Walter Locke

Posted by Jude de angulo on Tuesday 7th of April 2026 00:45

Married Sarah Ann Griffin (c. 1760–1832) on 8 February 1787 in Fareham, Hampshire. They resided at Haylands, near Ryde on the Isle of Wight. One of their sons was Commander Nagle Lock (c. 1790–1818), who died aged 28 and is buried with his parents. The unusual given name “Nagle” was bestowed in gratitude to Lieutenant (later Admiral Sir) Edmund Nagle, who rescued Walter Locke from drowning after he fell overboard from HMS Warwick in the early 1780s. The rescue incident became a celebrated naval anecdote, recounted by Edmund Burke (Nagle’s kinsman) and preserved in James Prior’s memoir of Burke and Vice-Admiral John Surman Carden’s A Curtail’d Memoir. The family memorial at St Thomas Church, Ryde, records Walter as “Vice Admiral of the White” and notes the burial of his wife Sarah and son Nagle Lock.


The dramatic rescue by Edmund Nagle on HMS Warwick forged a lifelong bond and directly inspired the naming of Walter’s son Nagle Lock — a personal tribute rare even in the close-knit naval officer community of the period.
Walter Locke had a long, solid career spanning the American Revolutionary War, French Revolutionary War, and Napoleonic era, though he is best remembered today for the Warwick incident and his later residence on the Isle of Wight.
Name spelling appears interchangeably as Locke or Lock in period documents and modern records.
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