Admiral Robert Patton: One of Trafalgar’s Last Surviving Officers

Admiral Robert Patton was born in Fareham in 1791 into a naval family. His father was Captain Charles Patton RN, and another close relative, Admiral Hugh Patton, also served in the Royal Navy.

Robert entered the Navy in February 1804, aged about thirteen. The following year, still only fourteen, he was serving as a midshipman aboard HMS Bellerophon at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805.

Bellerophon was heavily engaged in the fighting. Patton therefore experienced at first hand the battle in which Nelson’s fleet defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets and secured one of the most famous victories in British naval history.

His naval career continued long after Trafalgar. He served aboard HMS Niobe, Polyphemus, Dispatch, Doterel, Loire and Junon. During service off North America he was involved in operations connected with the War of 1812, including boat actions in the Chesapeake and off New London. In December 1813, while serving aboard Loire, the ship captured the American privateer Rolla.

Patton eventually retired from active service in 1847. As was common in the nineteenth-century Royal Navy, he continued to rise on the retired list, becoming rear-admiral in 1854, vice-admiral in 1861 and finally admiral in 1864.

What makes his story especially remarkable is his longevity.

By the late nineteenth century, the young officers and sailors who had fought at Trafalgar were disappearing. In 1879 Patton was photographed as part of a group of six elderly surviving Trafalgar officers. When he died at Fareham in 1883, aged ninety-two, he appears to have been the senior-ranking surviving veteran of the battle and one of its very last surviving officers.

His Naval General Service Medal carried the clasp “Trafalgar”, recognising the battle he had witnessed as a teenage midshipman almost eighty years earlier. The medal survives today together with photographs of Patton in old age.

His memorial at St Peter & St Paul therefore connects Fareham directly with Trafalgar. Robert Patton left the town as a boy, fought in one of the defining naval battles of British history, served through the Napoleonic and American wars, and eventually returned to Fareham, where he lived long enough to become one of the last living links with Nelson’s fleet.