Difference between revisions of "Cyprian Arthur George Bridge"

Revision as of 16:08, 6 November 2010

Sir Cyprian A. G. Bridge, pictured as a Rear-Admiral.
Photo: Library of Congress.

Admiral SIR Cyprian Arthur George Bridge, G.C.B., Royal Navy (13 March, 1839 – 16 August, 1924) was an officer of the Royal Navy.

Early Life & Career

Bridge was born on 13 March, 1839, at St. John's, Newfoundland, the eldest son of Thomas Finch Hobday Bridge (b. c.1812), rector (afterwards Archdeacon) of St. John's, Newfoundland, and his wife, Sarah Christiana, daughter of John Dunscomb, an aide-de-camp to the Governor of Newfoundland. On his father's side Bridge was descended from a Flemish family settled in England in the twelfth century, and among his immediate predecessors he had associations with the sea service: two of his grandfather's brothers served in the navy, one of them under Rodney; his grandfather was a midshipman in the East India Company's and the Admiralty's packet services; his father was prevented only by short sight from adopting a sea life, and became chaplain to Admiral Sir Thomas John Cochrane, governor of Newfoundland.

Bridge went to England first in 1851, with a nomination for the Royal Navy given by Admiral Cochrane. He was sent to school at Walthamstow House, passed, in January 1853, the entrance examination for the Navy—then a very simple test—and was appointed to the paddle wheel sloop Medea, 850 tons, and, later, to the flagship Cumberland on the North American station. Early in 1854 he was transferred to the corvette Brisk, under Commander Beauchamp Seymour (afterwards Lord Alcester), and in her was sent into northern waters on the 1856 outbreak of war with Russia; he was present at the operations in the White Sea of the squadron under Sir Erasmus Ommanney.

In 1855 Bridge passed for Midshipman, having served two years as cadet; he was still under sixteen years of age, but had been in three ships, had served on foreign stations, and had seen war service. He was next appointed to the Pelorus, again under Seymour, for service in the East Indies. He took part in operations at Rangoon which continued for some years after the Second Anglo-Burmese War, and in the Bay of Bengal and the Red Sea made acquaintance with the old Indian Navy, shortly afterwards dissolved; he was a constant advocate of its resuscitation as a fighting force in later years. He became a mate in 1858, and a Lieutenant in 1859, aged twenty. Having passed the necessary examinations he joined the Algiers, line of battle ship, and in her served in the Mediterranean under Sir William Fanshawe Martin, whom later he described as the greatest flag officer since the Napoleonic wars and an abler man than Lord St. Vincent. His period of service in the Algiers was uneventful but highly instructive, for Admiral Martin conducted a continuous investigation into fleet evolutions and the tactics of battle. After three years in the Mediterranean, Bridge served successively in the Hawke on the Irish station, and the Fawn (1864–7) in the West Indies.

Being now of eight years' standing as a lieutenant, Bridge went to the Excellent in order to qualify in gunnery; he did not, however, serve as a gunnery specialist, for he was invited by Sir Alfred Ryder, Second-in-Command of the Channel Fleet (1868–9), to act as his flag-lieutenant. In April, 1869, at the age of thirty, he was promoted to Commander. He had now seen sixteen years of service, mostly at sea. In later life he contrasted the sea service of his younger days with that of more recent times.

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century most officers and men were at sea from 250 to 300 days out of the 365. In the last quarter … there were not many officers and men who had been in blue water for 90 days in the year.

The importance of service at sea and of acquiring the habit of taking responsibility and risks were deeply impressed upon him. A service which has to take the risks of war must not, he considered, be nurtured delicately in peace; he, when in command, never shrank from taking such risks. After his promotion Bridge was appointed to the Caledonia in the Mediterranean. Two years of service in her were followed by a year in the gunnery ship Cambridge, a year in the Implacable, and two and a half years in the Audacious, flagship of Admiral Ryder in China.

After returning to England, Bridge married, in 1877, Eleanor, daughter of George Thornhill of the Indian Civil Service; there were no children of the marriage. In September, 1877, with eight years' service as a commander, but not yet of command, he was promoted to Captain. Four years on half pay followed.

During 1878 and 1879 Bridge served on Admiralty and War Office committees on heavy guns, on armour plates and projectiles, and on explosives; for six months in 1881 he was a member of the ordnance committee. He was then offered command of the Espiègle, on the Australian station. In that appointment he was Deputy Commissioner for the Western Pacific, and made a series of reports on conditions in the islands which displayed the breadth of his mind and the acuteness of his perception. A note from the Admiralty hydrographic department in September 1884 remarked: "The Espiègle sends us more information than any other dozen ships."

Bridge returned from Australia in September, 1885. After six months on half pay he was appointed to command the Colossus, the latest type of battleship, and while serving in her prepared and submitted to the Admiralty a scheme for the mobilization of the navy. He vacated this command in 1888, and in 1889 was made director of the recently established Naval Intelligence Department at the Admiralty. This department fulfilled, within limits, the functions of a naval staff, an institution to which Bridge in his later years was much opposed, holding the view that a staff of the military type was not adapted to the needs of sea service. After fourteen and a half years in the rank of Captain, Bridge reached Flag Rank in 1892. In June, 1893 he chaired the preliminary meeting which led to the establishment of the Navy Records Society. On leaving the Admiralty in August, 1894 he was highly complimented by Lord George Hamilton, the first lord, on his stable and well thought out work as Director of Naval Intelligence.

In November, 1894 Bridge hoisted his flag as Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Squadron. He held the command, with his flag on board the Orlando, until 1898. He was promoted Vice-Admiral in 1898, and was created K.C.B. in 1899, but he had no further command until April, 1901 when he was appointed Commander-in-Chief in China. During the period of his command the Anglo-Japanese treaty was concluded (1902); Bridge's tact, ability, and firmness were important contributions to the successful issue of the negotiations. He strongly opposed the plan of establishing a permanent naval base at Weihaiwei, which had come into British hands in 1898, after the Sino-Japanese War. In a paper, The supply and communications of a fleet, which he read at the Hong Kong United Service Institution in 1902, he demonstrated that the quantity of stores needed by a squadron in those waters was too great to be maintained in peacetime, and that therefore, whether a permanent base were established or not, a chain of supplies would be needed. Flying bases, he explained, had always had to be maintained and were almost certain to be in better positions for strategical needs than permanent bases erected in peace. This reasoning appears to have been accepted by the Admiralty. Bridge reached the rank of Admiral in 1903 and was promoted G.C.B. He remained in command in China until the spring of 1904, when he returned to England. He retired, having reached the age limit, on 15 March, 1904.

Bridge served as an assessor on the international commission of inquiry into the Dogger Bank incident (October 1904), and as a member of the Mesopotamia commission of inquiry appointed in August 1916. During the First World War he maintained an optimistic attitude, and wrote many letters to the press rebuking pessimism and criticism of British action at sea. His belief that control of the sea was synonymous with control of communications strengthened the argument of those who claimed that as long as Jellicoe enjoyed the latter there was no need to seek the complete destruction of the German fleet. In the controversy which arose after the war concerning the size of fighting ships, Bridge was a strenuous advocate of a reduction in their size.

Bridge was widely read in many languages. He read Latin, French, German, and Swedish with facility and was acquainted with Italian and Spanish. His study of war began early and continued throughout his life. It covered a wide period of modern history and thought and was by no means confined to naval affairs—one of his earliest papers was Memoirs of the marquis of Pombal (Edinburgh Review, July 1872). The result of his wide reading was that his opinions were founded on a broad basis of recorded experience. This gave him at once clear vision and a consistency of view which never amounted to tenacious adherence to his own opinions. With beliefs rooted in history and principles distilled from experience, and with a desire to arrive at truth only through honest investigation, Bridge disliked profoundly a naval policy which, in his view, not only conflicted with reason and experience but also suppressed all attempts at discussion. This, in his words, was a "dictatorship of the materialate", meaning thereby a dictation of naval policy by men of a school of thought the dominating idea of which was the possession of instruments of war more powerful than those of any possible opponent—in short, the subordination of the strategical factor to the material. Naval architecture, Bridge held, should be "the handmaid of tactics", and his views on shipbuilding policy were to a great extent compressed within two short objective paragraphs:

Have the smallest fleet that can do the work which you want it to do: not the biggest that you can cajole or force the taxpayers into granting the money for. (Current History, March, 1921)

Build the smallest and least costly ships that can play their part in war: not the biggest that naval architects and engineers are able to design and build. (ibid.)

These views inevitably made Bridge an opponent of Fisher's construction of H.M.S. Dreadnought, the all big gun warship. The ship may have represented a significant advance in naval technology but Bridge regarded it as actually harmful to British interests. The new ships were far more costly and the result was that the British could afford to build fewer of them. This meant less, not more security. Bridge, by 1904, had other problems with Fisher and regretted the impending departure of what he considered the forthrightness and honesty represented by Fisher's predecessor, Admiral Lord Walter Kerr. Bridge had not forsaken the battleship itself, however, and in 1914 he was one of those who criticized Admiral Percy Scott for what he regarded as an exaggeration when Scott asserted that the submarine had driven the battleship from the seas. Bridge at this time was inclined to underestimate the role of the submarine in war, largely because neither the Russians nor the Japanese had made use of them in the Russo-Japanese War.

Bridge's political outlook was, conformably to his sentiments, Liberal. His was one of the names proposed for a peerage in the Parliament Bill crisis of 1911. In 1910 Asquith spoke of him as one of the country's most distinguished admirals, "a man absolutely detached from the various conflicting schools of the navy". His social gifts were considerable. Very courteous, he was both a good listener and a good talker with a ready and sometimes caustic wit. He sought information at all times and was quick to discern those who possessed it.

Besides numerous contributions to the daily press Bridge wrote, from 1872 to 1923, many articles on tactics, strategy, and naval policy in the reviews. His books were The Art of Naval Warfare (1907), Sea Power and other Studies (1910), and Some Recollections (1918). He also edited a History of the Russian Fleet during the Reign of Peter the Great by a Contemporary Englishman, 1724 (Navy Records Society, 1899), and wrote an important Admiralty paper, British Port Defence Policy (1901). Bridge died at Coombe Pines (a house he had built for himself), Coombe Warren, Kingston Hill, Surrey, on 16 August, 1924 and was buried at Putney Vale cemetery four days later. His correspondence and journals were deposited at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

Footnotes

Bibliography

Service Records