The fascinating life of Admiral Sir Edward R. G. R. Evans, Royal Navy, First Baron Mountevans
For a young sub-lieutenant in the late-Victorian Royal Navy, even one as bright and ambitious as Edward “Teddy” Evans, advancement in rank came at a snail’s pace. After decades of peace, the navy promoted officers rarely, usually when some superannuated relic was pensioned off.
Naval service denied Evans and others the opportunities available to young Army officers to show courage and dash across the growing British Empire. One of the only ways for a young naval officer to get ahead was through geographical exploration. For this reason, Sub-Lieutenant Evans jumped at the opportunity to become second officer in the bark-rigged whaler Morning. In early 1902, Evans and the Morning sailed to the relief of the British National Antarctic Expedition that had set out the year before in the Discovery under Royal Navy Commander Robert F. Scott.
Born Edward Ratcliffe Garth Evans in 1880—he added “Russell” when he married—he had little in his upbringing that foretold life of serial heroism. He was the son of a moderately successful, middle-class London barrister, weaned on tales of British derring-do and unfailing pluck. Armed with this and little more—he had no experience in cold-weather environments—Evans steamed for the Antarctic on 6 July 1902 seeking adventure.
To his dying breath in a Norwegian chalet in 1957, he remained just a lad seeking the next test of his courage and tenacity.
To the South
he Morning arrived at Port Lyttelton, New Zealand, in mid-November, just before the beginning of the antipodean summer, to find that there had been no word from Scott in more than a year. Heading south on 6 December, the ship encountered one obstacle after another. She slowed to a crawl when she ran into pack ice 300 nautical miles from the western edge of the Ross Sea, the starting point of her search for Scott’s party. Moving south along the coast, the crew sighted the Discovery on 23 January 1903, deep in McMurdo Sound on the western side of Ross Island.
Making contact the next day, they found that Scott was away, sledging to the south. He had reached 82?17’S on 30 December, the farthest south reached by anyone to date, and turned back the next day. Suffering from scurvy and general malnutrition, Scott’s party returned on 3 February more dead than alive. By the end of February, it became clear that the expected breakup of the pack ice in McMurdo Sound was not going to occur and the Discovery was unlikely to break free. The Morning was ordered back to New Zealand, departing McMurdo on 2 March. The trip back to Port Lyttelton was three weeks of battling ice and storms, but the arrival in New Zealand was pure pleasure for Evans because it meant he faced a winter with little work and plenty of spare time to fill with social events.
Evans was temporarily posted to the cruiser HMS Phoebe after promotion to lieutenant. This duty did nothing to prevent him courting and becoming engaged to Hilda Russell of Christchurch just days before the Morning set out again at the end of November. The Antarctic expedition had come under Royal Navy control, and the Morning sailed with orders to return with Scott and his men, with or without the Discovery. A large relief ship, the Terra Nova, accompanied the Morning, and the ships arrived at McMurdo on 5 January 1904.
The Terra Nova carried a hold full of gun cotton to blast away any ice that separated the Discovery from the two rescue ships. Evans was put in charge of the blasting and did his job well. On 16 February, a final charge shattered the ice to within a few yards of the Discovery. Shaking herself free after two years, she started down the channel, only to be caught midway by a sudden gale that drove her up on Ross Island. A provident change in the wind blew her free again, and she soon joined the rescue ships in McMurdo Sound, reaching Port Lyttelton on 1 April.
Twelve days later, Evans and Russell married. By September 1904, he was back in England with his new bride—and prospects not much brighter than they had been when he had left two and a half years before.
South Again and Almost to the Pole
“The peace-time Navy lacked excitement for me,” Evans wrote later.1 He was tempted to volunteer to join Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 Antarctic expedition but decided he could not afford a long period without his naval salary.2 The lure of the far South overcame him, however, and two years later, he was raising money to finance his own expedition to circumnavigate Antarctica. Evans heard Scott also was fundraising for another try at the South Pole and readily accepted appointment as Scott’s second-in-command in exchange for sharing the money Evans had raised. They departed London in Terra Nova on 1 June 1910 with three primitive motor tractors to haul the sledges, 19 Manchurian ponies (in which Scott put great store), and 34 Siberian Huskies. They departed Port Lyttelton on 26 November.
The tragic fate of Scott and the polar party was the result of poor planning and poor judgment on Scott’s part and the failure of certain subordinates to carry out orders. The primitive motor tractors quickly failed, the ponies were ill-suited to the harsh polar conditions, and the Scott party had too few dogs and too little knowledge of their use.3 Nevertheless, Scott led two sledges hauled by eight men to within 160 miles of the Pole, at which point he made the expected decision that one sledge would turn back and the other would continue on.
Scott chose five men including himself—not four as intended—to push on, ordering Evans and the two others to haul the other sledge 650 miles back to McMurdo. This decision doomed Scott’s party. With one additional mouth to feed, they now had insufficient food to reach the Pole and return safely. The decision also very nearly condemned Evans and the others—three men hauling a sledge intended for four.
The sledges parted company on 4 January 1912. Although Evans never admitted it, he was devastated at not being chosen to make the final dash to the Pole.4 At the same time, he was free of Scott, who felt challenged by Evans’ greater energy and was openly critical of what he considered to be Evans’ “mental limitations.”5 Whatever emotions this conflict generated in Evans, he may very well have been the last survivor to see Scott alive.
The journey back was a terrible slog for Evans and his companions. He very nearly did not survive, as he fell victim to scurvy and vitamin-B deficiency thanks to the expedition’s poorly planned diet.6 Just 35 miles from Ross Island, Evans was unable to go any farther; one of his companions marched the last miles alone to fetch help.
On 28 February 1912, the Terra Nova arrived back at McMurdo, and Evans was carried aboard. By 1 April, he was back in New Zealand, barely able to walk and greeted by the news that Roald Amundsen had reached the South Pole the previous December. He returned to England to complete his recuperation and was summoned to be presented to King George V, who announced Evans’ promotion to commander.
By 14 December he was back in New Zealand on board the Terra Nova, heading south again from Lyttelton. On 18 January 1913, the ship was within sight of the expedition camp on Ross Island. It was there Evans learned of the deaths of Scott and the others in the polar party. The world did not learn the tragic news until the Terra Nova returned to New Zealand on 10 February with the expedition’s survivors. Compounding the tragedy, Evans’ wife contracted peritonitis on the return journey to England and died as their steamer approached Toulon.
A War to Be Fought, and Derring-Do to Be Done
The time between his return to England in the spring of 1913 and the outbreak of war in August 1914 kept Evans busy. As the Scott expedition’s senior surviving officer, he became the natural choice to hit the lecture circuit with the excellent photographs taken by Herbert Ponting. This appears to have been when he discovered his ability to entertain. He never let facts get in the way of a good story and was greeted with universal acclaim. He was invested as a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 16 May 1913.
On 2 August 1914, two days before Britain declared war on Germany, he was ordered to recommission the aged destroyer HMS Mohawk and report for duty in the Dover Patrol. It was his first naval command and the first time he had set foot on board a destroyer, but he took to both naturally. From the moment he nailed a stuffed penguin doll to the Mohawk’s foremast, he won the affection and loyalty of her crew, something he seemed to do on every ship he commanded.
For the most part, Dover Patrol duty was tedious, requiring many nighttime hours to keep the narrow waters closed to German U-boats and small craft. Evans took command of another old destroyer, HMS Viking, just days before the Mohawk sustained serious damage from a mine strike. The Viking was known as the “Packet of Woodbines” (after a popular brand of cigarettes) because of her distinctive profile with six separate funnels. She frequently was called on to operate close to the Belgian coast or to run dignitaries across the Channel, activities that broke the tedium. Suffering from fatigue-induced migraines, Evans left the Viking at the end of 1915, allowing him a month of rest before he took up command of HMS Crusader, another Tribal-class destroyer. The Viking, too, hit a mine shortly after Evans left her, suffering severe damage.
Evans was given the destroyer-leader HMS Broke near the end of 1916. At 1,610 tons and 331 feet long, she was significantly larger than the Tribal-class destroyers Evans previously had commanded. Badly shot up at the Battle of Jutland, the Broke had been extensively rebuilt. Along with an older destroyer-leader, HMS Swift, Evans’ ship was patrolling against an anticipated raid by German destroyers in the Channel on the night of 20–21 April 1917, under the tactical command of Commander A. M. Peck in the Swift.
That night, a dozen German destroyers emerged from Zeebrugge. Six went south to Calais, shelled the port, and returned without interference. The other six went west, briefly bombarded Dover, and then turned north to clear the mine barrage before heading east. The Swift led the Broke along an east-west line north of the barrage in close order.7 The night was extremely dark, so the action that developed as the two groups met was confused and punctuated by brief bursts of violent combat separated by longer periods of groping about in the gloom. Both Peck and Evans had the same improbable instinct on sighting the German line—to fire a torpedo and then turn to ram the nearest enemy. Why both British captains would opt to immobilize their own ships—when they knew the enemy ships were smaller and more numerous—is difficult to understand.
In the event, the Swift missed her target and steamed away from the engagement to the east. The Broke’s bow struck the German destroyer G42 just abaft her after funnel, slicing clean through the smaller ship and badly damaging the Broke in the process.8 As the destroyer-leader staggered away from the sinking G42, she passed at least two more German ships, which fired into her.
This gunfire caused serious damage, particularly to the ship’s powerplant, bringing her nearly to a stop. Seeing that the Broke was losing headway, Evans turned her back toward two burning German destroyers sinking behind him. One was G42; the other was G85, which appears to have been the target of both the Swift’s and Broke’s torpedoes. Evans ordered his ship toward G85 to rescue survivors from her burning deck, but the Broke’s engines gave out entirely and she drifted to a stop, “my stem nearly touching her.”9 The Broke had to be towed back to Dover with 21 sailors dead and 27 wounded.
If the story had been allowed to rest there, Evans would have gained additional acclaim, though some might have questioned his tactics. But, like many of Evans’ stories, it grew in the telling. Evans had become a popular author of books and articles, especially for boys, when he wrote a 1927 account of the battle for Chums magazine, a boys’ weekly.
His recounting equaled anything Robert Louis Stevenson could conjure up. Instead of slicing through G42, in the Chums account, the Broke stuck fast and “carried her bodily along on our ram.”10 Never mind that the Broke had no ram, just a straight stem, or that the stem probably towered 10 to 20 feet above the German’s deck. Evans tells of “the huddled mass of men” on G42’s decks: “Many of them clambered up our bow and got on to our forecastle, to meet with instant death from our well-armed seamen and stokers.”11
He painted a picture of a hand-to-hand struggle for possession of his ship’s upper deck against desperate German sailors, fought with cutlasses and bayonets like something from Nelson’s day. The Germans, of course, were utterly defeated, the last of their dead bodies thrown into the sea as the Broke’s bow ground over the German’s fantail and she charged off searching for another enemy to ram. It was a ripping good yarn, essentially fictitious—a detail that mattered little to the audience.
The Most Heroic Deed of All
The return of peace in 1918 meant a rapidly shrinking Royal Navy and a sharp reduction in the number of midgrade officers. After some time on half-pay, Evans was given command of the new light cruiser HMS Carlisle at Hong Kong on 2 February 1921. Little time passed before he found another chance to test his mettle.
Evans took the ship on what was supposed to be a “get-acquainted” cruise up the Chinese coast, reaching Mako (present-day Makung) in the Pescadores Islands off Formosa (Taiwan) at the beginning of March. On 2 March, the steamer SS Hong Moh, overloaded with more than 1,100 passengers, left Hong Kong for Swatow (Shantou), a port city due west of Mako. Too heavily loaded to cross the bar into Swatow, the Hong Moh was attempting to head north to the larger port of Amoy (Xiamen) when an approaching gale drove her onto a rocky headland east of Swatow at sunset on 3 March.
Not until the next morning did word of the steamer’s plight reach the outside world. By that time, she had broken in two, and every attempt to launch lifeboats had been defeated by the rising gale. Informed of the situation about midday on the fifth, Evans took the Carlisle out before dark and arrived shortly after dawn the next morning, 60 hours after the Hong Moh had grounded. Around 100 passengers had been rescued by then. But the high surf made close-in work impossible, and the unwillingness of many of the passengers to abandon their valuables made them reluctant to attempt to swim. As the storm increased in ferocity and the halves of the ship were driven farther onto the rocks, more passengers were swept away. By the time the Carlisle arrived, perhaps 350 people still were on board the battered steamer.12
At considerable risk to his ship, Evans brought the Carlisle to within a few hundred yards of the Hong Moh, creating a small patch of calm water in the cruiser’s lee. The ship’s boats worked all day and rescued another 100 or so. At about 1400, seeing that the last few hundred passengers had no intention of voluntarily abandoning the precarious shelter of the Hong Moh, Evans ordered his barge launched and personally took it to within about 50 yards of the wreck.
When he failed to induce the remaining passengers to abandon the wreck, Evans stripped down to his underclothing, tied a line around his waist, and swam across to the ship through crashing surf littered with flotsam and corpses. At the forward half, already mostly collapsed, he was able to rescue only two people, but when he swam over to the rear half he found more than 100. He got most of them into lifejackets and helped them to the lifeboats. By the time the sun went down, Evans had reached the point of exhaustion but was confident there were no more living souls on what remained of the Hong Moh.
The Carlisle steamed toward Hong Kong that evening with 221 survivors. Lloyd’s of London began awarding three classes of a medal for the saving of life at sea in 1836. The Gold Medal has been awarded only once, on 22 November 1922, to Teddy Evans for his actions off Swatow the year before.
The Boy Who Never Grew Up
While Evans never again recorded an act so heroic, the rest of his life was one of great activity and service. Virtually every public and professional honor available to a sailor came his way. He was promoted to the rank of admiral in 1936, having been raised to Knight Commander of the Bath the year before. Even though he formally retired from the Royal Navy in 1941, he remained as one of the London Regional Commissioners for Civil Defence for the duration of World War II. During the Blitz, he seemed to show up everywhere that bombs had dropped. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Mountevans in 1945.
Well into his sixties, if Evans sensed during a talk that he might be losing an audience’s interest, he would strip off his jacket, drop to the stage, and perform a few one-handed pushups. To the end, there remained in him a boy who never grew up, who loved showing off, and who proved he had much to show.
1. Reginald Pound, Evans of the Broke, A Biography of Admiral Lord Mountevans, K.C.B., D.S.O., LL.D. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 53.
2. Shackleton also failed to reach the South Pole but did set a new record for farthest south at 88?23’S, just 112 miles from the geographic pole.
3. Roland Huntford, The Last Place on Earth (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 188. Scott described the process of driving dogs and killing off weaker ones to feed stronger dogs (and their human drivers) as the load lightened as “sordid,” preferring the “glory” of man-hauling. Roald Amundsen, who used dogs, beat Scott to the Pole by more than a month despite a later start.
4. Pound, Evans, 105–06.
5. Pound, 81. Scott’s antagonism to Evans led him to order Evans’ sledge team to discard their skis on the Beardmore Glacier, while his team kept theirs. Cf., Huntford, Last Place, 439.
6. Vitamins had not yet been isolated, but the connection between diet and some disorders, such as scurvy, had been common knowledge for many years. Yet Scott’s expedition made no effort to prevent these diseases. For example, Scott’s crew carried biscuit made from white flour leavened with baking soda, while Amundsen’s biscuit used whole grain flour and rolled oats leavened with yeast; Scott’s biscuit supplied little other than calories, while Amundsen’s was a rich source of Vitamin B. Huntford, Last Place, 476.
7. Report of the Court of Enquiry into the circumstances attending the action between HMS Swift, HMS Broke with enemy destroyers on the night of 20th/21st April 1917, ADM 137/3659, 22 April 1917, 625.
8. Report, 644–45.
9. Report.
10. Capt. Edward R. G. R. Evans, RN, “The Broke’s Glorious Fight,” in Chums, 31 July 1927, 36/1820, 47–48.
11. Evans, “The Broke’s Glorious Fight.”
12. Pound, Evans, 174–77.