[1][2][3][4][5][6] Born in Duncannon, Ireland, he was the son of British army captain Francis Charles Cromie of the Hampshire Regiment (later Consul-General in Dakar, Senegal).

[1][2][3][6] In 1906 he was awarded the bronze Royal Humane Society medal, while serving on submarine HMS A3 at Spithead, he tried to save a sailor who was swept overboard.

[1][2][3] Together with his knowledge of the Russian language and prevailing conditions, on 19 October 1917 he was promoted Acting Captain and appointed as naval attaché to the British Embassy in the tense revolutionary city of Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), Russia.

[2][3] Other accounts and sources, however, reveal that meetings with other Russian members of the counter-revolution were at that time taking place, namely with the former imperial Tsarist officers Lieutenant Sabir and Colonel Steckelmann.

[5][6] Other accounts and sources, however, reveal Captain Cromie was having tea with the British Chaplain, Mr. Lombard, and he had stepped out of the room to return in a short moment.

[2][3] British Foreign Office advices declared; attaché Captain Cromie opposed the Bolshevik troops and killed three soldiers with his own hands.

[2] On 3 September 1918, American Consul Haynes (the first American Consul of career)[10] at Helsinki in Finland, officially reported the murder of Captain Cromie and attack on the British embassy to the United States Department of State, that the entire British embassy personnel in Petrograd had been arrested, and similar arrests had simultaneously taken place in Moscow.

[2] The embassy attack and killing of naval attaché Captain Cromie was reported with intense indignation by the British news media.

A firsthand recount, published in 1934 by Mary Britnieva,[11] a Red Cross nurse who had served on the Eastern Front, recounts the events witnessed by her sister-in-law, who was in the British embassy at the time of the attack: Francis Cromie married Gladys (Gwladys) Catherine Josephine (née Cromie) March 1907, in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England.

[8] Covered with the Union flag, his body was finally buried in Smolensky Cemetery, Saint Petersburg, by the Scottish minister Dr.