receiving the khedive’s bronze star with clasp for the battle of Toker, and the medjidie of the fourth class. Cradock afterwards served in the royal yacht, from which he was promoted to commander. As commander of the Alacrity, he commanded the naval brigade which led the Allied forces at the storming of the Taku Forts, 17 July 1900, and was noted for promotion for gallantry. Later on, as commander of the British naval brigade, he directed the British, American, Japanese, and Italian forces when they advanced to the relief of the Tientsin Settlement; and he took part in the subsequent relief of Sir Edward Seymour’s column at Siku, besides assisting in the capture of the Peiyang arsenal, Tientsin.
Cradock’s career in later years followed the normal course. He filled every appointment with credit to himself, and brought to his duties not only abounding energy, but the sporting instinct. He never married. His outlook on life and his attractive conception of the naval career found expression, after his promotion to captain, in a little book entitled Whispers from the Fleet (1907). Cradock had already written Sporting Notes in the Far East (1889), and Wrinkles in Seamanship (1894), but in his latest book he addressed himself in particular to young officers who were entering upon their careers. In view of his subsequent fate, this volume has peculiar interest. He packed it with sound common sense and did not disdain to bring to his aid anecdotes and humorous pictures. He adopted and emphasized the maxim that ‘a naval officer should never let his boat go faster than his brain; a dash into a basin at 20 knots even in the strongest winds and cross tides is unnecessary. Should it come off, there is only a matey or two to see, and if it does not, there is a stone wall and a court of inquiry ahead.’ He expressed a contempt for those who were ‘for ever writing to the newspapers to prove that because one nation would have six and a half battleships built in three years, and another four and a quarter commenced next month, unless we immediately do something we shall in ten years time be seven-eighths of a battleship behind the combined navies of the world—not forgetting Timbuctoo’. The strength of the navy, he suggested, consisted in the complete loyalty and good comradeship between officers and men and ‘the sacred laws of naval discipline’. To him the navy was not a collection of ships, but a community of men with high purpose, and he had confidence that, ‘though it had lost its masts and sails, our personnel (after a few hard knocks) will prove as good as ever’.
Cradock was promoted rear-admiral in 1910, and created K.C.V.O. in 1912. In February 1913 he was appointed to the command of the North America and West Indies station. At the outbreak of war, he was faced with a task of great difficulty. With his flag in the armoured cruiser Suffolk, he had, it is true, a much larger force under his command than the two German light cruisers immediately opposed to him; but the area under his control extended from the St. Lawrence to Brazil; and, as the admiral in charge of a force designed for commerce protection, he had the duty of seeing that enemy merchant ships in Atlantic ports were shadowed and that the flow of British trade was maintained. He performed this varied work very skilfully; during the first week of the war he drove both German cruisers off the trade routes, and only missed destroying one of them—the Karlsruhe—by a very narrow margin. On 14 August 1914 the Admiralty was able to telegraph to Paris: ‘The passage across the Atlantic is safe; British trade is running as usual.’
Cradock was now compelled to take similar measures for the southern Atlantic, whither he had driven his opponents. Before proceeding south, he hoisted his flag in the Good Hope, and early in September arrived at Pernambuco, where he was told by the Admiralty that the German admiral, von Spee, with the enemy’s China squadron, was assumed to be moving eastwards across the Pacific with the Falkland Islands as a possible objective. This message quite altered the nature and scope of Cradock’s duties, as he was now faced with the double problem of countering every possible move on the part of a powerful, concentrated squadron, and, at the same time of protecting trade against the Dresden which was still at large. Either task was extraordinarily difficult; if he went in search of his principal opponent it would be quite possible for Admiral von Spee to slip past, and then fall upon our trade and coaling bases in the Atlantic. In these circumstances, Cradock telegraphed to the Admiralty that the only way of dealing with the situation was to concentrate two forces, one to the east and one to the west of the Magellan Straits, and to make each sufficiently powerful to crush Admiral von Spee’s squadron. This the Admiralty, with urgent demands at the moment for naval
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