In January 1755, at a time of increasing tension between France and the United Kingdom in North America, Howe was appointed to command the 4th-rate Dunkirk. He sailed in April 1755 in a squadron under Admiral Edward Boscawen, ordered to intercept French ships carrying reinforcements to Canada. Although war had not been declared, two unsuspecting French stragglers were captured off the St Lawrence on 8 June 1755. Howe’s ship fired the first shot of the maritime war, after he had gallantly allowed time for ladies on the deck of the French 60-gun Alcide to be escorted below. Formal hostilities began with the Seven Years War in 1756. Howe, in Dunkirk, spent the summer of 1756 in command of a flotilla defending the Channel Islands. In May 1757 he entered Parliament as Member for Dartmouth and continued to represent that borough until his elevation to the House of Lords in 1782. On 2 July 1757 he went with his entire crew to the 3rd-rate Magnanime in which he served under Sir Edward Hawke [7] in the unsuccessful British expedition against Rochefort (September 1757).
In 1758 Howe was selected to command the naval element of another descent on the French coast. Hawke, under the mistaken impression that this expedition was intended for Rochefort, temporarily resigned his command of the Channel fleet in protest at what he took as a slight. In fact, the raid was destined for St Malo. Howe, as commodore with his broad pendant in the 3rd-rate Essex, covered the landings on 5 June 1757 and the subsequent re-embarkation a few days later. Another brief landing, at Cherbourg in August 1757, was followed by a return to St Malo at the beginning of September. There the British rearguard was forced to re-embark under fire across an open beach. Howe was among the captains who went in their boats to rescue the troops and was widely commended for his efforts and his personal encouragement of the seamen. In 1758, on the death of his elder brother, who fell in the British attack on the French fort of Ticonderoga, New York (5 July 1758), he succeeded to the family estates and peerage, as the third Viscount Howe. In the same year he married Mary Hartopp, the daughter of a neighbouring landowner in Nottinghamshire.
During 1759, once more in Magnanime, Lord Howe served under Hawke in the fleet blockading Brest and was in the lead in the successful attack on the French fleet in Quiberon Bay (20 November 1759). He remained on this station for the rest of the Seven Years War and became a colonel of the Marines on 4 February 1760. In 1762 he was appointed flag captain of the 3rd-rate Princess Amelia, flagship of the newly promoted Rear-Admiral the Duke of York (younger brother of George III), who had begun his naval career as a midshipman under Howe in Essex in 1758. Between 20 April 1763 and 31 July 1765 Howe was a lord commissioner of the Admiralty. He then served as Treasurer of the Navy until 18 October 1770, when he was promoted to rear-admiral of the Blue. Earlier in 1770 an invasion force from the Spanish colony of Argentina had expelled the British garrison of the Falkland Islands. After the news reached London, the unpopular Prime Minister of the day, Lord North, (whose survival in office would otherwise have been in doubt) agreed to a show of force. Howe was nominated in November 1770 as C-in-C of a hastily assembled fleet, but hostilities were averted by a settlement in which Spain disavowed the action of the local governor, while both sides secretly agreed to evacuate the islands. Howe was promoted to rear-admiral of the White on 31 March 1775 and vice-admiral of the Blue on 7 December 1775.
In the opening phase of the American War of Independence Howe’s younger brother, Lieutenant General Sir William Howe, commanded the British forces at the battle of Bunker Hill, Massachusetts (17 June 1775). As the war continued, Lord Howe was appointed C-in-C on the North America station in February 1776. The two brothers, who had some sympathy with the colonials, were authorized by North to offer conciliatory terms, but these proved unacceptable. During the next two years the Howes undertook a number of combined operations, occupying New York and Long Island in August and September 1776, and establishing control of the coast from Rhode Island to Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware. The entry of France into the war in 1778 brought a French fleet to North America, where Howe, promoted to vice-admiral of the Red, was considerably outnumbered and at first declined to give battle. After a severe gale off Rhode Island damaged many of the French ships in August 1778, Howe pursued them to the colonial-held port of Boston, Massachusetts. With no immediate sign that they intended to put to sea, and his own fleet strengthened by the arrival of long-delayed reinforcements, Howe took the opportunity to resign his command. He returned to London, where he told the ministers that the American colonies could not be held. Believing that they intended to make him a scapegoat for their own failures, he refused to serve again while they remained in power.
Howe accepted command of the fleet in the Channel on 2 April 1782, five days after the fall of North’s ministry. He became admiral of the Blue on 8 April 1782 and was raised to the peerage of Great Britain as Viscount Howe of Langar on 20 April 1782. With his flag in the 1st-rate Victory, he spent May 1782 watching the Dutch fleet in the Texel. In September 1782 he sailed with a large convoy and escort, totalling 183 ships, to relieve Gibraltar, under siege by the Spanish. He achieved this, a task that he considered the most difficult he ever attempted, between 11 and 16 October 1782, despite the presence of a larger Franco-Spanish fleet and the usual difficulties of controlling merchantmen. Nevertheless, one of his officers, Lord Hervey, publicly questioned Howe’s valour, for failing to close with the enemy. Howe challenged him to a duel, but, at their meeting, Hervey gave satisfaction by retracting his criticism.
Howe became First Lord of the Admiralty in the Earl of Shelburne’s administration on 30 January 1783, shortly before the end of the war. He left the Board in April 1783, when the Fox-North coalition came into office, but was re-appointed on 31 December 1783, as a member of the new Cabinet under William Pitt the Younger. He was promoted to admiral of the White on 24 September 1787. Howe became very unpopular as he implemented the usual post-war cuts in defence expenditure and, finding himself unsupported by Pitt, resigned in July 1788. His efforts were acknowledged in August 1788 by advancement in the peerage to an Earldom together with a new barony that, as he had no son, was granted a remainder in the female line. In May 1790 Earl Howe was appointed to command the fleet formed to meet the threat of a new war with Spain, over the possession of Nootka Sound (Vancouver, British Columbia). During August 1790 he cruised in the Channel, performing fleet evolutions and introducing a new code of flag signals on which he had been working for several years. As a mark of distinction, he was ordered to fly the Union flag at the maintopmast (so making him acting admiral of the fleet) in his flagship, the 1st-rate Queen Charlotte. After the crisis was resolved without bloodshed he hauled down his flag in December 1790.
With the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France on 1 February 1793 Howe, at the express request of George III, again accepted command of the fleet in the Channel, and the flag of an acting admiral of the fleet. Described as “undaunted as a rock and as silent”, he maintained a blockade of the French Atlantic naval bases from May to December 1793, when, reluctant to expose his precious ships to winter gales, he returned to port, a decision strongly supported by the Treasury. Howe again put to sea with his fleet in May 1794. After detaching one division to escort the outgoing British convoys, he searched the Atlantic for the American grain convoy on which the French were relying to avert a threatened famine. On 1 June 1794, with twenty-two battleships under command, he encountered a French fleet of twenty-five, sent out to protect the convoy. In a major fleet action he captured seven of them and two weeks later returned to Portsmouth in triumph. Although “The Glorious First of June” was hailed by the British as a great victory, the grain fleet reached Brest in safety and thus allowed the French to continue the war. Howe was again at sea in 1795, remaining in command of the fleet only in deference to the King’s wishes, and thereafter spending most of his time at Bath. On 12 March 1796 he became admiral of the fleet.
Early in 1797 Howe received a number of petitions from seamen at Portsmouth, seeking his support for redress of grievances over pay and cond
itions of service. About to hand over the fleet to his second-in-command, Lord Bridport (Sir Alexander Hood), Howe took no action beyond forwarding them to the Admiralty. On 16 April 1797, when Bridport gave orders to make sail, the crews of sixteen ships refused to obey. Concessions were eventually offered, but the seamen placed little faith in the Admiralty. It was only when Howe himself, aged and infirm, but a favourite with the lower deck, was sent with full powers to grant whatever was required that confidence was restored. On 15 May 1797, after twelve hours of being rowed round the fleet, where he spoke to every ship and was received with cheers, “Black Dick” was carried on the shoulders of his men to the port governor’s house, where he and his countess entertained the ships’ delegates to dinner.
His part in resolving this crisis must count as the greatest of all Howe’s services to his country. On 2 June 1797 he became the first officer to be awarded the Garter solely in recognition of naval duties. He suffered increasingly severe pain from gout, and in 1799 agreed to the latest form of medical treatment, electric shock therapy. He died, probably of a stroke, on 5 August 1799 and was buried in the family vault at St Andrew’s parish church, Langar, Nottinghamshire. He was devoted to his wife and their three daughters, of whom the eldest, Sophie, who married the heir to the first Viscount Curzon, inherited his barony. The Irish peerages passed to his brother, Sir William Howe, and his earldom became extinct. His name was given to a number of geographical features in the South Seas.
JACKSON
Sir HENRY BRADWARDINE, GCB, KCVO (1855–1929) [70]
Henry Jackson, the eldest son of a farmer in Cudworth, Yorkshire, was born at his mother’s family home in Barnsley, Yorkshire, on 21 January 1855. After attending school at Chester and a naval tutorial establishment at Fareham, Hampshire, he entered the Navy as a cadet in the training ship Britannia in December 1868. He became a midshipman on 20 April 1870, in the armoured ship Hector, a ship of the Reserve at Southampton Water, from which he joined the corvette Cadmus as a supernumerary in December 1871. He remained there until promoted to acting sub-lieutenant on 18 October 1874 at the beginning of his promotion courses. Jackson was appointed a sub-lieutenant in the corvette Rover on the North American and West Indies station in August 1876 and was promoted to lieutenant on 27 October 1877. In March 1878 he was appointed to the corvette Active, from which he served ashore during 1879 in the Zulu War. From 1881 to 1884 he was at Portsmouth in the torpedo school Vernon and qualified as a torpedo lieutenant, a specialization that included responsibility for ships’ electrical systems. Jackson was promoted to commander on 1 January 1890. In the same year he married Alice Burbury, the daughter of a distinguished scientist. On 30 June 1896 he was promoted to captain and was appointed to command the torpedo school Defiance. From 1897 to 1899 he was naval attaché in the British Embassy at Paris, followed by appointment to command the torpedo depot ship Vulcan. Jackson’s pioneering achievements in the field of radio (with the Marconi wireless system having been adopted for the fleet a year earlier) were acknowledged in 1901 by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1902 he became Assistant Director of Torpedoes at the Admiralty, from where he became captain of Vernon in 1904.
Jackson returned to the Admiralty in February 1905 as Third Sea Lord and Controller of the Navy, responsible for the design and building of ships during a period of increasing tempo in the naval race with Germany. He was promoted to rear-admiral on 18 October 1906 and awarded the KCVO. On leaving the Board of Admiralty in 1908 Sir Henry Jackson was given command of the Sixth Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean, with his flag in the cruiser Bacchante. He became a vice-admiral on 15 March 1911, with appointment as Director of the Naval War College at Portsmouth. In February 1913 he became Chief of the War Staff at the Admiralty. He was promoted admiral on 10 February 1914. It was intended that Jackson should move in August 1914 to be C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet, but uncertainty over his health meant that on the outbreak of the First World War in that month he was retained at the Admiralty and employed as an adviser on overseas expeditions. As such, he supported the seizure by Australia and New Zealand respectively of the German colonies of New Guinea and Samoa. In May 1915, when Lord Fisher [58] resigned office as First Sea Lord, Jackson was appointed in his place and also became Chief of the Naval Staff. Thereafter, the posts of First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff were combined into a single appointment.
Jackson, a dour Yorkshireman, approached his duties in a spirit of scientific caution, said little and declined to delegate decisions to his subordinates. He was a capable administrator and established a good relationship with the new First Lord, Arthur Balfour, who succeeded Winston Churchill in Asquith’s Cabinet in May 1915. Jackson’s first task was to co-operate with the military in closing down the Gallipoli campaign, after which he turned to deal with the growing menace of submarine warfare. He left the operations of the Grand Fleet in the hands of its C-in-C, Sir John Jellicoe [68], and played little part in the Admiralty’s contribution to the battle of Jutland (31 May-1 June 1916), which he entrusted to Sir Henry Oliver [78], Chief of the War Staff. As a radio specialist, he was irritated by Jellicoe’s subsequent criticisms of the fleet’s inadequate communications, and also by his complaints that the Admiralty had not provided him with enough destroyers. With his Yorkshire habit of plain speaking, Jackson told Jellicoe that the Grand Fleet had been given everything that the Admiralty had at its disposal. Nevertheless, the feeling spread that Jackson and Balfour had failed to obtain for the Navy its proper share of the national defence effort. Their prestige suffered when German destroyers appeared in the Channel and German submarines continued to sink British merchantmen. Their calm steady approach, at first welcomed after the hyperactivity of Fisher and Churchill, came to be seen as ineffectual and uninspiring, and they became the targets of a Press campaign for their removal. Jackson himself came to feel that he had been too long away from a seagoing command and resigned in favour of Jellicoe on 4 December 1916.
Jackson was then appointed President of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, where he remained until promoted to admiral of the fleet on 31 July 1919. In 1920 he became the first chairman of the Radio Research Board of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, where he continued his enthusiastic support for developments in this field, carrying out his own research, visiting laboratories and discussing experiments with their staff. He went onto the retired list in December 1924 and was awarded the Hughes medal of the Royal Society in 1926. Sir Henry Jackson died without offspring at his home, Salterns House, Hayling Island, Hampshire, on 14 December 1929 and was buried in the island cemetery.
JELLICOE
Sir JOHN RUSHWORTH, 1st Earl Jellicoe, GCB, OM, GCVO
(1859–1935) [68]
John Jellicoe was born at Southampton on 5 December 1859, the second son of a merchant captain and marine superintendent in the service of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. He included several officers of the Royal Navy among his ancestors and his mother’s grandfather had been an admiral during the Napoleonic wars. He was educated at Southampton and Rottingdean, before entering the Navy in 1872 as a cadet in the training ship Britannia. He passed out top of his term and was appointed midshipman in the autumn of 1874, in the frigate Newcastle, in which he served in the South Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans before returning home early in 1877. Jellicoe joined the battleship Agincourt in July 1877 and served in the Mediterranean Fleet during the international crisis of 1878 when there was a risk of war between the United Kingdom and Russia over the Turkish Question. He became a sub-lieutenant on 5 December 1878, and remained in Agincourt, which became the flagship of Sir Beauchamp Seymour as C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet. During 1880 Jellicoe completed his promotion courses before returning to sea as signal sub-lieutenant in the battleship Alexandra, flagship of the C-in-C, Mediterranean. He was promoted to lieutenant on 23 September 1880 and, after returning home, was re-appointed to Agincourt in the Mediterranean in February 1881. In May 1882, when Agincourt carried troop
s from Malta to reinforce the British operations against a nationalist insurgency in Egypt, he commanded a rifle company in the naval brigade at Ismailia. From there, disguised as a refugee, he was sent with despatches to the fleet at Port Said.
Jellicoe qualified as a gunnery officer in 1883. He was appointed to the staff of Excellent in May 1884 and supported its captain, John Fisher [58], in the reforms he was at that time introducing there. During 1885, when the United Kingdom and Russia were on the verge of war over the disputed control of Penjdeh on the borders of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, a fleet was briefly mobilized in the Channel, under Sir Geoffrey Hornby [45], C-in-C, Portsmouth, with his flag in the armoured ship Minotaur. Fisher was appointed captain of the fleet and selected Jellicoe as one of his staff officers. Jellicoe became gunnery officer successively of the turret ship Monarch in September 1885 and the battleship Colossus in April 1886. Later in 1886 he returned to the staff of Excellent as an experimental officer and remained there until September 1889, when Fisher, as Director of Naval Ordnance at the Admiralty, arranged for Jellicoe to join his staff. Jellicoe was promoted to commander on 30 June 1891. In March 1892 he again joined the Mediterranean Fleet as commander of the battleship Sans Pareil. Early in 1893 he was selected by Sir George Tryon, C-in-C, Mediterranean, to be commander of his flagship, the battleship Victoria. On 22 June 1893, when this ship was rammed and sunk by the battleship Camper down during fleet evolutions off the coast of Lebanon, Jellicoe was in sick bay with dysentery. He survived by clinging to wreckage and, after sick leave, was appointed commander of the new flagship, the battleship Ramillies, in which he served in the Mediterranean from October 1893 to December 1896. He was promoted to captain on 1 January 1897 and spent the following year as a member of the Admiralty’s Ordnance Committee.
British Admirals of the Fleet Page 21