Edmund Robert Fremantle

Admiral THE HONOURABLE SIR Edmund Robert Fremantle, G.C.B., C.M.G., Royal Navy (15 June, 1836, – 10 February, 1929) was an officer of the Royal Navy.

Early Life & Career

Edmund Robert Fremantle, the fourth son of Thomas Francis Fremantle, First Baron Cottesloe, by his wife, Louisa Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Field-Marshal Sir George Nugent, First Baronet, was born in London on 15 June, 1836. When he was old enough to know his own mind he had no doubt as to the profession he should follow. His great-grandfather, Sir Thomas Francis Fremantle, had been Nelson's friend, and he had two uncles who were then Post-Captains in the navy, so that he felt himself "bound to enter the naval service." After going to Mr. Tabor's school at Cheam in Surrey, where great stress was laid on punctuality and correctness of demeanour, he obtained a nomination from the First Sea Lord, Sir James Whitley Deans Dundas. He went to Portsmouth in 1849 for his entrance examination, and after a correct answer to the question "If a yard of cloth costs 1s. 4d. how much will three yards cost?" and a correctly written "dictation" was told that he had passed "a very good examination."

Fremantle's first appointment was to the Queen, 116 guns, Captain Charles Wise, flying the flag of Admiral Sir William Parker, the "last of Nelson's captains." Having spent three years in the Mediterranean, he came home and was appointed to the Spartan frigate, 26 guns, Captain Sir William Hoste, for service on the China station. There he had his first taste of war in the Burmese War of 1852.

The six years' service then required to qualify for Mate's rank were completed by Fremantle in June, 1855. In December of the same year he was made acting Lieutenant, but he was not confirmed as Lieutenant until 14 January, 1857 at the age of twenty. The Spartan's commission lasted five and a half years, Sir William Hoste remaining throughout in command. During this long service Fremantle acquired a taste for serious reading. "In my midshipman's days in the Spartan I read through Gibbon, … Alison's History of Europe, Shakespeare, Byron, and many standard works; while James's Naval History, over which I talked and argued with some of my mess-mates, became a household word with us … In this way many naval officers of my day did much to make up for defective early education, and I think our knowledge of naval history was generally superior to that of our better instructed successors. …" Of these early years of service he wrote: "If I took my lessons as a naval officer from the Queen, my time in the Spartan gave me my real sea experience and I believe to a great extent formed my character."

On his return to England in 1857 Fremantle spent eight months on half pay. In July, 1858 he was appointed Flag Lieutenant to his uncle, Admiral Sir Charles Fremantle, who was then commanding the Channel Squadron, and served with his flag in the Renown (July–October, 1858) and the Royal Albert (October, 1858–October, 1860). As his uncle did not complete the full three years in command, Fremantle did not at once obtain his promotion on hauling down the flag, but a fortnight later (25 October, 1860) he was appointed as fifth lieutenant to the Neptune in the Mediterranean, later commanded by Captain Geoffrey Thomas Phipps Hornby. Nine months later he obtained his promotion to Commander on 9 July, 1861 and, as a necessary consequence, a long period of half pay. This time was not, in his opinion, wasted. He agreed with what his former captain, Hornby, had remarked, that, given a sound grounding on naval matters, a man's mind was enlarged, and he became a more capable officer, through mixing in civil society and affairs. For much the same reason Fremantle favoured early promotion, even at the expense of "favouritism", for the reason that men who serve long in the junior ranks may become "deeply immersed in the routine of the service and perhaps too full of details" to acquire the qualities more needed in a great commander than mere technical knowledge. This by no means implied that he considered technical knowledge unnecessary. On the occasions on which he was on half pay he seized the opportunities to study, as a Commander, steam engineering, mathematics, and nautical astronomy, and, as a captain, gunnery. He then made the acquaintance of that distinguished naval thinker, Captain Philip Howard Colomb, and attended lectures at the Royal United Service Institution; thus he kept in touch with both the technique and the theory of naval science.

The Maori War in New Zealand was in progress in 1864, and Fremantle, seeing that the Commander of the Eclipse had been severely wounded in the fighting, went to London and applied for the vacancy. A few days later he received notice of his appointment and that he must sail by the next mail ship; this he did, although he had been rather seriously injured in a hunting accident, and joined his ship in New Zealand in April, 1864. The Eclipse was a 700-ton steamer, 4 guns, barque-rigged; Fremantle commanded her for three years, and although he "saw little real fighting" in the New Zealand War he had a not uneventful commission of varied and valuable experience in command. In 1866 he married, at Sydney, Barberina Rogers (died 1923), eldest daughter of the Honourable Robert McIntosh Isaacs, of Sydney. They had six sons, the fourth of whom died as a child.

Returning home in February, 1867, Fremantle was promoted to Captain on 15 April. Appointments for Captains were few, and he now spent no less than six years on half pay. This was a very hard time for a married officer with scanty private means and a family of four boys; but he lived in a small house of his father's at Swanbourne, in Buckinghamshire, and devoted his time to local interests, to taking part in discussions at the United Service Institution, and to writing on naval subjects—occupation which "had its uses in keeping me in touch with the service;" he observed, however, that in the navy there was some prejudice against officers writing to the papers. He spent some time in 1871–1872 at the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth, where he passed the examination in gunnery—an unusual thing for a Captain, for which he received the thanks of the Admiralty. It was not, however, until March, 1873 that he obtained the command of the paddle-steamer Barracouta.

In May, 1873 the ports in the Gold Coast Protectorate were threatened by an Ashanti army, and the Barracouta was sent with a reinforcement of 100 marines for Cape Coast Castle, where Fremantle found himself senior officer of a squadron of seven small vessels. He took part in the operations for the defence of Elmina, in protecting Cape Coast Castle and Sekondi, Dix Cove, and Axim, and in various affairs on the coast, including Sir Garnet Wolseley's first operations. He was severely wounded in the advance on Kumassi. In November a severe bout of fever obliged him temporarily to leave the coast to recover at St. Helena; and he finally came home in May, 1874. He was made C.B. and C.M.G. in that year, and was mentioned in the vote of thanks in parliament.

In September, 1874 Fremantle took command of the Doris, frigate, 32 guns, one of a detached squadron cruising under sail. Paying her off in September, 1876 he spent nine months on half pay, again attending lectures and writing articles for naval and other papers. On 15 May, 1877 he was appointed to command the Lord Warden, ironclad, 7,800 tons, in the Channel Squadron, but saw little sea-service in her, as she passed into the reserve in the following year. The command lasted till November, 1879, when he transferred to the Invincible, ironclad, 6,000 tons, one of the squadron in the Mediterranean under Admiral Hornby. While in command of these ships he saved life on two occasions. When leaving Plymouth Sound in June, 1877 he jumped overboard after a boy who had fallen from aloft, and in Alexandria harbour in February, 1880, his ship being under way, he dived off the bridge and rescued with great difficulty, and nearly at the cost of his own life, a man who had fallen overboard. For the first of these acts he received the bronze medal of the Royal Humane Society, and for the second the Stanhope gold medal for 1880, the silver medal of the Royal Humane Society, and the gold medal of the Shipwrecked Fishermen and Mariners' Royal Benevolent Society. In 1880 he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal United Service Institution for a prize essay on Naval Tactics.

In January, 1881 Fremantle was appointed senior naval officer at Gibraltar. There he spent three years, "probably the most pleasant service of my career," although it galled him to witness, as an onlooker, the transports and men-of-war on their way to the war in Egypt. His next ship was the Dreadnought, 10,800 tons, which he commanded from August, 1884 until 7 April, 1885, when he became Rear-Admiral at the age of forty-nine: he was then, with the exception of the Duke of Edinburgh, the youngest officer on the Flag List. Fifteen months on half pay followed. Shortly before this time the torpedo boat had made its appearance, and a school of French naval thought, which had adherents also in England, contended that the days of great ships were over. Fremantle strongly opposed this view in two articles on "Ironclads and Torpedo Flotillas" and "Are Ironclads Doomed?" in the Nineteenth Century and Blackwood's Magazine respectively. Many years later he maintained the same view in the controversy which was conducted in The Times in 1920–1921 between those who believed that the submarine had abolished the "battleship" and their opponents. The problems of shipbuilding policy in relation to strategical needs was, in fact, the unceasing study of his active mind. His view, in 1903, was that "we should build battleships of medium size, not more than 11,000 or 12,000 tons … which would be far more useful than our 15,000 ton battleships." He wrote much in these years on the problems of trade defence and the need which it imposed for extensive cruiser forces ("Our Food Supply and Raw Material in War," Fortnightly Review, February, 1903; "Oversea Trade in War," Navy League, 1909).

From August, 1886 until August, 1887 Fremantle flew his flag on board the Agincourt as Second-in-Command of the Channel Squadron. In February, 1888 he was appointed to the command on the East India Station, with his flag on board the Bacchante and, later, the Boadicea. During his command a blockade on the East coast of Africa was conducted with the object of stamping out the slave trade. In January 1890, in expectation of a rupture with Portugal, his command was increased by vessels from the Cape, Australia, and China, but action proved unnecessary. In October, 1890 an expedition was prepared for the punishment of the Sultan of Vitu, in British East Africa, who had murdered nine Europeans. The sultan's forces numbered some 7,000 to 8,000 men, though not more than 1,500 had fire-arms. Fremantle's force, consisting of 700 seamen and marines, 400 troops from Lamu, and 150 Indian police, with 400 porters, marched against the sultan and carried the operation to a successful end. On 30 August of that year Fremantle was promoted to Vice-Admiral.

In February, 1892 Fremantle was appointed Commander-in-Chief on the China Station, flying his flag successively on board the Impérieuse and Centurion. He held the command until July, 1895. During the Chino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 he had the delicate task of preventing as far as possible British trade with China. In June, 1896 he succeeded Admiral Sir Algernon Lyons as Commander-in-Chief at Devonport, and held the post for the customary three years. On 10 October, 1896 he was promoted to Admiral. On 15 June, 1901, having reached the age limit, he retired. During the years between his retirement and his death, which took place in London on 10 February, 1929, he both read and wrote on current naval matters. His principal contributions to naval literature were his prize essay on Naval Tactics on the open sea with the existing types of vessels and weapons (1880), the lives of Hawke and Boscawen in (Sir) John Laughton's From Howard to Nelson (1899), and an autobiographical volume, The Navy as I Have Known it (1904). He was buried at Swanbourne. A cartoon of Fremantle appeared in Vanity Fair on 29 November. 1894.

Bibliography

• "Admiral Sir E. R. Fremantle" (Obituaries). The Times. Tuesday, 12 February, 1929. Issue 45125, col A, pg. 9.
• Fremantle, Admiral Hon^ble Sir E. R. (1904). The Navy as I have Known It: 1849—1899. London: Cassell and Company, Limited.

Service Records

• The National Archives. ADM 196/36.
• The National Archives. ADM 196/14.