Quicksilver Captain: The Improbable Life of Sir Home Popham
356 pages
David Childs
The last section for comment on an officer’s report is one, if I remember correctly, headed ‘Loyalty, Integrity and Tact’. I’m not sure I ever met any successful officer who would have had a particularly low score for these attributes. Now, thanks to Jacqueline Reiter I have, Home Popham of whom a fellow captain wrote: “He is an extraordinary man, and would have been a great man, had he been honest.” And more besides, here was a man who was never given an order but that he felt he could and should disobey it. Well, how about Nelson? The difference was that Nelson disregarded orders because he knew the nation and the navy could achieve more by his doing so, while Popham disobeyed solely for his own benefit.
He once abandoned his Red Sea station, where he was acting in support of the army, to absent himself for seven months and a round trip of 9,000 miles purely for his own self-interest. Having successfully led the amphibious assault that retook the Cape of Good Hope he again abandoned the army and sailed across the ocean to seize Buenos Aires only to lose it and the majority of his landing force, one month later. Of course, there were enquiries and Courts Martial but, because Popham was inevitably far more eloquent and intelligent than his prosecutors he got off very lightly.
And yet, he was a man with many talents and an understanding of amphibious and combined operations that made him the man to consult when such operations were planned, meaning he spent more time ashore than afloat. He was even gazetted a post-captain in 1795 although the only ship he had ever commanded was a captured sloop in 1781 and that for just a few months. What he did spend his time doing was advising government, even when his opinion was not requested, acting as a diplomat and intelligence gatherer and creating the naval signal code that was used to hoist England’s most famous signal on 21st October 1805. Many would be satisfied with a career of which that was the highlight. Not Popham, he spluttered over with ideas but had a major problem in that, although some of them were good and many were not, he was incapable of identifying which were which and therefore chose those which were in his own self-interest. Yet, he could also be a visionary, leading an unsuccessful attack on the French fleet off Boulogne, to test Robert Fulton’s invention of a submarine and torpedoes and forming the Sea-Fencibles, a collection of fishermen and smugglers, to patrol the coast when the French threatened to invade.
When things went awry, as they often did, he was brilliant at blaming others, a facility that did not endear him to many of his fellow officers, several of whom refused to serve with him. The Governor-General of India wrote that “his judgement is far from solid – he is much more likely to mislead those who would trust to him, by his plausibility, than to aid their views by any correct or useful information.”
On his death, aged just 57, the obituarists divided into two camps: yet all had to admit that here was a man who had filled every waking moment in his short life with frenetic activity while the “general charge against him was that he did, not too little but too much.” Perhaps, he did have an “excess of cleverality” but it is that which makes the story of his career such a fascinating read – a chapter at a time, he is too exhausting a subject to do otherwise.
