Rear-Admiral Rear admiral is a senior naval flag officer rank, equivalent to a major general and air vice marshal and above that of a commodore and captain, but below that of a vice admiral. It is regarded as a two star "admiral" rank. It is often regarde ...

Sir Charles Langdale Ottley (8 February 1858 – 24 September 1932) was a

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against F ...

officer who served as Director of Naval Intelligence.

Life

Ottley was born in 1858 to Lawrence and Elizabeth Ottley. His father was a canon in

Richmond Richmond most often refers to: * Richmond, Virginia, the capital of Virginia, United States * Richmond, London, a part of London * Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town in England * Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada * Richmond, California, ...

in Yorkshire. She was educated at home and his eldest sister Alice Ottley cared for him and his three brothers Henry Bickersteth, Edward Bickersteth and Robert Lawrence Ottley. In 1861 he was one of twelve children left when his father died. His family moved back south where his mother and his sister Alice took in pupils.Gillian Avery, ‘Ottley, Alice (1840–1912)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 200
accessed 21 January 2017
/ref> Ottley joined the

in 1871.H. G. Thursfield, �
Ottley, Sir Charles Langdale (1858–1932)
��, rev. Andrew Lambert, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 21 January 2017. Promoted to

captain Captain is a title, an appellative for the commanding officer of a military unit; the supreme leader of a navy ship, merchant ship, aeroplane, spacecraft, or other vessel; or the commander of a port, fire or police department, election precinct, e ...

in January 1899, he became naval

attaché In diplomacy, an attaché is a person who is assigned ("to be attached") to the diplomatic or administrative staff of a higher placed person or another service or agency. Although a loanword from French, in English the word is not modified accor ...

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

July 1899 and Director of Naval Intelligence in February 1905 before becoming secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence in October 1907. Ottley was the main naval delegate to the Second Hague Conference in 1907 and took a leading role in drafting the convention limiting the employment of submarine mines. The next year at the International Maritime Conference he accepted limits on the use of economic blockade, a considerable concession as Britain was at the time the world's greatest naval power. According to the naval historian

Andrew Lambert Andrew Lambert (born 31 December 1956) is a British naval historian, who since 2001 has been the Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies, King's College London. Academic career After completing his doctoral resear ...

He was a man of much charm and no little literary ability, a good linguist, and a fluent, convincing, and persuasive speaker. Despite his many talents, however, he was not a leader. He made the committee of imperial defence a highly effective secretariat and co-ordinating body, but never achieved the influence or eminence of his successor. He was, like many of his contemporaries, exploited to further the aims of Lord Fisher, and then discarded when he was of no further use.

Notes

References

*H. G. Thursfield, �
Ottley, Sir Charles Langdale (1858–1932)
��, rev. Andrew Lambert, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 13 January 2014.

Life

Notes

References

Further reading