Commodore Augustus Willington Shelton Agar, (4 January 1890 – 30 December 1968) was a Royal Navy officer in both the First and the Second World Wars. He was a recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces, for sinking a Soviet cruiser during the Russian Civil War. In his naval biography, Footprints in the Sea, published in 1961, Agar described himself as "highly strung and imaginative." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that Agar "epitomizes the 'sea dog' of British naval tradition: honourable, extremely brave and totally dedicated to King, country and the Royal Navy." Early life Augustus Agar was born in Kandy, Ceylon, on 4 January 1890. He was the thirteenth child of John Shelton Agar/Eagar, an Irishman from Milltown, County Kerry, who had left his native land in 1860 to become a successful tea planter in Ceylon. John's cousin Honora Eagar was the first wife of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, an Irish Fenian leader and member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Agar was brought up in comfortable circumstances in a fine house with servants. Agar's mother, who was Austrian, died shortly after his birth, and at the age of eight he was sent with one of his brothers to school in England. All his brothers were educated in English public schools, and all his sisters were educated in Austrian or German schools. His father died in 1902 of cholera which he had caught during a visit to China. Augustus ("Gus") Agar attended Framlingham College in Suffolk. He was now without parents or a fixed home and his oldest brother, Shelton, determined that he should go into the Navy. Gus, who idolized his older brother, willingly agreed. To prepare, he attended Eastman's Royal Naval Academy in Southsea. A friend of the family, Sir Henry Jackson, later an admiral and First Sea Lord, nominated Agar for a place in the annual intake of naval cadets. After time spent with a "crammer", he passed the entrance exams and in 1904 joined the naval cadet school, HMS Britannia, at Dartmouth. The Britannia was a wooden man of war, obsolete when launched in 1860, and soon tied up and used as a stationary training ship. As a part of his training, Agar went to sea in a 5,650 ton second class cruiser, , and afterwards on