Admirals by Lambert Andrew

Author:Lambert, Andrew [Lambert, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780571265688
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2011-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

Home at Last, but not to Rest

Only two months later Parker was appointed to chair a committee on future naval manning requirements. His committee, which included his long-serving flag captain Peter Richards, agreed that the age-old system of recruiting men on a ship-by-ship basis for the length of the commission, which had served every admiral since Lord Howard, must be replaced by continuous general service for an agreed number of years. From this decision emerged the modern naval rating. The final report was submitted to the First Lord, a post once again taken up by Sir James Graham, and adopted by an Order in Council of 1 April 1853. By the time the navy went to war against Russia in March 1854, some seven thousand men had accepted the new scheme.

In October 1853 a fresh crisis over the future of Ottoman Turkey loomed, prompting Graham to offer Parker command of a projected Baltic fleet. However, there was a span to all human things. Feeling unequal to the demands of working up a new force, entering a new theatre and conducting large-scale operations, the seventy-three-year-old admiral declined, ‘in justice to my country’.120 Instead, he took the shore command at Plymouth, where he served throughout the Crimean War (1854–6). He was also consulted on the viability of Lord Cochrane’s plan to capture Sebastopol with poison gas, a proposal that was ultimately declined on humanitarian grounds.

In 1863 Sir William became Admiral of the Fleet, the ultimate tribute to a life of service. As one old colleague declared, ‘he stood indisputably first in his profession’.121 That pre-eminence survived him: men who were raised in his school led the navy into the twentieth century. Parker died of bronchitis at Shenstone Lodge on 13 November 1866. He was buried without pomp or ceremony at the local church.

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