Alfred Fernandez Yarrow
It’s a windy Sunday morning in August 1878. Off the coast of Portsmouth lies the British Fleet, waiting to be reviewed by the Queen. The band is playing the jolly musical number from HMS Pinafore, satirising the ‘ruler of the Queen’s Navee’ when suddenly, from the east, two vessels, quite like any other the crews of the battleships have seen, come speeding toward the fleet at unusual speed.
A cheer goes up from the crews, recognising the daring of the voyage the little craft have taken from the Thames to the Solent - a journey that many feared would split the lightweight vessels in two. They are the first torpedo boats to navigate in open waters, and onboard are their builder, Alfred Yarrow and his wife - the pair have refused to expose their crews to dangers they wouldn’t themselves face.
At 38, Alfred Fernandez Yarrow had already come a long way from a humble Stepney childhood. By the time he died, aged 90, in 1932, he was Sir Alfred, the first Baronet of Homestead, and had seen Yarrow and Co become one of the world’s great shipbuilders.
Alfred was born in Stepney, the son of a Jewish mother and nonconformist Protestant father. His first schoolmaster astutely noted a ‘talent for engineering’, and Alfred won a scholarship to University College School.
At 15, he moved across the river to Greenwich, to begin an apprenticeship with Messrs Ravenill Salkeld, Marine Engineers. The hours were long and hard, but when the working day ended, Alfred remained in the workshop, studying and working on his own designs. He befriended another boy, James Hilditch, and together they developed a number of original inventions and took out several patents. Among them was a plough, put into production by Coleman and Sons, of Chelmsford. The young Yarrow soon became a London rep for the company.
They were an extraordinary pair, installing the first overhead telegraph line in London between their two homes, and developing a steam traction engine, put into production by Greenwich firm TW Cowan. They even set up their own Civil and Mechanical Engineers Society, with some 30 members, and Yarrow as the first vice president. When Hilditch left to join his father in the north of England, Yarrow decided to set up in business. He was just 23 when he opened his first yard, Yarrow and Hedley (a partnership) at Folly Wall on the Isle of Dogs. After a shaky start, the two became successful building steam river launches. Some 150 vessels were built between 1869 and 1875 including the boat used by Henry Morton Stanley to search the Congo for David Livingstone.
By the 1870s the firm had moved into building military vessels, designing torpedo boats first for the Argentine and Japanese navies, and then for the British Navy. Alfred dissolved the partnership with Hedley and the firm became Yarrow and Co. Yarrow was an entrepreneur and salesman as well as a brilliant engineer, and the dramatic meeting with the fleet in Portsmouth that day was a most effective way to end the furious and often acrimonious debate in Parliament over the worth of the boats. The masters of Her Majesty’s Navy were notoriously slow to accept innovation, so Yarrow took his design straight to Her Majesty.
Later that day, Victoria sent a message to Yarrow, via the Admiral of the Fleet, that nothing in the Review had impressed her so much as these new craft. With a suitable sense of theatre, Alfred and his crews had escorted the Queen from Cowes to Portsmouth, one boat on either side of the Royal Yacht. A few days later, the future King Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, made a trip in one of the boats alongside Alfred. He loved the speed of the boats, and their future was assured. The boats, designed to ram enemy vessels with a torpedo on a stake, and escape under cover of the explosion, became a feature of HM Navy. As a young naval officer, Prince George (the future George V and the son of Edward VII), would command one of the craft.
Technology moved on though, and Yarrow was ever alert to the changes. In 1892 he called on Admiral Sir John Fisher at the Admiralty and told him of the new, super-fast ‘torpedo boats’ which were being built for foreign navies. Yarrow was commissioned to come up with his own - not difficult as the Yarrow yard had already built the Kotaka, for the Japanese Navy, effectively the world’s first ‘torpedo boat destroyer’. The result was the HMS Havock and the HMS Hornet, delivered in 1893. At 180ft long and speeding at 27 knots, they were the Royal Navy’s first destroyers, delivering torpedoes but much larger and more seaworthy than the earlier torpedo boats.
In 1898, Yarrows moved out of the Folly Yard to London Yard, but in 1906 followed the rest of the London shipbuilding business out of the Thames. By 1916, he was Sir Alfred, and developed at taste for philanthropy, contributing toward a convalescent home for children on the Isle of Dogs, and towards medical research at Whitechapel’s Royal London Hospital, among numerous other causes.
Alfred Yarrow died in 1932 at age 90, with the company in good health. It would go on to be swallowed by GEC in 1974, and eventually by BAe Systems Marine.