Horace Hood

Rear-Admiral Sir Horace Lambert Alexander Hood (2 October 1870 – 31 May 1916) was a Royal Navy admiral of the First World War, whose lengthy and distinguished service saw him engaged in operations around the world, frequently participating in land campaigns as part of a shore brigade. His early death at the Battle of Jutland in the destruction of his flagship HMS Invincible was met with mourning and accolades from across Britain.

Hood was a youthful, vigorous and active officer whose service in Africa won him the Distinguished Service Order and who was posthumously appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in recognition of his courageous and ultimately fatal service in the Battle of Jutland, during which his ship was constantly engaged from its arrival at the action and caused fatal damage to a German light cruiser. He has been described as "the beau ideal of a naval officer, spirited in manner, lively of mind, enterprising, courageous, handsome, and youthful in appearance … His lineage was pure Royal Navy, at its most gallant".

Horace Hood was descended from one of the most influential and experienced navy lines, being a great-great-grandson of Admiral Samuel Hood, 1st Viscount Hood, who won numerous actions against the French in the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolutionary Wars. His father was Francis Wheler Hood, 4th Viscount Hood, and his mother Edith Lydia Drummond Ward. Born in South Street, London, Hood joined the Royal Navy aged 12, attending HMS Britannia cadet training ship at Dartmouth in 1882. Graduating top of his class in September 1885, Hood joined HMS Temeraire as a midshipman and served on her for a year in the Mediterranean Squadron before joining HMS Minotaur. In 1887 he was attached to HMS Calliope, a small cruiser which sailed for the Pacific Ocean. It was aboard her that Hood experienced the Samoan Hurricane in which Calliope was the only survivor of seven foreign warships in Apia Harbour.

Hood gained a record score in his exam for lieutenant, and qualified first time. He served in HMS Trafalgar for a time before taking three years out to study gunnery and staff duties. On his return to sea, he spent brief periods aboard HMS Royal Sovereign, HMS Wildfire, HMS Sans Pareil and HMS Cambrian. He performed well at these duties and, in 1897, was recommended to the Egyptian government, which provided him with a Nile gunboat to command on the Nile Expedition of 1898 in the Mahdist War. During these operations, Hood was conspicuous in his duty as second-in-command to Captain David Beatty and saw action for the first time, providing artillery support at the Battle of Atbara and Battle of Omdurman. For his services in these operations, he was promoted to commander, skipping the intermediate rank.

During the Second Boer War, Hood was given command of transport ships taking supplies to South Africa. He was later transferred to Admiral Lord Charles Beresford's flagship HMS Ramillies in the Mediterranean from 9 September 1901. Promoted to captain on 1 January 1903, ha was in July that year placed in command of HMS Hyacinth, flagship of Admiral George Atkinson-Willes on the East Indies Station. In April 1904, Hood was given his first independent command as he led a force of 754 sailors, marines and soldiers of the Hampshire Regiment against the Ilig Dervishes of Somaliland. Landing his men on an opposed beach in the dark, Hood led from the front, personally engaging in hand-to-hand combat and driving the dervishes into the hinterland, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

Distinguished by his action, Hood was given command of the armoured cruiser HMS Berwick in 1906 and the following year was made naval attaché to the British Embassy in Washington D.C. It was there he met Ellen Touzalin Nickerson, a widowed mother, whom he married in 1910. The couple had two sons, Samuel Hood, 6th Viscount Hood (1910–1981) and Alexander Lambert Hood, 7th Viscount Hood (1914–1999). In 1908, Hood was given command of the pre-dreadnought battleship HMS Commonwealth, in which he served for a year before receiving a shore appointment to command the Royal Naval College, Osborne, where he stayed until 1913 when he was raised to flag rank. For three months Hood raised his flag in the dreadnought battleship HMS Centurion before becoming Naval Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, in July 1914.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Hood's experience with coastal operations recommended him to serve with a small flotilla of Humber-class monitors on the Belgian coast, bombarding German positions and troop formations during the Siege of Antwerp and then the Battle of the Yser, assisting Belgian forces to hold the coastline during the Race for the Sea.

Later in the year, Hood became Commander-in-Chief, Dover and commander of the Dover Patrol, tasked with preventing German ships and submarines passing through. He was transferred to command of Force E at Queenstown by orders of Churchill and Fisher, for his perceived failure to do this as submarines continued to pass the Channel to threaten shipping in the Irish Sea. Force E consisted of obsolete cruisers and boarding vessels whose task was to patrol the area south west of Ireland to give instructions to arriving merchant vessels and guard against attacks by armed merchantmen. In February their operating area had been moved 200 miles further west as they were considered in themselves to be tempting targets for submarines. After his transfer, intelligence reports based on intercepted messages from German submarines showed that they had indeed had extreme difficulty passing the Channel, and as a result their orders were changed to travel around Scotland instead. Before Churchill was replaced as First Lord he corrected his mistake by appointing Hood to command of the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron operating out of Rosyth in Scotland. Hood's command was the three battlecruisers of the Invincible class: HMS Indomitable, HMS Inflexible and his flagship HMS Invincible.