At the time of his appointment as First Sea Lord Pound was already suffering from problems with his left hip and had begun to walk with the aid of a stick. His practice of sleeping on a camp bed at the Admiralty, so as to be immediately available, meant that he did not rest well, and his habit of closing his eyes to concentrate his mind during important meetings led some to suppose that he was asleep. The strain of working with Churchill, whose eccentric hours of work and insistent demands for information and action told heavily on all the Chiefs of Staff, left him increasingly tired. This, together with the successful “Channel dash” of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was one of the factors that led Churchill in December 1942 to replace him as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee by General Sir Alan Brooke, the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff. His last important official meeting was the Quebec Conference between President Franklin D Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1943. There he began to lose sensation on his right side and, on returning to London, was diagnosed as suffering from a malignant brain tumour. He resigned office on 20 September 1943 and was immediately admitted to the Royal Masonic Hospital, London. He declined the offer of a peerage, but accepted the Order of Merit. Pound died on 2 October 1943. After a funeral in Westminster Abbey, his ashes were taken aboard the cruiser Glasgow at Portsmouth and scattered in the Solent.
POWER
Sir ARTHUR JOHN, GCB, GBE, CVO (1889–1960) [97]
Arthur Power, the son of a corn merchant, was born in London on 12 April 1889 and joined the Navy as a cadet in the training ship Britannia in 1904. He became a cadet captain in his second term and chief cadet captain in his third, and gained the King’s Medal, awarded to the best cadet of each intake. He was promoted to midshipman on 15 September 1905 and was appointed to the battleship King Edward VII, flagship of Lord Charles Beresford in the Channel Fleet. On 15 January 1909 he became an acting sub-lieutenant at the beginning of his promotion courses, and on 15 April 1910 was promoted to lieutenant and appointed to the battle-cruiser Indomitable in the Home Fleet. From there in October 1912 Power became the first lieutenant of the destroyer Nautilus. In 1913 he joined the gunnery training school Excellent and qualified as a gunnery officer. During the First World War he served in the battleship Magnificent, the cruiser Royal Arthur, the monitor Raglan, in which he took part in the Dardanelles campaign, and the battle-cruiser Princess Royal in the Battle-cruiser Fleet in the North Sea. He was promoted to lieutenant-commander on 15 April 1918 and married Amy Bingham, the daughter of a Territorial lieutenant-colonel, and later had with her a family of three sons. He remained in Princess Royal after the end of hostilities in November 1918 and, in August 1920, joined the instructional staff at Excellent. Power was promoted to commander on 31 December 1922 and then served from January 1923 to August 1924 as Assistant Director in the Naval Ordnance Department at the Admiralty. After attending the Royal Naval Staff College, Greenwich, he served from 1925 to July 1927 as commander of the battle-cruiser Hood, flagship of the Battle-cruiser Squadron in the Atlantic Fleet. From 1927 to his promotion to captain on 30 July 1929 he was employed at the Royal Naval Staff College, Greenwich. Power then joined the Ordnance Committee at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, before returning to sea in April 1931 as flag captain of the Second Cruiser Squadron in the Home Fleet, in the cruiser Dorsetshire. In July 1933 he was appointed to the Imperial Defence College and in October 1935 became the captain of Excellent.
Power left Excellent in September 1937, prior to appointment as captain of the new aircraft carrier Ark Royal, then under construction at Birkenhead. He assumed command in July 1938 and later became flag captain to the Rear-Admiral commanding aircraft carriers in the Home Fleet. After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 he remained in Ark Royal until returning to the Admiralty in May 1940 as Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff (Home) with promotion to rear-admiral on 25 June 1940. In August 1942 he was given command of the Fifteenth Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean, with his flag in the cruiser Cleopatra. Early in 1943 he became flag officer commanding the Malta-based Force K, with acting promotion to vice-admiral, confirmed on 4 August 1943. As flag officer, Malta, he played an important part in planning the seaborne invasions of Sicily (10 July 1943) and Southern Italy (3–9 September 1943). Following the Italian surrender on 8 September 1943, Power commanded the naval forces in the landing of V British Corps at Taranto. He subsequently became head of the Allied military mission to the Italian government and was for a short while second-in-command of the Mediterranean Fleet. In January 1944, with his flag in the battle-cruiser Renown, he was given command of the First Battle Squadron and appointed second-in-command of the newly re-established Eastern Fleet, with the award of the KCB. Sir Arthur Power became C-in-C, East Indies, in November 1944 and continued the policy of naval strikes against the Japanese in Borneo and Malaya. After the Japanese surrender Power entered Singapore harbour on 3 September 1945, with his flag in Cleopatra, the first major ship of the Navy to return there since the defeats of February 1942. His happiness was marred by the death of Lady Power in 1945.
After returning home Power was promoted to admiral on 6 May 1946 and served as Second Sea Lord from 1946 to 1948. As the member of the Admiralty responsible for personnel matters, he completed the demobilization of men and women engaged for the duration of hostilities only and the reduction of the Navy’s manpower to its peacetime establishment. In 1947 he married Second Officer Margaret Watson, WRNS. From May 1948 to May 1950 he was C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet, followed by appointment in September 1950 as C-in-C, Portsmouth. He was promoted to admiral of the fleet on 22 April 1952 and became NATO Allied Commander, Channel and Southern North Sea (CINCHAN). Sir Arthur Power went on half-pay after hauling down his flag at Portsmouth in September 1952. He died at the Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar, Gosport, on 28 January 1960.
RICHARDS
Sir FREDERICK WILLIAM, GCB (1833–1912) [52]
Frederick Richards was born at Ballyhally, County Wexford, on 30 November 1833. His father, a captain in the Royal Navy, and his mother, daughter of the Dean of Killala, County Mayo, both came from the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy. He was educated at the Naval School, New Cross, Greater London (now Goldsmiths’ College, University of London) and joined the Navy as a cadet in 1848. He subsequently served on the Australian station, where on 8 January 1854 he was appointed acting mate in the sloop Fantome. He was promoted to lieutenant on 31 October 1855 and returned home in 1856. Richards was appointed to the 2nd-rate Ganges, flagship of the C-in-C on the China station, in 1857 and became the flag lieutenant in April 1859 and commander of the paddle-sloop Vixen, during the Second China War, on 9 February 1860. After returning home with Vixen in 1861 he commanded the gunboat Dart on the West Coast of Africa station from March 1862 to January 1866. He was promoted to captain on 6 February 1866 and married Lucy Fayle, the young widow of a clergyman and heiress to her father’s estate of Horton Court, Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire. He then went on half-pay until 1870 when he was appointed to the Indian troopship Jumna, an unattractive post, as this class of vessel was not a combatant but a transport, and there were constant disputes between the naval and military officers over the command of the troops on board.
At the end of three years in the troopship service Richards was rewarded in June 1873 with command of the turret ship Devastation, the first British battleship to be powered by steam alone. He served in this ship in the Mediterranean from 1874 to June 1877 and became commodore and senior officer on the West Coast of Africa, with his broad pendant in the corvette Boadicea, in October 1878. He arrived at the Cape of Good Hope at the end of January 1879 to learn that, in the Zulu War, a British force had been wiped out at Isandhlwana, and another was besieged at Eshowe. Richards moved up to Natal, where he landed at the head of a small naval brigade and served at the battle of Gingindlovu (2 April 1879) and the relief of Eshowe (3 April 1879). He returned to Natal with a naval brigade in January 1881 on the outbreak of the Boer (First Anglo-Boer) War and, after taking par
t in the battle of Laing’s Nek (28 January 1881), was awarded the KCB later in the year.
Sir Frederick Richards returned home with promotion to rear-admiral on 9 June 1882 and subsequently served as junior naval lord at the Admiralty until May 1885, when he was appointed C-in-C, East Indies, with his flag in the corvette Bacchante. During the Third Burma War he provided a naval brigade to support the British advance up the Irrawaddy River to Mandalay, ending with the annexation of Burma (Myanmar) to the British Indian Empire.
After completing this command in April 1888 Richards was appointed to a committee investigating the state of the fleet. Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Review at Spithead in 1887 had mustered an impressive number of ships, but only thirty-five were major combatants, including nine without armour. The committee’s findings questioned the ability of the Navy to meet the combined fleets of any other two Powers (the “two-Power standard”), regarded as essential for the safety of British interests) and led to a general demand for naval rearmament. This was met by the Naval Defence Act of 1889, providing for the construction of eight battleships of the new Royal Sovereign class. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Goschen, funded this with a new tax, estate duty, payable at a rate of 1 per cent by the inheritors of estates with a value above £10,000. Richards was promoted to vice-admiral on 27 October 1888. From 1890 to June 1893 he was C-in-C on the China station and then returned to the Admiralty as second naval lord.
Richards was promoted to admiral on 1 September 1893 and became first naval lord in November 1893, in the Board headed by Earl Spencer in Gladstone’s fourth Cabinet. He remained at the Admiralty during a new building programme, caused by advances in naval artillery. The collision of two battleships in June 1893, with Victoria sunk and Camperdown damaged, had revealed how quickly the Navy’s numerical superiority might be reduced, so that an entire squadron, eventually built as the Magnificent class, was needed. To fund this, Gladstone’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, brought in a new tax, death duties, levied on all forms of property before the residue was passed on to inheritors. During the course of the next century this measure became a means for the redistribution of wealth and led to the break-up of the landed estates that, with their great country houses, had been an important feature in British history. At the time it was opposed by Gladstone on the grounds that it would allow uncontrolled increases in public expenditure. Defeated in Cabinet on the naval issue, he resigned in March 1894 and was succeeded by Lord Rosebery. When Rosebery’s administration fell in June 1894 Richards, with the other naval lords, remained at the Admiralty under Goschen, who became First Lord in Salisbury’s third administration and continued the previous ministry’s naval programme. On 20 October 1898, shortly before Richards reached the compulsory retirement age for his rank, Goschen arranged for him to be promoted admiral of the fleet, passing over the two admirals senior to him, so that he could remain on the active list and thus continue as first naval lord. Richards finally left the Admiralty in August 1899, when Goschen decided to replace him by Lord Walter Kerr [56]. He retired to his home at Horton Court, where he died, without offspring, on 28 September 1912. A trust fund was set up in his memory, to make charitable grants to officers of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines and their dependants.
ROWLEY
Sir William, KB (c. 1690–1768) [6]
Will Rowley, a native of Essex, joined the Navy as a volunteer by Order, or “King’s Letter Boy”, in 1704, in the 3rd-rate Orford, commanded by Captain John Norris [1]. He served in the Mediterranean during the War of the Spanish Succession and was appointed lieutenant in the 3rd-rate Somersett in December 1708. After the end of the war he was promoted on 26 June 1716 to be captain of the 6th-rate Biddeford, based at Gibraltar. From then until February 1719 he was engaged in trade protection duties against pirates operating from S’la (Sallee) on the west coast of Morocco. In September 1719 Rowley was given command of the 6th-rate Lively, in which he was employed, mostly in anti-smuggling duties, in the Irish Sea until June 1728. On the outbreak of the War of Jenkins’s Ear he was appointed to a ship in September 1739, but declined it on the grounds that he was involved in expensive litigation in Dublin. He did not again go to sea until 1741, when he was given command of the 2nd-rate Barfleur in the Mediterranean, during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48).
Rowley remained in Barfleur when promoted to rear-admiral of the White on 7 December 1743. His promotion directly to the White squadron was a consequence of the increase in the establishment of flag officers from nine to twenty-five earlier that year. He took part in the battle of Hyeres, Toulon (11 February 1744) and was, together with Captain Edward Hawke [7], one of the few officers to emerge from that engagement with credit. He was promoted to vice-admiral of the Blue on 23 June 1744 and became C-in-C, Mediterranean, in August 1744. He maintained the blockade along the French Riviera and watched the Republic of Genoa, in case it abandoned its policy of neutrality. In February 1745, at Gibraltar, he was given the task of investigating the questionable conduct of Captain Richard Norris at the battle of Hyeres. Rowley released him from arrest pending the outcome of the investigation, but Norris then took the chance to escape to Spain. He was the elder son of Sir John Norris (Rowley’s old captain) who was also, at the time, the commander-in-chief and admiral of the fleet, and there was a strong suspicion that Rowley had been in some way influenced by this. Rowley became a vice-admiral of the White on 23 April 1745, but the Admiralty decided that, in view of the Norris affair, he could not be relied on to maintain impartial discipline in a fleet. He was accordingly removed from his command on 29 May 1745.
Although he never again commanded at sea, Rowley nevertheless rose to become admiral of the Blue on 15 July 1747, admiral of the White on 12 May 1748 and a lord commissioner of the Admiralty, in the Board headed by Admiral George Anson [5], on 22 June 1751. Apart from a brief period out of office between November 1756 and April 1757, he remained in the Admiralty until July 1757. He was awarded the KB on 12 December 1753 and sat as Member of Parliament for Portsmouth from 1750 to 1754 and for Taunton from 1754 to 1761. On the death of Lord Anson Sir William Rowley succeeded him as C-in-C and admiral of the fleet on 17 December 1762. He died on 1 January 1768. With his wife, Arabella, the daughter of a landholder in County Londonderry, he had four sons and a daughter. Their second son, Joshua, became a baronet and rear-admiral of the White, and their daughter Arabella married a captain in the Navy.
RYDER
Sir Alfred Phillipps, KCB (1820–1888) [43]
Alfred Ryder, the seventh son of the Honourable Henry Ryder, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, was born on 27 November 1820. The bishop’s elder brother, through whom he was connected by marriage to several other noble families, was the first Earl of Harrowby. Alfred Ryder’s sister became the wife of the Whig politician and Cabinet minister, Sir George Grey. Ryder himself never married. He joined the Navy on 6 May 1833 and was promoted to lieutenant on 2 July 1841, appointed to the 5th-rate Belvidera, commanded by the Honourable George Grey, and served in the Mediterranean from 1841 to 1845. He was promoted to commander on 26 May 1847 and was given command of the steam sloop Vixen on the North America and West Indies station. At the beginning of 1848 he was in a small British force sent to Nicaragua (a region in which at that time both the British and the United States were interested as a possible route across Central America) following the arrest of two British subjects in the port of San Juan del Norte (Greytown). The local Nicaraguan commander, Colonel Salas, retreated thirty miles up the rapids and waterfalls of San Juan River to a fort at Serapaqui, where Ryder followed him in his ship’s boats. After a short action (12 February 1848), the Nicaraguans were driven into the surrounding rain-forest and the fort was destroyed. Ryder was promoted to captain on 2 May 1848 in recognition of his services.
In 1853 Ryder was appointed to the frigate Dauntless in the Channel. After the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 Dauntless formed part of the fleet sent to the Baltic under Sir Charles Nap
ier. Along with Captain Henry Codrington [35], Ryder was criticized by Napier for failing to bring his ship up to the required standard, but like Codrington, was sufficiently well connected to retain the confidence of the Admiralty. In the closing stage of the war he served with Dauntless in the Black Sea and took part in the capture of Kinburn (Pokrovskiy), guarding the strategically important Russian port of Ochakov in the Dnepr estuary (Dneprovskiy Liman). From 1863 to 2 April 1866, when he was promoted to rear-admiral, he was Controller of the Coastguard. During 1868–69 Ryder was second-in-command in the Channel. He subsequently became naval attaché at Paris, at the time of the Franco-Prussian War (July 1870- February 1871). He was promoted to vice-admiral on 7 May 1872 and served as C-in-C on the China station from 1872 and 1874. Ryder became an admiral on 5 August 1875 and was C-in-C, Portsmouth, from 1879 to 1884, with the awarded of the KCB in May 1884, followed by promotion to admiral of the fleet on 29 April 1885. During April 1888 Sir Alfred Ryder sought medical treatment in London for depression. He drowned in the Thames near Vauxhall, after falling from a river steamer, and was buried on 5 May 1888 in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Hambleden, Buckinghamshire.
SALMON
Sir Nowell, VC, GCB (1835–1912) [53]
Nowell Salmon, son of the Reverend Henry Salmon, Rector of Swarrington, Hampshire, and his wife Emily, the daughter of Admiral Nowell, was born on 20 February 1835. After attending Marlborough College, Wiltshire, he joined the Navy in May 1847 and was appointed midshipman and mate in the 2nd-rate James Watt in March 1854. After serving in the Baltic in 1854 and 1855 during the Crimean War Salmon was promoted to lieutenant in January 1856 and joined the frigate Shannon for service in the East Indies. During the Indian Mutiny campaign of 1857 Salmon served in command of a rifle company in a naval brigade in Oude (Awadh). At the first relief of Lucknow in November 1857 he was awarded the Victoria Cross for climbing a tree under heavy fire in order to observe the fall of shot despite being wounded in the thigh by a musket ball. He took part in the British recapture of Lucknow in March 1858 and, in recognition of his services, was promoted to commander on 22 March 1858. In November 1859 Salmon was given command of the sloop Icarus on the West Indies and North America station. There, during 1860, he was sent from Belize to deal with W W Walker, the colourful American adventurer and former president of Nicaragua, who had turned to piracy and raided the Honduran city of Truxillo. Salmon intercepted his ship, overpowered his crew and handed him over to the Honduran authorities, who had him court-martialled and shot.
British Admirals of the Fleet Page 36