Herbert William Richmond
Admiral Sir Herbert William Richmond, K.C.B. (15 September, 1871 – 15 December, 1946) was an officer of the Royal Navy during the First World War. A great educator, after he was retired from the service he became a college head
Richmond was born at Beavor Lodge, Hammersmith, London, on 15 September, 1871, the third child and second son of the artist Sir William Blake Richmond (1842–1921) and his second wife, Clara Jane (d. 1916), daughter of William Richards of Cardiff. Herbert had first developed an interest in joining the navy when, at the age of ten, he had visited Portsmouth. He attended St Mark's School, near Windsor, and his brother wrote later that: ‘He was not happy there. The complexities of Greek, Latin and mathematics worried him and confirmed him in his desire to go to sea’ (Trevelyan, 326).
He entered the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in 1885; two years later he went to sea as a midshipman in the Nelson, flagship of the commander-in-chief on the Australia station. In 1892 he joined the hydrographic branch but lack of prospects there encouraged him to transfer to the torpedo branch in 1894. As a torpedo officer he served in several battleships, including two years in the Majestic, flagship of the Channel Squadron. In 1903 he was promoted Commander and appointed to the Naval Ordnance Department at the Admiralty in recognition of his technical expertise.
After a year in that department Richmond became executive officer of the Crescent, flagship of the commander-in-chief on the Cape of Good Hope station, for nearly three years before returning to the Admiralty where he became naval assistant to the Second Sea Lord. On 8 July, 1907 he married Florence Elsa (d. 1971), second daughter of Sir (Thomas) Hugh Bell, second baronet, of Rounton Grange, Yorkshire. They had one son and four daughters. Around this time Richmond's diary writings began to show the severely critical, and often arrogant, attitude he would adopt towards policies and individuals with whom he disagreed. In 1907 he characterized Admiralty organization as ‘beneath contempt’ and increasingly showed ‘the intolerance he had for less gifted contemporaries—a certain prickliness of character that coloured most of his personal relationships’ (Hunt, 2, 20).
Richmond was promoted Captain in 1908 and in 1909 appointed to the command, for nearly two years, of the most famous ship in the navy of that day, the Dreadnought, then flagship of Sir William May, commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet. But by then his arrogance and intolerance had begun to cause him to be ‘regarded as an unsettling gadfly, increasingly isolated and mistrusted by superiors’ (Hunt, 25). He was consequently relegated to command only second-class cruisers for eighteen months from March, 1911.
Despite his earlier dislike of school, Richmond had become increasingly intellectual in his interests and approach. During these commands he edited the Navy Records Society's volume on The Loss of the Minorca (1913), delivered a series of lectures on naval history at the Royal Naval War College, and completed a book, begun in 1907, entitled The Navy in the War of 1739–48, which, however, was not published until 1920. At the War College he developed among the students the group of naval reformers later known as the Young Turks who advocated a much more offensive naval policy during the war.
In 1913 Richmond became assistant director of the operations division of the war staff at the Admiralty. In this role he was not afraid to attack bitterly the strategic plans of his superiors, including those of the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Arthur Marder suggests that in these circumstances ‘the admiralty showed great forebearance indeed in continuing his employment’ (Marder, Dreadnought, 1.404). But his career hardly prospered. He left the Admiralty in May, 1915 to become liaison officer with the Italian naval command, a post which he held for four months before returning home to command the old battleship Commonwealth in the 3rd Battle Squadron. In April, 1917 he was appointed to command the battleship Conquerer in the Grand Fleet, where he gained the support of Sir David Beatty, the commander-in-chief. By late 1917 the prime minister, Lloyd George, had become familiar with the ideas of the Young Turks. Through contacts, he and Richmond discussed naval issues and Richmond's career was revitalized. With Beatty's strong support in April, 1918 he was selected as director of the newly formed training and staff duties division of the naval staff at the Admiralty. Richmond's ideas were in advance of his time, however, and practically all of his recommendations were vetoed; he was glad after a few months of frustration to return to the Grand Fleet, in command of the battleship Erin.
In 1920, after Beatty's appointment as first sea lord, Richmond was promoted to flag rank, and appointed to command the re-established Royal Naval War College to which flag officers and captains were sent to study the higher direction of war. There he was at last given the independence to promote his ideas. But when cutbacks occurred in the navy soon after, such studies were given low priority and his staff was severely reduced. He resumed work for the Navy Records Society, editing the Spencer Papers (vol. 4, 1924).
In 1923 Richmond was appointed commander-in-chief of the East India station. On his return to England at the end of 1925, he was kept from the higher level positions he would have expected by his continuing disagreement with current naval policy. In 1927, however, he was appointed commandant of the new Imperial Defence College where his views could perhaps be more safely expressed in training rather than command within the navy. His term there was brought to an end only by the standing rule which prescribed two years as its duration.
Richmond had been promoted Vice-Admiral in April, 1925 and Admiral in October, 1929. But his unpopularity within the Admiralty was reinforced when, on the eve of the naval conference of 1930, Richmond contributed two articles to The Times (21 and 22 November 1929) on the subject of naval reduction, which proposed limitation in the size of ships rather than the official Admiralty plan of numerical reduction. This action, Marder suggests, ‘virtually terminated his career on the active list’ (Marder, Portrait, 29), and he was refused further employment. In April, 1931, twelve months before the date on which he would have been subject to compulsory retirement under the standing regulations, he retired at his own request, and devoted himself to his work as a naval historian, which was, said George Trevelyan, his ‘greatest service to this country’ (Trevelyan, 332).
In 1931 Richmond published The Navy in India, 1763–83, which he had researched in the archives of Ceylon and Pondicherry eight years earlier, and a work on naval limitation under the title Economy and Naval Security. He also delivered a series of lectures at University College, London, and the Lees Knowles lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1932, published in book form as Imperial Defence and Capture at Sea in War. In 1933 he published a treatise, Naval Training, and the following year a more important work, Sea Power in the Modern World. In that year he was elected to the Vere Harmsworth chair of imperial and naval history at Cambridge, which Trevelyan, who was part of the electing body, said was a ‘marked compliment to his eminence as a historian, for owing to the age limit affecting professorships he could only hold it for two years’ (Trevelyan, 334). He was also made a professorial fellow of Jesus College. He was completely successful in the academic environment. At the close of his two years' tenure of the chair, he was elected to the mastership of Downing College, which had just fallen vacant.
On the outbreak of war in 1939 Richmond became chairman of the university joint recruiting board; he welcomed the establishment in his own college of the Cambridge naval division, and he started a series of lectures on foreign affairs and the progress of the war for the junior combination room, afterwards continued and extended as the ‘Richmond lectures’. But his greatest interest remained the promotion of ideas, learnt from history, of sea power and of a British strategy based on it. In 1941 he published, in the Cambridge Current Problems series, a booklet surveying British strategy from the days of Queen Elizabeth I; in 1943 he took the same theme for the Ford lectures which he delivered at Oxford, and these he afterwards expanded into his greatest work, Statesmen and Sea Power, published in 1946 only a few weeks before his death. A volume left in manuscript was edited by E. A. Hughes and published in 1953 as The Navy as an Instrument of Policy, 1558–1727.
Richmond was appointed C.B. in 1921 and promoted K.C.B. in 1926. He was elected F.B.A. in 1937 and was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. On the establishment in 1934 of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich he was appointed one of the trustees. He received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from Oxford in 1939. He was forced by illness to give up all strenuous physical activity after 1940. He died of a heart attack at his home, the master's lodge, Downing College, on 15 December, 1946, and was cremated at Cambridge on 18 December.
