A Monthly Publication

...OF THE HMS GROWLER

By Jim Welham

It is rewarding to rediscover long forgotten events of local history.  The major sources of information regarding Hunstanton are widely spread; the Town Council Minutes are kept at Kings Lynn Town Hall, microfilm copies of the Tory Lynn News from 1869, and the Whig [later Liberal] Lynn Advertiser from 1842, are held by Kings Lynn Library, as are pre-1837 records of parish baptisms, marriages and deaths. Other Norfolk newspapers such as the Norfolk Chronicle, the predecessor of the EDP, are at the Norwich Forum and many other records are in the Archive Centre at County Hall, or the National Archives Centre at Kew and various museums. However the value of modern resources such as The Times Online Archive cannot be underestimated, which allows fully searchable access to every article written in the Times or Sunday Times newspapers from 1785.

The National Archives also offer an online service, where a limited number of historical documents can be viewed from the comfort of a home computer, and this article resulted from my entering Hunstanton then Wills into that site. The wills of the wealthy property owners were there but so was one unusually interesting entry:-.

Will of Robert Hawes formerly serving as Able Seaman aboard his Majesty’s gun brig Growler now a prisoner of war in Arras France, of Hunstanton Norfolk 1813

It is only when he was dying that his name was spelt as Hawes, all other documents refer to him as Hawse. Other details of his employment were unavailable as no seamen’s records were retained prior to 1853.

A short summary of the service of HMS Growler is easily traced. She was a Royal Naval 12-gun gun-brig built in 1804 at Bucklers Hard, Beaulieu River, Hampshire, at the height of the Napoleonic wars, and had 2 square-rigged masts which enabled her to be fast and manoeuvrable. The Growler featured in several major incidents during one of the most dramatic periods of British naval history, and she survived the war. So how did Robert Hawse become a prisoner of war? Did he desert or was he captured?

When the Growler was launched the French Army was preparing for the invasion of England.  The two countries had been at war since 1793, and Bonaparte’s men had subdued the armies of mainland Europe. A fleet of flat-bottomed boats waited to transport 200,000 soldiers the 20 miles across the English Channel to what seemed certain victory, but were unable to sail as the Royal Navy had control of the sea. When the French and Spanish fleets were defeated by Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleon was obliged to turn away. In due course he invaded Russia, suffered defeat and the start of his downfall. These circumstances were to be repeated by Hitler in the following century, except then it was the Royal Air Force who prevented the Germans crossing the Channel.

Despite Nelson’s victory some French ships continued to operate against the Royal Navy for the remaining 10 years of the war. One of their strongholds was a harbour named The Basque Roads, near Rochefort in the Bay of Biscay, where the French believed their ships were safe from attack. Their vessels lay in two lines next to the Isle d’Aix, behind a large boom secured by anchors and chains, which was patrolled by gun boats and covered by shore batteries. Capt Thomas Cochrane was ordered to attack the French ships. He was well known for his daring and ability as a frigate captain, and would not have been out of place in the 20^th century with his enthusiasm for the use of chemical weapons and explosives. He decided to destroy the enemy with fire-ships, much to the disapproval of his admiral, who considered them a horrible anti-Christian form of warfare. Cochrane was to go even further by creating what he called an ‘explosion’ vessel.  He described in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Fighting Captain, how he adapted a captured transport ship by reinforcing the lower deck with logs, then packing it with 1,500 barrels of gunpowder, hundreds of shells, 3,000 hand grenades, and attaching rockets to the rigging.

The Growler was one of a number of ships ordered to create a diversion by attacking from the east of the island on the night of 11^th April 1809. Cochrane and a crew of 5 volunteers took advantage of a brisk onshore wind to sail the explosion ship towards the French ships. It was left against the boom and Cochrane and his men abandoned it and hurriedly started to row back, but made only slow progress against the wind and the tide. To their added consternation the fuse which had been intended to burn for 15 minutes, lasted less than half that time and a huge explosion disintegrated the fire-ship, destroyed the boom and badly damaged many of the French ships. A hail of timber, and missiles passed over Cochrane’s boat, and the crew realised that had they made better progress in their escape, they would have all been killed. Hardly had they realised how lucky they were, when the sea was convulsed by the explosion and they were hit by a mountain of water which tossed the boat about as if it was a cork. When Cochrane succeeded in returning to the fleet, he was enraged to find that the crews of the other 20 fire-ships had saved themselves an arduous pull by igniting them early, at a considerable distance from the boom, knowing that if any member of a fire-ship’s crew was captured, they would immediately be put to death. Only 4 of the fire-ships reached their intended target and none did any damage. However the French believed they were also packed with explosives and panicked, cut their cables, and all but two ran aground. The French ships were badly damaged but the victory was only partial and the harbour was used to attack English shipping until the end of the war.

On 9^th January 1812 two French 40-gun frigates Arienne and Andromaque, and the 16-gun brig-corvette Mamelouck, sailed from France into the Atlantic. There they destroyed 36 ships, not only English merchant vessels, but those of Spain, Portugal and the United States of America.  Captain the Honourable Henry Hotham of the 74-gun Northumberland was given the task of intercepting the frigates on their return to France.  On 22^nd of May 1812 the Northumberland, in the company of the Growler, sighted the enemy ships under full sail making for the port of L’Orient. The English ships were to the windward and tried to cut them off.  The French knew that they would be supported by numerous gun batteries from the shore, and attempted to pass between the British ships and the land. The massive Northumberland stood as close to land as possible and exchanged broadsides with the frigates, but was damaged by cannon fire from the enemy ships and the shore batteries.  The frigates were obliged to sail ever closer to land, and all three French ships grounded on a sandy beach at full sail. Their crews abandoned ship and scrambled ashore. Knowing that the tide was falling, the Northumberland pulled away for repairs, whilst the tiny Growler stayed in position and fired at the French seamen whenever they attempted to return to their ships. When repairs were completed and the tide had turned, the Northumberland returned and fired broadside after broadside at the three stranded ships until they caught fire and were completely destroyed. Lieutenant Weeks of the Growler was promoted to Commander as a result of the action

On 26 November 1812 members of the Growler’s crew were involved in what was described by a Court Martial as ‘one of the foulest unprovoked and desperate murders which has ever disgraced the British Navy.’  Two seamen from the Growler, Millington and Williams, formed part of a prize crew which had been ordered to sail a captured French brig, Le Suir Maree, to Plymouth. Two other members of the prize crew, Boyd and Grant, had completed their Watch at midnight that first night, and at 3am were awoken by the other 5 members of the crew who told them that they had murdered the ships officers, the Masters Mate, the Quartermaster and a passenger. They offered Boyd and Grant the opportunity to join them and sail the ship to France, but they refused. They were kept prisoner in the cable tier, and although the mutineers promised they would not harm them, they expected to be murdered at any moment. In the morning they heard a shout from the deck saying that two ships were giving chase, and about 8 o’clock they heard the sound of a boat being lowered and rowed towards the nearby Isles of Scilly.  As this left only 3 mutineers on board, Boyd seized a chance to throw one of them overboard but the mutineer held onto the rigging with both hands and nearly bit off Boyd’s thumb. Grant hit the mutineer with a stick and he fell overboard and drowned. As the frigate HMS Aquilion was drawing near, they overpowered Millington and William who were placed in irons and returned to England. At a court martial held on the HMS Salvador Del Mundo at Plymouth, Millington and Williams offered no explanation as to why they had committed the murders. They were sentenced to death and hanged from a yardarm.

Although interesting, none of this was helpful in finding out why Hawse became a prisoner of war, so the next step was to obtain a copy of his Will.  I paid the required £3.50 and almost immediately was reading the following:-

In the name of God Amen.

I Robert Hawes a native of Hunstanton County of Norfolk and formerly serving as able seaman onboard Gun brig Growler, Mr Nesbitt Commander now detained as a prisoner of war in Arras  France and being in a weak state of health but of sound mind and memory thank be given to God,… make and ordain this my last will and testament that this is to say principally and first of all I recommend my soul into the hands of the almighty God that gave it and my body I recommend to the Earth or Sea as it shall please God … such worldly Estate wherewith it hath pleased God to bless me in this life I give and dispose in manner following I give  and bequeath to my honoured mother Frances all my wages and prize money that is or may become due to me…

The command of the Growler changed about once a year and in 1806 that position was held by Lieut Thomas Nesbitt, which therefore identified the year Hawse was taken prisoner. The only event mentioned in the summary of the Growler during that period was when sailing to take up station off Brest on 28 January, the crew captured a prize, the 14-gun French privateer lugger Voltigeur of St Malo.   It was Prize Money, or the possibility of earning some, which kept the navy content in otherwise intolerable conditions. Captured enemy ships were legally the property of the Crown and were keenly sought, as the value of a prize and cargo could earn a crew the equivalent of a year’s pay. Hence boarding enemy vessels and hand-to-hand fighting remained common, even though ships’ cannon could sink the enemy from afar.

My next move was to contact Arras. By chance, within days of my retirement from the Norfolk Constabulary in 2003, I stayed in Arras, the capital of the Pas-De-Calais region, northern France with my wife, Veronica. Arras had the misfortune to be very close to the front line for most of the First World War. It was a key stronghold for the Allies, as the town was built on chalk and large underground caverns had been created, which proved a safe environment for troops and supplies. We visited some of the war memorials including the enormous monument at Thiepval which bears over 70,000 names of the missing on 16 pillars, the Ulster Regiment’s memorial castle, the towering Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge and the Royal Newfoundland Regiment’s memorial site at Beaumont-Hamel, which is topped with a huge caribou. For this research, my French-speaking wife contacted the authorities in Arras and found that although about 1200 English prisoners of war were held there during the Napoleonic wars, all the written records of those detained were destroyed in a bombardment in 1915. 

After that it was back to the National Archive Centre website for confirmation that they had the log books of the Growler for the period in question, after which we booked a remarkably cheap weekend break at the superb Chiswick Morant Hotel. On the Sunday we went to Kew Gardens, but the day before visited the neighbouring National Archive Centre. We eventually managed to pass through their formidable security procedures and there were waiting for us the Growler’s 3 log books from 1804 to 1806. Not that I actually had the chance to examine them as my wife seized them saying how interesting they were, which left me no choice but to look through a pile of old  files relating to Hunstanton Pier.

The Admiralty Muster Book showed the gun brig Growler as having a complement of 50, including 6 marines, on its first muster of 3rd Sept 1804. Robert Hawse was a member of the original crew and was listed as an Ordinary Seaman.  That entry showed he was from Hunstanton, aged 22 and earned £2/10- per ‘muster;’ a period which varied between 5 and 7 weeks. 

The Growler’s first duties were patrolling off the west coast of Brittany and several entries related to its firing across the bows of luggers and schooners, before boarding them. When prisoners were taken they were fed at two-thirds rations.

From 1^st December 1805 Lieut Thomas Nesbitt assumed command and on 1^st January 1806 Robert Hawse was promoted to Able Seaman and his pay increased to £5 per muster session. The incident that was to cause his eventual death was recorded in the Captain’s Log on 7^th March 1806.

PM Fresh breeze and clear. Got underweigh. Made sail for the Squadron to the South of the Saints went through the Passage du Raz. Saw a strange schooner standing to the North. Fired several guns and bring her too. Proved to be L’Amelie of L’Ouest laden with wine and brandy. Sent an Officer to take charge of her

13^th March - The Amelie was manned by the Prize Master Lachlan Grant, and crew of Robert Hawse, Robert Jordan, John Willson, James Jones, William Clarkson and Peter Byrne.

A copy of a letter to the Admiralty was stuck in the second muster book and provided the following information. 

HMS Gun Brig Growler off Brest 14^th August 1806.

Gentlemen

Agreeable to your letter dated 22^nd July. I have news of the six men belonging to HMS Gun Brig Growler under my Command sent in L’Amelie de L’Ouest, on the 14^th March last – we have heard from Mr L Grant Prize Master of the said vessel dated Verdun 16^th June. Informed me he was wrecked to the West of the Isle Bass on the 17^th March, delivered himself with the 5 men as prisoners of war.

I am Gentlemen, your most obedient humble servant,

John Price Lieutenant Commander

 The Isle Bass is probably the Isle de Batz off the Normandy coast. It remains a mystery what caused the ship to run aground. The weather might have been a factor, as might the cargo of wine and brandy. The cause of Hawse’s death after 7 years imprisonment will probably never be known.

The war concluded in 1815 following Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. The Northumberland received the honour of being selected to transport Napoleon into exile on the island of St Helena, although within a few years she had been converted into a prison hulk. The Growler was sold at the end of the hostilities, and her surviving seaman and marines returned to their homes to find an economic crisis, famine, high prices, and chronic unemployment. They never received what would have been a substantial amount of prize money for the Amelie de L’Ouest and her cargo as she was wrecked, rather than delivered to a home port.