British Admirals of the Fleet

by T A Heathcote

  Chatfield became gunnery lieutenant of the battleship Caesar in the Mediterranean Fleet in January 1899, where he became a firm friend of her commander, Charles Madden [75]. He was one of the young officers consulted by the C-in-C, Sir John Fisher [58], and liked his realistic approach to training, but was uncomfortable with Fisher’s habit of criticizing their superiors, and regretted the way in which he split the Royal Navy into opposing factions. In January 1900 he joined the staff of the gunnery school Wildfire at Sheerness, where he incurred the displeasure of the Admiralty for taking the destroyer Spitfire along the Thames to Greenwich at a speed of twenty-seven knots. Chatfield returned to sea in November 1902 as gunnery lieutenant of the armoured cruiser Good Hope, flagship of the First Cruiser Squadron, with Madden as flag captain. After cruises to South Africa and the West Indies he was promoted to commander on 31 December 1903 and in January 1904 became commander of the battleship Venerable, flagship of the second-in-command of the Mediterranean Fleet.

  Chatfield returned to Excellent as commander in March 1906 and remained there until promoted to captain on 30 June 1909. While at Portsmouth he met the eighteen-year-old Lillian Matthews, the sister of one of his sub-lieutenant students. They were married in July 1909 and later had two daughters and a son. While on honeymoon in Switzerland, he was invited to become flag captain in the battleship Albemarle, flagship of Sir Colin Keppel as second-in-command of the Atlantic Fleet. Chatfield held this appointment from September 1909 to February 1910, when the ship was paid off and her flag and crew transferred to the battleship London. He spent the first part of 1911 as a student on the War Course at the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth, after which he was selected by Sir Colin Keppel to be his flag captain in the converted liner Medina, carrying George V [64] to India for his coronation Durbar. On returning to the United Kingdom early in 1912 Chatfield went on half-pay, until given command of the cruiser Aboukir from the reserve fleet in the summer manoeuvres, as flag captain to Rear-Admiral David Beatty [69]. In September 1912 he was appointed to the cruiser Southampton, under construction in the Clyde, from where he was selected by Beatty to become his flag captain in the battle-cruiser Lion in March 1913.

  After the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 Chatfield remained in Lion and was Beatty’s flag captain at the battles of Heligoland Bight (28 August 1914), the Dogger Bank (24 January 1915), where his ship was badly damaged and put out of action for four months, and Jutland (31 May 1916), where Lion narrowly escaped destruction. In November 1916, when Beatty succeeded Sir John Jellicoe [68] as C-in-C of the Grand Fleet, Chatfield went with him as flag captain and chief of staff, first in the battleship Iron Duke and then, after February 1917, the battleship Queen Elizabeth. Chatfield remained in this appointment throughout the rest of the war. He was succeeded in April 1919 and was awarded the KCMG. Sir Alfred Chatfield was also offered command of the royal yachts, in a gesture intended by George V to give him a break from combatant duties. He declined, and was instead appointed to the Admiralty in July 1919 as Fourth Sea Lord. Beatty, who became First Sea Lord in November 1919, appointed Chatfield as Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff in February 1920.

  Chatfield was promoted to rear-admiral on 31 July 1920. He attended the Washington Naval Conference of 1920–21, as a technical adviser to Beatty, and became the senior British naval delegate in the closing stages of the negotiations. He left the Admiralty in September 1922 to assume command of the Third Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean Fleet, with his flag in the cruiser Cardiff. He spent eight months in the Dardanelles, at the time of the Chanak crisis, when there was a risk of hostilities with a renascent Turkey, before the fleet returned to its base at Malta on the conclusion of the Treaty of Lausanne. In 1925 Chatfield returned to the Admiralty as Third Sea Lord and Controller of the Navy, responsible for ship-building, dockyards and armaments. He found this a difficult time, as the Ten-year Rule instituted in 1923 was beginning to take effect, while the Treasury maintained its constant pressure for economies. He was promoted to vice-admiral on 1 March 1926. After the departure of Beatty from the Admiralty in July 1927, Sir Ernie Chatfield, as he became known about this time, remained there until September 1928. He became C-in-C, Atlantic Fleet, with his flag successively in the battleships Nelson and Rodney, on 1 March 1929.

  Chatfield was promoted to admiral on 1 April 1930 and was appointed C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet, with his flag in the battleship Queen Elizabeth, on 27 May 1930. He introduced a policy of realistic training, including night exercises, but set his face against detailed operations orders produced in what he referred to as the “Germanic” staff manner. He ended this command in September 1932 and became First Sea Lord on 12 January 1933, in the Board headed by Sir Bolton Eyres-Monsell in Ramsay MacDonald’s second National Cabinet. Almost his first act was to countermand the First Lord’s scheme for introducing sail training for potential petty officers as a means of improving their leadership skills. Chatfield, who remembered the hazards and unpopularity of such training from his days in Cleopatra, considered that the Royal Navy no longer had the expertise safely to operate full-rigged ships and saw little benefit in sending modern-minded ratings to sail in them. He nevertheless maintained good relations with Eyres-Monsell, himself a former naval officer, and found him a valuable ally and supporter. As part of his policy of restoring morale in the Fleet, he introduced the practice of Sea Lords wearing uniform when visiting ships or dockyards. Previously they had worn civilian clothing, indicating their constitutional position as members of a ministerial body rather than officers of the Navy, and thereby had come to be regarded as unsympathetic to the Service. Not to be outdone, the Civil Lords adopted a blue suit and yachting cap, for which a special badge was designed, for wear on official visits.

  Chatfield proved himself adept at dealing with Cabinet reluctance to make adequate provision for naval expenditure. He was able to persuade Ramsay MacDonald that, despite opposition from the Foreign Office and the Treasury, the Navy should have seventy cruisers, rather than the fifty agreed at the Naval Conference of 1930, and that large battleships should continue to form the main force of the Fleet. In June 1935 Stanley Baldwin succeeded MacDonald at the head of a National government and, in June 1936, appointed Sir Samuel Hoare as First Lord of the Admiralty. In June 1936 a new office was created, Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, filled by Sir Thomas Inskip. Chatfield, who had become chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, was initially opposed to this move, seeing it as a threat to the unanimity that the three Chiefs had previously felt bound to reach in their deliberations. Nevertheless, with Hoare’s full support, he was able to use Inskip as an arbitrator to meet two of his main targets. The first was to overcome the arguments of those who argued that the battleship was outmoded and vulnerable to air attack, and that bombers were both cheaper and more effective. The second was to obtain the removal of the Fleet Air Arm from the Royal Air Force to the Royal Navy, a cause he considered so important that he threatened to resign if the Air Ministry did not yield. A compromise was agreed in July 1937, whereby all aircraft and crews intended to operate from carriers became part of the Royal Navy, but maritime aircraft operating from coastal bases remained part of the Royal Air Force.

  Chatfield played an important part in the 1935 Naval Agreement with Germany, arguing that Hitler had already denounced the naval clauses of the Versailles Treaty, but was at least ready to accept permanent inferiority to the British at sea. He took a similarly practical approach to the Ethiopian crisis of 1935–36, where he thought that the establishment of an Italian empire in East Africa would have the effect of making Italy more dependent on British goodwill. He was concerned to avoid any hostilities that would result in losses of ships before his rearmament programme was under way, and was initially sympathetic to the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War that began in 1936. Nevertheless, after Italian submarines (secretly operating in support of the Nationalists) began to attack merchant ships, he became a hero of the Left for his part in co-o
rdinating international plans against them. He remained at the Admiralty, being twice extended in office, until 10 August 1938, with promotion to admiral of the fleet on 3 May 1935 and the grant of a peerage as Baron Chatfield of Ditchling in the coronation honours of May 1937.

  During the winter of 1938–39 Chatfield chaired a committee on the rearmament of the Army in India, taking account of the increasing cost of modern weapons and the limited finances of the Indian government. His tour was boycotted by Indian politicians, who argued that the British troops in India were an army of occupation and should be withdrawn. The dominant Congress party pressed for a national army, under the control of Indian ministers, and open to recruits from all classes rather than only those designated “martial” by the British. Chatfield judged that British troops were an important part of India’s defences, not only against invasion, but also the increasing inter-communal tension. An army under the control of local politicians would, he thought, give unlimited power to “a sectional oligarchy”. He had to admit that the Navy could no longer defend India’s coasts and seaborne traffic, and proposed that external security should be achieved by one Indian division being kept available for deployment anywhere between Suez and Singapore. Recognizing that Indian politicians would not vote the necessary supplies from their own budget, he recommended that the army in India should be modernized at British expense.

  On his return to London in February 1939 Chatfield accepted the post of Minister for Co-ordination of Defence, in succession to Inskip, in the National Cabinet under Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister since May 1937. Having endured years of Treasury parsimony, he ranged himself alongside the Service ministers against the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, who maintained his department’s view that the growing defence estimates would ruin the country. He felt that Chamberlain had been right not to go to war for the sake of Czechoslovakia and saw that the British would be even less able to help Poland, but joined with the Cabinet decision to offer her a guarantee, in the hope this would deter a German attack on the Western democracies. On the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 Chatfield was invited to become a member of Chamberlain’s War Cabinet, together with the three Service ministers. He soon found that, whereas previously, as deputy chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence, he had been the Cabinet’s main adviser on defence matters, he was now the “fifth wheel on the coach”. Likewise, he had no place in the Chiefs of Staff Committee that he had dominated as First Sea Lord. Although adept at operating the machinery of government in Whitehall, he was less happy as a minister than he had been as an administrator, especially as he did not have an actual ministry to support him. In October 1939 he asked Chamberlain to abolish the title of Minister for Coordination for Defence and offered to remain in office as Minister without Portfolio. In April 1940 Chamberlain accepted the first part of this proposal and decided that the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, should become chairman of the Military Co-ordination Committee in Chatfield’s place. Chatfield himself was persuaded to resign, with the offer of an unspecified important appointment overseas, but declined to leave the country in time of war. When Churchill became Prime Minister on the fall of the Chamberlain government in May 1940 he took the title Minister of Defence for himself. His relations with Chatfield during his years in the wilderness had been cordial, but the two were never close allies and Chatfield was not offered a place in the new administration. He busied himself in other ways, including chairing a committee on the evacuation of London’s hospitals, and speaking from time to time in the House of Lords on defence questions. His memoirs, The Navy and Defence and It Might Happen Again, published in 1943 and 1947, pressed the case for adequate and timely provision for national defence. He retired to Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, where he died on 15 November 1967, and was succeeded in the peerage by his son Ernie.

  CLANWILLIAM

  EARL OF, see MEADE, RICHARD JAMES, [50]

  CLINTON

  The Honourable GEORGE (1686–1761) [4]

  The Honourable George Clinton, third son of the sixth Earl of Lincoln, was born in 1686. He joined the Navy in 1707, during the War of the Spanish Succession, after which he was appointed captain of the 5th-rate Speedwell on 16 June 1716. In 1720 he commanded the 4th-rate Moncke in the Baltic fleet under Sir John Norris [1]. The ship was lost in a storm on the return to England, but Clinton was able to save all his crew and most of his stores and was honourably acquitted at the subsequent court-martial. He returned to the Baltic in command of the 4th-rate Nottingham, where he served under Norris’s command in 1721 and 1722. During 1727, in a brief war with Spain, Clinton was captain of the 4th-rate Colchester, blockading the Spanish coast and escorting home the annual convoy of Levant merchantmen from Smyrna (Izmir). Between July 1727 and May 1728 he commanded the 4th-rate Sutherland. In 1732 he was given command of the squadron sent annually to Newfoundland, with the associated function of civil governor. In 1734, at a time of tension between the United Kingdom and Spain, he was given command of the 3rd-rate Berwick in Norris’s fleet in the Channel. Clinton served during 1736–37 as commodore and C-in-C in the Mediterranean and, on the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’s Ear in 1739, was given command of the 3rd-rate Prince Frederick. In 1740, in the War of the Austrian Succession, he commanded the 2nd-rate Marlborough.

  Clinton was appointed governor of the colony of New York in 1741, though he did not arrive to take up office until September 1743. Inexperienced as an administrator, he found himself opposed in council by a party led by the Chief Justice of the colony, James De Lancey, and failed to defend the crown prerogative against attacks in the New York Assembly. He was recalled in 1753 and became Member of Parliament for Saltash, Cornwall, in 1754. He became rear-admiral of the Red on 7 December 1743, vice-admiral of the White on 19 June 1744, vice-admiral of the Red on 3 April 1745, admiral of the White on 15 July 1747 and admiral of the fleet in March 1757. His naval and civil appointments probably reflected the patronage of his eldest brother, a faithful supporter of the eminent Whig politician, the Duke of Newcastle, who became Prime Minister in 1754. Clinton died on 10 July 1761. He was married to Anne Carle, the daughter of a major general. They had six children, of whom only two survived infancy. Their son, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton (born in Newfoundland when his father was governor there) served as C-in-C, North America, during the American War of Independence. Their daughter, Mary, married a future admiral.

  COCHRANE

  Sir THOMAS JOHN, GCB (1789–1872) [28]

  Thomas Cochrane was born in 1789, the eldest son of the Captain the Honourable (later Admiral Sir) Alexander Cochrane (a younger son of the eighth Earl of Dundonald), and his wife Maria, the widow of another naval captain. His cousin and namesake, Thomas, Lord Cochrane, later 10th Earl of Dundonald, was one of the boldest and most colourful frigate captains of the Napoleonic wars. Dismissed from the Royal Navy and imprisoned for fraud in 1814, Lord Cochrane went on to serve as an admiral in the Chilean, Brazilian and Greek Navies before being re-instated in 1832 and subsequently becoming an Admiral of the Red.

  Thomas Cochrane joined the Royal Navy on 15 June 1796, during the French Revolutionary War, as a first class volunteer in his father’s ship, the 5th-rate Thetis, in which he served for the next two years on the North American station. Early in 1800 he became one of his father’s midshipmen in the 3rd-rate Ajax in the Channel fleet. They were soon deployed to Quiberon, to support the Chouans, the French Royalists fighting in Brittany. In May 1800 Ajax escorted a convoy of British troopships to Belle-Ile, only to find the place too heavily defended for a landing to be attempted. In August 1800 he was in the squadron covering a British landing to seize the Spanish naval base of Ferrol. This was found to be impregnable and the soldiers re-embarked to the indignation of their naval colleagues, who had expected handsome prize money. In a more successful operation in March 1801, his ship was at the landing of a British army in Egypt, leading to the defeat of the French at the battle of Alexandria (21
March 1801).

  On the renewal of war with France in May 1803 Cochrane was in his father’s flagship, the 3rd-rate Northumberland, where he served first on the Irish station and then the northern coast of Spain. He was appointed lieutenant in the 5th-rate Jason on 14 June 1805, in the West Indies, where his father was C-in-C, Leeward Islands, from 1805 to 1808. He became commander of the sloop Nimrod on 24 September 1805 and, after serving in the sloop Melville, was made acting captain of Jason on 23 January 1806, with his rank confirmed on 23 April 1806. On 27 January 1807, off the coast of Dutch Guiana (Surinam), he captured the French sloop Favorite and gained his first mention in despatches. In late December 1807, after Denmark had become a French ally, he took part in the capture of the Danish islands of St Thomas, St John and St Croix, off Puerto Rico.

  Cochrane was given command of the 5th-rate Ethalion in October 1808, and was again mentioned in despatches for his part in the British recapture of the French West Indian islands of Martinique in February 1809 and The Saints (Iies des Saintes) in April 1809. He returned to the United Kingdom when his father’s command in the West Indies came to an end and, in January 1812, married Matilda, the daughter of Lieutenant General Sir Charles Ross. They later had a family of two sons and two daughters. On 31 August 1812 Cochrane was appointed to the 5th-rate Surprise, which he commanded on the North American station during the American War of 1812. In this war he captured the United States privateer Decatur on 16 January 1813, served in the Chesapeake Bay area in support of Sir George Cockburn [20] in the British attacks on Washington and Baltimore, and took part in operations along the coast of Georgia. In 1815, with the end of the Napoleonic wars, he was placed on the half-pay list.