HMS Captain 1870         

The Story of HMS Captain - The Main Characters (cont)

Captain Hugh Talbot Burgoyne, V.C.

The son of much respected military figure in Victorian England, Sir John Fox Burgoyne. 

Hugh entered the navy in 1847, and had a varied career including being awarded the V.C. at Crimea. At the time he was serving on HMS Swallow, a ship with a reputation for `strict discipline', and famed for her singing crew and their sea shanties. He volunteered to land at a beach near the town of Genitchi where the Russian Army were in strength. They were out of covering gunshot range of the ships offshore and met considerable enemy opposition, but managed to set fire to corn stores and ammunition dumps and destroy enemy equipment before embarking again.

On the 27th June 1875, Queen Victoria presented the first ever Victoria Crosses at a huge ceremony in Hyde Park, with a crowd of more that 100,000 in attendance. Burgoyne was the third sailor ever to be awarded the medal, one of twelve that day, the medals being personally presented by Queen Victoria. 

He also commanded Wivern, a low freeboard ship with Coles’s turrets, built surreptitiously for the Confederate (Southern) States of America, but seized and purchased by the British Navy. 

He finally joined the Captain, at Coles’s request, in 1868 before it left Birkenhead. Initially surviving the capsizing, he failed to make it to the boat on which the survivors had clambered.

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See also the family information on the Memorials page for Sutton, Bedfordshire, and Hoxne, Norfolk)

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The picture of Hugh Burgoyne above had been sent to Werry by Burgoyne's widow, Evelyn, undercover of the following letter (both provided by Lewis Werry's descendant, Carole Hollow). It is not known the background to the contact between these two, but Evelyn's letter to Werry posted 10th March 1872 is as follows -