Thread by @RussInCheshire

By-election day in #TivertonandHoniton , so let me tell about their former MP, who was once one of the most famous people in England, a national hero, a disgraced fraudster, and an astonishingly accomplished piratical maniac.

He had quite a life.

Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane was born in 1775 in Hamilton, Scotland, and I should confess immediately that I really admire the guy.

I also think he was capable of epic twattery, and if he was alive now he'd be in jail or Downing Street. Probably both.

Same old same old.

Practically as soon as he was potty-trained, he began his career of indisputable heroism, technical innovation, radical politics, nepotism, corrupting elections, stock-market fraud, almost starting world wars, legalised piracy, mercenary warfare, and shameless bullshit.

Aged just 5, he was registered as a crew member on no fewer than four simultaneous Royal Navy ship.

This meant, on paper at least, he'd gain the years of service required for later promotion. This practice was 100% illegal, obviously, but loads of rich families did it.

His father also secured for the boy a commission in the Army.

This meant by the age of 11 he was – on paper – simultaneously fighting on 4 separate warships, route-marching across a couple of continents, and receiving daily tutoring at his home in Fife.

His real-world naval career began when aged 17 he joined a ship under his uncle’s command.

By 20 he was a lieutenant, was transferred to the flagship, and immediately fell out with absolutely everybody who wasn’t related to him, and many who were.

Throughout his career, at sea and on land, he quarrelled lavishly and spectacularly with superiors, subordinates, political opponents, party colleagues, multiple admirals, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the entire body of officers and sailors of the Chilean navy.

His capacity for causing trouble was breath-taking: within months of joining the Royal Navy he was court-martialled for disrespect. It was rumoured he was shagging the wife of his commanding Admiral, and he was often sent on seemingly impossible missions, just to get rid of him.

Despite this, he thrived because he was – depending on who you ask – either remarkably good at killing the French and Spanish; or just as good as anybody else, but one of the lucky few who survived long enough to tell their side of the story.

Cochrane took part in a couple of actions, and was given command of the 14-gun ship "Speedy" – one of the smallest in the Royal Navy – in which he charged around the Mediterranean attacking anything that could float and wasn’t a dead gannet.

No swash was left unbuckled.

He was astonishing. In his first year in command, Speedy captured or sank 53 enemy ships - one a week.

In most cases, he planned as meticulously as he could, but in his most celebrated action he unexpectedly stumbled upon the Spanish ship "El Gamo" and had to improvise.

He began the action at a massive disadvantage.

When you captured a ship you had to send it back to port, with some of your own crew on board. He’d captured so many, his ship was already struggling with half its normal capacity. And then El Gamo rocked up.

El Gamo was four times the size of Speedy, with twice as many guns and six times as many crew.

In such circumstances a captain was expected sail away as fast as possible, even throwing his own guns overboard to make the ship lighter and faster.

Cochrane was having none of it.

Instead, in frankly dazzling display of seamanship and courage, said "fuck it" and sailed straight at her, enduring a couple of full broadsides as he charged.

He had nowhere to hide. He stood on the deck, not returning fire, as the Spaniards fired cannon at him for 15 minutes.

Cochrane had realised El Gamo was SO much bigger than his own ship that if he literally bumped hulls with her, she wouldn't be able to fire down onto his decks. But he could fire into her hull, point blank.

When El Gamo tried to board Speedy, he just steered 20 feet away

When the Spanish boarding party ran back to fire their guns at the now shootable Speedy, Cochrane just crashed into El Gamo again, and kept firing from zero feet away.

After half a bloody hour of this, he led his tiny crew onto the deck of a ship four times bigger

The only man he left aboard Speedy was the ship’s doctor.

Not only that, he actually charged using only half his men – he sent the rest around the back of the ship to attack from behind.

So he ended up beating 600 armed Spaniards with just 40 knackered men

Honestly: amazing.

In those days, when a captain captured a ship, the govt literally bought it off him.

That year in the Med made Cochrane an Admiral, vastly famous, and epically rich. He retired and went into politics as a "radical", committed to ending the corrupt buying of seats in parliament

Unfortunately, his opponent in the seat of Honiton wasn't averse to buying votes. Cochrane lost. But he tried again a couple of years later, won the seat, and ended his life in the Lords.

Stirring music. Fade to black. Exit via the gift shop. What a hero.

Right?

Erm...

Turns out, Cochrane won the seat of Honiton by the simple expedient of paying ten guineas per vote.

He denied doing it at the time, but a decade later he literally stood up in parliament and announced he was only there because he paid for each vote. Blatant corruption.

He then took a bit of time off from winning global conflicts and corrupting democracy, cos he had an idea for some tunnelling equipment, which he patented along with an engineer you might have heard about: Brunel.

It was used to build the Thames Tunnel.

Then he gave some thought to paving, and patented the use of asphalt, which is still used on pretty much every road in pretty much every part of the world.

He did that. Asphalt. On his day off.

He also invented multiple improvements to naval equipment and street lighting.

But it wasn't all fun: he next became deeply embroiled in the aptly named Great Stock Exchange Fraud.

In 1814, as the Napoleonic war continued, a man arrived in a pub in Dover, claiming he was aide to a British General, and had news Napoleon was dead, and war was over

News spread fast, and the Stock Market went ape-shit.

The value of govt bonds soared in the morning, and then, as it became increasingly clear the entire thing was a hoax, the value plummeted again in the afternoon.

Plus ça change.

But why would somebody perpetrate such a hoax?

Who could possibly gain by telling palpable lies to a gullible public about the collapse of a major European political infrastructure? It is a complete mystery, obviously.

Investigations found that days before the fake news arrived in Dover, 6 individuals purchased £1.1m of govt stocks, which they sold during that morning's boom. £1.1m is equivalent to a few billion today. We're talking big money.

And one of those investors? Thomas Cochrane.

The pretend aide spreading rumours in Dover was the arrestingly-named Charles Random de Berenger, a Prussian aristocrat who had been seen entering Cochrane’s home on the day before the hoax.

Cochrane was arrested and put on trial, and his defence came down to this:

What do I, a mere life-long sailor, know about pubs in our major ports?

How can I, a mere member of the House of Commons, be expected to understand the stock market?

You can trust me; I’ve only been telling documented lies since I was 5 years old

He was found guilty, stripped of his knighthood and his naval rank, expelled from parliament, fined, and sentenced to be put in the stocks in a public place, and pelted with whatever old shite passers-by could find for a few hours.

This sounds mild, bordering on being quite fun in a village fête kind of way; but it often resulted in the criminal losing an eye or two, and those who had become fans of Cochrane began to lobby against the sentence.

We don't want our political heroes to face justice, do we?

But mainstream politicians, keen to see justice and honesty retain a place in our society, insisted Cochrane should be punished. They pointed out that he was not exactly a stable, law-abiding character.

A few years earlier one of his parliamentary colleagues had ...

... barricaded himself into his own home to avoid an arrest warrant. Being a decent chap who wants the best for everybody, Cochrane had offered to come to his aid.

And that all sounds quite kind and helpful until you realise Cochrane’s plan was ...

... to gather together some old shipmates, bombard the London townhouse with cannon, and then storm it, leaving the property destroyed and the arresting officers (and probably everyone else) dead.

A good indication of Cochrane’s views on the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.

Yet the public loves a rogue, especially one who annoys the French, and enough people were passionately pro-Cochrane that the evidence no longer seemed to matter.

His sentence was downgraded, and other than a £1000 fine, he essentially got away with a (probable) vast fraud.

[There have been long suggestions the entire fraud was just … a fraud. The theory is that the Admiralty wanted to publicly disown Cochrane so they could send him on a secret mission to destabilise Spanish South America, and plausibly deny it was on behalf of Britain]

You'd think that would be enough for one life? We've barely started.

To escape controversy, Cochrane moved to, of all places, Chile, a nation which officially didn't exist, being a colony of Spain. He made friends with the leaders of the independence movement.

And just 2 months later he was made a citizen and an Admiral in the Chilean Navy, and told to win their independence.

His default plan for practically everything - from a roast-beef dinner, to a friend’s marriage, to a Spanish flagship - was to destroy it in a demented fury

So he set about organising the Chilean navy with his usual zeal.

And yet, in the proud tradition of Britons abroad, he refused so utterly to speak any Spanish that the entire Chilean Navy had to speak English, and widely hated him for it.

But against all odds he held things together long enough to help free Chile and Peru from their colonial masters.

Remarkably, in less than two years, and without speaking a word of the local language, he helped bring about independent government across the region.

Then, presumably bored by peace, he apparently started a rumour that he wanted to invade Saint Helena and free the imprisoned Napoleon from his exile.

Napoleon would then (it was supposed) forgive Cochrane for single-handedly sinking half the French Navy...

... and then (it was supposed) Napoleon and Cochrane would join forces to rule a unified South America.

Needless to say, the Chileans and Peruvians were less than keen on this idea, so Cochrane was cordially invited to fuck off to a different continent.

So he came back to Europe, and did the same thing again, this time in Greece.

He joined the Greek independence movement, and in only a couple of years his military skills had helped to free the nation from Turkish rule.

The weird thing is, he appeared to be fiercely pro-Empire, but also entirely opposed to the notion of Empire.

Everybody should be free, except when they were colonised by Britain, in which case they should just be grateful. Sound familiar?

Anyway, after he’d pretty much single-handedly demolished Napoleon’s navy, driven the Spanish out of South America, and battered the Ottoman Empire into dust, the British decided it was time to let bygones be bygones, and he was invited back.

By the time he got back to Britain, everybody seemed to have forgotten we'd kicked him out in disgrace, and he was swiftly knighted for a second time, reinstated into the Royal Navy as an Admiral, and given a seat in the House of Lords.

By the time the Crimean War began, Cochrane was an old man, but that wasn’t why the Navy didn’t give him a command.

Bluntly, the British concluded Cochrane was too likely to lead a daring attack and risk the entire fleet.

Aged 80, he was still a nutter.

But he didn’t want to sit out a good fight, so he hired a warship – yeah, you could do that in those days – crewed it out of his own pocket, and offered to charge up and down the Russian coast bombarding their ports, like a mad octogenarian pirate.

He lived long enough to be photographed, and died aged 84 during surgery.

He is buried in Westminster Abbey, a location which means, unlike Nelson, not a single pigeon gets to shit on him.

And to this day the Chilean Navy holds an annual wreath-laying ceremony at his grave.

The end

Yes, I'm well aware he's the model for Jack Aubrey in the (truly BRILLIANT) books by Patrick O'Brien - that's how I first heard of Cochrane.

Somebody should turn his life (or the books) into an epic series.