# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Richards, Frederick William

​RICHARDS, Sir FREDERICK WILLIAM (1833–1912), admiral, was born at Ballyhally, co. Wexford, 30 November 1833, the second son of Captain Edwin Richards, R.N., of Solsborough, co. Wexford, by his wife, Mary Anne, daughter of the Rev. Walter Blake Kirwan [q.v.], dean of Killala. After education at the Naval School, New Cross, he became a naval cadet in 1848. He served for several years on the Australian station and was promoted acting mate, H.M. sloop Fantome, on the same station in January 1854. He was promoted lieutenant in October 1855, and on returning home in 1856 went on half-pay for a year, after which he was appointed to the Ganges, flagship on the China station. The commander-in-chief, Rear-Admiral R. L. Baynes, appointed him flag lieutenant in April 1859, and in February 1860 he was promoted commander in command of the paddle-sloopVixen on the China station. He brought home and paid off this vessel in 1861. From March 1862 to January 1866 he commanded the Dart, a gunboat, on the west coast of Africa, and on his return was promoted captain in February 1866.
After four and a half years on half-pay Richards commanded the Indian troopship Jumna till June 1873, and was then selected to command the Devastation, the first steam turret battleship designed without any sail power. This command was of much importance, as the loss in 1870 of the Captain, a sailing turret ship of special design, had caused great anxiety as to the stability of such vessels. Richards's conduct of the exhaustive steam trials and his able reports on them completely satisfied the authorities and allayed public anxiety. In 1874 he took the Devastation to the Mediterranean and remained her captain till June 1877. The following January he became captain of the steam reserve, and in October 1878 he was appointed commodore and senior officer on the west coast of Africa, H.M.S. Boadicea. When he arrived at the Cape the disaster at Isandhlwana in the Zulu War had just occurred (22 January 1879), and he promptly proceeded up the east coast outside the limits of his station, and landed in March 1879 with a small naval brigade and commanded it at the battle of Gingihlovo (2 April) and in the relief of Echowe (3 April). For these services he was gazetted and made a C.B. (1879). He remained as commodore in South Africa until June 1882, having taken part in the battle of Laing's Nek (28 January 1881) in the Boer War, and being promoted K.C.B. for this service the same year.
After promotion to flag rank in June 1882 Richards was appointed junior naval lord at the Admiralty under the second Earl of Northbrook. In May 1885 he received the command of the East Indies station with his flag in H.M.S. Bacchante. In the course of this three years' command he organized and equipped the naval brigade in the Burmese War and was officially thanked by the government of India for his services. After his return to England in 1888 he was appointed, with Admirals Sir William Montagu Dowell and Sir Richard Vesey Hamilton, to report on the lessons of the naval manœuvres of that year. Their report, most of which was acknowledged to be due to the hand and brain of Richards, presented a most convincing discussion of the conditions of modern warfare and a clear statement of the vital importance of sea power to the existence of the British Empire, and set forth what became known as the two-power standard as the principle on which the British shipbuilding programme should be based. This able report, though challenged at first by official naval opinion, made a great impression, and may be regarded as one of the determining causes of Lord George Hamilton's Naval Defence Act of 1889, which in effect recreated the royal navy. Richards was also the naval representative on the royal commission on naval and military administration (1890), in the proceedings of which and in the drafting of its conclusions he bore a leading part.
Richards was promoted vice-admiral in 1888, and in 1890 went as commander-in-chief to the China station until June 1892, when he rejoined the Board of Admiralty under Lord George Hamilton as second naval lord. He was promoted admiral in September 1893, and in November of that year was selected by the fifth Earl Spencer to succeed Sir Anthony Hiley Hoskins as first naval lord, a position which he retained for nearly six years. His career as first naval lord was of great importance in the history of naval administration. Richards had a clear understanding of the needs of the navy, and he had the entire confidence of his political chiefs, Lord Spencer and Mr. (afterwards Viscount) Goschen. This period was marked by a great development of the shipbuilding programme begun under the Naval Defence Act of 1889, and, at Richards's particular instigation, by a series of big naval works ​carried out under the Naval Works Acts of 1895 and subsequent years. The result was that the naval ports and dockyards at home and abroad were renovated and brought up to date to meet the requirements of the modern navy. Under this scheme naval harbours were constructed at Portland, Dover, Gibraltar, and Simon's Bay, and great extensions of the dockyards at Portsmouth, Devonport, Malta, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, and Simon's Bay. In carrying his naval programme Lord Spencer had to contend with a most formidable opposition from Sir William Harcourt and from Mr. Gladstone himself, and it was only the unwavering determination of Richards and his other colleagues on the Board that enabled him to succeed—a success which had no little to do with Mr. Gladstone's final decision to retire from office.
In June 1895 Richards was promoted G.C.B. on the resignation of the Rosebery ministry. Mr. Goschen, who then again became first lord after an interval of over twenty-one years, wisely decided to follow the precedent set by Lord Spencer and to retain the naval advisers of the outgoing government. He and Richards worked together with remarkable unity of purpose during the next four years. The sending of the fleet to the Dardanelles in 1895 brought the Turkish government to a sense of its responsibility for the Armenian massacres; the commissioning of the flying squadron in 1896 indicated clearly to the German Emperor the dangerous consequence of his ill-advised telegram to President Kruger; in 1897 and 1898 it was the action of the British fleet which at length restored order in Crete; the vigorous handling of the naval situation in the Fashoda crisis in 1898 was the chief preventive of war with France over that incident; and, finally, the firm attitude of the government based on the readiness of the fleet stopped any interference by European powers in the Spanish-American War. There was thus a universal and well-founded feeling in the naval service that its interests were safe in the hands of Richards. In November 1898 Richards would have been retired for age, but Goschen obtained a special order in council promoting him to be admiral of the fleet in order that he might remain on the active list until the age of seventy. In the following August Goschen decided that it was time that Richards should give place to a younger officer as first naval lord, though Richards was much disappointed at being superseded after the special promotion to keep him on the active list. He was succeeded by Lord Walter Kerr, who was fully in accord with the policy pursued by the Board during Richards's term of office.
Richards was undoubtedly one of the leading administrators in the history of the navy. He early won the confidence of his superiors, and was selected for one important duty after another, performing them with unfailing success until he reached the position of chief naval adviser to the Crown at a time when a firm and clear restatement of the essentials of maritime policy was invaluable to the country. Richards was a man of prudent foresight, clear, if limited, vision, and firm determination that what he knew to be right should be done. His powerful intellect was somewhat slow in operation; but, though not ready in council, he could and did express his views in admirable English which left no doubt of his intention or of the strength of will that lay behind it. His official minutes were models of vigorous style and well-chosen language. As a sea officer it was not his fortune to command a battle fleet or to win the renown of such great peace commanders as Sir Geoffrey Thomas Phipps Hornby and Sir Arthur Knyvet Wilson. His great natural qualities of a clear brain and indomitable will, combined with a gift for organization, found their best opportunity in his work at Whitehall. Though he was naturally of a retiring disposition, always avoiding publicity and loathing controversy, his character was so transparently honest and just and his devotion to his service and country so marked that he was regarded throughout the naval service with a most complete confidence and trust. In private life he was a constant friend and, though a ruler among men and of a stern exterior, was full of human sympathy, and possessed a deep fund of humour and kindness of heart.
After his retirement Richards maintained his interest in naval affairs, and although he was not in sympathy with many of the changes and reforms carried out by later administrations, he seldom expressed his mind in public and took no share in controversy. In 1904, shortly after the election of Lord Goschen as chancellor of Oxford University, Richards was given the honorary degree of D.C.L. He died at Horton Court, Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, 28 September 1912.
After the successful struggle over the naval programme in the Cabinet of 1893–1894, the officers of the fleet had Richards's ​portrait painted by (Sir) Arthur Cope, R.A., and presented it ‘from the navy to the nation’. It was hung in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. In November 1912 a ‘Sir Frederick Richards memorial fund’ was established by a large representative meeting of admirals, friends, and admirers, the trustees of which make charitable grants to naval and marine officers and their dependants. A memorial tablet is in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral.
Richards married in 1866 Lucy (died 1880), daughter of Fitzherbert Brooke, of Horton Court, Gloucestershire, and widow of the Rev. Edwin Fayle. They had no children.
[Admiralty records; private information.]
V. W. B.