Difference between revisions of "Lewis Bayly"

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Admiral SIR Lewis Bayly, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., C.V.O., Royal Navy (28 September, 1857 – 16 May, 1938) was an officer of the Royal Navy.

Early Life & Career

Bayly was born at Woolwich, 28 September 1857, the third son of Captain Neville Bayly, of the Royal Horse Artillery, by his wife, Henrietta Charlotte, daughter of General Charles George Gordon, of the Royal Artillery, and great-great-nephew of Admiral Sir Richard Keats. He entered H.M.S. Britannia on 15 July, 1870 and passed out in 1872 as a Navigating Cadet, but he was promoted to Sub-Lieutenant for navigating duties in 1876, when the Navigating Branch was abolished and changed over to the Executive Branch; he became Lieutenant in 1881. He served in the Ashanti campaign (1873) and in the Congo expedition (1875) in the Encounter, and in the Egyptian war of 1882. In 1883 he specialized in torpedo, but his first important appointment was as Naval Attaché to the United States of America in June, 1900; in the two years there he gained experience which was to stand him in good stead in his last appointment.

In 1907, after having commanded the cruiser Talbot on the China station and the battleship Queen in the Mediterranean, Bayly was selected for the command of the destroyer flotillas in the Home Fleet, with the rank of Commodore, First Class, in the Attentive. In Bayly's own words, "destroyers were then a comparatively new arm, and their capabilities when working in flotillas were not very well understood." A fine seaman and a hard taskmaster, he completed an immense programme of exercises during the next two years and laid solid foundations for the future handling and administration of flotillas. In 1908 he was appointed president of the Royal Naval War College, Portsmouth, and promoted to Rear-Admiral; he held the presidency until 1911 when he was given the command of the first Battle Cruiser Squadron (flag in the Indomitable and later in the Lion); this was followed by the command of the Third Battle Squadron (1913–1914, flag in the King Edward VII), and, in 1914, by that of the First Battle Squadron (flag in the Marlborough). This squadron was part of the Grand Fleet assembled at Scapa Flow on the outbreak of war in August, 1914. In September Bayly was promoted Vice-Admiral and in December he was appointed to command the recently strengthened Channel Fleet (flag in the Lord Nelson), but a few days later was relieved of his command because, during exercises, one of his battleships, the Formidable, was sunk by torpedo. He asked for a Court-Martial, but this was refused, and he was appointed president of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich on 18 January, 1915.

Appointed Senior Officer on the Coast of Ireland on 20 July, 1915 and assumed command on 22 July. His title was changed to Commander-in-Chief, Coast of Ireland on 4 June, 1917. The German submarine campaign was at its height and the frequent sinkings in the Western Approaches could only be checked by extremely vigorous defence measures and by exploiting new methods of attacking the submarines. Bayly had all the qualities for conducting the anti-submarine campaign, but for the first two years he never had sufficient ships for the large area for which he was responsible, until, in 1917, welcome reinforcements from the United States began to arrive.

Bayly was promoted to the rank of Admiral on 23 October, 1917, vice Carden, placed on the Retired List.^[1] Bayly proved the ideal commander of a mixed Anglo-American force. He made the senior United States officer (Captain Joel Roberts Poinsett Pringle, afterwards vice-admiral) his chief of staff, the first foreign naval officer to hold such an appointment, and he mixed the ships of the two navies in his flotillas and squadrons so that after a few months they were all one navy. Although in his own service his reputation was that of a hard taskmaster with a brusque, intolerant manner, the American navy discovered a human side which led him to be known to all American sailors as ‘Uncle Lewis’. It is no exaggeration to say that by the time the war was over, he was as well known in the United States as in his own country. It was the joint practice of naval warfare that broadened and deepened into a sympathetic understanding between Bayly and Pringle and all those who served under them, and this understanding spread to wider reaches and helped materially to cement friendship between the two English-speaking countries.

In 1921 Bayly, who had retired in July, 1919, visited the United States as the guest of the Queenstown Association, a club formed by officers who had served under him from 1915 to 1918, and of which he was vice-president. In 1934 he was again the guest of the American navy when, at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, he unveiled a memorial, which the Secretary of the Navy had granted him permission to erect, to his American chief of staff, Vice-Admiral Pringle.

Bayly was appointed C.V.O. in 1907, C.B. in 1912, K.C.B. in 1914, and K.C.M.G. in 1918. He received the Grand Cross or the Dannebrog in 1912 and the American D.S.O. He married in 1892 Yves Henrietta Stella, daughter of Henry Annesley Voysey; there was no issue of the marriage. He died in London 16 May 1938.

Footnotes

Bibliography

Service Records

• ADM 196/19
• ADM 196/22
• ADM 196/38