[16] It was Dewar's misfortune during this service to be taken in by the Dreadnought hoax on 10 February, in which he escorted a party of practical jokers, that included Virginia Woolf, pretending to be Abyssinian royalty, on an official visit to the battleship.

[8] Dewar was reappointed to Dreadnought on 28 March 1911,[17] was promoted Commander on 22 June[18] and on 14 December he was appointed for duty at the Royal Naval War College, Portsmouth as an instructor.

On 4 March 1913, it was announced that Commander Dewar had been awarded the Gold Medal and Trench-Gascoigne Prize by the Royal United Service Institution for his winning essay on the question "What is the war value of oversea commerce?

Dewar was then and remained unsympathetic to the removal of his concluding chapter; In light of later events, the opposition aroused by my proposals may seem extraordinary, but they marked [in his opinion] a complete break with tradition and were far from obvious at the time.

After Richmond went abroad on active service, Dewar decided that instead of being a society of purely discussion, it ought publish a journal, to which end he "raised subscriptions for the first issue from some forty or fifty officers of all ranks".

On 28 July, Dewar married Gertrude Margaret Stapleton-Bretherton, the sister of Evelyn, Princess Blücher, in a service at St. Bartholomew's Church in Rainhill on Merseyside.

Prince of Wales remained in the 5th Battle Squadron until 1915, when with a number of other pre-dreadnoughts she was sent to the Eastern Mediterranean to support the Gallipoli landings, the goal of which was to capture the strategically important Dardanelles Straits, take Constantinople and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war.

Following aborted attempts to lend heavy-gunfire support to the troops at ANZAC Cove, Dewar wrote an unofficial memo to the Rear-Admiral commanding the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, with suggestions for the employment of indirect fire to attack Turkish targets.

Dewar followed the Beatty school of thought espoused by his former captain, Herbert Richmond, that the battle had been lost by the staid admirals of the battleship squadrons.

In November 1920 he and his brother Captain Alfred Dewar (retired) were entrusted with compiling the Naval Staff Appreciation of the battle, which was completed in January 1922.

[32] The two brothers had produced a body of work which favoured Beatty, for whom the Dewars' "capacity for original thinking and literary talents always held an appeal.

"[33] Even Richmond, who intensely disliked Jellicoe and was a confidant of Beatty, agreed with the Committee on Imperial Defence's official naval historian, Sir Julian Corbett who wrote that Dewar's "facts were, I found, very loose.

"[34][b] The Appreciation, which had originally been intended for distribution around the Royal Navy, was deemed so full of "far-reaching and astringent criticism of Jellicoe"[35] and of a new and therefore irrelevant tactical theory that Beatty and his Board of Admiralty were compelled to decide against its publication.

[36] The final straw had been the very public heckling of Dewar when he lectured from his Appreciation to the twenty students of the Senior Officers' War Course at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich.

[37] Churchill wrote an anti-Jellicoe tract in his World Crisis, Volume III which in large measure shared Dewar's views on tactics and even some diagrams.

He was fortunate after the "Geddes Axe" (the systematic contraction of the Naval Service to a size substantially smaller than its pre-war level) and his controversial tenure at the Admiralty that he was still considered worthy of sea duty, the qualification for promotion to flag rank.

During the U.S. blockade of the Mexican port of Tampico in 1924, Dewar and Cape Town cancelled their planned cruise of the Caribbean to adequately represent the British government at Vera Cruz, proceeding there on 4 January.

After two years in the position, he was relieved in June 1927 and given from 15 October command of the battleship Royal Oak, flagship of the Rear-Admiral in the 1st Battle Squadron, Mediterranean Fleet.

[c] Notwithstanding, Collard on occasion acted imperiously and tactlessly on his flagship, causing friction with Dewar and his executive officer, Commander Henry Martin Daniel, DSO.

[44] Dewar and Daniel, feeling that morale was sinking due to these public displays, wrote letters of complaint which were given to Collard on 10 March, on the eve of a major exercise.

[45] Having arrived back in England, Dewar and Daniel gave their version of events at the Admiralty, and put in writing requests for reinstatement in their positions in Royal Oak, or trial by court-martial.

Having received Keyes' full dispatch on 16 March, the Board of Admiralty resolved that Dewar and Daniel should undergo trial by court-martial as soon as possible at Gibraltar, where Royal Oak was due to be berthed.

Out of four charges which Daniel faced, two related to writing an allegedly subversive letter (the complaint) and the other two to publicly reading it out to officers of Royal Oak.

Much to the surprise of many, on 25 September 1928 it was announced that from 5 November Dewar would be given command of the battle cruiser Tiger, the oldest of her type still in service and engaged primarily in training.

The posters, which Dewar himself called "propaganda sheets", were titled "Admiral Dewar's Election News", and carried the statement "The British Navy at Jutland in 1916 beat the ex-Kaiser; and at Invergordon in 1931 it beat Mr. Montagu Norman", and featured prominently a depiction of the former Kaiser of Germany in civilian clothing in front of a sea battle, with the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, looking on.

[55] Responding to a review of The Navy from Within in The Naval Review which questioned the prominence of "The Royal Oak Affair" in the book, Dewar responded by stating; When the Royal Oak case demonstrated to the whole Navy that it was more than dangerous to make a complaint against a superior in accordance with the regulations, it paved the way to the Invergordon Mutiny and several minor incidents of the same kind, each of which might have been avoided if men had had faith in the statutory right of complaint.

The solicitors acting on behalf of Aspinall-Oglander and the publishers, Hogarth Press Ltd., agreed to apologise in court and paid Dewar damages and expenses.

[58] In 1957, he returned to his earlier theme on the failings of officer training, in a three-part exposition on the Dardanelles Campaign for The Naval Review, the journal he had helped found over forty years previously.

In the concluding article, published in October 1957, Dewar wrote that the failure of the Navy to adequately support the Army at Gallipoli "is to be found in the system of training officers which consciously or unconsciously suppressed independent thought and suggestions from subordinates.

c. ^ The Rear-Admiral in a battle squadron would in action command half the ships in a tactical formation called a division, and therefore required a small staff.