Rosslyn Wemyss

Rosslyn Wemyss (the name is pronounced “Weems”) was the professional head of the Royal Navy in the last year of the First World War. On 11 November 1918 he was the only representative of the victors apart from Marshal Ferdinand Foch to sign the Armistice of Compiègne. On the Allied side he was responsible for its naval terms: the surrender of the U-boats, the internment of the High Seas Fleet and the maintenance of the blockade. Earlier he had been governor of the base on the island of Lemnos during the fighting for the Dardanelles, had directed the evacuation of troops from Gallipoli and had supported the Arab Revolt against the Turks. He was not a great fleet commander in battle, but a skilful organiser and a diplomat in uniform. Few remember his name today, although some writers credit him with the symbolic “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”.

Family and early years

He was born on 12 April 1864 in London, the third and youngest son of James Hay Erskine Wemyss, a Member of Parliament and owner of Wemyss Castle on the Firth of Forth in the Scottish county of Fife. His father died in the year of his birth. The boy grew up at the family seat by the sea, and in 1877, aged thirteen, he entered the training ship Britannia as a cadet. He belonged to a Scottish aristocratic family with close links to the court, and this social standing was to help him throughout his career.

As a young cadet and midshipman he served in the corvette Bacchante, in which the sons of the future King Edward VII, Princes Albert Victor and George, made a voyage round the world in 1879–1882. With Prince George, later King George V, he afterwards enjoyed a long acquaintance. He went on to serve in ships of the Channel Fleet and the Mediterranean Fleet, as well as in the royal yachts. In 1898 he was promoted to commander and during the Boer War served in the cruiser Niobe. In 1901 he was second-in-command of the liner Ophir, in which Prince George, then Duke of York, sailed to Australia to open the first parliament of the federation. On his return he was promoted to captain.

Career before the war

In 1903 he married Victoria Morier, daughter of Sir Robert Morier, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, who had died a few years earlier. They had one daughter. In the same year Wemyss became the first commandant of the new Royal Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, where the youngest cadets were trained according to the programme of the naval reformer Admiral John Fisher. He then commanded the cruiser Suffolk in the Mediterranean and the battleship Implacable. In 1911 he was promoted to rear admiral, and in 1912 took command of a battleship squadron in the Home Fleet. He was regarded as a quick-witted, charming and well-connected officer, but one without experience of handling great fleets.

The Dardanelles and the Red Sea

At the beginning of the war he commanded a cruiser squadron in the western part of the English Channel. In February 1915 he was sent to the Greek island of Lemnos, where in the bay of Mudros he was to prepare a forward base for operations against the Dardanelles. Out of nothing he created a port, depots and facilities for hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of soldiers. On 25 April 1915 he commanded the ships that landed troops at Cape Helles on the Gallipoli peninsula, and in August he supported the landing at Suvla Bay. The Gallipoli campaign, however, ended in defeat. In the autumn of 1915, while temporarily standing in for the fleet commander, Wemyss was among the officers who demanded a fresh attempt to force the Straits. The government decided otherwise, and in December 1915 Wemyss directed the evacuation of troops from Suvla and Anzac, carried out without loss.

In January 1916 he took command of the East Indies and Egypt Station. His ships covered the Suez Canal and the shores of the Red Sea, and from June 1916 supported the Arab Revolt of the Sharif of Mecca against the Turks: they brought in arms, supplies and men and shelled Turkish garrisons in the ports of the Hejaz. T. E. Lawrence later wrote that Wemyss had been the godfather of the Arabs until they could stand on their own feet. In December 1916 Wemyss was promoted to vice admiral.

First Sea Lord

In the summer of 1917 he returned to London as Second Sea Lord and then Deputy First Sea Lord, deputy to the professional head of the Admiralty. The First Lord of the Admiralty, the politician Eric Geddes, was dissatisfied with the caution of Admiral John Jellicoe and dismissed him on Christmas Eve 1917. Wemyss was appointed in his place. Many officers regarded him as a courtier who owed his promotion to his connections, and loyalty to the ousted Jellicoe long made his work difficult.

Wemyss nevertheless proved an effective chief. He reorganised the Naval Staff and gave more freedom to younger, energetic officers. He encouraged Vice Admiral Roger Keyes, commander of the Dover Patrol, to act more boldly in the Strait of Dover, which led to the raid on Zeebrugge in April 1918, intended to block the base of the German U-boats in Flanders. In 1918 the convoy system, introduced while Jellicoe was still in office, brought victory over the German submarine campaign.

Compiègne

In the autumn of 1918, when Germany asked for an armistice, the Admiralty demanded the surrender of the High Seas Fleet. Allied politicians, who feared that excessively harsh naval terms would provoke the Germans into refusing, agreed to a compromise: the U-boats were to be surrendered, and the largest surface ships disarmed and interned in neutral or Allied ports. Wemyss travelled with Foch to the Forest of Compiègne as the Allied naval representative. On 8 November he accompanied the marshal at the first meeting with the German delegation of Matthias Erzberger, while the naval terms were discussed with the Germans by his deputy, Rear Admiral George Hope. In the night of 10–11 November the Allies agreed to several amendments; among other things, instead of 160 U-boats, which did not exist, the Germans were to surrender all those they had. At about 5 a.m. Wemyss signed the armistice alongside Foch.

The time at which the armistice came into force followed from the rule that fighting would cease six hours after signature, and it was agreed to treat five o’clock as the time of signing. His biographer John Johnson-Allen and some British writers nevertheless credit Wemyss with ensuring that the ceasefire took effect at eleven and not later. According to this account, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, wanted it to happen in the afternoon so that he could announce the end of the war in the House of Commons, and the admiral insisted on the earlier hour, which spared soldiers’ lives. This account cannot be fully confirmed from other sources. What is certain is that in the morning Wemyss went with Foch to Paris to see the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau.

On 21 November 1918 the High Seas Fleet steamed into the Firth of Forth to surrender to the British, and was then interned at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. On 21 June 1919, when the German commander at Scapa Flow believed that the armistice was about to expire while Germany had still not accepted the peace treaty, the crews themselves scuttled their ships. Wemyss is said to have written at the time that he regarded it as a real blessing, since it settled once and for all the Allies’ quarrel over the division of the German ships.

The peace conference and departure

At the Paris Peace Conference Wemyss was the chief British naval representative. According to the recollections of the economist John Maynard Keynes, he took part in the negotiations that in March 1919 led to the Brussels Agreement: Germany handed over its merchant fleet to the Allies, and in return food deliveries were allowed into the country, which was still under blockade. Meanwhile pressure was growing in London for the post of First Sea Lord to go to the popular commander of the Grand Fleet, Admiral David Beatty. Wemyss, embittered by the way he had been treated, stepped down. On 1 November 1919 he was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, and some two weeks later he was created Baron Wester Wemyss, with a seat in the House of Lords.

Last years

In retirement he wrote a memoir of the Dardanelles campaign, published in 1924, sat on the board of the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless and spoke from time to time in the House of Lords. He spent most of his time in Cannes on the Riviera. He died there on 24 May 1933, a few months after Hitler came to power in Germany. He was buried at the family seat of Wemyss Castle in Fife. He had no sons, so the title became extinct with him.

Significance

Wemyss won no great naval battle, and in the history of the Royal Navy he remains in the shadow of Jellicoe and Beatty. His part in the road to the Second World War is bound up with a single document. The naval terms of the armistice, which he helped to draft, took Germany’s fleet from her without a battle, and its scuttling at Scapa Flow became for the German navy a symbol of honour saved in defiance of the victors. The officers who in the 1930s built Hitler’s Kriegsmarine carried away from November 1918 both humiliation and a fear of a repetition of the Kiel mutiny. The British blockade, which the armistice maintained until the peace was signed, became in German memory one of the gravest charges against the victors. The “eleventh hour”, meanwhile, with which Wemyss’s name is linked, still marks the moment at which the British and their former allies remember those who fell in both world wars.