Month: December 2016

On 2 January 1909 two Captains in the Royal Navy were promoted to the rank of Rear-Admiral. This was not particularly unusual, as occasionally more than one officer was promoted at the same time. What was unusual was that the two officers in question, George E. Patey and Julian C. A. Wilkinson, had both been born on 24 February 1859. They both entered the Royal Navy in January, 1872, and then the climb up the greasy pole began. Patey was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant on 10 August 1881, while Wilkinson was promoted on 29 June 1883. Patey specialised as a gunnery officer, while Wilkinson remained a line officer. Promotion to Commander and Captain was solely by selection. Patey’s promotion to Commander came on 31 December 1894, and Wilkinson followed exactly a year later. Both officers were promoted to the rank of Captain on 1 January 1900. Thereafter, provided they had their sea time in and remained fit, both men were guaranteed their flag, which was governed strictly by seniority. Despite the large number of promotions to flag rank which marked this era (there were 21 in 1908 and 14 in 1909) both men managed to be promoted to Rear-Admiral on the same day. One would hope both officers went out and placed large sums of money on a horse the day they learned of their promotions.

Patey went on to retire as an Admiral having commanded the Australian Fleet and the North America and West Indies Station, dying in 1935. Wilkinson, whose health had never been great, retired in 1911 and died in 1917.

On 13 February 1878 a British squadron of ironclads proceeded up the Dardanelles Straits to Constantinople during the Russo-Turkish War. This was one of those rare moments during the so-called Pax Britannica when the battleships of the Royal Navy came close to opening fire. On that winter’s day, with a blizzard blowing, and visibility practically nil, all hands were at general quarters, the squadron inched its way up the straits. On the bridge of the ironclad Achilles stood Captain Sir William N. W. Hewett, a hero of the Crimean War, knight of the Bath, and recipient of the Victoria Cross. With him stood three midshipmen, cowering in the cold, one of whom was George A. Ballard, who came to prominence as a war planner in the years leading up to the First World War. At the time Ballard was just 15 years old. He later recalled:

We had no shelter there and looked so miserably frozen that Hewett laughed and sent us down to lunch in his cabin with orders to the steward to give us champagne.

With the exception of the grounding of the flagship Alexandra on account of the atrocious visibility, the passage of the fleet passed without incident, and the Turkish forts, which were to prove so troublesome a generation later, did not open fire. And the young Ballard had a good lunch! The author heartily approves of champagne as a curative for cold.

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in the orders for the squadron which transited the straits, they are reproduced in the author’s ‘A Distinct Point in Modern Naval Tactics’ in The Mariner’s Mirror.

I was looking through an admiral’s service record, and my eye was caught by the record of another officer who was killed during the First World War. Given the age of the admiral in question, this had to be someone quite old. On closer inspection he was even older, and leads on to an interesting life.

Henry Thomas Gartside-Tipping was born in Dublin in 1848, the son of Gartside Gartside-Tipping of Rossferry, Co. Cavan, and entered the Royal Navy in September, 1860. He passed his Lieutenant’s examination in Seamanship in June 1867, managed to be appointed to the royal yacht Victoria and Albert (which carried with it automatic promotion) and was duly promoted to the rank of Lieutenant in August 1870. While taking the short course in Gunnery in H.M.S. Cambridge, gunnery training ship at Plymouth, he was reported to be unable to perform manual labour on account of ‘heart disease’, and thereafter was appointed to relatively sedate posts: command of Dapper, tender to the Britannia at Dartmouth; Ganges, boys’ training ship. In July 1879 he became an Inspector of Life Boats with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. He was placed on the Retired List for non-service in July 1884. He married, in December 1890, Mary Stuart Pilkington, of Southport.

At the outbreak of the First World War he returned to active duty, taking command of the yacht Aries in September 1914. In January 1915 he took command of the yacht Sanda and charge of Auxiliary Patrol Area XIV. He ceased command of the area on 29 May, but retained command of the Sanda, which was sunk by gunfire during an operation off the Belgian coast on 25 September. Gartside-Tipping, aged 67, was lost with his ship.

Vice-Admiral Bacon, commanding the Dover Patrol, mentioned Gartside-Tipping in his January 1916 despatches, claiming he was the ‘oldest naval officer afloat’. He wrote of him, ‘In spite of his advanced age, he rejoined, and with undemonstrative patriotism served at sea as a Lieutenant-Commander.’ Gartside-Tipping was not the oldest naval officer killed during the war, however. On 2 October 1918 Temporary Honorary Lieutenant Edwin Follett, D.S.C., R.N.V.R., borne on the books of Proserpine, was killed in Iraq, aged 75.

Tragically Gartside-Tipping’s widow, Mary, serving in France with the Women’s Emergency Corps, was shot and killed on 4 March 1917 by a deranged soldier.

To mark International Day of Persons with Disabilities (3 December), a quick post on a naval officer who, despite what might usually have been a career-ending injury, managed to rise to the top of his profession. Lieutenant Montague E. Browning, gunnery officer of the battleship Inflexible, had his left hand amputated following an accident on board ship on 15 August 1899. After being repeatedly found unfit he was reported fit for service on 21 January 1890, ‘having been fitted with an efficient mechanical substitute for his hand’. He returned to duty as gunnery officer of the cruiser Forth for the annual manoeuvres that Summer, and remained on the Active List for another 36 years, retiring as an Admiral in 1926, after holding command afloat during the First World War and serving as Second Sea Lord and Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth, afterwards. He died in Winchester on 4 November 1947, aged 84.

On a personal note, I spend most of my time caring for a father who has only one leg, so regrettably I have a little idea of some of the obstacles that people with disabilities face on a daily basis.

Sources

The National Archives, ADM 196/42/104.
The Times, 6 November 1947, 7.