Ships
- HMAS Australia (D84) Captain from 28 August 1939
Robert Ross Stewart, the officer carried on the lists as Robert R. Stewart, was a Royal Navy captain whose main wartime command was an Australian heavy cruiser. He was born at Bromley, in England, on 25 October 1893, the son of a member of the London Stock Exchange. He joined the Navy as a midshipman on 15 September 1911, was made an acting sub-lieutenant in January 1914 and a sub-lieutenant that July, and was promoted lieutenant on 15 February 1915, so the First World War reached him while he was already a junior officer at sea. He became a lieutenant-commander on 15 February 1923, a commander on 30 June 1928, and a captain on 31 December 1935.
His shore and staff work between the wars was built around signals. From 2 May 1924 until 1926 he served as Fleet Signal Officer of the Mediterranean Fleet. On 1 February 1932 he took up the post of executive officer at the Portsmouth Signal School. Those appointments left him a captain who knew both the fleet and the signal service when the Admiralty sent him out to command a cruiser of the Royal Australian Navy.
He assumed command of HMAS Australia on 28 August 1939, the day the County-class heavy cruiser recommissioned at Sydney after paying off into reserve in April 1938. Britain and Germany were at war within a week. For about the first nine months Stewart kept Australia on the Australian coast and on the escort routes across the Indian Ocean, searching for German raiders and covering troopships. The cruiser worked between Fremantle and Cape Town, and then from the Cape toward Freetown. On 25 June 1940 she left Cape Town with the troopships Orion and Reina del Pacifico, and the three ships arrived at Freetown on 3 July.
In July 1940 Australia joined the watch off Dakar with the British ships Hermes, Dorsetshire and Milford, keeping an eye on the French warships that had remained in West Africa after the armistice. During that month the cruiser fired her first shot of the war while beating off an attacking bomber. By 3 August Stewart had her at Scapa Flow for gunnery practice. In September she sailed south again with the force sent to Dakar in the hope of bringing French West Africa over to the Allied side.
When talks failed, the ships fought the batteries and the vessels in the harbour from 23 September 1940. Australia engaged the large destroyer L'Audacieux at close range and left her burning and aground. French gunfire then hit the cruiser, and men of her company were killed and wounded. Stewart took the damaged ship back to Britain for repair.
Once the dockyard had made good the damage, Australia spent the winter and the following months with the Home Fleet, on northern patrol and on the cover of convoys. Stewart stayed in command until August 1941. Later wartime captains of the same cruiser included Harold Bruce Farncomb and Emile Frank Verlaine Dechaineux, who took her through the Pacific fighting. Stewart was placed on the retired list on 2 January 1945. He died on 27 February 1988, aged ninety-four.