After being awarded the KCB in 1933 Sir Roger Backhouse (widely known simply as “RB”) was promoted to admiral on 11 February 1934. He became C-in-C, Home Fleet, with his flag successively in the battleships Nelson and Rodney, in August 1935. Believing that a fleet commander should concentrate all decisions into his own hands, he was unable to establish good working relations with his chief of staff, Rear-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, an old shipmate in Dreadnought. When Ramsay prepared orders on his behalf, Backhouse considered that this was tantamount to usurping his own authority as C-in-C. Ramsay came to believe that Backhouse was trying to deny him the responsibility that went with the post of a chief of staff and was relieved at his own request in December 1935. Backhouse was appointed First Sea Lord in 1938, in the Board headed by Alfred Duff Cooper in Neville Chamberlain’s Cabinet. Very tall, with a determined manner and presence, capable of great charm though also of harshness to subordinates who did not reach his standards, he soon established his authority as the head of his Service. Almost immediately after taking up office he was faced with the implications of the Munich crisis. Duff Cooper resigned and his successor, Earl Stanhope, accepted the Treasury view that, with Germany appeased, the rate of naval rearmament could be reduced.
As First Sea Lord Backhouse was willing to consider innovations, but his critics saw him as prone to indecision and over-centralization. He seems to have realized that the official British strategy of sending a major fleet to Singapore to protect Australia against any Japanese aggression was no longer viable, and hinted as much to his Australian opposite number. The establishment of a German protectorate over the Czech lands in March 1939 forced the Cabinet to face the need for greater defence spending, but Backhouse did not live to see the results. He became ill in the Spring of 1939 with what was at first thought to be influenza, but was later diagnosed as a brain tumour. As his health grew worse, he left office in May and retired in June 1939. He was promoted to admiral of the fleet from the retired list on 5 July 1939 and died in London on 15 July 1939.
BATHURST
Sir DAVID BENJAMIN, GCB (1936-) [115]
Benjamin Bathurst, the son of Group Captain and Lady Ann Bathurst, was born on 27 May 1936 and educated at Eton College. He entered the Navy as a cadet in 1953 when he joined the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and became a midshipman on 1 September 1955. He was promoted to acting sub-lieutenant on 1 January 1957 and served during 1958 in the coastal minesweeper Woolaston followed by promotion to lieutenant on 1 February 1959. In 1959 he married Sarah Peto and later had with her a son and three daughters. Bathurst specialized as a naval aviator and qualified as a pilot at No 1 FTS, Royal Air Force, Linton-on-Ouse in 1960. After completing a helicopter conversion course at the Royal Naval Air Station Seahawk, Culdrose, Cornwall, in 1961, he served during 1962 in the ship’s flight of the guided missile destroyer Devonshire. In 1964 he was in 737 Squadron at the Royal Naval Air Station Osprey, Portland, at the Central Flying School, RAF Ternhill, where he qualified as an instructor, and 706 Squadron at RNAS Culdrose. During 1965 he was an exchange officer with the Royal Australian Navy, and was based at the Royal Australian Naval Air Station Albatross, Nowra, New South Wales, with the Australian 723 and 725 Squadrons. Bathurst was promoted to lieutenant-commander on 1 February 1967 on appointment as senior pilot of 820 Squadron in the aircraft carrier Eagle. From February to October 1969 he was the commanding officer of 819 Squadron. During 1970 he served on the staff of the Director General of Naval Recruiting in the Ministry of Defence, with promotion to commander on 30 June 1970.
Bathurst returned to sea as executive officer of the guided missile destroyer Norfolk from February 1971 to November 1972. In February 1973 he was appointed to the Directorate of Naval Air Warfare at the MOD, where he remained until promoted to captain on 31 December 1974. From March 1975 to April 1976 he commanded the frigate Ariadne, after which he rejoined the Navy Department at the MOD as Naval Assistant to two successive First Sea Lords, Sir Edward Ashmore [109] and Sir Terence Lewin [110]. Bathurst became Captain (Frigates) of the Fifth Frigate Squadron, in the frigate Minerva in September 1978. During 1981 he attended the Royal College of Defence Studies, followed by appointment as Director of Naval Air Warfare in 1982. He was promoted to rear-admiral on 10 October 1983 and subsequently served until 1985 as Flag Officer, Second Flotilla. Between 1985 and 1986 he was Director General, Naval Manpower and Training, at the MOD, followed by promotion to vice-admiral on 22 December 1986. Bathurst remained at the MOD from 1986 to 1989 as Chief of Fleet Support, with the award of the KCB in 1987.
Sir Benjamin Bathurst was promoted to admiral on 21 April 1989. Between 1989 and 1991 he was C-in-C Fleet, with the NATO commands of C-in-C, Channel (CINCHAN) and C-in-C, Eastern Atlantic (CINCEASTLANT). He returned to the MOD in 1991 as Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, and remained there from 1993 to 1995 as First Sea Lord. He was promoted to admiral of the fleet on leaving office on 10 July 1995, the last officer to be awarded this rank in normal peacetime circumstances.
BATTENBERG
Prince Louis of, see MOUNTBATTEN, LOUIS ALEXANDER
[74]
BEATTY
Sir DAVID RICHARD, 1st Earl Beatty, GCB, OM, GCVO, DSO
(1871–1936) [69]
David Beatty was born on 17 January 1871 at Howbeck Lodge, Nantwich, Cheshire. He was the second son in a family of five children of a former subaltern of the 4th Hussars who had been obliged to resign after eloping with the wife of a brother officer. Both parties came from Anglo-Irish squirearchy and on their marriage settled in Cheshire to train horses from their family estates in Ireland. Beatty joined the Navy as a cadet in the training ship Britannia in 1884. In February 1886, through the influence of his mother (a forceful women, who prophesied that one day England would ring with her son’s praise) he was appointed to the battleship Alexandra, flagship of the Duke of Edinburgh [49] as C-in-C, Mediterranean. He became a midshipman on 15 May 1886 and an acting sub-lieutenant in May 1890, at the beginning of his promotion courses. On 19 January 1892 he was appointed sub-lieutenant in the battleship Nile in the Mediterranean. He joined the royal yacht Victoria and Albert in July 1892 and, on the completion of her summer cruise, was promoted to lieutenant on 25 August 1892. Thereafter he served in the Mediterranean, successively in the corvette Ruby until September 1893, the battleship Camperdown until September 1895, and the battleship Trafalgar until late 1897.
During 1896 Beatty was second-in-command of a flotilla of river gunboats on the Nile, in support of the Anglo-Egyptian expedition for the re-conquest of the Sudan. After passing the Third Cataract, Beatty (with his sun helmet hit by a Sudanese bullet) took over when his commanding officer was wounded, and pushed on upstream to reach Dongola with the Army. Beatty was awarded the DSO and went home on leave. He returned to the Nile campaign in 1897, in command of the Egyptian gunboat El Teb. The vessel capsized attempting to pass the Fourth Cataract, but Beatty escaped and went on to command a naval rocket battery at the battle of the Atbara (8 April 1898) and the gunboat Fateh at the battle of Omdurman (2 September 1898). He then proceeded up the river with the expedition commander, Sir Herbert Kitchener, to establish contact with a small French party that had reached Fashoda from West Africa. The French officers were treated diplomatically and carried down the Nile to Egypt, but the Fashoda Incident inflamed French public opinion and for a time threatened to lead to war between France and the United Kingdom. Beatty, with special promotion to commander on 15 November 1898 (passing over nearly 400 lieutenants senior to him) returned home a hero. In his favourite pastime of foxhunting he met the twenty-three-year-old American society beauty, Mrs Ethel Field Tree, heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, as wilful as she was beautiful, and already growing estranged from her husband.
Beatty returned to sea in April 1899 as commander of the battleship Barfleur, flagship of the second-in-command on the China station. In 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, he landed with reinforcements for the multinational garrison of Tientsin (Tienjin). He led a number of so
rties, in one of which he was ambushed and wounded, and later took part in the relief of the naval brigade under Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Seymour [57] at Hsiku. His services were rewarded with promotion to captain on 9 November 1900. In May 1901 he married Mrs Tree, after her husband had obtained a divorce and the custody of their child, on the grounds of desertion. Marriage to a divorcee was frowned upon in the society of the time, and Beatty’s family counselled him against this step, but the combination of Beatty’s heroic reputation and his wife’s riches made them acceptable at Court, and at first they were happy together. In June 1902 Beatty was given command of the cruiser Juno, in which he served successively in the Channel and the Mediterranean, where he transferred to the cruiser Arrogant in April 1903. From October 1904 to September 1905, still in the Mediterranean, he commanded the armoured cruiser Suffolk. His wife accompanied him and lived at Malta. When there was talk of Beatty being disciplined for damaging Suffolk’s engines when rushing back to join her, she offered to buy the Admiralty a new ship as a replacement. He subsequently returned to London where he was appointed a naval adviser at the War Office.
Beatty was appointed in December 1908 to the battleship Queen, in the Atlantic Fleet. Two years later he reached the top of the captains’ seniority list, but his rapid promotion, and the fact that his wife’s money had made it unnecessary for him to seek a ship, meant that he had not served the six years at sea required for promotion to flag rank. Nevertheless, the First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher [58], wished Beatty to be promoted, and by a special Order in Council made him a rear-admiral on 1 January 1910, the youngest flag officer since Nelson. He declined the offered appointment as second-in-command of the Atlantic Fleet, based at Gibraltar, in the hope that he would be given a post in the more important Home Fleet. The Admiralty, where there was some feeling against Beatty because of his rapid promotion, was not accustomed to officers behaving in such a way, and his career might have languished but for a social encounter with Winston Churchill, who became First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911. Despite official advice to the contrary, Churchill appointed Beatty to his staff as Naval Secretary in January 1912. In the manoeuvres of July 1912 Beatty commanded a cruiser squadron from the reserve fleet, with his flag in the armoured cruiser Aboukir. A former cavalry subaltern, Churchill was impressed by the dash and quickness of mind he believed Beatty had developed from his polo-playing and foxhunting, and which other naval officers seemed to him to lack. He decided that these attributes made Beatty an ideal choice over the heads of all other candidates for command of the Battle-cruiser Squadron. Beatty assumed command, with his flag in the battle-cruiser Lion in March 1913 and was awarded the KCB in June 1913.
Sir David Beatty was given acting promotion to vice-admiral on 2 August 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War. His first sea combat was at the battle of Heligoland Bight (28 August 1914) where he emerged as the inheritor of the Nelsonian tradition of the offensive. He demonstrated the same offensive spirit at the battle of the Dogger Bank (24 January 1915), where he inflicted a defeat on the German battle-cruiser force, though Lion was badly damaged, so that the Germans escaped before Beatty could shift his flag to Princess Royal and re-establish control. At the battle of Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916) Beatty succeeded in drawing the German High Seas Fleet into contact with the Grand Fleet, but in the process suffered the loss of two battle-cruisers. Their destruction by sudden explosion led Beatty to remark to his flag captain, Alfred Chatfield [83] “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today, and with our system”. Some analysts later criticized Beatty’s tactics at Jutland, though others defended his actions with equal vigour.
On 4 December 1916 Beatty succeeded Sir John Jellicoe [68] as C-in-C, Grand Fleet, with acting promotion to admiral. With his handsome appearance, flamboyant manner, cap worn at a rakish angle and jacket adorned with six buttons in place of the regulation eight, he was the antithesis of his austere and clinical predecessor. His own dash in command of the battle-cruisers at Jutland was widely contrasted with Jellicoe’s cautious handling of the main battle fleet, and he was popular both with the British public and the King, George V [64]. Believing that the Germans had escaped destruction because the Grand Fleet had lacked tactical flexibility, he replaced Jellicoe’s prescriptive fleet orders with fleet instructions that allowed captains greater freedom to use their initiative. Early in 1917, he transferred his flag from the battleship Iron Duke to the faster and newer battleship Queen Elizabeth. After the United States entered the war in April 1917 his fleet was reinforced by a battle squadron under Rear-Admiral Hugh Rodman, United States Navy. Despite two successes by German surface raiders against Norwegian convoys, the Grand Fleet retained its dominance of the North Sea until the end of the war, when the High Seas Fleet mutinied rather than put to sea. On 21 November 1918, in accordance with the terms of the Armistice, Beatty escorted it to internment at his own base, Scapa Flow and gave the order “The German flag will be hauled down at sunset and will not be hoisted again without permission”. This was, in fact, an unlawful requirement, as the High Seas Fleet had been interned rather than captured, and remained the property of the German government, but, under Beatty’s guns, the Germans were forced to comply. He was promoted to admiral on 1 January 1919 and to admiral of the fleet on 3 April 1919, prior to hauling down his flag when the Grand Fleet was dispersed on 7 April 1919.
In the post-war honours it was at first envisaged that Beatty should be granted a viscountcy, as had been awarded to Jellicoe. He held out for an earldom, such as had been given to Field Marshal Haig, C-in-C of the British Expeditionary Force at the time of the Armistice, and received this late in 1919. He also hoped for an immediate appointment as First Sea Lord, preferably combined with a role as C-in-C of the Navy, but the incumbent, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss [71], remained in post until 1 November 1919, when Beatty succeeded him. Earl Beatty was First Sea Lord for over seven and a half years, holding this post for longer than any other officer and serving under five successive First Lords, in one Coalition, one Labour and three Conservative administrations. During this period he had to deal with all the usual problems facing a post-war navy, including Treasury-led demands for reductions in the fleet. The long-standing British policy of maintaining absolute supremacy at sea had to be abandoned in the face of the emergence of the United States as a world power, with the wealth and will to build a large navy matching its new position.
Beatty attended the Washington Naval Conference of November 1921, where in accord with Cabinet policy, he accepted parity, at the lowest possible number, with the United States battlefleet, while retaining superiority over France, Italy and Japan. Nevertheless, he continued to argue that British dependency on seaborne trade required British supremacy in the number of cruisers. He saw Japan, a former ally, as a future rival, and pressed hard for funds to construct a naval base at Singapore from which fleet operations in the Far East could be mounted. He also pressed for the return of responsibility for naval aviation from the recently-formed Royal Air Force to the Royal Navy, on the grounds that this arm would play a vital part in future warfare at sea and could not be entrusted to another Service with its own doctrine and priorities. Indeed, he began by advocating the abolition of the Royal Air Force and the Air Ministry altogether, and promised financial savings in other branches of the fleet if given control of the RAF’s maritime air assets. He failed in this, and the RAF’s argument that the air was an indivisible element, so that the same Service should operate aircraft over the sea and over the land, continued to have Cabinet support. His only success was an agreement achieved in 1924 that observers and non-commissioned aircrews in aircraft carriers should be members of the Royal Navy rather than the Royal Air Force.
Beatty supported the creation of the Chiefs of Staff Committee and proved to be a fair-minded chairman. He encouraged the development of the Naval Staff College at Greenwich and the Imperial Defence College, London. He also used his position as First Sea Lord to alter the draft of the
official record of the battle of Jutland, so as to maximize the achievements of his own Battle-cruiser Fleet and imply that Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet had arrived late and done little. This led to a controversy between rival adherents of the two admirals that outlived both of them. Beatty’s greatest achievement in this period was to defend the Navy against even more drastic reductions than those it actually sustained. He ended his active career on leaving the Admiralty in July 1927. He maintained his reputation as a keen horseman, but two severe hunting accidents, following a car crash, left him badly injured. Edith Beatty had given her second husband two sons, but their marriage was increasingly unhappy, with each partner unfaithful to the other. Beatty himself later complained “I have paid a terrible price for my millions”, while his wife blamed him for neglecting her in order to further his naval career. She grew steadily more unstable and restless, and travelled extensively to find cures for her ill-health. This, to a great extent psychotic in origin, ended with her death from cerebral thrombosis in July 1931. Beatty died of heart failure at his London home on 11 March 1936 and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. He was succeeded in the peerage by his elder son.
British Admirals of the Fleet Page 5