Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon

[qprdave]

Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon

Died 9th Jun 1947

Published in The Times on June 10, 1947

[peter schofield]

The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times (London, England), Saturday, October 20,
The Commander of the Dreadnought
To be only 43 and command the worlds greatest battleship must surely come near to the summit of every sailorman’s desire. Captain Reginald Bacon, DSO the Commander of the Dreadnought, has not attained his distinguished command without a fairly hard struggle upwards. Submarine training had formed a good part of his training, and submarine work, as the outsider knows, is not exactly child’s play. Commander Bacon while serving as lieutenant on the Camperdown was awarded a medal by the Italian government for saving life at the wreck of the Utopia in the Bay of Gibraltar, and he has also seen fighting service, for he gained his DSO when in command of the Theseus during the Benin Expedition. On the conclusion of the campaign he wrote a book ‘Benin the City of Blood’, and he has also written a text book entitled ‘Manual of Electricity and Electric Lighting for the Navy’. It is entirely as it should be that Captain Bacon should command the Dreadnought for he was assistant to Sir John Fisher when the plans of the great ironclad first saw the light of day, and he was for years in connection with Messrs. Vickers, Sons and Maxim and devoted himself to the construction of the submarine from the very first day their use and construction was decided upon by the Admiralty. A fitter man for this important could hardly, therefore have been found.

[patroclus]

Bacon's two volumes of Memoirs - "A Naval Scrapbook 1877-1900" and "From 1900 Onward" are well worth reading. He was a firm supporter of Jellicoe and his "Life of John Rushworth, Earl Jellicoe" should be read with that in mind but is valuable. His other well-known work, the 2 volume "The Dover Patrol 1915-1917", is invaluable for the details of these operations (in spite of his reluctance to accept the permeability of his barrages by U-boats.

[dennis a feary]

Here are details of awards to Adm Bacon ;

BACON Reginald H.S CVO., DSO Vice Admiral RN 79D238
Commanding Dover Patrol N/E 01.01.16 Gazetted
Dover Patrol KCB
For services in command of the Dover Patrol, 1915.

BACON Reginald H.S KCB., KCVO., DSO Vice Admiral RN 79D024
Dover Patrol N/E N/E N/E
Bombardment of Zeebrugge & Ostend 11-12.05.17 & 4-5.06.17 N/E Planned and carried out the bombardment of Zeebrugge on the 11-12th May, and of Ostend dockyard on the 4-5th June, 1917, with very successful results.
Their Lordships' appreciation expressed of the efficiency of the plans adopted, and the care and thoroughness with which operations were organised and carried out.

BACON Reginald H.S KCB., KCVO., DSO Vice Admiral RN 79D017
Dover Patrol N/E N/E N/E
Attacks on German Destroyers 07.04.17 N/E
Their Lordships' high appreciation expressed of the skill and careful organisation with which this very successful operation was carried out.

Sadsac

[kronserg]

Noticeable photo - aboard HMS Dreadnought

92908

[peter schofield]

Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies

Bacon, Sir Reginald Hugh Spencer (1863–1947), naval officer, was born on 6 September 1863 at Wiggonholt rectory, Sussex, youngest of the eight children of the Revd Thomas Bacon and his wife, Emma Lavinia, daughter of George Shaw of Teignmouth. He entered the Royal Navy via the Britannia in January 1877. Rated midshipman on leaving, and already known to his peers as Porky, he was appointed (January 1879) to the Alexandra, flagship of Sir Geoffrey Hornby and then of Sir Beauchamp Seymour, ‘the swell of the ocean’, in the Mediterranean. After good results at Greenwich he was promoted lieutenant in August 1883 and went to sea in the sail training-ship Cruiser before specializing in torpedoes and qualifying at Vernon. He became torpedo officer in two flagships of the channel squadron, Northumberland and Camperdown. He returned to Vernon until promoted commander in June 1895, when he was appointed to the cruiser Theseus in the special service squadron which was suddenly withdrawn from the Mediterranean in January 1897 to reinforce the West African squadron under Sir Harry Rawson in dealing with the critical situation in Benin resulting from the massacre of an English party. Bacon accompanied the by now traditional naval brigade up country as intelligence officer, for which he was appointed to the DSO and mentioned in dispatches. Six months later, having written a spirited account of the expedition entitled Benin, City of Blood (1897), he was sent to the Empress of India, which took part in the queen's jubilee review before joining the Mediterranean Fleet. In 1898 she was ordered to Crete to join Admiral Sir Gerard Noel's punitive expedition after the massacre of the British vice-consul and his family. So far Bacon's had been the classical career of an enterprising officer of his day. The advent of Sir John Fisher as commander-in-chief, the Mediterranean Fleet, was to have a shattering effect on even so rhadamanthine an institution as the Royal Navy but it brought Bacon opportunities of which he took full advantage. Fisher welcomed ideas from junior officers; Bacon was quick to respond to his admiral's request for suggestions about the tactical deployment of torpedo boats. Fisher's approval of his proposals was instant and rewarding; on his recommendation Bacon was promoted captain in June 1900, only five years since he had been promoted commander.

Bacon's first appointment was to evaluate the technical aspects of the Paris Exhibition of that year; the next to attend one of the early war courses at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Thereafter he oversaw the introduction of submarine boats into the Royal Navy. G. J. Goschen's last act before he retired as first lord had been to order five Holland submersibles from America, to be built under licence by Vickers and by Maxim. Bacon was appointed inspecting captain of submarine boats, a post which he held until 1904 and which made him father of ‘the trade’, as the Submarine Service is affectionately known, supervising both the construction of its boats and the training of their crews.

Fisher became first sea lord on Trafalgar day, 1904, and at once recruited Bacon—said to be the cleverest officer in the Navy—to be his naval assistant. After working on the new designs committee with the specifications of the revolutionary Dreadnought and the new battle cruisers, and commanding the Irresistible in order to gain the sea time needed for further promotion, he was appointed in January 1906 to Dreadnought as her first captain. It was while he was in the Mediterranean that he obliged Fisher with private letters, ostensibly about the fleet in general and the seagoing reaction to board innovations and experiments, but occasionally commenting on individuals. However apart from a reference to certain admirals ‘getting at the King’, he was careful not to identify brother officers, doing so only once and that a junior; but the suspicion that he informed on a fellow officer stuck, an odium from which his standing never quite recovered. He lacked the gift of drawing loyalty or affection from his officers and men; and when the texts were almost inadvertently quoted by Fisher in his feud against Lord Charles Beresford in 1909, the effect may have contributed to Bacon's decision to retire from the service. He had served as flag captain and chief of staff to Sir Francis Bridgeman when he hoisted his flag in the Dreadnought as admiral in the Home (Reserves) Fleet; in 1907 he relieved Jellicoe as director of naval ordnance, in the middle of a controversy concerning the choice of a centralized fire-control system. Fisher and Jellicoe favoured Pollen's invention, but Jellicoe left the Admiralty for the fleet, and Bacon opted for the cheaper but less accurate system designed by Captain F. C. Dreyer. This was a controversial and, as events were to show, a mistaken decision, and though Bacon could scarcely have missed the flag list in July 1909, he was perhaps fortunate in being invited by McKenna to join the board as third sea lord and controller, again relieving Jellicoe. But he had been offered the post of managing director of the Coventry ordnance works and calculating that because of his short time at sea he would be unlikely to obtain any significant command afloat, he asked for his name to be transferred to the retired list that November.

By August 1914 Bacon had produced a new howitzer, of which he took a detachment to Flanders in 1915, commanding the force in the rank of colonel 2nd commandant, Royal Marines. To the astonishment of many of his naval contemporaries and the fury of some, he was recalled to active naval service by Churchill, then first lord, and appointed to relieve Rear-Admiral Horace Hood in command of the Dover patrol and as senior naval officer, Dover. He was promoted vice-admiral late in 1916, and early in January 1917 proposed to Jellicoe, who had become first sea lord, a seaborne assault on the Belgian coast, using monitors to push floating piers ahead of them, and landing 14,000 men with artillery and transport over open beaches while Ostend and Zeebrugge were bombarded by other inshore craft. This promising scheme was never mounted because the army failed to co-ordinate its part of the plan. In 1918 the two ports were raided, but in accordance with plans amended significantly in the light of criticisms made by Bacon when the originals had been sent to him by mistake—they were being circulated in confidence to other officers while he was still in command at Dover.

Bacon's days there were numbered once Sir Eric Geddes became first lord in July 1917. Fortified by the appointments of Admiral Wemyss as deputy first sea lord and Rear-Admiral Roger Keyes as director of plans, Geddes set up a channel barrage committee under the latter on 13 November. This irked Bacon, whose conceit shone through in a series of petulant letters he sent to the first lord. These did not endear him to an equally self-confident man. But Bacon was the man in the job, and as such he was supported by Jellicoe, for too long for the latter's own good. Eventually their hands were forced. Bacon was cornered over the use of nets, mines, and searchlights and then over the disposition of his surface forces. Intelligence of numerous and safe transits of the Dover Strait by U-boats tipped the scales; Wemyss was adamant that he should go. Jellicoe was reluctant to relieve him. Wemyss contemplated resignation. A. J. Marder has argued that the primary cause of Jellicoe's dismissal was the impending sacking of Bacon, and it was indeed Jellicoe who was sacked by Geddes at Christmas time 1917 in a manner which still astonishes. Wemyss replaced Bacon with Keyes on new year's day 1918: an instant and significant increase in U-boat sinkings spoke for itself.

Bacon's considerable abilities were too valuable to lose, and again it was Churchill, now minister of munitions, who redeployed them, making him controller of the ministry inventions department. He was advanced to the rank of admiral in September 1918 and his name finally went onto the retired list on 31 March 1919. He moved to Hampshire and devoted himself to shooting and to chairing the Romsey bench, spending his summers at his house near Lerici in Italy. He also turned to writing, in a faintly pompous tone more reminiscent of Beresford than of Fisher. His autobiography needed two volumes, A Naval Scrap Book, 1877–1900 (1925) and From 1900 Onward (1940); two more were devoted to the Dover patrol, and in 1923 he accepted Jellicoe's request to act as his literary representative when the official Jutland report was published. This led to Bacon writing The Jutland Scandal (1925), ‘Dedicated to those two neglected goddesses, Justice and Truth, now worshipped in an obscure corner of the British Pantheon’ (Bacon, The Jutland Scandal, dedication) which even Jellicoe thought was a shade too strong—‘the criticism is obvious but he has overdone it … I am sorry that he rubbed it into Beatty so hard’ (Winton, 292). To others it seemed able if trenchant; in the service there was some repugnance at the title. In 1929 he published the standard biography of Fisher, again in two volumes; sympathetic but not sycophantic, though now rather outdated. Seven years later he managed to deal with Jellicoe in one thick volume, an authorized work though he did not have access to all the admiral's papers, and refused to have the manuscript vetted by his literary executors.

Bacon married in 1894 Cicely Isabel (d. 1955), daughter of Henry Edward Surtees MP, of Redworth Hall, co. Durham. They had one daughter and two sons; the elder was killed at Loos and the younger died while a naval cadet. Edward VII had appointed Bacon CVO in 1907; he was promoted KCVO in 1916, and appointed KCB for his work at Dover. He enjoyed several foreign awards. Undeniably a man of brilliant professional attainments, with a most original mind and probably the cleverest of the many able young officers of his time, he justified Fisher's selection as a disciple in the promotion of many major reforms. He won early and accelerated promotion by merit, and his development of the submarine force alone would secure his fame. His work at Dover enhanced it. He was unfortunate in his manifestation of self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction. Bacon died at his home, Braishfield Lodge, near Romsey, on 9 June 1947, and was buried in Romsey.

A. B. Sainsbury

[jainso31]

An extremely well judged and beautifully written Obituary.Thank you for the privilege of being able to read it on this Forum.

jainso31

[Harley]

Material from the O.D.N.B. is copyright, Peter. One has to quibble with some of the points in it. Bacon's promotion to Captain after five years wasn't out of the ordinary at all. It doesn't help that in his first set of memoirs Bacon claimed that he had been the youngest of his batch of Lieutenants promoted to Commander, when he wasn't. With regards to fire control Sainsbury was rather premature in referring to "a mistaken decision".