Commander, the Hon. Edward Barry Stewart Bingham
HMS Nestor, Royal Navy
(1881 – 1939)
Family Background:
Born in Bangor Castle in County Down to Lord Clanmorris, Bingham was not the typical Irish serviceman in the war.
He entered the Royal Navy, almost two decades before the outbreak of WWI, in 1895 (1).
Jutland – May 31st, 1916:
The Battle of Jutland was the largest, and most celebrated, naval battle of the Great War. Neither the British nor the German side won a decisive victory, but the battle did further cement Britain’s mastery of the seas.
Bingham, in command of the ships Nestor, Nicator, and Nomad, lauched a successful torpedo attack on a number of German battleships. Unfortunately it cost him his ships as well, which were sunk to the bottom of the sea (2).
Captured that same day as a prisoner of war, he was intially thought to be dead. He spent the remainder of the war a prisoner, until his release in December, 1918. Bingham was than given his V.C. by King George V, the only Jutland V.C. not given posthumously (3).
A copy of the London Gazette describing these actions and announcing his V.C. win can be found here
As the son of Irish nobility and a native of Northern Ireland, Bingham is with the collective memory of the North.
(1). “Commander Barry Bingham VC,” Imperial War Museum, accessed December 3, 2016, http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/commander-barry-bingham-vc.
(2). “Commander Barry Bingham VC.”
(3). Richard Doherty and David Truesdale, Irish Winners of the Victoria Cross (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 116.