- See John William Cobb’s entry on the Board of Trade’s Ancestry public tree.
- This information updates the group’s previous research published on the former DTI website (now archived by the National Archives).
- Do you have any more information about John William Cobb? If so the War Memorial Research Group would love to hear from you
Name recorded on Board of Trade Memorial: J. W. Cobb
Born: 20 November 1882, Gateshead, Durham, England
Date of Death: 1 November 1914
Age at death: 32
Service, Regiment, Corps, etc: Royal Navy
Unit, Ship, etc: HMS Good Hope
Enlisted: Gateshead
Rank: Leading Seaman (Service No: 206567)
Decorations: WW1 Service Medals (1914 Star, Victory Medal, British War Medal)
War (and theatre): WW1
Manner of Death: Killed in Action (KIA) when ship sunk
Family Details: Son of Rebecca Cobb of Gateshead on Tyne. Husband of Alice Wood (formerly Cobb), 17 Bolivar Place, Gateshead on Tyne
Residence:
Home Department: Board of Trade – Labour Department (Northern Division)
Civilian Rank:
Cemetery or Memorial: Portsmouth Naval Memorial; Board of Trade War Memorial; Memorial to Staff of the Ministry of Labour; Memorial plaque in 21st May Square,Coronel, Chile
Biography:
John William Cobb was the first man from the Board of Trade to be killed in WW1.
He was born on 20 November 1882 in Gateshead, County Durham, England. His mother was Rebecca Cobb (1831-1939) and his step father was Richard Lowey (1862-1911). They were married in 1884. He had four step-sisters – Mary Jane Lowey (1886-?), Margaret Ann Lowey (1887-1898), Sarah Lowey (1889-1982) and Rebecca Lowey (1890-1968) and two step-brothers – Richard Lowey (1893-1947) and James Lowey (1903-1975).
John appears in several census records, with the first being in 1891 aged 9 when the Lowey family are living at 93 Burdon Street, Gateshead. He then appears aged 19 in the 1901 census on as a crew member on a Royal Navy vessel.
John first enlisted in the Royal Navy aged 16 on 18 September 1899. His full naval service history survives so we know that he served on a range of ships in the years between 1899 and 1905 such as the Northampton, Caracas, Victory, St George, Australia, Duke of Wellington and Duncan.
On 3 October 1903 he married Alice Mary McKeon (1885-1928) in Portsmouth. They do not appear to have had any children.
By the 1911 census, John was back living in Gateshead with Alice at 12 Balfour Street, Bensham. By this time he is recorded working as a caretaker for the Board of Trade’s local Labour Exchange.
At the start of WW1, John re-attested and served in the Royal Naval Reserve as a Leading Seaman on board the HMS Good Hope. The rank of leading seaman was a junior non-commissioned naval rank.
No photos of John are known to survive but the photos below are some of the officers and men of HMS Good Hope (sources: https://www.hedgeend-tc.gov.uk/archive-1/community-events-archive/serviceman-of-hms-good-hope/ and https://www.battleships-cruisers.co.uk/ship_photo.php?ProdID=101565)
HMS Good Hope was one of four “Drake” class armoured cruisers built in around 1900. Originally called “Africa”,the ship was renamed ahead of its launch. During WW1, the Good Hope as a reinforcement ship commanded by Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock (1862-1914).
The Good Hope and other ships in the squadron were based off the coast of South America in the autumn of 1914. They were tasked with finding German naval squadron’s. On 1 November 1914, they encountered the German force off he coast of Chile. The German ships outnumbered the British and were also more powerful, and two British armoured cruisers, the HMS Good Hope and HMS Monmouth were sunk in the Battle of Coronel which was a shocking loss for the British. They lost 1,600 sailors and it has been described as “Britain’s worst naval disaster for 100 years”. In comparison not a single German life was lost.
The naval battle was widely reported in the British press (as shown by the newspaper headlines published in the Nottingham Evening Post and The Daily Citizen on 6 and 7 November 1914 (source: British Newspaper Archive). First reports were patchy – with reports that the Good Hope had survived – and unconfirmed with no official confirmation from the Admiralty.
In his memory we republish here the words from an old DTI News article called “The Forgotten Men – Part 3” which was first published in October 2000 and tells his WW1 story.
For John Cobb, Good Hope meant no hope
When John Cobb had the dubious distinction of being the first Board of Trade man to lose his life in the First World War, it was largely down to the incompetence of the Admiralty, explains Christopher Yorke-Edwards.
Cobb was serving in HMS Good Hope, an elderly armoured cruiser with just two 9.2 inch guns and 16 broadside-mounted six-inch guns, half of which were so low down they could not be used in any sea that was much more than a flat calm. She was commissioned on mobilisation with a scratch crew comprising 90 per cent reservists.
When Good Hope became the flagship of Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher (Kit) Cradock, her crew had practised firing her guns only once. Admiral Cradock was one of a number of commanders tasked to locate and destroy the crack German East Asiatic Squadron which had been making its way from its pre-war base in China across the Pacific Ocean towards South America.
The German ships, which included the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, were under the command of Vice-Admiral Graf von Spee. The two armoured cruisers, sister ships, each had eight 8.2-inch guns, all of which could be fought in a seaway, and highly trained crews who had won the Kaiser’s prize for gunnery efficiency.
Such ships, together with a number of light cruisers that had joined the squadron, would wreak havoc in the South Atlantic shipping lanes used heavily by British merchant vessels. John Cobb is unlikely to have been aware that among his erstwhile colleagues’ tasks back at the Board of Trade was arranging large shipments of meat from South America to feed the troops at the front.
Although the Admiralty appreciated the importance of destroying the German ships, they deployed many allied warships on less vital tasks elsewhere. At one point, they made the mistake of thinking von Spee was sailing west instead of east so Cradock’s squadron was not reinforced as it should have been. And their instructions were often badly worded and confusing, so, for example, that the Admiral thought he was supposed to engage the enemy even if his force was inadequate to gain victory.
The upshot of all this was that on 1 November, 1914, Good Hope, with the similarly ill-fitted and ill-prepared Monmouth, the light cruiser Glasgow and an armed merchant ship, engaged the German ships in battle off Coronel on the coast of Chile. Cradock’s force was certainly inadequate. Good Hope and Monmouth were soon sunk. No-one, not even the Germans, saw the going of the British Flagship. As night fell Good Hope, her Admiral and entire ship’s company, including our man John Cobb, slipped beneath the waves unobserved.
The Battle of Coronel was a disaster, not only in terms of lives and ships lost, but also in the reputation of the Royal Navy that revelled in the traditions of Nelson. Von Spee had destroyed Britannia’s image of invincibility.
Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, one of Britain’s most notable naval commanders at the time, observed: “Poor old Kit Cradock has gone at Coronel. His death and the loss of the ships and the gallant lives in them can be laid to the door of the incompetency of the Admiralty. They have broken over and over again the first principles of strategy.”
Back in Whitehall, retribution became the priority. On hearing the news of Coronel – the other two of Cradock’s ships had escaped – the Admiralty wasted no lime in dispatching two battlecruisers to seek out and destroy von Spee’s squadron. The two forces engaged off the Falkland Islands. The Germans were doomed and it was not long before they succumbed to the awesome firepower and superior range of the battlecruisers’ 12-inch guns.”
John died aged 32 and has no known grave. He is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial. He is also remembered by two Civil Service memorials – the Board of Trade War Memorial and the Memorial to Staff of the Ministry of Labour. His name is also recorded in De Ruvigny’s Roll of Honour with a brief entry stating: “COBB, JOHN WILLIAM, Leading Seaman (R.F.R., B. 1345), H.M.S. Good Hope; lost in the action off Coronel, on the coast of Chili, 1 Nov 1914”.
In 1989, a memorial was erected in Plaza 21 de Mayo in Coronel, Chile along with two plaques depicting the HMS Good Hope and HMS Monmouth. The inscription reads: “In memory of the 1,418 officers and sailors of the British military squadron and their Commander-in-Chief, Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, Royal Navy, who sacrificed their lives in the Naval Battle of Coronel, on 1 November 1914. The sea is their only grave. — 21st May Square plaque”.
The battle is not familiar in common British popular memory, but on 1 November 2014 on the 100th anniversary of the battle descendants and others returned to the site of the battle, at sea to lay flowers and remember, as does the Trade Historians Group as part of our ongoing research into all the men named on the Board of Trade War Memorial.
Board of Trade War Memorial 