Lord Walter Kerr

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Admiral Lord Walter Talbot Kerr was born on 28 September 1839 and died on the 12th May, 1927 at age 87. He held the rank of Fleet Admiral in the service of the Royal Navy and was the British First Sea Lord from 1899 to 1904.

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1 Early Royal Navy Career
2 First Sea Lord and Opposition to Submarines
3 Family
4 See also

[edit] Early Royal Navy Career

Walter Kerr entered the Royal Navy in 1853. He served as Naval Cadet in the Baltic during the Russian War, and as Midshipman with the "Shannon" Naval Brigade in India during the Mutiny. He was later promoted to Captain and then secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty. After several years in the admiralty he rose to the rank of Vice Admiral and eventually to the position of commander of the channel squadron. Then he became Second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet. Upon his return to England, he became Second Sea Lord at the Admiralty. After several years as A.D.C. to Queen Victoria and as Privy Councellor he was made First Sea Lord. Lord Walter was awarded the Humane Society's Silver Medal for saving a bluejacket's life and was remarked to have been both brave and intelligent in his early career.

[edit] First Sea Lord and Opposition to Submarines

Admiral Kerr was a proponent of the Royal Navy leadership who rejected the idea of submarines. Kerr was a stringent advocate of the idea of the surface fleet as the principle unit of naval warfare and had disagreements with the newly formed Submarine Task Force. The A-class submarine (the first Royal Navy submarine) developed into the B-class. The B Class Submarine Service’s first Captain – Roger Bacon, who invented the submarine’s periscope had wanted to put a small-calibre gun on the deck of the B-class but he did not receive support to do this from the First Sea Lord, Lord Walter Kerr. The First Sea Lord had never given his full support to the Submarine Service and he refused to give his permission for Bacon to do anything with the new submarines. There has been speculation as to why Kerr adopted his view that Submarines were pointless, especially as the “Daily Express” had as early as 1902, informed its readers about the submarines “tremendous possibilities in warfare.” It is possible that he saw the submarine as an underhand weapon that should not have been associated with the Royal Navy; it could simply be that submarines had yet to be tried and tested in war and that their designs were still relatively crude, hence his rejection of the use of submarines.

[edit] Family

He was the son of John William Robert Kerr, 7th Marquess of Lothian and Lady Cecil Chetwynd Chetwynd-Talbot. He married Lady Amabel Frederica Henrietta Cowper, daughter of George Augustus Frederick Cowper (6th Earl Cowper) and Anne Florence de Grey, on 18 November 1873. They had six children.