He was the thirteenth child of John Shelton Agar/Eagar, an Irishman from Milltown, County Kerry, who had left his native land in 1860 to become a successful tea planter in Ceylon.

After time spent with a "crammer", he passed the entrance exams and in 1904 joined the naval cadet school, HMS Britannia, at Dartmouth.

She arrived in September 1915 at the Royal Navy base at Mudros on the Greek island of Lemnos at the entrance to the straits leading to the Black Sea.

The sheltered waters of the Aegean Sea and the straits enabled Hibernia to use all her guns and she was employed in firing at Turkish targets on Gallipoli and the nearby Asia Minor shore.

Hibernia returned to Britain when the Allies evacuated Gallipoli and was stationed at Rosyth with others of her class to guard against raids on the British coast by German ships.

Although it was apparent to local Allied commanders that the materiel landed after the spring of 1917 was not being put to good use, their advice to stop the flow was ignored by Whitehall.

This difficult and occasionally dangerous mission occupied the Iphigenia until the end of February 1918, when worsening conditions and a hostile Bolshevik government prompted a withdrawal.

It was planned that they be either towed or carried into battle on the German controlled coast by the light cruisers and destroyers of Commodore Sir Reginald Tyrwhitt's Harwich Force.

The shallow draught and high speed of the CMB made it ideal for landing on enemy occupied shores and making a quick getaway.

The last British agent left in Russia, Dukes had been infiltrating the Bolshevik government for some time and had made copies of top secret documents.

Also operating in the eastern Baltic Sea was a Royal Navy detachment of light cruisers and destroyers under Admiral Sir Walter Cowan.

Cowan's mission was to keep the sea lanes open to the newly independent Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, which were under threat of being overrun by Soviet Russia.

The Bolsheviks had seized much of the Russian fleet at Kronstadt, and Agar considered these vessels a menace to British operations and took it upon himself to attack the enemy battleships.

The attack was then resumed and a Russian cruiser, the 6,645 ton Oleg was sunk, after which Agar retired to the safety of the open bay under heavy fire.

On 30 September 1930, Agar was placed in command of the sloop HMS Scarborough attached to the North America and West Indies Squadron.

Other seagoing commands followed, first in early 1936 aboard the 4,190 ton anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Curlew, part of the Reserve Fleet at the Nore.

By the time they reached Halifax the Emerald had lost her ship's boats, rafts and various depth charges, wires, shackles and other valuable equipment, not to mention her spotter plane, a Fairey Seafox.

The last attempt seemed set to be successful until the command ship with Agar aboard, HMS Hambledon, a Hunt class destroyer, hit an acoustic mine mid-Channel and was severely damaged.

This was a critical position as the Germans were vigorously attacking the coastal convoys running down the English Channel and up and down the east coast from Scotland to the northeast of England down to London.

The toll on the East Coast convoys was just as great, with the threat of E-boats making a quick dash from ports in the Low Countries.

The problem was that if coastal convoys were discontinued, the British rail network could not handle the extra traffic and factories would be idle for lack of raw materials.

The ship carried a catapult operated reconnaissance aircraft (a Supermarine Walrus), had a great range and was designed for finding and destroying enemy commerce raiders.

Dorsetshire was berthed at the naval base at Simon's Town, South Africa, on 7 December 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and, soon after, British positions at Hong Kong, Shanghai and Malaya.

She was immediately assigned to escort a convoy of British troops just arriving from Halifax in American transports, originally destined for the Middle East, but now diverted to Singapore.

This was essential duty as these convoys were now vulnerable to attack by both German and Japanese raiders, passing by the less than friendly Vichy French island of Madagascar.

A Consolidated Catalina flying boat had just reported that it was shadowing a large force of enemy carriers accompanied by battleships steering west from the Malacca Straits, directly for Ceylon.

At this point, lacking further direction, as Somerville was maintaining radio silence and Colombo was out of action, Agar made a fatal decision.

Agar worked hard to save his crew, picking up the wounded in a whaler, gathering up stragglers and giving good advice.

[8] Augustus Agar was described by Alfred Draper in his book, Operation Fish, as a "slim, impeccably-uniformed man with an extremely courteous manner."

He devised a means (drawing on his Murmansk experience in 1917–18) of getting steam heat into the mess decks, so that the men coming from and going onto duty in the cold could get a "warm up".