William and his wife, ‘down to the neighbourhood of the Crystal Palace, where there are so many objects to divert attention, and stay there for a month or more…’1 His activities on his return to London certainly show him to have been very much in tune with the spirit of the times. He continued to work on his steam engine and his improved boiler and between 1851 and 1853 he took out a series of patents for using the bitumen from Trinidad in the construction of sewers and tunnels; for laying pipes below ground; for insulating wire; and for use as a waterproofing building material in an enlightened scheme to construct an embankment along the Thames.2 He also published the observations he had made during his Atlantic cruise in a paper entitled ‘Notes on the Mineralogy, Government and Conditions of the British West India Islands, and the North-American Maritime Colonies’.

  On the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 he revived his ‘Secret War Plans’ and wrote to Sir James Graham, who had succeeded Lord Auckland as the First Lord of the Admiralty, urging him to consider the use of smoke screens and poison gas against the Russian forces and ships at Sebastopol and Kronstadt. At one stage the Admiralty seriously considered appointing Cochrane as commander-in-chief of the Baltic Fleet but he was now seventy-nine and it was decided that ‘though his energies and faculties are unbroken, and though, with his accustomed courage, he volunteers for the Service, yet, on the whole, there is reason to apprehend that he might deeply commit the Force under his command in some desperate enterprise, where the chance of success would not countervail the risk of failure and of the fatal consequences, which might ensue’.3 However, his plans for the use of poison gas were carefully considered by a secret committee chaired by Admiral Sir Thomas Byam Martin. The committee sought advice from the eminent scientist Michael Faraday who agreed that burning sulphur would yield deadly fumes that could incapacitate or kill men but he was doubtful whether it would prove practicable on the scale which was proposed. He pointed out that the fumes from 400 tons of burning sulphur ‘being heavier than air, would descend and move along over the surface of the water…’. He reckoned that the height of the poisonous fumes would be anything between ten and fifteen feet at first, and the width would be less than a mile, but the water ‘would tend continually to take part of the noxious vapour out of it’. He suspected that much larger quantities would be required than was proposed and he pointed out that if the enemy had sufficient warning of the attack they could be supplied with respirators to resist the effects of the sulphur fumes.4 Although Cochrane’s plans were turned down he continued to argue his case with Sir James Graham and then with Lord Palmerston who was tempted to let Cochrane go out to the Crimea and superintend the scheme and take the blame if it failed, but in the end the plans were shelved.

  On his return from his Atlantic cruise Cochrane stayed with his brother William for a while and then moved into lodgings at 2 Belgrave Road in Pimlico.5 He paid a visit to France in August 1851 to help Kate move from Paris back to Boulogne but reported to Arthur, ‘Poor Mama is no better in health than she was.’ As for his children, three of them were doing well and two of them seemed to be beyond redemption. His eldest son, Tom, had returned from Hong Kong a reformed character. He had married Louisa, the daughter of William Mackinnon, a Scottish MP and head of the Mackinnon clan, and was now living a respectable life in the remote but fashionable Scottish coastal resort of Banff.6 But the debts of Horace had now risen to £8,000 and Cochrane believed him to be irretrievably ruined. ‘I have been so tortured by Horace,’ he wrote on 20 July, ‘who, if caught will undoubtedly be transported…’7 The situation of his daughter was equally worrying. ‘Poor Liz is lost, incurably gone. She is living at Florence in the society of young men, not one but in the plural number, the females, though virtue is there not much prized, having cut her.’8 However, he could take consolation in the naval careers of Arthur and his youngest son, Ernest. They both took part in the attack on the Russian fortress of Bomarsund during the Crimean War and served with distinction; Arthur was promoted to post-captain following the fall of Bomarsund and Ernest was promoted to lieutenant.9

  Cochrane in his eighties had become an admired and much-revered figure, laden with so many honours that photographs taken of him in his admiral’s uniform around this time show him weighed down by medals, ribbons and gold braid. In addition to the Order of the Bath he had a number of medals which had been presented to him by the Chilean government; the Emperor Pedro had, as we have seen, bestowed on him the Grand Cross of Brazil and created him Marquis of Maranhão; and in 1835 King Otho of Greece had conferred on him the insignia of Grand Commander of the Order of the Saviour of Greece. He had now risen to the rank of Admi
ral of the Red in the British navy, and had been given the additional honorary title of Rear-Admiral of the United Kingdom. In 1854, at the invitation of Prince Albert, he had become an Elder Brother of Trinity House and in 1856 he was persuaded by his old colleague George Seymour, now a vice-admiral, to become an honorary member of the United Services Club in Pall Mall. An article describing his achievements was published in the Illustrated Times around this time and included a memorable description of his appearance:

  ‘Fancy to your self a broad-built Scotchman, rather seared than conquered by age, with hair of a snowy white, and a face in which intellect still beams through traces of struggle and sorrow, and the marks of eighty years of active life. A slight stoop takes away from a height that is almost commanding. Add to these a vision of good old-fashioned courtesy colouring the whole man, his gestures and his speech, and you have some idea of the Earl of Dundonald in this present June, 1855.’10 In contrast to this sympathetic description are the critical observations of his wife which are recorded in numerous letters to their sons: ‘Your father is becoming very shaking in his mind and memory,’ she wrote in 1856, ‘and indeed I think through his terrible deafness that he will lose all power of business powers…’11 She continued to be resentful of the way in which he had squandered the large sums of money which had come his way from prize money, and from his naval service as a commander of the navies of Chile, Brazil and Greece. ‘I hope, my dearest Arthur, that you will not imbue your hands in that hateful Pitch and dirt. For forty years and more I have been your Father’s wife and I have seen two noble fortunes spent, and not one penny of money spent ever returned…’ She reckoned that £70,000 had been spent on the two earliest parliamentary elections, £10,000 had gone on the convoy lamp experiments, and the steam engines and the pitch experiments had caused further ruination. She recalled that Hanover Lodge had been sold at a loss ‘to pay for the outlays on that hateful Janus’.12