British Admirals of the Fleet

by T A Heathcote

  Those who are favourably noticed inevitably have a better chance of promotion than those who, though otherwise equally well qualified, find themselves at some critical time under a spiteful or prejudiced superior. At the same time, those lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time need the additional quality of ambition to take advantage of their opportunities. From the second half of the nineteenth century, specialization brought a clear benefit and a total of twenty-five gunnery officers and twelve torpedo officers became admirals of the fleet. Appointment to a flagship, often at the nomination of the admiral concerned, generally carried the likelihood of further promotion. Fourteen future admirals of the fleet served as flag lieutenants (often to their fathers or uncles) and thirty-five as flag captains. Sixteen served in royal yachts. Ashore, twenty-one sat as Members of Parliament in the House of Commons and twenty-two, late in their careers, joined the House of Lords, all except two as peers of first creation.

  Despite the statistical information presented above, this book is intended as a work of synthesis rather than analysis, reflecting the author’s professional career as a museologist and his ivory-towered belief that the prime scholarly function of a curator (or curatrix) is taxonomy, the science of classification. Thus it is offered to historians and cataloguers as a convenient tool for use in research or study, as a supplement to existing knowledge and a guide to further areas for study. Other writers or researchers may find here ideas for fuller biographies, documentaries, screenplays or historical fiction. To members of the Royal Navy and its various reserves and auxiliaries, past, present and future, it is offered as a record of those who reached the highest rank their Service had to offer.

  NOTE ON THE RATING

  OF SAILING WARSHIPS

  During the period covered by this book, major sailing combatant vessels of the Royal Navy, including those with auxiliary steam engines when these came to be fitted, were divided into six rates, according to the number of their guns. 1st, 2nd and 3rd-rates were ships of the line, carrying their guns on two or three decks. 4th-rates were generally considered too weak to stand in the line of battle, and were mostly employed as convoy escorts for protection against commerce raiders, or as ships of force on distant stations. 5th and 6th-rates were respectively large and small frigates, defined as ships that carried all their guns on a single deck.

  THE BIOGRAPHIES OF THE

  ADMIRALS OF THE FLEET

  ALFRED ERNEST ALBERT

  HRH Duke of Edinburgh, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, KG, KT, KP, GCB, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, GCVO (1844–1900) [49]

  Prince Alfred, the second son and fourth child of Queen Victoria, was born at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, on 6 August 1844. Destined for a naval career, he joined the frigate Euryalus as a cadet in February 1858 and served in this ship on the Mediterranean and Cape of Good Hope stations before returning home in August 1861. In June 1862 he was appointed a midshipman in the 86-gun screw ship St George, in which he spent the next few months in the Channel, West Indies and Mediterranean. In October 1862 a military coup deposed the unpopular King Otto of the Hellenes. His subjects held a national referendum and, by 230, 016 out of the 241, 202 votes cast, elected Prince Alfred to the vacant crown, hoping that a young British prince would rule as a constitutional monarch. A prior agreement between the United Kingdom, France and Russia that no member of their royal houses would become a candidate for the Greek throne obliged him to decline. In March 1863 the Greeks elected Prince William of Schleswig-Holstein-Glucksburg, whose father became King Christian IX of Denmark in November 1863. King Christian’s daughter, Alexandra, married Prince Alfred’s eldest brother, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII [44]. In conjunction with these dynastic arrangements, the Prince of Wales renounced his right of succession to the childless Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Duke Ernest’s previous heir had been his younger brother, Albert, the Prince Consort, the Prince of Wales’s father, who died in December 1861). The succession to this German duchy was then settled on Prince Alfred, as next in line to the Prince of Wales.

  Alfred returned to naval duty and was promoted to lieutenant on 24 February 1863, when he was appointed to the corvette Racoon as her fourth lieutenant. He left this ship on his promotion to captain on 23 February 1866, followed by a peerage on being created Duke of Edinburgh on 24 May 1866. In January 1867 Edinburgh was given command of the frigate Galatea and began a long cruise taking him to Brazil, South Africa and the Australian colonies, where, at Sydney, he was shot and slightly wounded by an Irish nationalist, who was promptly arrested, tried and hanged. After returning to the United Kingdom in mid–1868, he spent a further year at sea in Galatea in which he visited India, China and Japan. On 23 January 1874, at St Petersburg, he married the Grand Duchess Marie, only daughter of Alexander II, Emperor of Russia. A second wedding, by Anglican rites, was held in Westminster Abbey, but the service was not attended by Queen Victoria, who disapproved of this alliance with the Romanov dynasty. Edinburgh, a heavy drinker in a time of heavy drinkers, was not one of his mother’s favourites, though he tried to act as peace-maker between her and the Navy (which she never forgave for denying her consort, Prince Albert, the rank of admiral of the fleet). He also incurred his mother’s displeasure for objecting to the behaviour of John Brown, the Queen’s Highland Servant.

  Edinburgh did not return to sea until 25 February 1876, when he was given command of the armoured ship Sultan in the Mediterranean, with Prince Louis of Battenberg [74] (a nephew of his sister, Princess Alice) as one of his junior officers. He served under Vice-Admiral Hornby [45] during the international crisis of 1878, when the Mediterranean Fleet was sent to Constantinople (Istanbul) to be met by a Russian army on the outskirts of the city. There, he found Louis’s brother, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, serving with the Russians, and invited him aboard his ship. This brought him a rebuke from the Queen, who told him that everyone would say the Battenbergs were Russian spies, and accused him of “extreme thoughtlessness”. In June 1878 Edinburgh became captain of the armoured ship Black Prince, in the Channel Squadron, followed by promotion to rear-admiral on 26 November 1878. From November 1879 to November 1882 he was admiral superintendent of naval reserves, based at Harwich, with his flag first in the corvette Penelope and then in the battleship Hercules. He was promoted to vice-admiral on 30 November 1882 and commanded the Channel Squadron, with his flag in the armoured ship Minotaur, from December 1883 to December 1884. Edinburgh was C-in-C, Mediterranean, with his flag in the armoured ship Alexandra, from March 1886 to March 1889, and promoted to admiral on 18 Oct 1887. Between August 1890 and June 1893 he was C-in-C, Devonport, and was promoted to admiral of the fleet on 3 June 1893.

  The Duke of Edinburgh succeeded his uncle as Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on 22 August 1893. The duchy was by this time part of the German Empire, though it still retained autonomy in internal affairs. A special Order in Council allowed Duke Alfred to retain his place in the Navy List. Despite his own reserved and somewhat distant character, he overcame the resentment of his German subjects at the arrival of a British admiral to rule over them. He displayed an interest in local agriculture and industry, indulged his taste for sporting activities, and, himself an enthusiastic rather than a talented violinist, became a patron of music. His lavish life style (including the retention of a London residence) ran him into debt, and to satisfy his creditors he was obliged to sell his valuable stamp collection. It was bought by his brother, the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII [44]. The Prince presented it to his own second son, the future George V [64], whose interest in this subject had been awakened when serving under Edinburgh as a young officer, and who went on to establish a philatelic collection of international importance.

  Duke Alfred’s declining years were marred by the death of his unmarried only son, Prince Alfred, who had never enjoyed robust health and shot himself in mysterious circumstances in February 1899. Duke Alfred himself died from cancer of the throat on 30 July 1900, at his palace of Schloss Rosenau, Cobur
g, and was buried in the family mausoleum there. Although all four of his daughters married and had issue, the Salic Law prevented them from succeeding to his throne. The succession therefore passed to his younger brother, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught. When Connaught disclaimed the title, it passed to the teenage Charles Edward, 2nd Duke of Albany, whose father, Leopold, had been Victoria’s fourth and youngest son. The dukedom of Edinburgh became extinct until revived in November 1947 for the benefit of Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten [99], consort of the future Queen Elizabeth II.

  ANSON

  George, Lord Anson (1697–1762) [5]

  George Anson, the second son of William Anson of Shugborough Hall, Colwich, Staffordshire, was born on 23 April 1697. His mother’s sister was married to Thomas Parker, later Earl of Macclesfield and Lord Chancellor of England from May 1718 to January 1725. Anson served in the Navy as a volunteer during the War of the Spanish Succession, joining the 4th-rate Ruby on 2 February 1711 and subsequently moving to the 3rd-rate Monmouth. On 17 March 1716, while serving in the Baltic fleet under Sir John Norris [1], he was promoted to lieutenant in the 4th-rate Hampshire, where he remained until December 1717. Anson was appointed second lieutenant of the 4th-rate Montague in March 1718, in a fleet sent to the Mediterranean to prevent a Spanish occupation of Naples and Sicily. He was present at the battle of Cape Passaro (31 July 1718) and transferred to the flagship, the 2nd-rate Barfleur, on 2 October 1719.

  Anson was in June 1722 appointed commander of the sloop Weazell, employed on anti-smuggling duties in the North Sea. In February 1723 he became captain of the 6th-rate Scarborough, operating against pirates and Spanish privateers around the Bahamas. In July 1728 he was given command of the 6th-rate Garland and served on the coast of South Carolina. He became a popular figure in the colony, where Anson County was named in his honour. In 1730–31 Anson was captain of the 5th-rate Diamond in the Channel, before going back to the Carolinas as captain of the 6th-rate Squirell. After returning home in June 1735, he was employed between 1737 and 1739 on commerce protection duties, first off the West African coast and then in the West Indies, in command of the 3rd-rate Centurion.

  On the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’s Ear in October 1739, Anson, in Centurion, was appointed commodore of a small squadron of six warships and two auxiliaries, and tasked to attack Spanish setdements and shipping in the Pacific. Delays at the Admiralty resulted in his orders, drafted in January 1740, not reaching him until the following June. He was provided with a total of 1,900 men, made up of untrained marines supplied by the Army and pensioners from the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich. The expedition eventually left Portsmouth on 18 September 1740 and soon ran into bad weather. After rounding Cape Horn, Anson reached the island of Juan Fernandez in June 1741, where two of his ships later joined him. After several weeks’ rest and refitting, he decided to put the survivors of the three crews (335 men out of 961) into Centurion, the only ship still sea-worthy. He then raided the Spanish port of Paita, Chile, before crossing the Pacific in 1742 to wait for the annual Spanish treasure ship from Manila, in the Philippines. Failing to make contact, he reached Macao on the Chinese mainland, with his crew reduced by scurvy to barely two hundred men. Finally, on 20 June 1743, he captured the treasure galleon Nuestra Senhora de Cabadonga, after which he sailed for home via the Cape of Good Hope. Anson arrived at Spithead on 15 June 1744, having circumnavigated the globe and acquired an immense quantity of bullion. This, valued at half a million pounds in the currency of the time (more than a quarter of the Royal Navy’s annual vote), was then driven to London in a triumphant convoy of thirty-two wagons.

  The prize money, with Anson entitled to one-eighth as commodore and two-eighths as captain, made him an extremely rich man and gave him a place in political circles. He was promoted to rear-admiral of the Blue on 19 June 1744, but refused the promotion because the Admiralty refused to confirm his first lieutenant as captain (originally denied on the grounds that Anson, although commodore, was at the relevant time in command of only his own ship). His conduct throughout the expedition was an inspiration to his crews. In an age of keen social distinctions, he helped in carrying the sick ashore, and worked as a carpenter when his ship was under repair. His navigational notes proved of great value to map-makers and he pointed out the potential value of the Falkland Islands as a British naval base.

  The United Kingdom formally entered the War of the Austrian Succession on 11 April 1744. A change of ministry in November 1744 brought a new First Lord to the Admiralty (the Duke of Bedford) with Anson himself being appointed to the Board. On 19 June 1745, following an increase in the establishment of flag officers from the original nine, he was promoted from captain to rear-admiral of the White. In July, still a lord commissioner of the Admiralty, he became vice-admiral of the Blue and was given command of the Western Squadron, in the Channel, though the poor state of his ships delayed his sailing until November 1746. Flying his flag in the new 3rd-rate Yarmouth, he cruised off the northern coast of France until returning to Portsmouth in February 1747 without having sighted the enemy. In April 1747 Anson again put to sea commanding the Western Squadron, in the Channel and off the French Atlantic coast, with his flag in the 2nd-rate Prince George. In a major fleet action off Cape Finisterre (3 May 1747), he captured six French men-of-war and six Indiamen, together with various other merchant ships and privateers. Their cargoes included the pay chests for the French garrison of Canada. With a major victory to his credit and prizes totalling around two million pounds, he was raised to the peerage as Lord Anson, Baron of Soberton and promoted to vice-admiral of the Red. He married Lady Elizabeth Yorke, daughter of the first Earl of Hardwicke, Lord Chancellor of England, and a political ally. The couple set up home at Carshalton before moving to Moor Park, Northwood, Middlesex (now a golf club).

  Lord Anson was promoted to admiral of the Blue on 12 May 1748. He became First Lord of the Admiralty, in succession to his friend and supporter the Earl of Sandwich, on 22 June 1751 and retained this post until November 1756, when the Duke of Newcastle’s ministry fell after a series of British disasters at the beginning of the Seven Years War. In June 1757 he became an admiral of the White. When Newcastle joined Pitt’s ministry on 2 July 1757, Anson once more became First Lord and continued to hold this office until his death. While at the Admiralty, he did much to reform the Navy. He made a point of visiting and inspecting dockyards, and succeeded for a time in at least reducing the corruption invariably associated with defence contractors. He improved the standard of medical care in the fleet and encouraged research into the cause of scurvy. The Articles of War were revised. Dress regulations were issued for officers, introducing the blue coat with white facings later adopted by almost every navy as standard nautical wear. This combination of colours was said to have been taken from a riding habit worn by the Duchess of Bedford, whose husband had been First Lord of the Admiralty from 1744 to 1748. Fighting Instructions were revised, allowing commanders to act in accordance with the spirit rather than the letter of tactical doctrine. The Marines were established as a corps under Admiralty control, in place of the Army’s marine regiments. An improved system of arranging warships into various rates, according to the number of their guns, was introduced.

  In July 1758, after Sir Edward Hawke [7] had suddenly hauled down his flag in protest at an imagined slight, Anson felt obliged to take his place in command of the Western Squadron. With his flag in the 1st-rate Royal George, he continued the blockade of the French Atlantic naval bases. Though not in favour of Pitt’s policy of raiding the French coast, he provided ships to cover descents on Cherbourg (August 1758) and St Malo (September 1758). Anson was promoted to admiral of the fleet on 30 July 1761. He died at Moor Park on 6 June 1762, two years after his wife, and was buried at his native Colwich. He had no children and his barony became extinct.

  ASHMORE

  Sir Edward Beckwith, GCB, DSC (1919-) [109]

  Edward Ashmore was born at Queenstown, County Cork, Ireland, on
11 December 1919, the elder son of Lieutenant (later Vice-Admiral) L H Ashmore and his wife, Tamara Vasilevna, whom he had met and married while serving in Russia, survivors of whose family became refugees from the Bolsheviks. Like his younger brother, who also became an admiral, Edward Ashmore accompanied his parents as they moved to various stations, rather than being sent to boarding school as was more usual at that period. He was educated at various schools at Alverstoke (Gosport, Hants), Claremont (Cape Province, South Africa) and Yardley Court (Tonbridge, Kent), before joining the Navy as a cadet at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in September 1933. He went to sea in the cadet training cruiser Frobisher from May to July 1937 and joined the battleship Rodney, flagship of the Home Fleet, as a midshipman on 1 September 1937. Ashmore was appointed in January 1938 to the cruiser Birmingham on the China station, at a time of increasing international tension with the Japanese. After returning home overland via Manchukuo (Manchuria), Siberia, Russia and Germany, he reached the United Kingdom on 26 August 1939 and was promoted to sub-lieutenant on 1 September 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

  Ashmore joined the destroyer Jupiter on 3 January 1940 and took part in various operations in the North Sea, the Norwegian campaign, and in the Channel (with a brief detachment to Force H at Gibraltar in February 1941). He was promoted to lieutenant on 1 January 1941 and left Jupiter in June 1941 on appointment as first lieutenant of the destroyer Middleton. This ship, commissioned at the end of the year, spent most of 1942 as a fleet escort, covering the Atlantic and North Russian convoys, with a brief detachment to the Mediterranean in June 1942 to escort a relief convoy to Malta, where Ashmore gained the DSC. In August 1942, he was sent to North Russia to help organize the return of the survivors of the ill-fated convoy PQ17. In December 1942 he married Elizabeth Mary Doveton Sturdee, a second officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, daughter of Rear-Admiral Sir Lionel Sturdee and granddaughter of Sir Doveton Sturdee [73]. They later had a family of a son and two daughters, the younger of whom was tragically killed in a rail disaster at Hither Green, London, in November 1967. Between February and May 1943 Ashmore served in King Alfred, Lancing, Sussex, training candidates for hostilities-only commissions.