After the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France in February 1793 Martin was appointed commander of the 6th-rate Tisiphone and sent to the Mediterranean, where he took part in operations off Toulon. On 5 November 1793 he was appointed captain of the 5th-rate Modeste, followed by command of the 5th-rate Artois, in which he served at the taking of Bastia, Corsica, in 1794. His next command was the 5th-rate Santa Margarita, based on the coast of Ireland, from where he captured the French corvette Jean Bart and the privateers Buonaparte, Vengeur and Tamise. In December 1796, commanding the 5th-rate Tamar, he went to the West Indies. Martin was at the unsuccessful British attempt to seize the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico in early 1797, but spent the following five months more profitably by making prizes of a total of nine privateers. During 1798 he commanded the 3rd-rate Dictator and, after returning home, was appointed to the 5th-rate Fisguard in which, in a single-ship duel off Brest, he captured the French frigate Immortalité (20 October 1798). He remained in Fisguard, from which he commanded a night raid by boats of his squadron up the River Quimper, Finisterre, to destroy three coastal batteries (23 June 1800). His prizes included the French frigate Vénus, the corvette Dragon, two privateers and four smaller warships. When the Treaty of Amiens brought peace with France in March 1802 the fleet was rapidly reduced and Martin went on half-pay.
With the renewal of hostilities in May 1803 Martin was given command of the 3rd-rate Impétueux in the Channel, where he served until December 1805. During 1807 he returned to the Channel in command of the 2nd-rate Prince of Wales. In 1808, in the 3rd-rate Implacable, he was with the force sent to the Baltic to support Sweden against Russia, France’s new ally in the north. In an encounter between the Russian and Swedish fleets (26 August 1808) he was credited with the destruction of the Russian 74-gun ship Vsevolod and awarded a Swedish knighthood. In 1809 he captured nine merchantmen in the Gulf of Narva and gained his fifth mention in despatches. On 1 August 1811 Martin was made a rear-admiral of the Blue. In 1812, with Russia once again a British ally, he returned to the Baltic, with his flag in the 3rd-rate Aboukir and supported the Russians in the defence of Riga against a French attack. From 1812 to 1814 he was second-in-command at Plymouth, with his flag at different times in the 3rd-rates Prince Frederick and Ganges, the 2nd-rate Impregnable, the 5th-rate Creole (off the Spanish coast) and the 4th-rate Akbar (off the Scheldt estuary). He was promoted to rear-admiral of the White on 12 August 1812, rear-admiral of the Red on 4 June 1814, with the award of a knighthood the same year, and the KCB in January 1815, when the Order of the Bath was reorganized.
Sir Thomas Martin was Deputy Comptroller of the Navy from January 1815 to February 1816 and Comptroller from then until November 1831, shortly before the duties of the Navy Board were taken over by a reformed Admiralty. At the Navy Board he had to deal with the reductions that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, but was also responsible for a new generation of large, fast warships that formed the nucleus of the Navy’s last sailing fleet. He entered Parliament reluctantly, only because this was part of the Comptroller’s duties as the officer responsible for shipbuilding and dockyards, and sat as a Member for Plymouth from 1818 until the reform of Parliament in 1832. He became vice-admiral of the Blue on 12 August 1819, of the White on 19 July 1821 and of the Red on 27 May 1825, followed by the award of the GCB in March 1830. He married Catherine Fanshawe, daughter of the Resident Commissioner of Plymouth Dockyard, sister of one future admiral and sister-in-law of three more. They had a family of three daughters and three sons, of whom two became captains in the Navy and the third became a lieutenant colonel in the Army.
Martin enjoyed the support of his old captain, William IV, both as Lord High Admiral and as sovereign, but was not always in accord with Sir George Cockburn [20], who was the senior naval member of the Board of Admiralty, but junior to Martin as a flag officer. Martin declined to give his parliamentary support to the new Whig administration that came into office in November 1830 and was dismissed from the Navy Board in October 1831. In the same year he was twice offered command of the Mediterranean Fleet, but declined on the grounds of his wife’s ill-health. He became an admiral of the Blue on 22 July 1830, admiral of the White on 10 January 1837, admiral of the Red on 23 November 1837 and admiral of the fleet on 30 October 1849. On the outbreak of the Crimean War in March 1854 he contributed to the planning of the naval campaign in the Baltic. Sir Thomas Martin died at Portsmouth on 21 October 1854.
MAY
Sir WILLIAM HENRY, GCB, GCVO (1849–1930) [65]
Henry May, the third son in a family of ten children, was born in Liscard, Cheshire, on 31 July 1849. His ancestors had for many generations lived in the Netherlands and, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, his grandfather had been simultaneously a captain in the Royal Navy and an admiral in the Royal Netherlands Navy. May’s father, a businessman, settled in Liverpool, where he served as the Netherlands consul. Henry May was educated at the Royal Institution School, Liverpool, and Eastman’s Naval Academy, Southsea, Hampshire, from which he entered the training ship Britannia in 1863. From there he joined the 1st-rate Victoria, flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet, in 1864, and transferred as a midshipman to the frigate Liffey in 1867. He was promoted to sub-lieutenant on 29 March 1869. He then served for a short time in the battleship Hercules before being appointed in June 1871 to the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, where he remained until promoted lieutenant on 7 September 1871. In April 1872 he rejoined Hercules in the Channel Squadron from where he went to the gunnery school Excellent at Portsmouth. After qualifying as a gunnery officer he was appointed in September 1874 to the frigate Newcastle in a detached squadron at Sheerness. He subsequently volunteered to join the sloop Alert, in which he served as navigating officer during an Arctic exploration in 1875–76. In 1878 he married Kinbarra Marrow, the daughter of a merchant, and later had a family of two sons. From 1877 to 1880 he was at Portsmouth in the torpedo school Vernon, followed by a few months in the frigate Inconstant. May was promoted to commander on 9 March 1881 and from then until 1884 was commanding officer of the torpedo-ram Polyphemus. From 1884 until his promotion to captain on 9 May 1887 he was second-in-command of Victoria and Albert.
In March 1888 May became flag captain to Sir Nowell Salmon [53], C-in-C on the China station, in the armoured cruiser Impérieuse. On his voyage out, complying with secret orders from the Admiralty, he established British authority over Christmas Island (now an Australian dependency) in the Indian Ocean, and became known as Christmas May. After returning home in 1890 he spent the next two and a half years in a series of appointments as naval attaché in the British embassies at Berlin, Paris and St Petersburg. In 1893 he became Assistant Director of Torpedoes at the Admiralty, from where in January 1895 he was appointed flag captain to the C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet, in the battleship Ramillies. In the first part of 1897 he was once more flag captain to Sir Nowell Salmon, as C-in-C, Portsmouth, and after the Diamond Jubilee Review, was appointed captain of Excellent in August 1897. May returned to the Admiralty in January 1901 as Director of Naval Ordnance and Torpedoes, and in April 1901 became Controller of the Navy and third naval lord of the Admiralty. He was promoted to rear-admiral on 28 March 1901 and remained at the Admiralty, with the award of the KCVO in January 1905. Sir Henry May assumed command of the new Atlantic Fleet, based at Gibraltar, in February 1905, with his flag in the battleship King Edward VII, and promotion to vice-admiral on 26 June 1905.
May returned to the Admiralty in 1907 as Second Sea Lord. At the end of 1907 the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, Herbert Asquith, looking for resources to fund the old-age pensions that the government had promised to introduce, rejected the Navy Estimates. Fisher, as First Sea Lord, was prepared to accept a reduction in the rate of building, but May led the other two Sea Lords in offering to resign if this was taken too far. A compromise was reached early in 1908, but May was cast out of “the Fishpond” (as Fisher’s favourites had become known). He nevertheless shared Fisher’s view that all ship
s in home waters, including the Channel Fleet and the Home Fleet (formed in 1906 by adding a fully manned new squadron at the Nore to the partly-manned reserve fleet), should be under a single operational command. He was promoted to admiral on 5 November 1908 and he was appointed C-in-C of the newly-enlarged Home Fleet in March 1909, with his flag in the battleship Dreadnought.
May remained there until March 1911, after making it clear that he had no wish to succeed Fisher when the latter left the Admiralty in January 1910. Fisher, who had succeeded in installing Sir Arthur Wilson [59] as his successor, nevertheless remained suspicious of May’s intentions and believed he was intriguing to become First Sea Lord in succession to Wilson. Winston Churchill, who had become First Lord of the Admiralty in Asquith’s Cabinet in October 1911, considered May as a possible successor to Wilson, but was told by Fisher that he was unpopular in the Fleet. May’s last command was as C-in-C, Devonport, from April 1911 to 20 March 1913, when he was promoted to admiral of the fleet. During the First World War he was a member of the Committee of Inquiry into the failure of the Dardanelles campaign and was also chairman of the Reconstruction committee, set up to consider likely post-war reductions. He also sat as a member of a sub-committee on fisheries. May retired in 1919 and settled at the Scottish Border town of Coldstream, Berwickshire, where he died on 7 October 1930.
MEADE
RICHARD JAMES, 4th Earl of Clanwilliam, GCB, KCMG
(1832–1907)[50]
Richard Meade, by courtesy Lord Gillford, was born on 3 October 1832, the eldest son of the third Earl of Clanwilliam, an Irish peer who had spent some time as a diplomat and been made a baron in the United Kingdom peerage in 1828. Gillford’s mother was the daughter of George Herbert, eleventh Earl of Pembroke, and a member of one of Victorian England’s most influential families. Gillford was educated at Eton College and joined the Navy in November 1845. After becoming a lieutenant on 15 September 1852 he was appointed in December 1852 to the frigate Impérieuse, in which he served in the Baltic in 1854 and 1855 during the Crimean War. In September 1856, together with several other young noblemen, he joined the frigate Raleigh under the Honourable Henry Keppel [36]. Hastening to join the Second China War, the ship struck an uncharted rock near Hong Kong and became a total loss, though all the crew was saved. Gillford remained with Keppel and served with him in boat actions in the estuary below Canton (Guangzhou), at Escape Creek (25 May 1857) and Fat-shan Creek (1 June 1857). In August 1857 he was appointed to the 2nd-rate Calcutta, flagship of the C-in-C, East Indies, Sir Michael Seymour, in personal command of the operations on the Chinese coast. Gillford landed with a naval brigade in December 1858, and at the storming of Canton (29 December 1857) was badly wounded in the arm by a heavy musket ball. He was mentioned in despatches and promoted on 26 February 1858 to be commander of the sloop Hornet, with which he returned to the United Kingdom.
Gillford was promoted to captain on 22 July 1859 and commanded the corvette Tribune in the Pacific from 1862 to 1866. He returned home and married Elizabeth Kennedy, daughter of the Governor of Queensland, and later had with her a family of four sons and four daughters. From 1868 to 1871 he commanded the battleship Hercules in the Channel, followed in 1872 by command of the steam reserve at Portsmouth. Gillford became third naval lord at the Admiralty in 1874, when Disraeli’s second administration came into office, and remained until the Conservative ministry fell in April 1880. He was promoted to rear-admiral on 31 December 1876 and succeeded his father to become fourth Earl of Clanwilliam on 7 October 1879. Between 1880 and 1882 Lord Clanwilliam (promoted to vice-admiral on 26 July 1881) commanded the Flying Squadron, with his flag in the frigate Inconstant, and took his ships around the world under sail. Among them was the corvette Bacchante, carrying the future King George V [64] and his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor. Clanwilliam was C-in-C, North America and the West Indies, with his flag in the battleship Bellerophon from August 1885 to September 1886, when he vacated the command after being promoted to admiral on 22 June 1886. Clanwilliam’s last command was as C-in-C, Portsmouth, from June 1891 to June 1894. He became an admiral of the fleet on 20 February 1895 and retired on 3 October 1902. He died at Badgemore, Henley, Oxfordshire, on 4 August 1907 and was buried in the Herbert family vault at Wilton House, Wiltshire. His eldest son, a former naval officer, predeceased him in 1905 and the earldom passed to Clanwilliam’s second son.
MEUX
The Honourable Sir HEDWORTH LAMBTON, GCB, KCVO
(1856–1929) [66]
The Honourable Hedworth Lambton, third son of the second Earl of Durham, was born in London on 5 July 1856. He was educated at Cheam School and joined the Navy as a cadet in the training ship Britannia in 1870. From there he was appointed in December 1871 to the frigate Endymion in the Channel, in which he served until August 1874, when he transferred as a midshipman to the battleship Agincourt, flagship of Sir Beauchamp Seymour as C-in-C, Channel Squadron, with Lord Walter Kerr [56] as flag captain. In March 1875 he was appointed to the cruiser Undaunted, which was at that time fitting out at Sheerness to be the new flagship on the China station, but left her to begin his promotion courses, with promotion to acting sub-lieutenant on 20 September 1875. Late in 1876 he was appointed to the battleship Alexandra, flagship of the C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet, where he served until promoted to lieutenant on 27 February 1879.
Lambton was re-appointed to Alexandra in February 1880 as flag lieutenant to Sir Beauchamp Seymour and was present in her at the British bombardment of Alexandria (11 July 1882) and subsequent operations in response to an Egyptian nationalist uprising led by Colonel Arabi (‘Urbi) Pasha. When Seymour (Lord Alcester) left the Mediterranean to join the Admiralty he gave Lambton one of the nominations at that period allotted to a C-in-C on hauling down his flag, so that Lambton became a commander on 10 March 1883. During 1883 he was at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, before becoming an aide-de-camp on the staff of Earl Spencer, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. As a wealthy young nobleman, he played a full part in Court and social life, both in London and Dublin. He had a strong interest in the Turf and had already begun to breed his own bloodstock. Spencer left Dublin in 1885 and Lambton returned to sea in July 1886 in command of the sloop Dolphin in the Mediterranean. He was appointed to the royal yacht Osborne in February 1888, where he remained until promoted to captain on 30 June 1889. Between 1890 and 1894 he was flag captain to the C-in-C, Pacific, Rear-Admiral Charles Hotham [55], in the cruiser Warspite.
In August 1892 Spencer became First Lord of the Admiralty in Gladstone’s fourth Liberal Cabinet and appointed Lambton as his Naval Private Secretary. When George (later Viscount) Goschen succeeded Spencer after Lord Salisbury took office as Conservative Prime Minister in June 1895 Lambton was retained in post until 1897. He exerted considerable influence on officer appointments and some naval lords of the Admiralty resented his high-handed approach to themselves, who were senior to him in age and rank. He was nevertheless on good terms with Rear-Admiral Sir John Fisher [58] and Lord Charles Beresford, Fisher’s future opponent, with both of whom he had served in the Mediterranean Fleet under Seymour. Between 1897 and 1899 Lambton was on the China station in command of the cruiser Powerful On his way home he was ordered to Durban, Natal, at the beginning of the Anglo-Boer South African War. Acting on his own initiative, he embarked a British infantry battalion at Mauritius and took it with him to Durban, where he arrived to learn that the C-in-C, Natal, Sir George White, was in great need of heavy artillery. Lambton then formed a naval brigade from Powerful and her intended relief, Terrible, equipped with naval 12-pdr and 4.7 inch guns on land carriages improvised by Captain Percy Scott of Terrible. This episode later became the theme for the Naval Field Gun Competition, a popular feature of the annual Royal Tournaments until these were discontinued in 1999. He reached Ladysmith just before the town was surrounded by the Boers, and played an important part in its subsequent defence until it was relieved in February 1900.
At the end of 1900, in the “Khaki election”, Lambto
n was persuaded by his family to stand for Parliament as the Liberal candidate for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the heartland of the Earl of Durham’s political influence. It was hoped that as a war hero he would capture the patriotic vote, but this went to the governing Unionist (Conservative) party and Lambton was defeated. In April 1901 he was given command of the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, followed by appointment as Commodore, Royal Yachts, from July 1901 to April 1903, with promotion to rear-admiral on 3 October 1902. Between June 1903 and June 1904 he was second-in-command to his old friend Lord Charles Beresford in the battleship Magnificent in the Channel Fleet. Between November 1904 and December 1906 he commanded the Third Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean Fleet, with his flag in the armoured cruiser Leviathan. In 1906 he was elected a member of the Jockey Club, the governing body of British horse-racing. By this time Sir Hedworth Lambton had come to share Beresford’s opposition to Fisher’s naval reforms and also echoed Beresford’s reservations about Prince Louis of Battenberg [74] on account of the latter’s German origins. Lambton and Beresford had both been intimates of King Edward VII [44], but became estranged from him towards the end of his reign, not least over the King’s support for Battenberg and Fisher. Lambton was promoted to vice-admiral on 1 January 1907 and served between January 1908 and April 1910 as C-in-C on the China station, with his flag in the armoured cruiser King Alfred.
In 1910 Lambton married the forty-year-old Viscountess Chelsea, whose first husband, second son of the fifth Earl Cadogan, had died two years earlier. The Chelseas had lived on the estate of Theobalds Park, Waltham Cross, Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, owned by Valerie, Lady Meux, the good-looking childless widow of the baronet Sir Henry Meux, the last of a rich brewing dynasty. This lady, of modest origins but determined character, had met her future husband in the bar of one of his own London taverns, the Horseshoe in Tottenham Court Road. She took control of his life and fortune (despite every effort by his family and business partners), kept her own racing stables and entertained lavishly. On the death of her weak-minded and alcoholic husband in 1900, she was left one of the wealthiest women in England. During the Anglo-Boer South African War, she commissioned and paid for a battery of naval 12-pdr guns on field carriages, made by the Els wick Ordnance factory, Tyneside. These guns, manned by men of the 1st Northumberland Volunteer Artillery, played a useful part in the South African campaign and Lambton had visited Lady Meux on his return from the war to express his appreciation of her patriotic gesture. The visit of this heroic scion of a noble house meant much to her, as, because of her background, she was not widely received in Society and had been given little official recognition of her contribution to the war effort. Their friendship, fostered by a common interest in racing, grew and, shortly before her death in December 1910, she made a will leaving him the bulk of her estates and fortune, on condition that he took the name Meux. He did so in September 1911, after being promoted to admiral on 2 March 1911.
British Admirals of the Fleet Page 28
