Looking Back

by Sir Seymour John Fortescue

GROUP ON BOARD H.M.S. “SURPRISE”

Lt. Hon. S. Fortescue	H.R.H. Duchess of Edinburgh		Com. Hon. M. Bourke
Admiral H.R.H. Duke of Edinburgh		Lady Mary Fitzwilliam

The Surprise and her sister ship, the Alacrity were built to replace respectively the old dispatch boats Helicon and Vigilant, which had been serving for years on the Mediterranean and China Stations. Commander Charles le Strange, a very old friend of the Sultan days, was in command of the Surprise. He had recently become an Equerry to H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh, who had already taken over the command of the Mediterranean Station.

The Surprise was a fairly useful vessel in many respects and could have been made much better had not the Admiralty thought fit to arm her with four or five 4½-inch guns, which she really was unfit to carry; the weight might well have been utilised in other directions. The accommodation aft for distinguished passengers was very good, and when in harbour, as far as they were concerned, she was a very nice yacht; but at sea, when steaming at any speed, the vibration was so terrific, that very few of them could stand being aft, and they generally used to come on the bridge and camp out there, which was not always very convenient to the officers who were carrying out their duties. However, the sea trips were generally short, and on the whole she answered very well, and only disappeared from service a few years ago. Having commissioned her, I was of course on board during her steam trials. With picked coal, and, moreover, with (what is more important still) picked stokers, she succeeded in going about eighteen knots on the measured mile, and under the same favourable circumstances did quite well on her six hours’ full-speed trial, averaging nearly sixteen knots. But we were to be bitterly disappointed in her performances later on. Without adventitious aids she turned out to be a very moderate steamer and not the best of sea boats. The first distinguished passenger we were ordered to embark was the Duke of Connaught. His Royal Highness was about to start for India, and wishing to curtail the length of his journey, decided to travel to Marseilles overland, from thence to be conveyed to Malta in the Surprise, where he could hit off the P. & O. steamer which was to take him to his destination. It became a question of accurate timing, as the P. & O. boats were in the habit of staying but very few hours at Malta. Consequently, the question arose of the number of hours it would take the Surprise to go from Marseilles to Malta. The Captain and I put our heads together, and though we were much too old hands at the game to place very implicit reliance in full-speed trials as conducted by the Admiralty, we thought we could safely guarantee an average speed of thirteen knots, which seemed to leave a very fair margin up our sleeves. About the end of August we left the port of Marseilles with our Royal passenger on board, steaming gaily some fourteen and a half knots. The heat was very great, and the stokers, though very willing, were mostly young hands, the coal was very far from being picked, so the speed of the ship, in spite of every effort, gradually got lower and lower, and we finally crawled into Malta at the ignoble speed of about ten knots, a good many hours late. It was a very mortifying début to make on our station, and it was a long time before we heard the last of it.

People interested in the Navy, who read the official accounts of the trials of new ships that always used to be published in The Times, may gather from this sad experience what a difference there is in actual practice between the performances that are published, and what is apt to be realised later on under normal conditions. (Eye-wash again!)

From 1886 to 1888, during my term of service on board the Surprise, the Mediterranean Station was at its zenith as regards strength and importance. It had been looked upon for many years as the Blue Ribbon of the Navy, and as regards the person of the Commander-in-Chief, it naturally gained additional éclat from the fact that no less a personage than H.R.H. Vice-Admiral the Duke of Edinburgh, the second son of Queen Victoria, was Commander-in-Chief, with the local rank of Admiral. His Royal Highness had hoisted his flag in February 1886 in the Alexandra, and in addition to her had seven of the most modern of our armour-clad ships under his command, with a considerable number of small craft, principally employed on service in the Red Sea. The Admiral and many of his Captains have joined the majority, but amongst others who are still with us, are the present Admiral Sir Compton Domville, then Captain of the Temeraire, and subsequently Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Station; Admiral Sir Henry Stephenson,[2] now Usher of the Black Rod, then commanding the Dreadnought, had under his orders our present King, serving as a Lieutenant on board that ship; Admiral of the Fleet Sir Hedworth Meux, then Commander Lambton, in command of the Dolphin sloop; another Admiral, now the Marquis of Milford Haven, was, as Prince Louis of Battenberg, Commander of the Dreadnought; while prominent among the Lieutenants serving in the different ships were the late Admirals Sir George Warrender, and Sir Frederick Hamilton, and the late Captain the Hon. Hugh Tyrrwhitt. Admirals Sir Cecil Colville, Sir Colin Keppel and Sir James Startin, all of whose names have already occurred in these notes, Midshipman David Beatty of the Alexandra, now Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty, are still, I am rejoiced to think, very much alive.

Malta, where I was to spend a great deal of my life for the next two years, was very gay. The Duchess of Edinburgh passed the whole of the winter there. The Governor had temporarily made over the palace of San Antonio, with its wonderful orange gardens, to the Duke and Duchess during their stay at Malta, so it was there that I first had the honour of making the acquaintance of Her Imperial Highness and her children. Her two eldest daughters were then only about eleven and twelve years of age, but already gave promise of great beauty; indeed, the eldest, the present Queen of Roumania, was, and still is, one of the most beautiful and attractive women in the world. The Duchess herself, if I may take the liberty of saying so, was, and is, a very remarkable woman. For the only daughter of the Emperor Alexander (in those days the greatest potentate in the world), it was in some ways rather a step downwards to marry a second son, even though he was the son of Queen Victoria; and, moreover, to be in a certain sense merely the wife of an Admiral when the Duke was employed on the duties of his profession; but she certainly succeeded, in her position as wife to the Commander-in-Chief, in making herself extremely popular with the Naval Officers at Malta. The dinners at San Antonio were infinitely more agreeable and less stiff than the sort of entertainments which were generally given at the various Admiralty Houses that I have known, and a command to dine there was not only an honour but a very distinct pleasure into the bargain.

Her Imperial Highness, like most of her compatriots, adored the South. She was devoted to Italian art, and lost no opportunity of seeing everything that was worth seeing in Italy and Sicily, and were I to catalogue all the interesting places that the Surprise visited in the course of two years, sometimes in company with the rest of the Fleet, and sometimes on detached cruises “on her own,” the result would be like nothing in the world so much as a portion of “Baedeker” on Italy.

But before saying anything more about trips, the main interest of which consisted in seeing some of the wonders of Italy, I must write of two or three cruises that were nothing if not official.