Sydney Fremantle

Sir Sydney Robert Fremantle was a British admiral from a family that had been giving the Royal Navy one admiral after another since the days of Nelson. For most of his career he was a staff officer and a signals specialist; during the First World War he commanded naval forces in the Mediterranean and served as Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff. Yet he passed into history because of a single day on which he was not there. As commander of the squadron guarding the interned German fleet at Scapa Flow, he put to sea for exercises on 21 June 1919, and while he was away the Germans scuttled 52 ships. His speech to the prisoners, in which he accused them of breaking their word and their honour, is among the most frequently quoted texts of that day.

A family of admirals

He was born on 16 November 1867, the eldest son of the naval officer Edmund Fremantle (1836–1929), who rose to the rank of admiral and commanded, among other posts, the British squadron in Chinese waters. The Fremantles, a family associated with the village of Swanbourne in Buckinghamshire, had a long naval tradition. Sydney’s great-grandfather, Thomas Fremantle, was one of Horatio Nelson’s captains and commanded the ship of the line Neptune at the Battle of Trafalgar. His son Charles Fremantle took possession of the west coast of Australia on behalf of the Crown in 1829, and the port city of Fremantle near Perth still bears his name. Sydney was the fourth admiral in the family.

In 1881 he joined the training ship Britannia, the nursery of Royal Navy officers. In 1883, as a midshipman, he was posted to the battleship Alexandra, flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1887, to commander in 1899 and to captain in 1903. In 1896 he married Lelia Hope. They had four children, and their son Edmund became a naval officer and was awarded the DSO in the Second World War.

Staff officer and signals specialist

As a captain he commanded the battleship Albion and, in 1908, the armoured cruiser Lancaster in the Mediterranean Fleet. From 1910 to 1914 he worked at the Admiralty. He headed the war division, which drew up plans for a war with Germany, and as chairman of the signal committee he rebuilt the fleet’s communications system to take account of the rapid development of wireless telegraphy. In 1911 he briefly commanded the battleship Dreadnought, the ship that gave its name to a whole era of battleships. According to his biographers, the new signalling methods had not been fully adopted before the war, and the war made it harder to introduce them. In 1913 he was promoted to rear admiral.

The First World War

In 1915 Fremantle became second-in-command of the 3rd Battle Squadron, made up of older battleships. At the end of the year he was sent with part of the squadron to the Mediterranean, where it supported the final phase of the fighting for the Dardanelles and Gallipoli. On 27 April 1916 the battleship Russell, in which he was sailing, struck mines off Malta and sank. More than a hundred men were killed. Fremantle survived with broken bones in his foot. In 1916 he commanded the 9th Cruiser Squadron in the Atlantic, and then served again in the Mediterranean, blockading the exit from the Dardanelles and covering the front around Salonika. In August 1917 he took command of the British squadron in the Aegean.

In January 1918 he returned to London as Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff under the First Sea Lord, Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, with the rank of vice admiral (some accounts say he received that promotion only in 1919). When the Admiralty was settling the naval terms of the armistice, he argued that the Germans should be made to surrender their fleet. In the end the Allies decided that the German ships would be interned, and when no neutral country was willing to take them, they were sent to Scapa Flow under British guard. These terms became part of the Armistice of Compiègne.

Scapa Flow

On 18 May 1919 Fremantle, with his 1st Battle Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet, led by the flagship Revenge and including the battleship Royal Oak, took over the guard of the 74 interned German ships. They were commanded by Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. The British expected that the Germans might try to scuttle the ships once the peace conference in Paris decided to hand them over. On 16 June Fremantle submitted to his superior, Admiral Charles Madden, a plan to seize the ships at midnight on 21/22 June, after the Allied ultimatum to Germany had expired. When he learned from the newspapers that the deadline had been extended to the evening of 23 June, he postponed the operation. Madden did not inform him of this officially.

On the morning of 21 June, in fine weather, Fremantle took the squadron to sea for overdue exercises in repelling torpedo attacks. Only three destroyers and a few smaller vessels remained at the base. At around 11.20 a.m. Reuter gave the signal to scuttle. Fremantle learned of it at 12.20 p.m., broke off the exercises and turned back at full speed, ordering by wireless that the sinking ships be towed into shallow water. By the time he returned, at around 2.30 p.m., only the largest ships were still afloat. The battleship Baden, three light cruisers and some of the destroyers were saved, but the scuttling of the German fleet claimed 52 vessels. British guards shot dead nine Germans.

That evening Fremantle had Reuter and his officers brought to the quarterdeck of Revenge and addressed them through an interpreter. He told them that while the armistice was still in force they had committed an act of war without warning; that they had had no grounds whatever for believing the armistice had lapsed; and that, had it done so, he would have informed them himself, since the letters to that effect had already been written. He asked whether they could suppose that his squadron would have been out of harbour at the moment the armistice expired. He declared that by their conduct they had added one more breach of faith and honour to those Germany had committed in this war, beginning with the invasion of Belgium, and that the word of the new Germany could be trusted no more than that of the old. Finally he handed them over to the military authorities as prisoners of war. In private he later admitted that he could not help feeling a certain sympathy for Reuter, who had kept his dignity in an exceptionally painful position into which he had been placed against his will.

The British Admiralty officially condemned the Germans, but it was no secret that the scuttling had solved a problem for it. Wemyss wrote that he regarded it as a real blessing, since it ended the dispute over how the German ships were to be shared out. Still, it was fair to ask why, in those critical days, the squadron had left its base and left the German ships almost unguarded. Fremantle stressed that, as far as he knew, the armistice was to remain in force for another two days, and that the plan to seize the ships was ready. He also claimed that before putting to sea he had unofficially given Reuter to understand that the armistice was still in force.

Later years

Fremantle commanded the 1st Battle Squadron until 1921. In 1922 or 1923, depending on the source, he was promoted to admiral. From 1923 to 1926 he was Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, one of the Royal Navy’s most important bases, flying his flag in the historic Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, where his great-grandfather had commanded a neighbouring ship. He retired in 1928. He was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and for his war service he also received the American Distinguished Service Medal, the French Legion of Honour and Greek, Japanese and Italian orders.

In 1931 he married for a second time, to Geraldine Cooke-Collis. In 1949 he published his memoirs, My Naval Career 1880–1928, in which he also described Scapa Flow. He left his papers, including a memorandum on the war in the Aegean and notes from his time on the Naval Staff, to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and to King’s College London. He died on 29 April 1958, aged 90.

Significance

Fremantle was a typical member of the generation of admirals who won the First World War at sea without a great victory in battle. He ended the war as the guardian of a defeated fleet, and the day on which that fleet slipped from his grasp overshadowed the rest of his career. His speech on board Revenge expresses how the British saw Germany in 1919: as a state that, from the invasion of Belgium to Scapa Flow, had broken its word. In Germany the same day became a legend of naval honour, later cultivated by the Kriegsmarine. In October 1939, six weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, a German submarine sank the battleship Royal Oak at Scapa Flow – the very ship that twenty years earlier had belonged to Fremantle’s squadron. The old admiral lived to see the fate of his former base become once again a symbol of the war between Britain and Germany.