British Admirals of the Fleet

by T A Heathcote

  John De Robeck, the second son of an Irish landholder, was born at Gowran Grange, Naas, County Kildare, on 10 June 1862. His father was Baron de Robeck in the nobility of Sweden, but both parents came from families forming part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, with its long-established tradition of military service. John De Robeck was the first to join the Navy and was a cadet in the training ship Britannia from 1875 to 1877. He served as a midshipman in the frigate Shannon in the Channel Squadron between July 1878 and March 1881 and was appointed to the boys’ training ship St Vincent at Portsmouth in April 1882. He became a sub-lieutenant on 27 July 1882 and joined the gunnery training school Excellent in 1883. In August 1883 he was appointed to the gunboat Espoir on the China station, where he was promoted to lieutenant on 30 September 1885. During 1886 De Robeck was in the battleship Audacious, flagship of the C-in-C, China station. In 1887 he was first lieutenant of the brig Seaflower, tender to the boys’ training ship Boscawen at Portland, before being appointed to the battleship Agincourt, flagship of the Channel Squadron, in which he served from November 1887 to September 1888. From then until December 1890 he was on the staff of Britannia. De Robeck returned to the China station to serve in the flagship, the armoured cruiser Impérieuse, between January 1891 and February 1893. From August 1883 to March 1895 he was the senior lieutenant in Britannia.

  De Robeck served as gunnery lieutenant in the corvette Cordelia on the North America and West Indies station from November 1895 until his promotion to commander on 22 June 1897. Between 1897 and 1899 he commanded in succession the torpedo-boat destroyers Desperate, Angler and Mermaid, based at Chatham, and from June 1900 to August 1901 was the commander of the cruiser Pyramus in the Mediterranean Fleet. He was promoted to captain on 1 January 1902. De Robeck then went on half-pay until August 1906, when he returned to the Mediterranean Fleet in command of the armoured cruiser Carnarvon. Between January 1908 and January 1910 he was captain of the battleship Dominion in the Channel fleet. He spent most of 1911 as Inspecting Captain of boys’ training establishments, based at Devonport, until promoted to rear-admiral on 1 December 1911. De Robeck was appointed in April 1912 to the newly created post of Admiral of Patrols, commanding four flotillas of destroyers, each led by a cruiser, and was additionally responsible for organizing a reserve of motor-boats for inshore duties. He completed his tenure of command in May 1914, but on the approach of the First World War in August 1914 was appointed to command the Ninth Cruiser Squadron, formed from the Reserve, with his flag in the cruiser Amphitrite. Based at Finisterre, his ships were employed on trade protection and interdiction duties in the mid-Atlantic, where he captured the German liners Schleisen and Graecia.

  At the beginning of 1915 De Robeck was appointed second-in-command of the naval force assembled to force a passage through the Dardanelles and attack Constantinople (Istanbul), with his flag in the battleship Vengeance. An initial bombardment carried out during February 1915 was judged unsuccessful. Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, the Allied naval commander, was invalided home in March 1915. The senior naval officer on the station was Sir Rosslyn Wemyss [71], but the command was given to De Robeck, who had worked closely with Carden, and who accordingly took his place in the battleship Queen Elizabeth. A renewed attack on 18 March 1915, with De Robeck’s flag in the battle-cruiser Inflexible, cost one French and two British battleships. Inflexible was damaged by a mine, to the fury of the First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher [58], who was expecting her return to the Grand Fleet. Shocked by the loss of the battleships, De Robeck decided that it was impossible to proceed without support from the Army and broke off the attack. He was present at the subsequent landings in Suvla Bay on 25 April 1915, with his flag in the cruiser Chatham. With Queen Elizabeth recalled to the Grand Fleet in May 1915 and two more battleships sunk by a German submarine, he withdrew his capital ships and gave the task of naval gunfire support to his destroyers, pending the arrival of new monitors and cruisers. The troops ashore could make no headway against the strengthened Turkish defences and were taken off by De Robeck’s fleet in January 1916. He was awarded the KCB in the campaign honours.

  Sir John De Robeck was appointed Vice-Admiral commanding the Second Battle Squadron in the Grand Fleet, with his flag in the battleship King George V, on 3 December 1916. He remained there, with substantive promotion on 17 May 1917, until the fleet was dispersed in May 1919 after the end of hostilities. Late in 1919 he was appointed British High Commissioner to Turkey and C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet, with his flag in the battleship Iron Duke. De Robeck was promoted to admiral on 24 March 1920 and hauled down his flag in the Mediterranean in April 1922. He married in 1922 the widowed Hilda, Lady Lockhart, and from August 1922 to August 1924 was C-in-C, Atlantic Fleet. He was promoted to admiral of the fleet on 24 November 1925 and held no further naval commands. De Robeck continued his lifelong interest in sports and games, and in 1925 became President of the Marylebone Cricket Club. He died suddenly at his home in London on 20 January 1928. There were no children of his marriage and his baronetcy became extinct.

  EDWARD VII

  ALBERT EDWARD, HM King of Great Britain and Ireland,

  Emperor of India (1841–1910) [44]

  Prince Albert Edward, eldest son and second child of Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert, was born on 9 November 1841. Created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester soon after his birth, he was known as the Prince of Wales for most of his long life. Fearing that her son might copy the dissolute and improvident ways of her father and uncles, Victoria provided him with strict tuition and rules of behaviour and kept him under close control until he reached the age of 21. The Prince of Wales attended Christ Church, Oxford, from 1859 to 1860 and Trinity College, Cambridge, from January to December 1861. The Queen denied him any part in her political duties and he instead became the leader of fashionable society, especially after Victoria herself withdrew into secluded widowhood. In March 1863 he married Princess Alexandra of Denmark. As Princess of Wales, she provided him with heirs and, accepting the conventions of her time, tolerated with resignation her husband’s various mistresses and adulterous affaires. On 18 July 1887 he was made an honorary admiral of the fleet, a rank that the Navy had always denied his father, though the Army made no difficulty about either the Prince Consort or the Prince of Wales being made field marshals on the Active List.

  In 1891 the Prince of Wales was a witness in a libel case, having been present at a game of baccarat when one player was accused of cheating. His playboy lifestyle then became a matter of public comment, so that he was obliged to issue a statement condemning intemperance and gambling. He kept up a keen interest in his racing stables and maintained his habit of attending lavish social events at home and abroad. He succeeded to the throne as Edward VII on 22 January 1901, though a serious illness led to the postponement of his coronation until August 1902. In domestic politics King Edward reigned as a constitutional sovereign and urged caution on the extreme Conservatives in the House of Lords when they sought to defy the Liberal majority in the Commons in 1909. In foreign affairs, as “the uncle of Europe”, his visits to other heads of state gained him a reputation as a diplomat and peacemaker, though he had little real influence on events. Edward’s personal relations with his nephew, the German Emperor William II [47], were outwardly cordial, but privately cool. This was partly because of the differences between William and his mother, (Edward’s elder sister Victoria, widowed on the early death of her husband the Emperor Frederick) and partly because of William’s open disapproval of his uncle’s hedonistic ways. Edward VII was the first non-seafaring British monarch to be an admiral of the fleet and the only one to be appointed while Prince of Wales. On his accession, he dispensed with the honorary element of his rank. His reign, though marked by turbulence in both domestic and foreign politics, came to be seen by its survivors as a golden twilight age before the cataclysm of the First World War. He died at Buckingham Palace, London, on 6 May 1910 and was buried in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

 
EDWARD VIII

  EDWARD ALBERT CHRISTIAN GEORGE ANDREW

  PATRICK DAVID, HM King of Great Britain and Ireland,

  Emperor of India, later HRH Duke of Windsor, KG, KT, KP,

  GCB, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, GCVO, GBE, ISO, MC

  (1894–1972) [84]

  Prince Edward (known in his family as David) was born on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge, Richmond Park, Surrey, the first in a family of five sons and one daughter of the then Duke and Duchess of York, later George V [44] and Queen Mary. Although in direct line of succession from his birth, Edward was initially given a naval education and from May 1907 was trained as a cadet at the Royal Naval Colleges, Osborne and Dartmouth. On the death of Edward VII [44] in May 1910, Prince Edward became heir apparent and was created Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester. On his sixteenth birthday he was created Prince of Wales, in a ceremony specially devised to appeal to Welsh national sentiment. The Prince found the event and the regalia rather fanciful and was glad to go to sea for three months later in 1911, as a midshipman in the battleship Hindostan. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1912 and studied there for two years. At the outbreak of the First World War he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 1st Battalion, the Grenadier Guards on 6 August 1914. When this unit embarked for France on 8 September 1914, George V refused to allow him to go with it, or to perform any military duties on active service.

  This prohibition remained a cause of dissatisfaction to the Prince of Wales who, like most young men of the time, wished to share the dangers of his friends and contemporaries. Instead, he was employed on the staff, where he was too junior in rank to be given important duties and too high in status to be used as an ADC. The Prince came under shell-fire on a number of occasions, on one of which his staff car was hit and his driver was killed. He was promoted to captain on 10 March 1916 and was awarded the Military Cross shortly afterwards, despite his representations that many more deserving officers had been overlooked. George V had previously had to order him to wear the decorations that he had been given by the French and Russian governments. The Prince himself, feeling he had done nothing to earn them, did so with reluctance. When it became clear that he would not be allowed into the line with the Guards Division, he asked to be allowed to leave the Western Front. In March 1916 he went to Egypt, ostensibly to report on the defences of the Suez Canal, but in practice to boost the morale of the British troops. He then returned to France, from where in November 1917 he went to Italy with the Allied reinforcements sent there after the victory of the Central Powers at Caporetto. He remained there until June 1918, when he returned to France until the end of hostilities in November 1918.

  With the war over, the Prince of Wales began a series of tours of the British Empire, the Far East and the United States. Everywhere he was greeted with acclaim. During the next eighteen years, he remained popular at home and abroad, a leader of fashion, and the world’s most eligible bachelor. On the death of his father on 20 January 1936 he succeeded to the throne as Edward VIII and, following the precedent set by George V, became an admiral of the fleet, a field marshal, and a marshal of the Royal Air Force the next day. It soon became clear that the new King wished to bring an element of freshness and informality into the monarchy. Influenced partly by his experience of military service in the First World War, he had developed vague humanitarian views on social matters and several times expressed sympathy for those whose lives were blighted by the consequences of mass unemployment. In November 1936, he gave hope to the distressed miners of South Wales and alarm to his Conservative ministers, by saying that “something must be done”.

  By this time, however, Edward’s reign was nearly over. He had fallen in love with an American lady of strong character and considerable charm, Mrs Wallis Simpson, whom he became determined to marry. Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister of the day, supported by the Labour Opposition and by the Prime Ministers of the self-governing Dominions, advised him that the King’s marriage was not one of personal choice alone, but a matter of state. An insurmountable objection to Mrs Simpson becoming Queen was that the Church of England taught that marriage was for life. It was therefore unacceptable for Edward, as Supreme Governor of that Church, to marry a lady with not merely one, but two divorced husbands still living. Despite all the urging of his friends, family and ministers, Edward decided that, if he must choose between his crown and Mrs Simpson, he would give up the former. He abdicated on 11 December 1936, telling his people that he could not carry out his duties in the way that he would wish to do, without the support and companionship of the woman he loved. He was succeeded by his younger brother, the Duke of York, who came to the throne as George VI [86]. Public opinion turned against Edward, who was seen by all classes as having put his personal feelings before his duty. Working class people in particular felt he had given Baldwin a way of removing someone who they imagined could have been the “people’s king” and could not understand why he simply did not keep Mrs Simpson as a mistress, in the way that they expected kings to behave.

  George VI granted his brother the title of HRH the Duke of Windsor. When the Duke married Mrs Simpson in France on 3 June 1937, she became Duchess of Windsor, but neither then nor later would George VI allow her the status of a Royal Highness. On the outbreak of the Second World War Windsor sought employment in the public service. After agreeing to waive his military rank as field marshal, he was made a major general and was attached to the British Military Mission in Paris. With the fall of France in June 1940, Windsor decided that the safety of his Duchess must be his first concern and fled with her first to Spain and then to Portugal. He refused orders to return to the United Kingdom and, in August 1940, accepted the post of governor of the Bahamas. This enabled him to support the war effort by promoting cordial relations with his American friends, including unauthorized private meetings with President Franklin D Roosevelt. At the end of the war Windsor was offered another West Indian post, as governor of Bermuda. He declined this and eventually returned to exile in France, where he died of cancer of the throat at his home in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, on 28 May 1972. He was buried at the Royal Mausoleum, Frogmore, Windsor. He relinquished all service appointments at the time of his abdication, but retained the ranks of admiral of the fleet, field marshal and marshal of the Royal Air Force on the active list until his death.

  ELLIOT

  The Honourable Sir CHARLES GILBERT JOHN BRYDONE,

  KCB (1818–1895) [42]

  Charles Elliot was born on 12 December 1818, the third son of the future second Earl of Minto, a Whig politician who from September 1835 to September 1841 sat in Lord Melbourne’s second Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. Charles Elliot’s uncle, Captain (later Admiral) the Honourable Sir George Elliot, became First Secretary of the Admiralty and played an important part in both the politics and practicalities of warship design during the late 1830s and 1840s. Sir George’s son, George Augustus Elliot, later became an admiral, and his father, Sir Charles Elliot, had been an admiral before him. The prominent Whig politician Lord John Russell, later Prime Minister, married in 1841 Lady Frances Elliot, who was Sir George’s youngest sister and Charles Elliot’s aunt. Charles Elliot entered the Navy on 6 May 1832 and became a lieutenant on 27 June 1838. He was appointed to the 2nd-rate Rodney in August 1838 and to the 6th-rate Talbot in October 1838, on the Mediterranean station, where on 16 July 1840 he became commander of the sloop Hazard. Elliot took part in the Allied bombardment of Acre, Palestine (Akko, Israel) on 2 November 1840, in support of the Sultan of Turkey against his rebellious subject Mehemet Ali, the Albanian ruler of Egypt and Syria. He was awarded the Navy silver medal and promoted to captain on 16 August 1841, in command of the frigate Spartan on the West Indies and North America station, where he remained until 1845.

  Elliot returned to sea in May 1853 as captain of the 5th-rate Sybille and on 26 January 1855 became commodore on the East Indies and China station. During the Second China War he took part in several boat actions a
nd landing parties in the estuary below Canton (Guangzhou) and was in a major action against Chinese war-junks at Fat-shan Creek (1 June 1857), with his broad pendant in the screw gunboat Haughty. He returned with Sybille to Devonport in March 1858 and was given command of the 3rd-rate Cressy in the Mediterranean in April 1859. He was promoted to rear-admiral on 5 August 1861. In 1863 he married Louisa Blackett, the daughter of a baronet. They later had four children, of whom three died in infancy before her own death in 1870.

  Elliot served as C-in-C, South America, from April 1864 to May 1866, when he was succeeded in post after being promoted to vice-admiral on 6 April 1866. He flew his flag in the screw ship Bombay until she was burnt by accident at Montevideo, Uruguay, in August 1864, after which he moved to the frigate Narcissus. Elliot was C-in-C at the Nore (based in the block ship Pembroke at Chatham) from July 1871 until his promotion to admiral on 8 February 1873. In 1874 he married Lady Harriet Liddell, daughter of the first Earl of Ravensworth, with whom he later had a family of three daughters and a son. His final command was as C-in-C, Devonport, from January 1880 to December 1881, with the award of the KCB in 1881. Sir Charles Elliot was promoted to admiral of the fleet on 1 December 1881 and exercised his right to remain on the active list as a supernumerary on half-pay until his death in the spring of 1895.

  ERSKINE

  Sir JAMES ELPHINSTONE, KCB (1838–1911) [54]

  James Elphinstone Erskine was born on 2 December 1838 and became a mate in the Navy on 1 January 1858. One of his grandfathers was a landed proprietor of Cardross, married to the daughter of the eleventh Baron Elphinstone, and the other was a lieutenant general. With several senior naval officers in his family, Erskine joined the Navy in 1852 and was appointed third mate in the paddle frigate Valorous, on the North America and West Indies station, on 1 January 1858. He left the ship on promotion to lieutenant on 28 June 1858 and between July 1859 and December 1860 was flag lieutenant to his uncle, Rear-Admiral John Elphinstone Erskine, with his flag in the 2nd-rate Edgar in the Channel Squadron. He was then appointed to the 2nd-rate Aboukir on the North America and West Indies station, where the outbreak of the American Civil War in April 1861 had led to tension between the United States and the United Kingdom. This arose largely from maritime issues, including the detention by a United States cruiser of Confederate envoys on passage in the British ship Trent and the provocative conduct of British blockade-runners. Erskine left Aboukir on his promotion to commander on 4 August 1862. He commanded the gunboat Speedwell on the West Coast of Africa from 1865 to 1867 and was promoted to captain on 4 November 1868.