Charles Langdale Ottley

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Rear-Admiral SIR Charles Langdale Ottley, K.C.M.G., C.B., M.V.O., Royal Navy (8 February, 1858 – 24 September, 1932) was an officer of the Royal Navy.

Early Life & Career

Ottley was born at Richmond, Yorkshire, 8 February 1858, the seventh son of Lawrence Ottley, rector of Richmond and canon of Ripon, by his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of John Bickersteth, rector of Sapcote, Leicestershire, and sister of Robert Bickersteth, bishop of Ripon. Robert Lawrence Ottley, canon of Christ Church, Oxford, was an elder brother. He entered the Royal Navy in 1871, and in 1877 was serving as a midshipman in the screw corvette Amethyst, when in company with the Shah she engaged the rebel Peruvian warship Huascar off the coast of Peru. He gained accelerated promotion to lieutenant by obtaining first class certificates in all his examinations, and in 1882, as lieutenant of the Monarch (Captain (Sir) George Tryon), was present at the bombardment of Alexandria, receiving the Egyptian medal with clasp and the khedive's bronze star. Later in that year he returned home in order to qualify as a torpedo officer, and while serving in the Vernon he displayed marked technical ability and inventive capacity by devising a very successful automatic mooring gear for submarine mines which bears his name. In 1884 he became torpedo lieutenant of Rear-Admiral Tryon's flagship, the Nelson, on the Australia station for two years; he was later appointed torpedo lieutenant of the Camperdown and afterwards of the Victoria, flagships of the commander-in-chief Mediterranean, Admiral Sir Anthony Hoskins [q.v.] , who was later relieved by Vice-Admiral Tryon. Ottley was promoted commander in 1892, but remained in the ship in that rank as executive officer until early in 1893, when he returned home in order to become commander of the Vernon for two and a half years. He resumed sea service in 1897, in command of the sloop Nymphe in the Mediterranean, employed chiefly as senior naval officer at Port Said in 1897 and at Constantinople in 1898.

Ottley relinquished command of the Nymphe on his promotion to captain in January 1899, and was then appointed naval attaché to various British embassies; he acted in that capacity during the next five years in Washington, Rome, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, and Paris, thereby gaining unique knowledge and experience of foreign navies and foreign policy. Towards the end of his service as naval attaché he contemplated adopting a political career, and he was chosen in 1903 as prospective conservative candidate for Pembroke Boroughs. But his special qualifications led to his appointment in 1904 to the staff of the recently established Committee of Imperial Defence, and in 1905 to his selection, although a comparatively junior captain, to succeed Rear-Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg (afterwards Louis Alexander Mountbatten, First Marquess of Milford Haven) as director of Naval Intelligence, then the most important post, other than membership of the Board, in the Admiralty; and he abandoned his parliamentary ambitions. As director of Naval Intelligence, he sat on a number of important commissions, notably that of 1906 on war risks to shipping. In 1907 he was the principal naval delegate to the second Peace Conference at The Hague, where he took a leading part in drawing up the convention limiting the use of submarine mines, to the development of which he had devoted so much ingenuity many years earlier. In that same year, when the original secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Sir George Clarke (afterwards Lord Sydenham), relinquished that office, largely owing to differences of view which had arisen between him and the first sea lord, Sir John (afterwards Lord) Fisher, Ottley was selected to relieve him. In 1908 he was a delegate to the International Maritime Conference of London. On 15 June, 1908, Ottley was placed on the Retired List with permission to assume the rank of Rear-Admiral.[1] He remained secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence until 1912, when he had completed five years in office. Those five years, largely as a result of Ottley's unostentatious but skilful organization and guidance, were the most important period in the development of the committee into a highly efficient instrument for the co-ordination of the nation's forces in the preparation for, and conduct of war.

On retirement from office, Ottley made his home at Coruanan, Fort William, Inverness-shire, and joined the board of Messrs. Armstrong, Whitworth & company, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne; he took an active part in the superintendence of that company's output of war material, particularly after the outbreak of war in 1914. He was appointed M.V.O. in 1903, C.B. in 1911, and K.C.M.G. in 1907 for his services at The Hague Peace Conference. He retired from the board of Armstrongs on the post-war reconstruction of the company. In 1892 he married Kathleen Margaret, daughter of Colonel Alexander Stewart, of the Royal Artillery, and had a son, who died of wounds in 1914. A few days before his death he moved from Coruanan to Creag, Tarbet, Argyll, where he died 24 September 1932. He was a man of much charm and no little literary ability, a good linguist, and a fluent, convincing, and persuasive speaker.

Kathleen Margaret, his widow, died in Bath on 4 February, 1940 aged sixty-seven.[2]

Footnotes

  1. London Gazette: no. 28150. p. 4555. 23 June, 1908.
  2. "Deaths" (Deaths). The Times. Thursday, 8 February, 1940. Issue 48534, col B, pg. 1.

Bibliography

  • "Rear-Admiral Sir C. L. Ottley" (Obituaries). The Times. Monday, 26 September, 1932. Issue 46248, col A, pg. 17.

Service Records