Lieutenant Henry Stoker, the captain of the AE2, is shown here in Turkish captivity with two fellow officers. Lieutenant Geoffrey Haggard, an Englishman, was born in 1888 and entered in the Royal Navy as a cadet in 1901. In 1915, he joined the AE2 and was captured when the submarine sank. After the war, Haggard was awarded the DSC (Distinguished Service Cross) for his bravery during the AE2’s passage of the Dardanelles in April 1915. Forced to leave the submarine service because of impaired health, Haggard went to Australia and eventually settled down on a property in rural Victoria. He was killed in a railway accident in 1939, just after he had received news that he had been accepted back into the Royal Navy.
Lieutenant John Cary was the AE2s Third Officer. Like Stoker, an Irishman, he was lent to the Royal Australian Navy by the Royal Navy in 1913 and joined the AE2 in 1915. During his captivity, he wrote to Miss Elizabeth Chomley of the Australian prisoner of war section of the Australian Red Cross in London:
If you can get me exchanged, please do, but it is no good my being medically examined as they only laugh at me. Home sickness and incipient lunacy are really my main illnesses.
[Cary, quoted in Fred and Elizabeth Brenchley, Stoker’s Submarine, Pymble, 2003, pp.239-240]
Cary spent some time in the Royal Navy and with the Royal Australian navy after the war and retired in 1935. He died in 1953 from a heart attack suffered during a round of golf.