On the memorial above Plymouth Sound, a Jewish midshipman faces the earl’s house across the water — and a whole forgotten history with him.

Among the names carved into the Naval Memorial on Plymouth Hoe is that of Midshipman V. Schreiber, who went down with the entire company of HMS Monmouth at the Battle of Coronel in November 1914. He was a Jewish boy from a city whose Jews had served the Royal Navy for two centuries, and the great white memorial that carries his name looks out, across the Sound, at the gun batteries and lawns of Mount Edgcumbe. Stand at either point and you can see the other. That single sightline holds one of the quietest and least-told stories in English maritime history.

Mount Edgcumbe is a naval house. The Edgcumbes’ Tudor mansion guards the western shore of the Sound, its Earl’s Battery still trained on the water; the first Earl was a Royal Navy admiral who had commanded the Plymouth station, raised to his earldom in 1789 by a king he received on the lawn while the fleet lay at anchor below.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)