Background
Ernest Troubridge was born in Hempstead on July 15, 1862, the son of an army officer. His ancestors had fought at Cape St. Vincent, at the Nile, and at Copenhagen.
Ernest Troubridge was born in Hempstead on July 15, 1862, the son of an army officer. His ancestors had fought at Cape St. Vincent, at the Nile, and at Copenhagen.
He attended the Royal Naval College, at Dartmouth as a naval cadet, and by 1884 had been promoted to lieutenant. During his service with the fleet he was awarded the silver medal of the Royal Humane Society, when in 1888 he saved the life of a young seaman who had fallen overboard in the night while their ship was in Suda Bay, Crete.
As naval attaché to Tokyo, he took part in 1904 in the battles of Chemulpo and Port Arthur, and duly reported home on these. That same year he accompanied King Edward VII to Kiel. Three years later Troubridge was entrusted with command of the battleship Queen. In 1910, however, he returned to shore duty as private secretary to the first lord of the Admiralty; at Whitehall he served both Reginald McKenna and Winston Churchill well. Two years before the outbreak of the Great War Troubridge was appointed chief of the Naval War Staff. A born leader, he possessed unfortunately no creativity.
Perhaps as a result, Troubridge in January 1913 was given command of the Mediterranean cruiser squadron under the overall British commander in that region, Admiral Archibald "Arky Barky" Milne. It was in this capacity that Troubridge in August 1914 was blamed by the British public as well as by certain naval leaders of having permitted the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau to elude him at Messina and thus to enter the Dardanelles, thereby encouraging Turkey to enter the war as Germany's ally. A Court of Inquiry on September 9, 1914, found Troubridge's failure to engage especially the Goeben "deplorable and contrary to the tradition of the British Navy." A formal court-martial held between November 5 and 9, 1914, charged Troubridge that "from negligence or default he did on 7 August forbear to chase H.I.G.M.'s Goeben, being an enemy then flying." Troubridge was acquitted on the technicality that the Goeben constituted a "superior force," and that the Admiralty had specifically ordered him on August 4, 1914, not to engage any "superior force." Thus, although exonerated "fully and honorably," the affair nevertheless greatly damaged Troubridge's career; he was never again employed afloat.
In January 1915, Troubridge was appointed head of a British naval mission to Serbia to evacuate the Serbian army and refugees, and in September 1916, was attached to the personal staff of the crown prince of Serbia, where he remained until June 1919. Troubridge represented Great Britain at the International Danube Commission from 1920 to 1924. He had been promoted to the grades of vice admiral in 1916 and to admiral in 1919, before retiring from active service in 1921. Troubridge died of a heart attack in Biarritz on January 28, 1926. There is no cause to quarrel with Arthur Marder's balanced verdict that Troubridge's fault in August 1914, if any, had been erroneous judgment in not giving chase to the flying German cruisers, and no more.
Troubridge married Edith Mary Duffus on 29 December 1891. The couple had one surviving son, Thomas Hope Troubridge, who followed his father into the navy and eventually became a vice-admiral. Edith died in 1900 after delivering a stillborn fourth child. Ernest remarried on 10 October 1908. His second wife was the sculptor Margot Elena Gertrude Taylor, more commonly known as Una Vincenzo. The couple had a daughter, but separated in 1919, Una having begun a relationship in 1915 with Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall. Sir Ernest Troubridge died suddenly in Biarritz on 28 January 1926, and was buried there.