Hood, Sir Horace

(October 2, 1870, Tunbridge Wells – May 31, 1916, off the Skagerrak), British admiral. Hood entered the Royal Navy as a sea cadet in 1882. He took part in various imperial military operations: in 1897 on board a gunboat on the Nile, in the Boer War of 1898–1900, and in 1904 against the Dervishes in Somalia. Between 1910 and 1913 he commanded the Royal Naval College at Osborne. He then became captain of HMS Centurion, and in June 1914 Naval Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. In October 1914 Hood took command of a flotilla of …