Edward Hawke Locker

Edward Hawke Locker (byHenry Wyndham Phillips,c. 1840)

Edward Hawke Locker(9 October 1777, inEast Malling,Kent – 16 October 1849, inIver,Buckinghamshire) was an Englishwatercolourist(producing works now in theV&AandBritish Museum) and administrator of theRoyal Naval Hospital, Greenwich.

Life

He was the fourth (of five) surviving child and youngest son of the naval captainWilliam Locker,and was named after his father's patron AdmiralEdward Hawke.Entering the navy pay office as a clerk on 1 June 1795, he served in its India department (from 1799) and the board of naval enquiry before becoming a prize agent andEdward Pellew's civil secretary during his East Indies, North Sea and Mediterranean commands from 1804 to 1814. He was in England in July 1802, when he accompanied the French balloonistAndré-Jacques Garnerinon his second English ascent during thePeace of Amiens.He also spent time in Spain in 1813 during thePeninsular Waralongside LordJohn Russell,bringing despatches toWellington,as well as visitingNapoleonin May 1814 during hisElbaexile.

He was married in 1815 to Eleanor Mary Elizabeth Boucher, whose father the RevdJonathan Boucherhad once been a friend ofGeorge Washington.Their children included the poetFrederick Locker-Lampson(1821–1895) and the novelist-journalistArthur Locker(1828–1893), later the editor ofThe Graphic.The couple lived atWindsor(1815–19) then atGreenwich(1819 onwards). He was appointed secretary (1819) and then civil commissioner (1824) to theRoyal Naval Hospital,which he worked to improve by adding new roads byJohn Macadamin the Northumbrian coal mines it owned and in 1824 carrying forward his father's plans for a Naval Gallery in the Hospital's Painted Hall, with a gift of 31 paintings fromGeorge IV(the nucleus of the laterNational Maritime Museum). He joined Lord John Russell again as one of the founder members of theAthenaeum Club.However a mental breakdown in 1844 forced him to retire from running the hospital, and he retired to Iver, where he died five years later.

Works

• Views of Spain,1824, with illustrations after his own watercolours

Sources

• "Locker, Edward Hawke".Oxford Dictionary of National Biography(online ed.). Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/16893.(Subscription orUK public library membershiprequired.)