Richard Strachan, 6th Baronet

Sir Richard Strachan, 6th Baronet of Thornton GCB (born October 27, 1760 , † February 3, 1828 in London ) was a British naval officer at the time of the coalition wars .

Life

He came from an old Scottish noble family with a naval officer tradition. He was the son of John Strachan. He himself married Louisa Dillon in 1812. With this he had a daughter.

He entered the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1772 and served in part under his uncle Sir John Strachan. After his uncle's death in 1777, he succeeded him as a baron.

During the American War of Independence he served as a lieutenant and was promoted to commander of a cutter in 1783 . In the same year he received the rank of captain and commanded the frigate Naiad . In 1787 he traveled to China with the Vestal . The British Ambassador Charles Alan Cathcart was on board. Because he died during the trip, Strachan returned to England. The following year he served in the East Indies . In 1791 he brought up a French frigate. He returned to England in 1793.

As captain of the frigate Concorde , he took part in the naval battle off the Isle de Bas in 1794 . As the commander of a squadron of frigates, he took or destroyed numerous French merchant ships off the coast of Normandy and the coast of Brittany. Between 1796 and 1799 he commanded the frigate Diamond , before he took over the ship of the line Captain with 74 cannons in 1799 .

Together with other ships he managed to capture a squadron under Jean Baptiste Perree in June 1799 . In November of the same year he rescued the crew of the stranded ship of the line Malborough . In 1801 he ran his ship on a rock near Ouessant and was only able to reach the English coast with difficulty. In the same year he moved to the Donegal with 80 guns. The ship was assigned to the Canal Fleet and later the Mediterranean Fleet.

In 1803/04 he was the senior officer in Gibraltar and observed the opposing movements in Cadiz under the command of Nelson . He was appointed colonel in the marine infantry in 1804 . In 1805 he became a commodore of a squadron. With this he was looking for a French squadron under Zacharie Jacques Theodore Allemand . Instead, he found the four ships of the line of Comte Pierre Dumanoir le Pelley , which had escaped from the Battle of Trafalgar . He defeated these ships in the Battle of Cape Ortegal . He was then made a Knight of the Order of the Bath and an honorary citizen of London . Parliament also granted him a pension of £ 1,000 a year. Even before his victory became known, he was appointed rear admiral .

At the beginning of 1806 he was looking for a squadron that might sail to America. He then monitored the port of Rochefort until 1808 , when the French managed to sail towards the Mediterranean in bad weather. He followed the fleet and joined Collingwood off Toulon . He returned to the canal and watched the Dutch coast.

In 1809 he commanded the ships in the Walcheren expedition . It was about the landing of British troops on the Dutch island of Walcheren to relieve the Austrians during the Fifth Coalition War . The fleet consisted of over 250 warships and over 350 transporters. A total of 44,000 soldiers and the necessary war material were transported. The expedition suffered from objective problems, such as bad weather, but also from the conflicts between Strachan and the army commander John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham .

The expedition failed and Chatham held Strachan responsible to the king in 1810. This justified himself that the fleet would have done its part of the task. Nevertheless, he fell out of favor and received no further command, even if he was promoted to Vice Admiral and in 1821 to Admiral.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ according to other information: 4th Baronet

literature

• JK Laughton: 'Strachan, Sir Richard John, fourth baronet (1760-1828)', rev. Michael Duffy. In. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 Online version, accessed June 5, 2013

Web links

• Career data sheet