This snapshot taken on 04/06/2007, shows web content selected for preservation by The National Archives. External links, forms and search boxes may not work in archived websites.
Extract from DTI News October 2000: Part 3 Click here to view Part 1 of this article, and here for Part 2
When John Cobb had the dubious distinction of being the first Board of Trade man to lose his life in the First World War, it was largely down to the incompetence of the Admiralty, explains Christopher Yorke-Edwards.
Cobb was serving in HMS Good Hope, an elderly armoured cruiser with just two 9.2 inch guns and 16 broadside-mounted six-inch guns, half of which were so low down they could not be used in any sea that was much more than a flat calm. She was commissioned on mobilisation with a scratch crew comprising 90 per cent reservists.
When Good Hope became the flagship of Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher (Kit) Cradock, her crew had practised firing her guns only once. Admiral Cradock was one of a number of commanders tasked to locate and destroy the crack German East Asiatic Squadron which had been making its way from its pre-war base in China across the Pacific Ocean towards South America.
The German ships, which included the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, were under the command of Vice-Admiral Graf von Spee. The two armoured cruisers, sister ships, each had eight 8.2-inch guns, all of which could be fought in a seaway, and highly trained crews who had won the Kaiser's prize for gunnery efficiency.
Such ships, together with a number of light cruisers that had joined the squadron, would wreak havoc in the South Atlantic shipping lanes used heavily by British merchant vessels. John Cobb is unlikely to have been aware that among his erstwhile colleagues' tasks back at the Board of Trade was arranging large shipments of meat from South America to feed the troops at the front.
Although the Admiralty appreciated the importance of destroying the German ships, they deployed many allied warships on less vital tasks elsewhere. At one point, they made the mistake of thinking von Spee was sailing west instead of east so Cradock's squadron was not reinforced as it should have been. And their instructions were often badly worded and confusing, so, for example, that the Admiral thought he was supposed to engage the enemy even if his force was inadequate to gain victory.
The upshot of all this was that on 1 November, 1914, Good Hope, with the similarly ill-fitted and ill-prepared Monmouth, the light cruiser Glasgow and an armed merchant ship, engaged the German ships in battle off Coronel on the coast of Chile. Cradock's force was certainly inadequate. Good Hope and Monmouth were soon sunk. No-one, not even the Germans, saw the going of the British Flagship. As night fell Good Hope, her Admiral and entire ship's company, including our man John Cobb, slipped beneath the waves unobserved.
The Battle of Coronel was a disaster, not only in terms of lives and ships lost, but also in the reputation of the Royal Navy that revelled in the traditions of Nelson. Von Spee had destroyed Britannia's image of invincibility.
Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, one of Britain's most notable naval commanders at the time, observed: "Poor old Kit Cradock has gone at Coronel. His death and the loss of the ships and the gallant lives in them can be laid to the door of the incompetency of the Admiralty. They have broken over and over again the first principles of strategy."
Back in Whitehall, retribution became the priority. On hearing the news of Coronel - the other two of Cradock's ships had escaped - the Admiralty wasted no lime in dispatching two battlecruisers to seek out and destroy von Spee's squadron. The two forces engaged off the Falkland Islands. The Germans were doomed and it was not long before they succumbed to the awesome firepower and superior range of the battlecruisers' 12-inch guns.
© Department of Trade & Industry
Back to Part 1
