Ships
- HMS Dorsetshire (40) Captain from 18 August 1941 · Survived her sinking on 5 April 1942
Augustus Willington Shelton Agar was born in Kandy, Ceylon, on 4 January 1890, the thirteenth child of John Shelton Agar, an Irish tea planter from County Kerry, and his Austrian wife Emily Crüwell. His mother died when he was a baby and his father in 1902. Sent to school in England at eight, he went to Framlingham College, and his eldest brother steered him to the Navy. In 1904 he entered the cadet training ship Britannia at Dartmouth.
He served in the Grand Fleet and at the Dardanelles in the First World War and later moved to the small, fast coastal motor boats (CMBs). At the end of 1918 Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, asked him to take two CMBs to the Baltic to run British agents in and out of Bolshevik Russia. From a hidden base at Terijoki in Finland he crossed minefields and slipped past the forts of Kronstadt on a mission to retrieve the agent Paul Dukes.
On 17 June 1919 he went further. With CMB 4 he got past a destroyer screen into the approaches to Kronstadt. The boat broke down and had to be repaired alongside a breakwater for twenty minutes in plain view of the enemy, but he went on and torpedoed and sank the 6,645-ton cruiser Oleg, then escaped under heavy fire. He was awarded the Victoria Cross on 22 August. In the larger raid of 18 August he guided six other boats through the minefields and was appointed to the DSO. In 1920 he married Mary Petre, 19th Baroness Furnivall.
When the Second World War began he commanded the cruiser Emerald on the Northern Patrol, and in 1940 he planned Operation Lucid, the attempt to burn the German invasion barges in the Channel ports. He was chief staff officer of Coastal Forces from November 1940 to July 1941.
In August 1941 he took command of the heavy cruiser Dorsetshire. In the South Atlantic on 1 December 1941 she caught the German U-boat supply ship Python, which scuttled herself. After Pearl Harbor she escorted troop convoys to Bombay and Singapore, carried evacuees out of Singapore, landed Royal Marines in Burma and escorted the last convoy out of Rangoon.
In early April 1942 she was in Colombo with her engines opened up for refit when Admiral Nagumo's carriers entered the Indian Ocean. Agar reassembled the machinery and sailed with Cornwall at 10 p.m. on 4 April to join Admiral Somerville. On Easter Sunday, 5 April, with Colombo silent under attack, he chose to keep on toward the rendezvous rather than turn west, hoping to join a night attack on the Japanese. Spotted at 11:30, the two cruisers were caught by dive bombers about 1 p.m. Dorsetshire took some ten bombs and sank eight minutes after the first hit; Cornwall went down too. About 500 of Dorsetshire's men, Agar among them, spent some 32 hours in the water before Enterprise, Paladin and Panther rescued them. Survivors remembered him calmly gathering the wounded and the stragglers. Only 16 of the men who went into the water died.
He had been wounded in the leg and suffered lung damage from an air embolism and swallowed oil, which ended his seagoing career. He oversaw the completion of the carrier Unicorn in Belfast, then from 1943 to 1946 served as a commodore and president of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. In retirement he farmed strawberries at Alton, Hampshire, and wrote two memoirs, Footprints in the Sea and Baltic Episode. He died on 30 December 1968 and is buried at Alton.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Augustus Agar" (citing Agar's memoirs and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; accessed 2 Nov 2026).
Live Pacific Ships page for this officer (Dorsetshire, Indian Ocean raid).