A Name in the Stone: Plymouth’s Jewish Sailors and the Price of Belonging

On the memorial above Plymouth Sound, a Jewish midshipman faces the earl’s house across the water — and a whole forgotten history with him.

Among the names carved into the Naval Memorial on Plymouth Hoe is that of Midshipman V. Schreiber, who went down with the entire company of HMS Monmouth at the Battle of Coronel in November 1914. He was a Jewish boy from a city whose Jews had served the Royal Navy for two centuries, and the great white memorial that carries his name looks out, across the Sound, at the gun batteries and lawns of Mount Edgcumbe. Stand at either point and you can see the other. That single sightline holds one of the quietest and least-told stories in English maritime history.

Mount Edgcumbe is a naval house. The Edgcumbes’ Tudor mansion guards the western shore of the Sound, its Earl’s Battery still trained on the water; the first Earl was a Royal Navy admiral who had commanded the Plymouth station, raised to his earldom in 1789 by a king he received on the lawn while the fleet lay at anchor below. Every guest who landed beneath the house was welcomed with a salute. The family belonged to the Navy and to the nation effortlessly, by birth and by the established church.

The men across the water belonged to the same fleet, but only at a price.

The Schombergs prove it. Sir Alexander Schomberg, son of the German-Jewish physician to London’s Great Synagogue, commanded the frigate Diana and served beside Wolfe at the taking of Quebec in 1759. He was knighted; Hogarth is said to have painted him. Yet to hold the King’s commission he had to satisfy the Test Act, which required communion in the Church of England — so Schomberg, raised a Jew, took the Anglican sacrament. To serve the Crown, he gave up his faith. The Edgcumbes, across the water, had only to be born.

His family filled the service for generations. Isaac Schomberg rose to commissioner of the Navy and famously clashed with the future William IV — appointed first lieutenant to steady an inexperienced royal captain, he countermanded the prince’s orders and demanded a court-martial, in a quarrel Nelson had to step in to settle. Alexander Wilmot Schomberg fought to the rank of admiral through the Napoleonic wars. A doctor of the Great Synagogue had founded a line of the King’s sea-officers — at the cost, at the outset, of the synagogue itself.

Below the officer class, Plymouth’s Jews kept the fleet at sea as “slopmen” and Navy Agents, clothing crews, victualling ships and advancing the credit that sent them out. The ordinary sailors are harder to recover, but they were there: Benjamin Da Costa, a midshipman in Temeraire at Trafalgar; Abraham Barrett in Vanguard, Nelson’s flagship, at the Nile. The community that produced them built, in a discreet lane off Catherine Street, what remains the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in continuous use in the English-speaking world — but the deeper story is not the building. It is the bargain its congregants struck with the sea and the state.

The same Anglican settlement that lifted the Edgcumbes into the peerage is exactly what forced a Schomberg to choose between his God and his ship. One family inherited its place in the nation’s defence; the other had to purchase it, and the currency on offer was conversion. The eighteenth century would have backed the great house against the back-lane congregation every time. The centuries have not obliged. Mount Edgcumbe was gutted by German incendiaries in 1941 and rebuilt as a park anyone may now walk through. Schreiber’s name, and the names of the men who paid the same price he did, are carved into a memorial the nation still salutes each November.

I have crossed that water more times than I can count, Saltash at my back and the Hamoaze running silver toward the dockyard. The Edgcumbes fired their guns to greet every guest who came ashore beneath the lawn. We owe a quieter salute across the Sound — to a midshipman in the stone, and to all those who sailed from the opposite shore having surrendered more than most of us are ever asked to, only to be remembered as names facing the earl’s house and waiting to be read.