Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A superb campaign group of nine awarded to First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Hood of Avalon, G.C.B., Royal Navy

Naval General Service 1793-1840, 1 clasp, Syria (A. W. A. Hood, Midshipman.); Crimea 1854-55, 1 clasp, Sebastopol, unnamed as issued; China 1857-60, 2 clasps, Canton 1857, Fatshan 1857, unnamed as issued; Canada General Service 1866-70, 1 clasp, Fenian Raid 1866 (Captain Lord Hood of Avalon, H.M.S. Pylades) Canadian style impressed naming; Jubilee 1897, silver; Portugal, Kingdom, Military Order of Christ, breast badge, gold and enamels; Ottoman Empire, Order of the Medjidie, 5th class, silver, gold and enamel; St Jean d’Acre 1840, silver; Turkish Crimea 1855, Sardinian issue, light contact marks, otherwise good very fine or better (9) £4,000-£5,000

Arthur William Acland Hood was born on 14 July, 1824, the younger son of Sir Alexander Hood of St. Andries, Somerset, second baronet, and grandson of Captain Alexander Hood, who was mortally wounded when in command of the Mars, in her action with the French 74-gun ship l'Hercule, and died in the moment of victory, on 21 April, 1798. The baronetcy was conferred on Captain Hood's brother Samuel, who commanded the Zealous in the battle of the Nile, and died in 1815, whilst Commander-in-Chief in the East Indies. He had no issue, and the title, by special remainder, passed to his nephew. Belonging to a family so distinguished in our naval annals, Arthur Hood's career was almost naturally shaped out for him, and he entered the Navy in August, 1836. He saw some little fighting on the north coast of Spain, where the Civil War was then raging, and afterwards on the coast of Syria, where, in 1840, he was present at the reduction of Acre. In 1844-45 he went through a course of mathematics and gunnery on board the Excellent and at the college in Portsmouth Dockyard. He then was appointed to the President, flagship of Rear-Admiral Dacres at the Cape of Good Hope, and a few months later, on 9 January, 1846, was promoted to be one of her lieutenants. He remained in the President till she was paid off in January 1849, and after a year's holiday he was appointed, in January 1850, to the Arethusa, then commissioned for the Mediterranean by Captain Symonds, afterwards very well known as Admiral of the Fleet Sir Thomas Symonds. With Symonds, in the Arethusa, Hood continued for nearly five years, and was promoted to the rank of commander on 27 November 1854, for service with the naval brigade before Sebastopol. In 1856 he commissioned the Acorn brig for China, where he took part in the action with the junks in Fatshan Creek on 1 June 1857, and served with the naval brigade at the capture of Canton in the following December. For this he received his promotion to captain on 26 February 1858. He had now several years on shore, and it was not till December 1862, that he was appointed to the Pylades for the North America Station, where he remained for nearly four years, when he was recalled to England to take the command of the Excellent, then as now the headquarters of instruction in naval gunnery. He held this command for three years, and for the five following years was Director of Naval Ordnance, in which post he showed himself a careful, painstaking officer, though without the genius that was especially wanted at a period of great change. Irrespective of politics, Hood was by temperament a very old-fashioned conservative, and clung to the ideas of the past after they had ceased to be suitable for the present. The C.B. was conferred on him on 20 May 1871, and, in June 1874, he was appointed to command the turret ship Monarch in the Channel Fleet.
On 22 March 1876, Hood was made a rear-admiral, and in January 1877, he accepted a seat at the Admiralty. From December 1879, to April 1882, he commanded the Channel Fleet, and in June 1885, he was appointed First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, in succession to Sir Cooper Key, and in the administration of Lord George Hamilton. The four years which followed were years of great change and great advance, but it was commonly supposed that Hood's efforts were mainly devoted to preventing the advance from becoming too rapid. Like his predecessor he scarcely understood the essential needs of England as a great naval Power, and several of his public declarations might be thought equivalent to an expression of belief that, useful as the Navy was, the country could get on very well without it. On 14 July 1889, having reached the age of 65, he was put on the Retired List, and at the same time resigned his post at the Admiralty. He continued, however, to take an active interest in naval affairs; and, somewhat curiously, showed in occasional letters in our columns and elsewhere a more correct appreciation of the problems of naval supremacy than he was supposed to have done during his official life.
He had obtained the rank of vice-admiral on 23 July 1880, and of admiral on 18 January 1886. In December 1885, he was made a K.C.B., and a G.C.B. in September 1889. In February 1892, he was raised to the peerage as Lord Hood of Avalon. He married, in October 1855, Fanny Henrietta, third daughter of Sir Charles Fitzroy Maclean, and had issue two daughters.