Ernest Troubridge

Ernest Troubridge let the Goeben escape into the Dardanelles and was the only British admiral of the First World War to be court-martialled for failing to engage. He came from four generations of naval officers, was naval attache in Tokyo during the Russo-Japanese war and observed the battle of the Yellow Sea from a Japanese flagship, and was chief of the Admiralty war staff before the war. In August 1914 he commanded the First Cruiser Squadron in the Adriatic, four armoured cruisers, while the German battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau ran east across the Mediterranean. His orders told him not to engage a superior force. Goeben was faster and outranged his ships by several thousand yards, and after taking advice from his flag captain he broke off the pursuit before dawn on 7 August rather than fight in open water in daylight. The two ships reached Constantinople, were transferred to the Ottoman navy with their German crews, and shelled the Russian Black Sea coast in October, which brought the Ottoman Empire into the war on the German side. Troubridge was tried in November 1914 and acquitted, the court finding that his interpretation of superior force was correct, but he was never given a seagoing command again. He spent the rest of the war ashore, commanding a British naval mission on the Danube in Serbia, where he was well regarded, and was made an honorary citizen of Belgrade. His acquittal was not published at the time and the impression of disgrace stood for years. His half-brother's descendants included the naval officer and writer Thomas Troubridge. His second wife, Una Troubridge, left him and lived for the rest of her life with the novelist Radclyffe Hall, and he refused her a divorce. He died in Biarritz in 1926.

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