UK Edition
Who's on the new £5 coin? Honouring the youngest sailor killed in the Battle of Jutland
“We’re not dead yet… I remain your ever loving son.” These were the last words that Lily Cornwell would receive from her boy Jack. On 2 June 1916, as she hurriedly made her way north from East London some five days later, she received word from the hospital ward in Grimsby—where her sixteen year old boy lay mortally wounded. “Your son is dead.”
Just three weeks prior to the fateful endnote, Jack Travers Cornwell had bid his family farewell at Keyham Naval Barracks, Devonport; where he hastily graduated from boy recruit to gunnery ‘sight setter’ aboard the HMS Chester.
Within the month, he would be killed—cut down by mortar debris during the Battle of Jutland—out in the icy depths of the North Sea. His ship had taken seventeen direct hits from German artillery fire; the bodies of his shipmates strewn among palls of smoke and contorted steel.
While Cornwell clung on at his post in ‘dutiful silence’ beside the ship’s huge forward naval gun—rendered useless by canon fire— his wounds proved too ruinous.
By some miracle his ship escaped the German High Seas Fleet giving chase and made a bid for the Humber estuary. But three days later, lain in a hospital ward, he died alone.
Of the 6,094 British sailors killed attempting to contain Vice-Admiral Scheer’s force, Cornwell would be recorded as the night’s youngest victim: a recent school leaver just turned sixteen. The valour displayed by the working class boy from Leyton would fast become military folklore; his martyrdom splashed on the front pages of every Fleet Street newspaper.
But since Jack’s canonisation, the significance of that evening has become overshadowed by tales of trench warfare—the embodiment of the First World War.
The nation remembers more vividly the horrors of Flanders Fields; Owen’s coughing hags asphyxiated by chlorine gas, and the lines of grey muttering faces told through the eyes of Siegfried Sassoon.
Less well known is the battle along the Danish peninsular, where the British Grand Fleet clashed with the Germany Imperial Navy in the first—and only—major naval engagement of the First World War.
Despite the many thousands of lives lost at Jutland, the battle would prove indecisive. Declared a stalemate by British press, the two forces would not face one another again in open water; the Germans, wary of incurring such heavy losses again, reverted to a strategy of submarine warfare until the war's conclusion.
But at home, where public morale was waning by the minute, Jack Cornwell's sacrifice would take on much wider significance.
Today, his legacy remains more than naval legend. A century after Cornwell's death, his great nephew Alex Saradis—himself an able seaman serving in the Royal Navy—will be present to see his ancestor commemorated with the minting of the Cornwell five pound coin.
One of just a handful of boys to be posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross during the war, Jack’s legacy will now be recirculated in the form of a silver coin, released to the public by the Royal Mint on Wednesday 21 September. Alex is all too aware of the day’s significance: Cornwell’s ‘silent’ bravery is a mantra he grew up with.
“Jack’s story was bred into us as Raleigh, it is part of our ethos,” Alex says, sitting on the bridge of HMS Iron Duke, a Type 23 frigate currently moored in Devonport—the same base from which his great uncle bid his final farewells some hundred years beforehand.
“At Raleigh, the church has a huge stained glass window of him; we have lectures on his bravery and the ethics he stood for. To know that a member of the family is revered and respected in the Navy is a great source of pride for me. He enshrines the values drilled into us.”
Alex’s journey into the rank-and-file of the Royal Navy may be markedly different to Cornwell’s—he joined aged 21, having completed his education at Nescot College, Surrey.
Whereas Jack was thrown straight from the classroom into the largest naval battle of the First World War, Alex has spent his first year stationed in harbour, awaiting deployment either to the Baltics or Mediterranean, where he will likely form part of the taskforce policing the turbulent waters between Europe and the Middle East. But even now, it is Cornwell’s story that inspires him most.
“To know the sacrifice he made at such a young age, what he must have gone through—none of us can really know what must have gone through his mind at the time.
“To be taken away at sixteen; knowing that you’re entering a battle you probably won’t survive. It’s not something that we can really comprehend in our time.”
Enlisting for initial training ten months ago, shortly before an Anglo-German fleet sailed through the Orkney Islands to commemorate the battle’s centenary, Alex is the first member of the family to join the Royal Navy since Cornwell. “It’s funny that I’m the first, a hundred years on. Like Jack, I wanted to go out and see the world.”
“There are a lot of parallels between us,” he adds, smiling. “I am training to specialise in warfare, which is the role he would have had; like him, I will be heading out to sea for the first time after completing the eight month training schedule.”
Although three generations separate the two men, the physical similarities between them are also discernible. Studying one of Cornwell’s postage stamps— five million of which were printed during the public appeal to have the VC awarded to him— it is clear that the pair share the same distinctive bushy eyebrows, with crowns of oily brown hair, waxed and combed back to sit behind the ears.
Alex shares the same half-smile, although his complexion is slightly different, on account of his father’s Greek heritage. The resemblance is almost uncanny. Or at least that would seem the case, if the picture had in fact been of Jack Cornwell.
“It’s not actually Jack, so I don’t know how alike we actually are,” Alex says quietly, almost embarrassed by the admission. “But I can certainly see the resemblances between myself and the boy in the photograph.”
The now iconic portrait, found smattered on every front page and penny stamp after the time of Cornwell’s death, is in fact an image of his Jack’s younger brother George—Alex’s great-great grandfather. “The similarities seem to run through the family I think. My grandfather’s father also looks like a spitting image of him – and of me.”
Brought up in abject poverty, no photographs are believed to exist of Jack; nor were any thought to have been taken during his lifetime. In an era when iconography was essential to the British war effort—Lord Kitchener’s pointing finger the paragon of early 20th century propaganda—using his brother as stand-in was considered the natural thing to do.
“I think some people could find it disingenuous today, but back then he was part of something important: he was helping to boost public morale,” Alex says.
The money raised from the ‘Jutland Jack’ penny stamp was used to build the Star and Garter Home for disabled sailors, in Cornwell’s home ward in Richmond.
“You can see why they did it, the money made a difference.”
What many may now find more controversial—and troubling to learn—is the plight of the Cornwell family after his death. While large sums of money were raised for public services during the Cornwell campaign, his family were left penniless; his father Eli dead within three months while on acting service.
His mother Lily—just widowed and left to collect her son’s medal at Buckingham Palace alone—followed shortly after. In reduced circumstances and working in a sailors’ hostel to supplement the negligible pension given to her for Jack’s service, she was found dead at home—aged 48.
“What happened to the Cornwells was tragic—but that was the way it was back then,” Alex says. "They were very proud people. They had his medal, but even in their condition, they wouldn’t have sold it. It meant something to them.”
It was only after the war that Cornwell and his family received their rightful accolades. Exhumed from a pauper’s grave and reburied with a public funeral, his grave now rests at Manor Park Cemetery; his mother and father’s names inscribed next to his.
After decades of research into his life and upbringing, Cornwell’s grave was also awarded Grade II listed status earlier this year. “It definitely makes you think,” Alex says, “but I’m glad they have been recognised now.”
After receiving his great uncle’s coin on Friday, now on display in the First World War Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, London, it is clear that Alex’s appreciation of Cornwell’s heroics is tempered by an understanding of where he stands among the young men and women who died fighting along the battle lines of Europe—“He was just one of many.”
Contemplating his own future in the Royal Navy—like the many service personnel serving today and in long forgotten wars—his outlook on bravery and valour are perhaps best exemplified by the words chiselled upon his great uncle’s tombstone: "It is not wealth or ancestry but honourable conduct and a noble disposition that maketh men great."