Captain James Newman-Newman RN: Lost with HMS Hero on Christmas Day
Captain James Newman-Newman RN (1767–1811) spent his career in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and saw action in some of the defining naval campaigns of his generation.
As a lieutenant aboard HMS Royal George, he fought at the Glorious First of June in 1794, when Lord Howe’s fleet defeated the French Atlantic fleet. He later commanded frigates in the West Indies and home waters. In 1798, commanding HMS Mermaid, he fought the much larger French frigate Loire. The following year he took command of the captured Loire itself and helped capture the new French frigate Pallas in 1800.
By 1811 Newman-Newman was a senior captain in the Baltic fleet and commanded the 74-gun HMS Hero. His final task was to help escort a large convoy carrying troops and merchantmen from Sweden back to Britain.
The voyage ended catastrophically.
A huge winter storm struck the fleet in December 1811. HMS St George and HMS Defence were wrecked off Jutland on Christmas Eve, with enormous loss of life. The following day, Christmas Day 1811, Hero was driven onto the Haak Sands near the Texel on the Dutch coast. Conditions were so violent that rescue boats could not reach the ship. Of a crew numbering several hundred men, only twelve survived. Newman-Newman was among those lost.
His death was remembered prominently in Fareham. Inside St Peter & St Paul’s stands a substantial wall monument commemorating Newman-Newman and the men of HMS Hero. Royal Museums Greenwich specifically identifies it as an important Georgian naval memorial. Its sculpted relief, by the celebrated artist Sir Richard Westmacott, shows the figure of Hope looking towards the wrecked ship with its broken mast.
A portrait of Newman-Newman also survives in the collection of the National Maritime Museum. Painted around 1801, it shows him in full captain’s uniform with his hand resting on his sword.
His memorial at St Peter & St Paul’s therefore preserves the story of a man who survived decades of naval warfare, fought the French across several seas, and finally died not in battle, but in one of the Royal Navy’s great maritime disasters.
On Christmas Day 1811, HMS Hero disappeared into the storm. Only twelve men came home.
