Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville
Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville (September 7, 1863 – March 24, 1936)
Somerville joined the Royal Navy as a cadet in 1877. He trained as a Hydrographic Surveyor, was promoted to Captain in 1912 and Vice Admiral on August 1, 1919. He retired on August 2, 1919. While on surveying duties in the Western Pacific, Somerville built a significant collection of ethnographic artifacts in Solomon Islands - now in Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
In 1908, while surveying in British waters, he read a book suggesting stone circles and standing stones might have astronomical significance. He thereafter devoted much of his time to surveying such monuments in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere, and became a recognised expert in the field of archaeoastronomy. He contributed papers to the Antiquarian magazine.
As part of the late summer 1917 reorganisation of the burgeoning British Secret Intelligence Service, led by Mansfield Smith-Cumming and his de facto deputy, Colonel Freddie Browning, Somerville was appointed as 'officer in charge of the Naval Section within the Secret Service Bureau.' This was the first career naval officer posting to the Secret Service. In February 1919, Somerville wrote a review setting out a number of basic principles for service and encouraging the development of specialist intelligence technical skills within the navy for intelligence gathering and analysis.
After his retirement he returned to the family home at Castletownshend, near Cork in Ireland. On March 24, 1936 he was murdered by the Irish Republican Army for recruiting local men to join the Royal Navy.
[edit] Published works
- Ocean Passages for the World. Published for Hydrographic Dept., Admiralty, by HMSO (1923)
- The Chart-Makers. Blackwell & Sons. (1928)
- Commodore Anson's Voyage into the South Seas and Around the World. Heinemann. (1934)
- Will Mariner. Faber & Faber. (1936)
- Records of the Somerville Family of Castlehaven & Drishane from 1174 to 1940 (with Edith Anna Somerville). Published by Guy & Co, Cork, 1940
See also:
- The Selected letters of Somerville and Ross edited by Gifford Lewis, Faber (1989)
- Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, by Joseph O'Neill, Granta (2001) for a detailed account of Boyle Somerville's killing.
- MI6 The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, by Keith Jeffery, Bloomsbury (2010).
