Difference between revisions of "Frederic Charles Dreyer"

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Admiral SIR Frederic Charles Dreyer, G.B.E., K.C.B. (8 January, 1878 – 11 December, 1956) was an officer of the Royal Navy during the First World War.

Early Life & Career

Dreyer naval officer, was born on 8 January 1878 at Parsonstown, King's county, Ireland, the second son of the Danish-born John Louis Emil Dreyer (1852–1926), then astronomer to the fourth earl of Rosse, and his wife, Katherine Hannah (d. 1923), daughter of John Tuthill, of Kilmore, co. Limerick. From the Royal School, Armagh, Dreyer entered the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in 1891 and in his final examinations was placed fifth in his term. He continued to obtain class 1 certificates in nearly all his courses for sub-lieutenant and lieutenant (promoted July 1898) and for gunnery lieutenant; in 1900 he was the author of How to Get a First Class in Seamanship. In 1901, on the demanding advanced course for gunnery and torpedo lieutenants at Greenwich, he came first, with honours, in his class of three; he then joined the staff of the gunnery school, Sheerness. On 26 June 1901 Dreyer married Una Maria (1876–1959), daughter of John Thomas Hallett, vicar of Bishop's Tachbrook, Warwickshire; they had three sons and two daughters.

In 1903 Dreyer became the gunnery officer of Exmouth and, after the battleship was recommissioned in 1904 as the flagship of the Home (later Channel) Fleet, gunnery adviser to Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson. For three years to 1907 the Exmouth was first in the Channel Fleet in both gunlayers' test and battle practice. In 1905 Dreyer served on the calibration committee chaired by Rear-Admiral Percy Scott and, in January 1907, joined Dreadnought for her first cruise as experimental gunnery officer. On his return he went to the Admiralty as an assistant to the director of naval ordnance (D.N.O.), Captain John Jellicoe, but was quickly selected by Sir John Fisher (on Wilson's recommendation) to advise the nucleus crews of the Home Fleet in their gunnery training. At the close of 1907 he was promoted commander and then assisted Wilson during the trials of Arthur Pollen's rangefinder mounting and plotter in Ariadne. Afterwards Dreyer returned to the DNO's department (now under Captain Reginald Bacon) until he was appointed commander of Vanguard in late 1909. A year later he was invited by Jellicoe to be his flag commander, first in Prince of Wales and, from December 1911, in Hercules, appointments which established their "long and close connection which has been so valuable to me" (Jellicoe). A midshipman in Hercules, Stewart Arnold Pears (later Rear-Admiral), later wrote:

Dreyer, as a Commander, was of a contrasting type [to Jellicoe]. Tall, with a large head and brain, he was intolerant of lesser men. He would "fly off the handle" not just over a mistake, which might be understandable, but over the slightest hesitation in carrying out an often complicated instruction. He seemed to expect nothing but idiocy from his junior staff and while we admired his ability and devotion to his task we kept out of his way as much as we could. I remember being used as a "living" blast gauge before such things were invented. He had a wife and family but I do not recall any sight or sign of their existence during the year or more that I served in the same ship with him before the war. Later, my wife and I got to know them well and we have been in contact with one or another until quite recently. Meanwhile I encountered a mellowed Dreyer from time to time; on the last occasion before his death we reminisced over the early days in the friendliest manner.^[1]

Jellicoe arranged for Dreyer to take command of the new cruiser Amphion in 1913, and promotion to captain followed in June. Amphion was first in the whole navy in that year's gunlayers' test and first in its category at battle practice. In October 1913 Dreyer became flag captain to Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot in Orion, and in 1914 he received the civil CB for services to gunnery.

While in Orion, Sub-Lieutenant (later Admiral Sir) Angus Cunninghame Graham wrote of Dreyer:

Freddy Dreyer, the Captain, was quite a different type [compared to Arbuthnot], efficient, clever, one who did much for the Navy's gunnery and who rightly rose to high rank. He could be described as a caricature of the Navy's stock notion of a gunnery officer, an idea which does not fit most gunnery officers whom I have known, who were nice, able, normal people. Freddy did not inspire the lovable awe in which we held Sir Robert. He was obviously scared of his Admiral and seemed unwilling to assert his rights as a captain of his own ship in which Sir Robert was only a rather formidable lodger.^[2]

From 1899 onwards Dreyer had submitted a number of gunnery inventions. These were not successful until he and his elder brother, Captain John Tuthill Dreyer RA (1876–1959), who was himself a prolific inventor, put forward a device for obtaining range-rates from a plot of ranges against time. This led directly to the improvised rate plot used by Wilson shortly after the trials on Ariadne had finished, and from 1908 there was open rivalry between Frederic Dreyer and Pollen. However, the Royal Navy continued to experiment with manual course-plotting and it was not until Dreyer became commander of Vanguard that he first assembled a fire control system based on standard service instruments and a range-rate plotter patented by both Dreyer brothers in 1908. In September 1910 Frederic applied for a patent on a fire control table comprising a |dumaresq (an instrument, named after its inventor, modeling the relationship between speeds, courses, target bearing, range-rate, and deflection), range clock, and rate plotters for both range and bearing. Its novelty lay mainly in the integration of the components so that the results from the plots could be used to refine the settings of the dumaresq. The ‘original Dreyer table’ was designed and built by the firm of Elliott Brothers under the direction of Keith Elphinstone and installed in Prince of Wales in September 1911. After successful trials an order was placed for five improved Mark III tables, which incorporated manually set range and bearing clocks and a drive controlled from a gyrocompass receiver; subject to the limitations of manual working, the last feature (which was not included in Pollen's contemporary Argo clocks Marks III and IV) enabled the table to continue predicting ranges and bearings during changes of course, even if the target was obscured. The Dreyer table Mark IV (the first was installed in Iron Duke in 1914) was fully automatic, though its design was mainly the work of Elphinstone. In 1916 Dreyer was awarded £5000 for his inventions (which also included a range of tactical instruments). Although the Argo clock was superior mechanically, the automatic two-axis follower of the later Dreyer tables was equally innovative: these tables proved adaptable (in ways inconceivable for the separate and unconnected Argo clock and plotter) to new gunnery methods. The post-war Admiralty Fire Control Tables used Argo- or Ford-type variable speed drives, but their integrated design with separate plotting of ranges and bearings derived from the earlier Dreyer tables.

In 1915 Dreyer became Jellicoe's flag captain in Iron Duke. After Jutland he and his ship's gunnery were praised in the commander-in-chief's dispatches and he was appointed a military CB. He then accompanied Jellicoe to the Admiralty, initially as assistant director, anti-submarine division. From 14 February he worked with Morgan Singer to get acquainted with the officer of Director of Naval Ordnance, and later succeeded him. Proving himself "outstandingly able and of great energy and pertinacity" (Chatfield, 157), with the aid of a small committee, which included his elder brother (now colonel and eventually major-general and director of artillery), he drove through the development and supply of new and effective armour-piercing shell for the Grand Fleet, despite conflicts with the controller of armament production, Sir Vincent Raven. In 1918 he joined the naval staff as director of naval artillery and torpedoes. In 1919 he was appointed commodore and chief of staff for Jellicoe's empire mission and was made CBE. On his return Dreyer in 1920 resumed his staff duties as director of the gunnery division until he took command of the battle cruiser Repulse in 1922. He was promoted to the rank of Rear-Admiral (vice Alderson) on 12 December, 1923; in the following year he became Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff and was responsible for founding the Tactical School at Portsmouth. In 1927 he hoisted his flag in Hood in command of the battle-cruiser squadron (which included two aircraft-carriers). He was promoted vice-admiral in 1929 and became deputy chief of the naval staff in 1930. Thus Dreyer was a member of the board at the time of the Invergordon mutiny and had to accept that he would not, as he had hoped, be appointed commander-in-chief, Atlantic Fleet; instead, after promotion to admiral in 1932, he served as commander-in-chief, China station, from 1933 to 1936. He was promoted KCB in 1932 and GBE in 1936, and was placed on the retired list in 1939.

On the outbreak of war Dreyer immediately volunteered as a commodore, Royal Naval Reserve, of convoys. In 1940 he joined the staff of the general officer commanding-in-chief, home forces, on anti-invasion measures, and was then chairman of the Admiralty committee assessing U-boat losses. From 1941 he was a highly effective inspector of merchant navy gunnery until a temporary appointment as chief of naval air services in 1942. He briefly held the position of deputy chief of naval air equipment early in 1943 before finally returning to the retired list.

Dreyer died on 11 December 1956 at his home, Freelands, St Cross, Winchester, a year after publishing his memoirs, The Sea Heritage: a Study in Maritime Warfare. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. All three sons and both sons-in-law were naval officers; the second son, Sir Desmond Parry Dreyer, also commanded in the Far East and subsequently became second sea lord.

Beginning with Captain Stephen Roskill, who acknowledged an antipathy (Roskill, Naval Policy, 2.130), and Jon Sumida, later historians have been very critical of Dreyer himself and of the fire control tables. Yet Dreyer rate-plotting could make better use than the Argo true-course plotter of the intermittent and inaccurate target data actually available and, in battle, when conditions were comparable, German ships shot as well as or better than the British using a system of meaning ranges which was similar in principle to Dreyer's. At the end of the First World War Dreyer's ability and achievements were widely praised by senior officers; Jellicoe thought him ‘one of the best captains of ships I have ever known’ (F. C. Dreyer, 238). However, he was unapologetically ambitious and a disciplinarian who did not seek popularity. ‘A large man without much sense of humour’ (King-Hall, 247), he acquired a reputation as ‘one of the most outspoken of twentieth-century admirals’ (Marder, 1.35) who was also prolix on paper (Roskill, Naval Policy, 2.130); particularly in his defence of the board after Invergordon and as commander-in-chief, China (though also in early 1943), his lack of tact caused offence. Even so Dreyer more than Pollen established the foundations on which subsequent developments in British fire control were based, and he accomplished much, both in command afloat and at the Admiralty.

Footnotes

Bibliography