“Constitutionally incapable of refusing action”

The Scene: A heaving unsettled sea, and away over to the western horizon an angry yellow sun is setting clearly below a forbidding bank of the blackest of wind charged clouds.

Extract from Whispers From The Fleet by Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, KCVO, CB. 1908

The above words almost describe the prelude to the Battle of Coronel, a naval battle fought between British and German forces on 1^st November 1914 off the coast of Chile. This has a link to a previous blog – about HMS Gloucester and her involvement in the pursuit of the German warships Goeben and Breslau. Although these incidents may appear unrelated, they are not, for the first actually had a direct bearing on the latter.

Rear Admiral Sir Christopher ‘Kit’ Cradock

A [Ship’s] door to Gloucester’s past and the start of a world war…

At Gloucestershire Archives we have millions of documents concerning our county’s heritage but one of our most curious possessions is not a document but a wooden door hung on a wall!

We inherited this when we moved into our present building, the old Kingsholm Council School and what makes it special is that it comes from HMS Gloucester – a Town class light cruiser built in 1909 and the eighth warship to bear the name of our city.

As we reach the 100^th anniversary of Britain’s involvement in WW1, it is interesting to reflect that this door was involved in one of the first naval actions of that war, the chase of the German cruisers SMS¹ Goeben and SMS Breslau, which were then at large in the Mediterranean.