Charles William de la Poer Beresford, First Baron Beresford

Admiral Charles William de la Poer Beresford, 1st Baron Beresford, G.C.B., G.C.V.O. (10 February, 1846 – 6 September, 1919) was an officer of the Royal Navy.

Early Life and Career

Lord Beresford was born at Baronstown, Dundalk, co. Louth, on 10 February 1846, the second son of the Revd John de la Poer Beresford, fourth marquess of Waterford (1814–1866), and his wife, Christiana (1820–1905), fourth daughter of Charles Powell Leslie MP, of Glaslough, co. Monaghan. Early naval career He was educated at the Revd George Renaud's Bayford School, Hertfordshire (1855–7), by a tutor, the Revd David Bruce Payne, at Deal, and at Stubbington House, near Fareham, Portsmouth. He entered the Britannia as a naval cadet in December 1859, and in March 1861 was appointed to the Marlborough, 121 guns, flagship in the Mediterranean, one of the last built and finest of the old wooden line of battleships. He was rated midshipman in June 1862. He was transferred in July 1863 to the Defence, a new wooden hulled ironclad which he later described as ‘a slovenly, unhandy tin kettle’ (Memoirs, 1.41). After less than a year he was appointed as senior midshipman to the corvette Clio, 22 guns, in which he sailed to the Falkland Islands and round Cape Horn to Honolulu and Vancouver. In December 1865 he was transferred to the frigate Tribune, 31 guns, at Vancouver, promoted sub-lieutenant 1866, and in the following February transferred to the steam frigate Sutlej, flagship on the Pacific station. The following June he returned home in her and joined the Excellent gunnery school ship. After eight months in the royal yacht, Victoria and Albert, which gave him his promotion to lieutenant in October 1868, he was appointed to the frigate Galatea (captain, Prince Alfred, duke of Edinburgh), in which he made a voyage of two and a half years, visiting the Cape, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, India, and the Falkland Islands. In November 1872 he was appointed flag lieutenant to Sir Henry Keppel, commander-in-chief at Plymouth, and remained there until August 1874, when he was sent for a few months to the Bellerophon, flagship of the North American station.

Through the influence of his brother Lord Waterford, Beresford was Conservative MP for co. Waterford from 1874 to 1880, opposing home rule but supporting denominational education, and opposing abolition of naval flogging. In September 1875 he went as aide-de-camp to the prince of Wales on his tour in India and was promoted commander in November of that year. In May 1877, after a short period in the Vernon for torpedo instruction, he was appointed executive officer of the Thunderer, channel squadron, until April 1878. Beresford married, on 25 April 1878, the ‘picturesque’ Ellen Jeromina (d. 26 May 1922). Called Mina by her friends and Dot by her husband, she was the daughter of the late Richard Gardner, MP for Leicester, and his wife, Lucy, Countess Mandelsloh. Beresford and his wife had two daughters. Shortly after Beresford's marriage the prince of Wales requested that he be given command of his paddle yacht, the Osborne, a post which Beresford retained until November 1881. During these years, 1874–1881, he was known chiefly as a dashing sportsman, a friend of the prince of Wales, and a prominent popular figure in smart society. The ‘member for the navy’ At the beginning of 1882 Beresford took command of the barque rigged screw gunvessel Condor, 3 guns, under Sir Beauchamp Seymour (afterwards Lord Alcester). At the bombardment of the Alexandria fortifications (11 July 1882), Beresford took the little Condor close in under Fort Marabout and she took the leading part in silencing its guns. Seymour signalled ‘Well done, Condor’ and the crews of the great ironclads cheered her. Aboard the Condor were the Times correspondent and the Graphic special war artist, Frederic Villiers. Beresford's role was fully reported. After the bombardment Beresford was sent ashore under Captain John Fisher and appointed provost-marshal and chief of police, and efficiently restored order. He was promoted captain and mentioned in dispatches for gallantry. ‘Charlie B’ became a national hero and celebrity, from then on much featured in the illustrated and other press, and later also on picture postcards. He was offered an appointment on the staff of the khedive and also as war correspondent of the New York Herald, but Sir Garnet Wolseley refused to release him. Beresford returned home to public adulation and royal congratulations, and remained on half pay until August 1884, when he was appointed to the Alexandra, to act on the staff of Lord Wolseley (as he now was) during the Gordon relief expedition. He afterwards commanded the naval brigade on the Nile, with which he took part in the battle of Abu Klea on 17 January 1885. He also commanded the expedition which went to the rescue of Charles William Wilson in the Safieh, when he kept his ship steadily engaged under heavy fire while his engineer, Benbow, repaired her disabled boiler (4 February). He was commended in the House of Commons, and described by Wolseley in his dispatch as ‘an officer whose readiness and resource and ability as a leader are only equalled by his daring’. For these services he was made CB (1885).

Beresford came home in July 1885 and was elected Conservative MP for East Marylebone, London; he was re-elected in 1886. The prince of Wales, to whom he had become close, urged Lord Salisbury, on the formation of the 1886 Conservative government, to give him political office, but Salisbury appointed him fourth naval lord of the Admiralty under Lord George Hamilton. He secured the establishment of the naval intelligence department, but was a difficult colleague and early showed himself hostile to the policy of the board. He criticized the shipbuilding programme and the organization and pay of the intelligence department, and objected to the supreme authority of the first lord in naval administration. He resigned over the naval estimates in January 1888. Salisbury commented to the queen that he was ‘an officer of great ability afloat, but he is too greedy of popular applause to get on in a public department. He is constantly playing his own game at the expense of his colleagues’ (Bennett, 145). For the next two years he was ‘member for the navy’, a constant and outspoken critic of naval affairs in the House of Commons, demanding naval reforms and a stronger fleet. He contributed to the introduction of the 1889 Naval Defence Act and the Hamilton naval building programme. The controversial commander and ass During the period from 1889 to 1892 Beresford's and his wife's lives were darkened by a quarrel with the prince of Wales and the threat of public scandal. It stemmed from the prince's attempt to retrieve a highly indiscreet letter written in January 1889 by Frances, Lady Brooke, later countess of Warwick (1861–1938) [see Greville, Frances Evelyn], with whom Beresford had an affair in 1886–7 and who, in 1889, became the prince's mistress. Beresford and the prince were eventually formally reconciled, but their once warm relationship was replaced by resentment. In December 1889 Beresford was appointed to command the armoured cruiser Undaunted on the Mediterranean station, resigning his seat in parliament. He returned to England in June 1893 to take command of the Medway dockyard reserve until March 1896. In 1897 he was appointed aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria, and in September 1897 was promoted rear-admiral. From 1897 to 1900 he was Conservative MP for York. He continued to use the press to demand naval reform.

In 1898–9 Beresford visited China on an investigative mission for the Associated Chambers of Commerce—one of his indiscreet speeches led Salisbury to comment ‘C.B. is an ass’ (Bennett, 219)—and published his report, The Break-up of China (1899), advocating British reassertion of the ‘open door’, and Chinese reforms, and warning against the Russian threat. In January 1900 he was sent to the Mediterranean as second in command to Sir John Fisher, whose reforming zeal he shared. He earned a rebuke from the Admiralty after Arnold White in 1901 leaked to the Daily Mail a letter criticizing Admiralty policy. From very different backgrounds, Beresford and Fisher were both naval reformers with their own agenda, ambitious and sometimes unscrupulous rivals, and prima donnas. From 1900, through several incidents including Fisher's public reprimanding of Beresford, relations between them deteriorated into hostility. Thenceforth Beresford was apparently motivated largely by hatred of Fisher, whom he called ‘the Mulatto’, and whom he challenged for leadership of the navy. Their feud split the navy into the Fisherite ‘fishpond’ and the Beresfordian ‘syndicate of discontent’, while others deprecated the dispute and its harmful results. In the following years, to some extent Beresford became the spokesman of, and was used by, others with their own naval agendas.

In February 1902, after returning to England, Beresford was elected MP for Woolwich. He was promoted vice-admiral in October 1902, and early in 1903 again left the House of Commons to take command of the channel squadron. He was made KCB in June 1903. In 1904 he opposed Fisher's proposal for fast armoured cruisers rather than battleships, and he favoured Arthur Pollen's controversial rangefinding apparatus rejected by Fisher and the Admiralty. In March 1905 he hauled down his flag, and two months later went to the Mediterranean as commander-in-chief, with the acting rank of admiral, to which he was promoted in November 1906.

From 1907 to 1909 Beresford was commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet, then the principal fleet with fourteen battleships. His flagship was, ironically, the new battleship King Edward VII and he ‘lived in great style’ (Bennett, 283), attended by his Irish servants and his bulldog bitch Kora—with whom he was repeatedly photographed—and kept his motor car stowed amidships. In November 1907 he publicly reprimanded the Fisherite Sir Percy Scott for his insubordinate ‘paintwork’ signal. It was a time when, against the German threat, the naval forces in home waters were being gradually but radically reorganized by Fisher, first sea lord from 1904 to 1910; Fisher's 1905 promotion to admiral of the fleet dashed Beresford's hopes of succeeding him as first sea lord. Beresford opposed many of the changes, and relations between him and Whitehall became very strained; the gradual development of the Home Fleet as an independent command in peacetime, resulting in a significant diminution of his command, angered him. In March 1909, following McKenna's decision, he was ordered to haul down his flag and come ashore a year short of the normal term of command, the Channel Fleet being abolished as a separate command and absorbed into the enlarged Home Fleet. Beresford, greeted by cheering crowds at Portsmouth and London, next challenged the policy of the Admiralty and its organization of the fleets in a long polemical letter (dated 2 April 1909), particularly on the necessity for a war staff, to the prime minister, Asquith.

Politics and personalities played a major role. Beresford was a Unionist, Fisher a Liberal. Beresford accused Fisher of operating a system of espionage against him when he was commander-in-chief, Mediterranean, and ruthlessly crushing all opposition at the Admiralty. However, there were also solid professional reasons for the dispute. Beresford believed that Fisher's division of the forces destined to defend home waters into separate channel, home, and Atlantic fleets was potentially disastrous and that these forces should be under a single commander-in-chief who would manoeuvre and train them for war. Beresford alleged that the policy of scrapping obsolete warships had gone too far and left the navy with too few cruisers for trade route protection in war. Furthermore, there were not enough British destroyers suitable for work in the North Sea and they compared poorly with their potential German foes. Money spent on submarines was also wasted, they were purely defensive craft and not suited for an offensive fleet like that of the British. Beresford also asserted he had not received proper war plans from the Admiralty and that it was necessary to establish a real naval staff. Beresford's charges were referred to a subcommittee of the committee of imperial defence, composed of the prime minister, Crewe, Morley, Grey, and Haldane. Asquith defined the inquiry very narrowly, excluding the 1904–5 reforms. Beresford, McKenna (who put the Admiralty case), and others presented evidence. Beresford showed up very badly under Asquith's penetrating examination and he gave an impression of incompetence. The committee's report (published August 1909) on the whole vindicated the Admiralty, though in certain respects—notably that the Admiralty had insufficiently informed Beresford—it justified some of his criticisms. Beresford published his views in The Betrayal (1912). He was placed on the retired list in February 1911, and received the GCB the same year.

From 1910 to 1916 Beresford was MP for Portsmouth. He continued in parliament, the press, and elsewhere his campaign against Fisher and Fisher's changes. Although he gained some right-wing support, Balfour and other leading Unionists refused to support him. He supported the National Service League and compulsory military training, and co-operated with Roberts on the invasion controversy. He supported and was supported by the more extreme and largely Unionist Imperial Maritime League (the ‘Navier League’) which with his encouragement broke from the Navy League in 1908 and demanded Fisher's removal. Rebuffed by Northcliffe, Beresford was supported by the Daily Express and the Standard—H. A. Gwynne was probably his most important ally—both owned by Arthur Pearson, and by the Morning Post. In parliament he spoke vehemently but sometimes incoherently. He bitterly criticized Churchill (first lord of the Admiralty, 1911–15) for his autocratic methods and interference in professional naval matters, and in 1914 for his apparent attempt to coerce the Ulster loyalists. In 1914 Beresford published his surprisingly non-controversial two-volume Memoirs, largely on his career to 1885. In 1915 he requested a peerage. Balfour and Bonar Law favoured this and Asquith, though disliking it, acquiesced. On 22 January 1916 Beresford was created Baron Beresford of Metemmeh and Curraghmore, co. Waterford. Character and reputation Charlie B was one of the most remarkable personalities of his generation: colourful, idiosyncratic, maverick, brave, high-spirited, an enthusiastic sportsman, of noble birth, and with ample private means. He touched life at many points, and to the general public was the best-known sailor of his day. However, arguably there was truth in Lansdowne's criticism that ‘there never was a more cheaply acquired reputation than his’ (Williams, 135). Beresford was passionately devoted to the navy and to his country, but his love of publicity and impatience of control sometimes led him into conduct alien from the strict traditions of the navy. He was not an original thinker. In parliament and on the platform, while not strong in argument—the pro-Fisher Garvin called Beresford ‘the great dirigible … the biggest of all recorded gas-bags’ (Williams, 213)—he was a forceful speaker and was widely popular, usually confining himself to naval topics in which he was especially interested. Owing partly to his variety of interests and partly to his quarrels with authority, he had until late in life comparatively little sea experience, but from January 1900, when he hoisted his flag in the Mediterranean, aged nearly fifty-four, he was for the greater part of nine years continuously afloat. He was an able and active flag officer; and he commanded the most important British fleet with energy and ability, enhancing fighting efficiency, and devoting personal care to the welfare of his men.

There are however widely divergent opinions about Beresford. Many of his ideas were sound and full of common sense, but his actions and statements, particularly in later years, alienated others. He was ambitious to reach the highest naval position, and it was unfortunate that the last years of his command were clouded by personal antagonism with Fisher. An admirable host, in London and in general society, he enjoyed widespread popularity.

Beresford died of a cerebral haemorrhage while staying with the duke of Portland at Langwell, Berriedale, Caithness, on 6 September 1919. He had a state funeral in St Paul's Cathedral, followed by burial at Putney Vale cemetery, London, four days later. At his death his peerage became extinct.

Wealth at death; £13,122 11s. 0d.: Probate; 29 October, 1919.