U-322, a German Type VIIC/41 U-boat, departed Horten Naval Base, south of Oslo, Norway, for her second combat patrol on 15 November 1944. Embarking on a less trafficked route around northern Scotland and western Ireland, she entered, nearly six weeks later, the heavily patrolled and mined waters of the western English Channel.
This is an account of the archaeological evidence left when she came across two Allied convoys within the space of six days.
The Type VIIC/41 submarine, one of ninety-one made, was built in 1943 by the Flender Werke yard at Lübeck, and was commissioned on 5 February 1944 under the command of twenty-four-year-old Oberleutnant zur SeeGerhard Wysk. After completed training, she began her operational career with the 11th Flotilla on 1 November, departing from Kiel to Horten Naval Base the following day with the standard 52 men onboard. [1]
The 11th U-boat Flotilla was stationed in Bergen (Norway) and mainly operated in the North Sea and against the Russian convoys in the Arctic Sea. The U-322, however, was ordered to Britain and departed nine days after arriving at Horten.
At this late stage in the war, new Allied convoy tactics and technology, using high-frequency direction finding and the Hedgehog anti-submarine system, made any patrol a high risk, but particularly in the confined waters of the heavily protected English Channel a strong possibility.
The first convoy she encountered, MKS 71G (Mediterranean to the UKSlow), was an Allied convoy going from North Africa via Gibraltar to Liverpool. It was made up of 24 merchant vessels (the majority British) and seven escorts which had departed from Gibraltar on 16 December, was due to arrive in Liverpool on 24 December. [2] At 11.50 hours on 23 December 1944, the British-built but Polish-owned steam merchant SS Dumfries carrying 8,258 tons of iron ore from Bona, Algeria to the Tyne, was torpedoed and sunk by U-322 south of St. Catherine’s Point, Isle of Wight. [3]
The crew onboard the vessel, which was owned by Gdynia America Shipping Lines Ltd, Gdansk [4] were rescued by HMS Balsam, a Flower-class corvette who picked up the master (Robert Blackey) and seven crew members, landing them at Portsmouth; and HMS Pearl, an anti-submarine trawler, who picked up the remaining 41 crew members, eight gunners and two passengers, taking them to Southampton. [5]
The sinking of Dumfries was for many years attributed to U-722, but its involvement was disproved after its wreck was discovered elsewhere. [6]
The Dumfries wreck was most recently recorded by the UK Hydrographic Office [UKHO] in 2007 and noted it was sitting upright on a bed of gravel at a depth of 37 metres, largely intact. The remains are 11-12m high, 120m long, and 18m wide with a starboard lean and showing signs of breaking up. [7]
The second convoy encounter occurred seven miles southeast of Portland Bill Lighthouse on the 29 December 1944. This convoy was TBC-21, the Thames Estuary to the Bristol Channel route, bound from Southend in Essex to Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, Wales. [8]
No longer equipped with her full torpedo load (14), after the attack on Dumfries, U-322launched at least two torpedoes at the convoy which struck two large US Liberty ships within minutes of each other.
The first to be hit was the SS Arthur Sewell, the fourth ship in the port column. Travelling from Southampton for Mumbles, Wales, she had joined the convoy part of the way for protection. The 7,176-ton American cargo vessel was severely damaged, but the ship held and a tug, HMS Pilot (W 03), towed her to Weymouth. Five men were injured, and one killed out of a crew of sixty-nine. An injured sailor died the next day.
Built in March 1944 by the New England Shipbuilding Corporation, Portland, Maine, she was under the command of the US Maritime Commission at the time.
After the war she was first towed to Portland, temporarily repaired, and then to Bremerhaven where she was loaded with chemical ammunition, towed to sea and scuttled in the North Sea on 26 Oct 1946. [9] Her remains have yet to be located.
The second Liberty ship to be struck was the SSBlack Hawk, the last vessel in the starboard column, travelling in ballast from Cherbourg via the Isle of Wight to Fowey on behalf of the US Army Transport Service. [10]
Four of the ship´s 41 crew were injured, one later died. There were no casualties among the 27-man armed guard. [11] The men were picked up by HMS Dahliaand landed at Brixham at 20.30 hours. [12] There is a photograph of the ship sinking.
The torpedo struck the ship on the port side, and the engines were immediately secured as the ship started to sink by the stern. A crack appeared at the #3 hatch and only the two forward compartments kept the ship afloat.
The vessel broke into two large sections, with the aft or stern end sinking into the sea off the Bill of Portland, while the bow or fore section stayed afloat. [13] This section was towed to Worbarrow Bay where it was beached on 30 December 1944. The site was marked by a can buoy until the Worbarrow Bay pipeline was laid and the large section had to be dispersed, using explosives, in 1968. Today the bow lies at a depth of 13-15m, surrounded by 50m of debris. It can be identified by the heavy anchor chain that runs almost 75m south to a 3-ton anchor. [14]
The large stern end (30 feet) which had sunk off Portland Bill, was discovered in 1963, lying in two sections, on its starboard side with a gun still bolted to its platform, at a depth of 31-45m. Dispersal operations were carried out in November that year. At some point a bronze propeller was salvaged, possibly in the 1970s, according to an image published in Diver Magazine, October 1999. The remains were not identified as potentially a Liberty ship until 1975, with the Black Hawk attribution only confirmed in 1987.
The final wreck that day is that of U-322. Having fatally damaged the two cargo vessels, she was not long after sunk by one of the convoy escorts, HMCS Calgary, a Canadian Flower-class corvette, using depth charges. She went down on 29 December 1944 in the English Channel south of Weymouth. Fifty-two men died; there were no survivors.
The wreck was identified as U-322 by Axel Niestlé after it had been initially thought that it was U-772. [15] She is recorded by UKHO as intact with extended mast, 59m long x 18m wide at a depth of approximately 42m. [16]
The wreck of the U-322 is part of a distribution of archaeological remains telling the story of one series of attacks by a submarine in WW2.
It illustrates the complications of recording and interpreting the submerged remains with a story of partial sinking, conflicting records, misidentification, salvage, clearance for navigational safety and erasure by development.
The 1931-built Esbjerg cutter E1 Claus Sørensen, now in preservation, gives an idea of what Grethe Mortensen might have looked like as a two-masted motor fishing vessel. Photographed in 2019 by Thomas Dahlstrøm Nielsen Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-4.0
‘A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ So spoke Winston Churchill during a radio broadcast in October 1939, focusing on what the main actors would do next following the invasion of Poland. One of the key, and much-repeated, phrases that have come down to us from the Second World War, it could have been applied to many of the war’s subsequent events.
Prize of war
One of those events was the loss of HMSGrethe Mortensen, whose name suggests origins outside the Royal Navy. The first we hear of her in English records is as as the MFV Grethe Mortensen in prize case TS 13/1429 [1] taken by the King’s Proctor, a legal official acting for the Crown in the High Court of Admiralty (now HM Procurator-General and Treasury Solicitor). However, as the record has not yet been digitised, more details are only accessible by visiting the National Archives in person.
So little is known about her that one standard secondary wreck work states: ‘built as a large private steam yacht, this vessel was completed as a special service vessel in 1943. Was abandoned in a sinking condition after detonating a German-laid mine’, extrapolated from the bare-bones details available and accessible at the time of compilation, primarily from secondary sources. [1]
Nevertheless what we do learn from a brief glance at the Prize Court catalogue entry is that the three letters MFV demonstrate that she was a motor fishing vessel, so she was neither a private yacht nor steam-powered.
Prize cases are redolent of an earlier era, of privateering and sea battles during the Age of Sail in fact, but they occurred in both World Wars. When a ship is captured she becomes a prize of war: the capturing nation will interrogate the case according to prize rules, distribute any bounty to the capturing crew for the capture, and reassign the vessel in either their merchant navy or naval forces.
The key is that to all intents and purposes the Grethe Mortensen was an enemy vessel, and her name is distinctive enough for us to be sure we have the right vessel when we trace her in records. Names such as Two Sisters or Friends (in any language) are as difficult as Smith or Jones in genealogy!
A Danish ship
We can track her down in a Danish shipping register for 1944, wherein we can confirm that she was a 2-masted fishing vessel built of oak, beech and fir at Nordby in 1943, fitted with an engine developing 77HP, with a draught of 7.5ft, 40 tons gross, 14 tons net, and owned by H Mortensen of Esbjerg, Denmark. These details are confirmed by an official record of Danish losses in 1946, which include a retrospective record for Danish vessels lost during the war: according to that source, the loss was apparently not reported at Esbjerg until 16 January 1946. There was a war on, after all, and she was in a foreign service.
What we can now see is that she was small, and new, and we can also now confirm that she was definitely a motor fishing vessel, her original Danish nationality, and her service under the British flag. The official shipping statistics state her tonnage as 38 tons – close enough.
Why would Britain have regarded her as an enemy vessel? – because Denmark was under occupation by Nazi German forces from 1940. Grethe Mortensen was built in Denmark during the occupation years and thus was not a pre-existing vessel which had, for example, made her way to an Allied or neutral port on the fall of Denmark. Without sight of the prize case, which would no doubt shed light on the matter, we can only surmise that she was captured while out fishing, perhaps during a raid or after straying into English waters.
Transformation to Special Service Vessel
We turn now to British sources to see if we can discover a little more. We find out from an officially published list that Special Service Vessel, the requisitioned Grethe Mortensen, of 35 tons, built in 1943, was abandoned on 7 November 1944 in a sinking condition off North Foreland, Kent. [3] We know it is the right vessel – the name, the year of build, and the slightly variant tonnage again, this time 35, and it reconfirms her service under the British flag.
We can now see that she is classified among Royal Naval vessels and is a somewhat obscure ‘Special Service Vessel’, so she was on some form of war duty when she was lost. She is very small, and constructed of wood, so her role in that guise remains unclear.
What we can understand is that ‘Special Service Vessels’ is a label for ships that did not fit easily into any regular category of naval forces, and that during the Second World War a variety of ships of all shapes and sizes played a variety of roles.
We don’t really know exactly what she was doing, but from her position of loss – not in harbour in the role of harbour defence, like many small vessels, but offshore, located between the gateway to the English Channel at the Downs and the approaches to the Thames Estuary – we can surmise that she was probably in some sort of patrol role.
Danish sources shed very little light on the matter: ‘G.M. sailed in the British navy, and was lost in October 1944.’ is the terse one-liner in official loss records. [4]
Danish fishermen in Britain in WWII
She is mentioned again in passing in a 1961 article on Danish fishermen in Britain during the war, including the efforts of Danes living in Britain to raise money to build Spitfires. [5] Like the Belgians in Brixham (February 1943) Danes plied their fishing trade under the British flag at Fleetwood and Blackpool, fishing the cod-rich grounds off Iceland, and were ‘welcomed with open arms’.
It is said that four fishermen came over – their vessel sadly not named – in ‘quite an unusual way’: they rescued the crew of an American bomber which had crashed ‘into the drink’ (the English phrase is used!). The fishermen, with limited petrol for their engine, were going to make for home in Vestjylland (West Jutland) with the rescued crew. Instead the Americans persuaded them to set sail for England, helped along by a fair wind, and on arrival they were permitted to make use of British Danish-language radio channels to let their families know they were alive and in good health.
According to the article, two cutters from that Danish-British fleet were lost ‘during the war’, one being Grethe Mortensen of Esbjerg, 38 tons. It goes on to relate that she was taken over by the Royal Navy, and there were no Danes aboard when she was lost in October 1944.
It would appear from this article that Grethe Mortensen was part of the fishing fleet that had escaped and made its home in Britain, but voluntary action like this seems inconsistent with a Prize Court action. Curiouser and curiouser.
A July 1945 edition of the same source [6] has another virtually throwaway comment. It tells us that there is ‘sad news from England’ with a number of Danes drowned on a British-flagged fishing vessel on 21 April 1945, including a man from Esbjerg. He and that wreck form the focus of the article: we learn that he came over as first mate on either the Erling or Grethe Mortensen, both of Esbjerg, ‘which were taken over by the English on 14 May 1943’, which sounds both forcible and as if Grethe Mortensen had not spent very long at sea before this happened, given that 1943 was her year of build.
Her ‘circumstances’
Thus both British and Danish official and informal sources alike suggest that Grethe Mortensen was compulsorily taken over by the British under some obscure circumstance: she was more than requisitioned, she was the subject of a Prize Court action. So was the Erling. So there was definitely something about their ‘circumstances’. [7]
I have written frequently about wartime censorship, but it struck me that this might have made a newsworthy story even if published some time after the event (weeks or months). It had all the right ingredients for a snippet that contained a modicum of good news after four years of war.
We read on 11 September 1943 that: ‘Six Danish fishing vessels arrived last week in a British port, having been intercepted in the North Sea by British naval units . . . The boats set out from Esbjerg when Denmark was in a state of extreme tension . . . Each ship had a good catch of prime North Sea plaice, which was landed and sold.’
The article ends: ‘Approximately one third of the boats [two, then!] will be available again for fishing, and the older men, including the skippers, will man them. The younger men will go into the forces here . . . ‘ [8]
This does sound like a ‘capture’ and it hints that the fate of the other four boats was intended to be in some other capacity to be assigned but not publicised. Further, like the Erling and the Grethe Mortensen, they came from Esbjerg. We lack any confirmatory detail, as we would expect under the conditions of wartime journalism, but this seems that this might refer to the incident that led to the portals of the Prize Court.
What was her fate?
What happened to Grethe Mortensen on the day she was lost in November 1944, however, is less clear. As we have been able to demolish any assertion in a key secondary source that she was originally a steam-powered private yacht that was completed at the builder’s as a ‘special service vessel’, and as none of the other sources mention loss to war causes, any suggestion originating from the same secondary source that she was lost to a mine may also be unlikely.
Looking at the weather for 7 November 1944 in Met Office records [9], there does not seem to be anything particularly unusual about the meteorological conditions that day either: predominantly westerly, wind forces approximately 3-6. As we have shown before, however, vessels can be lost in similar conditions if they are unlucky enough, and the one clue we may have is that observations at 6-hourly intervals show the wind alternately veering and backing a couple of points either way. Perhaps that was enough for a small vessel to spring a leak or take on water and be overwhelmed by the sea.
It’s also interesting that Danish sources consistently report the vessel as lost in October, rather than November, but that information appears to be second-hand. On the other hand, dates in British Vessels Lost at Sea tend to be reliable, so I suspect that 7 November at least is accurate. It is difficult to know whether the date of capture in early September 1943 is reliable (‘last week’ could hide a multitude of sins if you wanted to be vague and escape the censor’s pencil) but I suspect it is, because reference is made to the Danish general strike or ‘August Uprising’ of August 1943. It would also seem more plausible for the date of capture than 14 May 1943 for a vessel recorded as newly built that same year.
At the moment we appear to be no further forward with the wreck event beyond this sparse detail, but at least we have been able to put some flesh on the bare bones of the vessel herself, and understand better what she actually was – even if the mechanism by which she became a Special Service Vessel, what she was doing at the time of loss, and the circumstances of the loss itself, all combine to form ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ that is only partially unravelled.
Footnotes
[1] Larn R & Larn B, 1995 Shipwreck Index of the British Isles: Vol 2, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Sussex, Kent (Mainland), Kent (Downs), Kent (Goodwin Sands), Thames (London: Lloyds of London)
[2] Prize Case for the MFV Grethe Mortensen,TS 13/1429, 1943-1946, The National Archives, Kew
October 1944 was a relatively quiet month in terms of shipping losses with 10 vessels reported lost during that month, none to war causes (e.g. torpedo, mine). In fact it was the weather that seems to have been the major factor for most of them, although the loss of LCP(L) 52, a Landing Craft Personnel (Large), was attributed to foundering following a fire in the Solent on 11 October.
Barge Norman sank off the Kent coast on 7 October, and another barge, Congo, is reported as having similarly sunk off the Essex coast on 13 October. LCT(A) 2454(Landing Craft Tank, Armoured) was forced ashore in wind conditions SW 4, freshening to force 5, on Chesil Beach, Dorset, on the latter date. [1]
Things were not looking good for vessels of shallow draught in high seas in autumn gales.
In a previous edition for November 1943 we looked at the collective loss of several landing craft from a single convoy off the Isles of Scilly. Almost a year later, a similar tragedy occurred with convoy KMS 66 (UK–Mediterranean Slow), which set out from the Clyde on 14 October 1944, with some LCTs under tow by the merchants in the convoy, a mixture of British, Belgian and Norwegian vessels. Further vessels joined convoy from Belfast the next day, and Liverpool and Milford Haven the day after, as the convoy steamed south out of the Irish Sea.
On 18 October 1944 KMS 66 ran into trouble off Land’s End in wind conditions reported at 6am that morning as WSW force 7 at the Lizard, W x S force 6 off the Isles of Scilly. [2] At 10.50 Nairnbank, which was towing LCT 494and LCT 7014, reported that contact had been lost with the former. [3]
By 12 the conditions had worsened to WSW force 8 at the Lizard, SW x W force 7 at the Isles of Scilly.
All hell subsequently broke loose over the next 24 hours. Calls for assistance were made from the foundering LCTs, towing merchants reported on the status of their ‘children’ and issued commands, orders were issued to escorts and merchants to search for the LCTs and assist in rescue, widening beyond the immediate convoy to other convoys in the area, and contact repeatedly made with the Admiralty and Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches. It was a frantic period. [4]
At 6pm conditions were force 8 from both the Lizard and the Isles of Scilly but it is also stated elsewhere that conditions were force 9. [5] Conditions remained similar at midnight and 6am the next day (19 October) abating somewhat towards the Isles of Scilly. The weather abated further over the course of the evening but by midnight of 19/20 October LCTs480, 488, 491, and 7014 had either foundered or been sunk following rescue efforts, and LCTs 494and 7015 remained unaccounted for. There were men lost from all of these vessels, from other LCTs which, however, survived the incident, and from rescuing vessels.
History has a nasty habit of repeating itself and never more so than on this occasion, which was almost a carbon copy of the events of November 1943.
It seems that one of the LCTs lost in this incident may have been discovered, as reported by Royal Navy News in 2023, while LCT 7074 survives in preservation and is open to the public.
For this month’s entry we turn to my colleague and fellow Maritime Research Specialist Tanja Watson. Thank you, Tanja, for putting this together! Tanja writes:
Over 1,500 British and foreign vessels are known to have been lost along the English coast during the Second World War. Some forty-five of these losses were German U-boats – not all located, or identities confirmed, but nearly all of them went down on the Bristol Channel and English Channel coasts. [1]
One of the identified wrecks is the U-247, a German Type VIIC patrol submarine.[2] Over 600 Type VIIs were built and represented the workhorses of the Kriegsmarines submarine fleet during World War II.
The U-247 was built in 1943 at the Friedrich Krupp Germaniawerft yard at Kiel. She was fitted with a Schnorchel underwater-breathing apparatus in April 1944, which allowed U-boats to stay under water for longer to avoid enemy detection. [3]
A surviving Type VIIC/41 submarine, the U-995, displayed at the Laboe Naval Memorial near Kiel (2004), CC BY-SA 2.0By File:U995 2004 1.jpg: Darkonederivative work: Georgfotoart – This file was derived from: U995 2004 1.jpg: CC BY-SA 2.0.
The U-247 was part of the 1st U-boat flotilla, also known as the Weddigen flotilla – the first operational U-boat unit in Nazi Germany’s Kriegsmarine. This combat flotilla was stationed first in Kiel (1935-41) and then Brest from June 1941 until it was disbanded in September 1944, and its remaining boats were distributed to other flotillas. [4]
The U-boat was sunk by two Canadian war frigates, the HMCSSwansea and Saint John, on 1 September 1944, while out on her second and final patrol. She had left Brest a few days earlier, on 26 August, with 52 crew on board under the command of 24-year-old Oberleutnant zur See Gerhard Matschulat who had been in post for one year. [5]
Lt Cdr W.R. Stacey, Commanding Officer of HMCS Saint John, holding a small cupboard door panel recovered from U-247. Credit: Lt F. Roy Kemp / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-190440
She was just entering the English Channel, near Wolf Rock – a rock located 9 miles (15 km) southwest of Land’s End, Cornwall, when six Canadian frigates from the 9th Escort Group, sweeping the convoy route between Land’s End and Hartland Point, picked up a strong signal at 6:45pm, 15 miles east of the Wolf Rock Light on Thursday 31 August 1944.
Monnow, Stormont, and Meon of Escort Group 9 (EG9) were ordered north to pursue the search, while Saint John, Swansea and Port Colborne were ordered to remain to pursue the contact. However, ‘tide conditions made the contact difficult to hold, and after a number of depth-charge and Hedgehog attacks contact was lost’ just after 11pm.
Contact was re-established at 1.55am by Saint John three miles from Wolf Rock, on the bottom at 77 metres. Two depth charge attacks from the frigate brought up oil and explosions from the target. A search was conducted of the area, but nothing was found other than the oil slick. Saint John’s echo sounder trace indicated the U-boat was heavily damaged, and directed by this, Saint John dropped five more depth charges on the target at 2pm, which completely destroyed U-247. [6]
Eventually rising debris, including a scrap of paper from the engine log (a certificate for the 10 millionth revolution of U-247‘s diesel engines); a door panel; clothing and other paperwork, confirmed the identity and the sinking. There were no survivors. [7]
Both depth-charges and Hedgehog had been used. A naval intelligence record (AUD Assessment) of the attack shows U-247 was detected by Asdic (sonar) but due to a lack of records, it was not possible to determine when or exactly how the U-boat was destroyed. [8]
Originally developed during World War I, at a time when the technology to locate submarines was very primitive, depth charges did not have to be direct hits. Once detonated the explosion created a fast-expanding gas bubble, generating a high-pressure shock wave that multiplied through the water, and could cause fatal damage to a submarine’s hull, even if the depth charge exploded some distance away. [9]
Developed in the years just before 1944, the Hedgehog antisubmarine mortar fired a spread of smaller explosive charges (eventually as many as 24 projectiles) ahead of the firing vessel. [10] The device proved to have a much higher kill to use ratio than depth charges, which a U-boat could survive hundreds of over a period of several hours, [11] but the Hedgehog relied on a direct hit. On average, one in every five attacks made by a Hedgehog resulted in a kill – compared with fewer than one in 80 with depth charges. [12]
The general wreck position was recorded as 49.54N, 05.49W, [13] where it lies at a general depth of circa 68-73 metres (sources vary). When located in the 1960s, it was still giving off oil. [14]
The UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) recorded a more precise position in 2002 (49°53,933’N, 05°49,916’W); and observed that the hull had blown open in front of the conning tower and was lying on its starboard side with bows facing south-east. [15]
The U-247 was of the same U boat type featured in the West German film Das Boot (1981). [16] This film gives a good impression of the experience working on a U-boat and of being under attack from depth charges.
Footnotes
[1] Statistics derived from Historic England’s National Marine Heritage Record (NMHR), currently accessed via the Heritage Gateway
D-Day was one day in history. It finally marked the day that the war turned, in Churchill’s famous phrase, from the ‘end of the beginning’ to the ‘beginning of the end.’ [1] As an equally famous saying has it, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, and it would take some months before the Allies were able to encircle the Germans at the Falaise Pocket [12 to 21 August 1944] south of Caen and the Normandy landing beaches, to clear the way to Paris, liberated shortly after [19 August to 25 August 1944]. It would take until the end of the war to fully drive the occupiers out of France.
The ongoing invasion effort required ongoing logistical support. Resistance came not only from land forces but also from seaborne forces, so for this entry we take a look at a number of ships wrecked while supporting operations in France, the common theme of the wrecks this month.
It is a tale of landing craft, Liberty ships, and ‘Government stores’.
The first of this group were lost on 8 August when convoy EBC 66 [Bristol Channel to France] was attacked while bound from Barry for Seine Bay. EBC 66 was a multinational convoy comprising British, American, Norwegian and Dutch ships, and escorted by three Flower-class corvettes from different forces: HMS Petunia; ex-HMS Lotus loaned to the Free French as Commandant d’Estienne d’Orves, named after a French naval officer executed by the Nazis in 1941, and HMCS Regina of the Royal Canadian Navy.
Off Trevose Head, north Cornwall, U-667 struck among the convoy. First to be attacked was the American Liberty Ship Ezra Weston, laden with ‘Government’ and general cargo, specified as 20mm guns, acid and military vehicles, from Avonmouth for Falmouth and the invasion beaches, which was torpedoed below the waterline at around 7.30 in the evening. This attack was initially attributed to a mine. Her captain attempted to beach her but she was in a sinking condition and beginning to break up. She broke in two at 9.45pm and had to be abandoned, fortunately without loss of life. LCT 644 took off the majority of the crew, 4 officers later leaving the vessel in a lifeboat. [2]
HMCS Regina stayed nearby to ‘become a sitting duck for the next torpedo’, as survivors put it. [3] She was struck at 10.48pm, and though 30 men were lost in the engine and boiler room, the survivors owed their lives two factors: to the Ezra Weston, as most were on deck watching over the stricken merchant in their care, and to the crewman on watch who had had the foresight to order her depth charges to be made safe. The survivors were picked up by LCT 644 and the Admiralty Trawler Jacques Morgand (formerly a Dieppe trawler and seized at Falmouth in July 1940). [4]
The two ships lie virtually side by side off the coast of Cornwall, within a few hundred metres of each other, and Regina showing evidence of an implosion on the seabed after her rapid sinking in less than half a minute, with a debris trail of unexploded depth charges. The Ezra Weston is split in two.
On the same day Fort Yale, a vessel on Lend-Lease to the UK from the US, was mined and damaged onthe other side of the Channel at Arromanches while on convoy ETM 56 (Southend to Seine Bay, motor transport to France) having been on ‘Special Services’ shuttling between the Thames and the Seine since the early days of the Normandy invasion. She was released from service on 12 August with engine damage, but apparently still afloat. On 15 August any further service was deferred pending repairs, but she was able to proceed back to Southend from the Seine under tow of two tugs, one British and one American, on 19 August. [5]
On 23 August she was torpedoed in mid-Channel SE of the Isle of Wight, with the majority of the crew being picked up and landed at Portsmouth.
On 14 August a near carbon-copy of the attack on Ezra Weston and HMCS Regina in roughly the same area, off Hartland Point this time, dispatched the American LST 921 and British LCI(L) 99, respectively a Landing Ship Tank and a Landing Craft Infantry (Large). They too were on an EBC convoy,EBC 72, and that number shows the frequency of convoys bound for Normandy: daily increments since EBC 66 on 8 August. [6] Their attacker was also U-667, which would herself not last much longer: her last known radio contact was on 25 August, but she failed to arrive at the rendezvous point the following day, having been lost in a British minefield off La Rochelle. [7]
We return now to another Southend to Seine Bay convoy, this time ETC 72, a coastal convoy. On 19 August they were in mid-Channel when U-413 torpedoed Saint Enogat SE of St. Catherine’s Point, Isle of Wight. Most of the personnel survived to be picked up and landed at Juno Beach. In a strange way, her place of loss reflects her service career. Built as part of War Standard tonnage in 1918 as War Clarion, she was sold post-war to one of the French railway companies: her new name Saint Enogat reflected the Breton area served by her new owner, the Chemins de fer de l’État, but she passed in 1920 to the Société Maritime Nationale. [8]
After the fall of France in 1940, Saint Enogat was seized at Plymouth and was transferred to the Ministry of War Transport (MOWT). She would return to France on the ‘Store Transport Service’ following the Normandy invasion, regularly shuttling between Southend and the invasion beaches, until her loss. Her sinking was initially attributed to a mine, but a later note adds: ‘Considered vessel more probably torpedoed by s/m.’ [9]
Our final and most famous wreck of the vessels bound for Normandy during August 1944 is undoubtedly the Liberty Ship Richard Montgomery, wrecked the following day on 20 August and regularly making headlines since.
Unlike the others, however, she was not lost to war causes. She crossed the Atlantic as part of convoy HX 301 from New York for Liverpool, arriving in Oban on 8 August, thence joining convoy ‘northabout’ round Scotland, after which she fed into a southbound convoy bound for the Thames. She then anchored in the Thames Estuary on Sheerness Middle Sand to await yet another convoy for her final destination of Cherbourg to support the invasion with her cargo of munitions.
There she broke her back and started to settle into the sand, with only half her cargo salvageable. She is designated under Section 2 of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 as a dangerous wreck, administered by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency through the Receiver of Wreck. [11] She lies within a well-demarcated exclusion zone and it has often been said that no other ship can now run onto Sheerness Middle Sand because of her, a most unusual case of one maritime hazard replacing the previous hazard at that location. [12]
Her story, from her background to her modern-day management, can be read in full in a dedicated article on GOV.UK
Famous in her own right, the Richard Montgomery is nevertheless part of a wider story, a bigger picture, and a maritime landscape of war that fed into the continuing battle to liberate France after D-Day.
Footnotes
[1] Winston Churchill, Prime Minister’s Address to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, Mansion House, 10 November 1942
[2] Ezra Weston, Historic England, National Marine Heritage Record (NMHR) record 766919
[3] Quoted from Deep Wreck Mysteries: Fatal Decision, broadcast ITV West, 25 January 2007, 7.30pm
[4] HMCS Regina, Historic England, NMHR record 1102944; Jacques Morgand, photograph and details online
[5] Fort Yale, Historic England, NMHR record 766513; Shipping Movement Record card, BT 389/13/246, The National Archives, Kew; Report of Total Loss, Casualty &c. No.75,092 Fort Yale, Lloyd’s Register Foundation Archive & Library, LRF-PUN-W244-0106-W,
[6]LST 921Historic England, NMHR record 1534459; LCI(L) 99, NMHR record 1534460; convoyweb
Following the launch of the D-Day invasion on 6 June 1944, the citizens of Britain knew that reprisals would come. On 13 June the first of the V1 rockets, known as the ‘Doodlebugs’, struck London, and it was London and the Home Counties which would bear the brunt of the damage.
Despite this life carried on. My mother never forgot her own encounter with a doodlebug in Chelmsford, Essex, scrambling for shelter with her little brother. According to a bomb map in Essex Archives, it was probably the V1 attacks on either 18 June or 9 July 1944. [1]
Only a few days after the 9 July incident in Chelmsford, on 12 July another V1 struck near Tower Bridge. The 2-ton steam tug Naja, built in 1924 and owned by Gaselee & Son, was destroyed and sunk in the Upper Pool, east of Tower Bridge, with the loss of six men during a crew changeover.
She is the only wreck in our records known to have been destroyed by a V1.
We do know, however, that the wreck was raised immediately by PLA Wreck Lighter No.2 as shown in an image taken by City of London Police, now in the London Museum. She is badly damaged aft but the idea that has gained traction in commentary on the Naja that she suffered a direct hit cannot be correct otherwise there would have been, at best, only debris left.
It is quite understandable that she was raised instantly in a busy waterway where wreck remains would pose both a navigational hazard and a risk of accretion and siltation if not dealt with immediately.
It is a reminder that destruction and death do not always equate to archaeological remains, although the vessel was definitively written off and her register closed. [2]
[2] Appropriation Books, official No. 148526, Crew List Index Project; catalogue entry for the Registers of Shipping and Seamen, Naja, BT 110/1261/13, The National Archives, Kew
The focus this month is on motor minesweeper MMS 227and to recognise the contribution of the Free Dutch forces.. After the fall of the Netherlands, Dutch vessels contributed to the Dunkirk evacuation and to the British trooping and convoy effort, including the liner Johan de Witt, which became a troopship and convoyed many British troops around the world, including my own late father in 1944. [1] Dutch ships also served in other theatres of war such as the Italian campaign of 1943 and at D-Day. [2]
A number of small motor minesweepers were built during the war by small contractors in sheltered coastal waters around the country. As always, production was dispersed for security and to take advantage of the specialist skills of the smaller boat-builders.
These builders, like Curtis of Par, Cornwall, who built MMS 227/Marken, specialised in the manufacture of wooden ships. Wood was ideal for motor minesweepers for several reasons: to take pressure off raw materials for steel ship production and because, unlike steel, it would not set off magnetic mines.
It remained a dangerous job: over the course of both World Wars this blog has highlighted how frequently minesweepers fell victim to the very danger they were working to save others from, and small wooden craft were extremely fragile in such an explosion.
Nevertheless over 400 of these vessels were built in two classes, one slightly larger than the other, either 105ft or 127ft long. [3] In an official Admiralty photograph campaign showcasing the work of the motor minesweepers and their crews from all walks of civilian life, they were labelled as ‘The Little Ship with a Big Job.’ [4]
Several of the smaller class of minesweepers were then cascaded to Free Dutch forces operating in the 139th Minesweeping Flotilla out of Great Yarmouth and Harwich. They were all renamed after locations in the Netherlands, rather than merely numbered, as they had been in the Royal Navy.
Thus it was that MMS 227became Hr. Ms.Marken, after the island on the IJsselmeer. (Hr. Ms. or Harer Majesteits is the prefix of ships of the Koninklijke Marine or Royal Netherlands Navy, which is conventionally translated into English as HNLMS or His/Her Netherlands Majesty’s ship.) Several would survive the war and be incorporated into the peacetime Dutch Navy to continue the postwar work of mine clearance in the North Sea.
On 18 April 1944 Queen Wilhelmina visited Dutch minesweepers at Harwich, an event that would not be reported in the press until 9 May, and even then in only the briefest of terms: ‘Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands recently visited men of the Dutch fighting forces and Dutch minesweepers whose crews were originally trawler fishermen.’ [4]
On 20 May 1944 Marken was clearing the War Channels when she struck an acoustic mine near the Sunk Lightvessel in the Thames Estuary, and was blown in half with the loss of 16 out of her 17 crew, including her captain Gerardus Albertus Smits of the VRH (Vrijwillige Reserve Hulpschepen, approximately equivalent to the Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve). [6]
The wreck was clearly visible as broken in two until around 1981, but by 1990 had shown signs of further deterioration and beginning to be covered by sand and buried by the following year. [7]MMS 113, of similar type, lies on the western foreshore of Portsmouth Harbour, another relic of the era of the ‘little ship with the big job’.
Footnotes
[1] Oral history reminiscence, Corporal R F Cant RAF, recorded in unpublished family notes
Eighty years on from the launch of Operation Neptune on 6 June 1944, the largest seaborne invasion in history, we take a look at those craft which, for one reason or another, did not make it to the landing beaches of Normandy, but which do form part of a tangible heritage of D-Day around the southern coasts of England.
An invasion of this scale required considerable preparations, in assembling the fleet, in meeting the conditions they were likely to find geographically and militarily, and in meeting the needs of the invasion forces once the assault on Normandy began in earnest.
A key problem for the invasion forces was the issue of landing supplies in a hostile environment until French ports could be recaptured from the occupying forces. To overcome this problem, the ‘Mulberry Harbours’ were prefabricated concrete units to be towed across the Channel and assembled at Omaha and Gold, two of the five designated landing beaches. ‘Phoenix’ caissons were built to be sunk in great secrecy off the southern coasts of England to be refloated and towed across once the invasion was under way to build the Mulberry Harbours, supported by subsidiary units such as ‘Whale’ pontoons.
Not all of the Phoenix caissons could be refloated to serve their purpose, and a number of these survive at the spot they were sunk 80 years ago. They are charted in southern English waters from the Bristol Channel in the west via the English Channel facing the Normandy coast to the Thames Estuary in the east. The remains of these Phoenix units form a counterpart to the remains of the ‘as built’ Mulberry Harbours on the opposite side of the Channel. (The Portland caissons shown at the top of the blog are slightly different, in that they came back as part of a return group post-war.)
The invasion began during the night of 5-6 June. LCT(A) 2428was a Mk V Landing Craft Tank (Armoured), which, as the description implies, was intended to carry tanks which could roll off directly onto the beach to provide covering firepower. This function would itself attract fierce return fire, so to that end the vessel was fitted with protective armour plating, hence the (Armoured) suffix.
LCT(A) 2428 was laden with Centaur CS IV tanks and Caterpillar D7 armoured bulldozers as she began to make her way over to Normandy. In the early evening of 5 June she broke down and anchored near the Nab Tower, to the east of the Isle of Wight. The vessel began to capsize following damage ‘sustained by weather to double bottoms on starboard side aft’ according to a military report, and shed her lading, although fortunately without loss of life. However, she remained afloat after capsizing, posing a navigational hazard, and the only remedy was to sink her by gunfire.
LCT(A) 2428therefore lies some distance from her cargo of tanks and bulldozers, which now lie as an assemblage off Selsey Bill, Sussex – two wreck sites from one event. The remains of the tanks and bulldozers form a Scheduled Monument: read more about the scheduled site and discover more about the Landing Craft 2428 project.
An operation at the scale of Neptune required air cover and air support. The wooden Horsa glider, a personnel carrier which could be towed to deploy troops by air, came into its own in seaborne invasions on D-Day and in other theatres of war. Like the Landing Craft Tanks, some of the gliders moved off for their own specific operations on the night of 5 June 1944, while others took to the air during D-Day itself.
Among them was Horsa Mk I LH550, bound for Landing Zone N at Ranville, Normandy, which slipped tow for reasons unknown, and ditched into the sea off Worthing, West Sussex, apparently without loss of life. Unlike the Mulberry remains or LCT(A) 2428and her cargo, the last resting place of Horsa LH550 is unknown.
Convoy ETM-1, comprising American Liberty ships, sent to Britain under the Lend-Lease programme, and their escorts, left the Thames Estuary on the morning of D-Day en route to Normandy. The convoy moved south towards the Straits of Dover when one of their number, the Sambut, was struck by fire from German positions at Cap Gris Nez. War matériel by its very nature is usually hazardous, and cargo vessels laden with such dangerous cargoes extremely vulnerable. Sambut‘s cargo of petrol cans and vehicles caught fire, which led to an explosion of the gelignite she also carried, and it was impossible to save the ship, her crucial supplies, or, unfortunately, a quarter of the personnel on board. (Read our D-Day 70 blog for more detail on the loss of Sambut.) The loss of Sambut was captured on film in real time by another ship in the same convoy, and the reminiscences of a survivor of the 92nd Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment of the Royal Artillery who was on board, recorded 50 years after the event, are also in the collections of the Imperial War Museum (Reel 2, 05:50 onwards). It is a well-documented wreck and is known and charted.
In the breadth and diversity of the craft that were lost on 6 June 1944 within English waters – aircraft, land vehicles, cargo ships and floating harbour structures – we glimpse a little of the scale of the invasion. We recognise, too, the archaeological remains of a single day in history on this side of the Channel, linked to their counterparts lost the same day on the Normandy beaches, memorials in concrete, wood, and steel.
Sailing ship under Whitby Abbey in stormy conditions, Charles George Harper. Source: Historic England Archive
A Sturdy Whitby Collier in the Storm of November 1810
It is my pleasure to welcome Mike Salter as our guest blogger for this article, which combines the old and new meanings of the word ‘adventure’: the shipwreck adventure of a vessel named the Sea Adventure, highlighted on the 300th anniversary of her build in 1724.
At that time the word ‘adventure’ meant a commercial venture, so a shipowner would ‘adventure’ his capital on the sea (although the modern word ‘venture’ was also commonly used). This naturally led to the meaning of ‘risk’, which has segued into today’s modern meaning, an exciting and/or risky activity or event. These two elements are present in her story, which Mike has researched and compiled into a booklet (details below).
He distils his research into the Sea Adventure‘s life and times below:
Her Life: Whitby and the Collier Trade
Colliers were the workhorses of the Industrial Revolution, bringing millions of tons of coal from the coalfields of the North-East to London and the east coast ports such as (King’s) Lynn, (Great) Yarmouth and Ipswich. Overlooked by many, they nevertheless fuelled British economic growth and overseas expansion.
My interest in theSea Adventurestemmed from finding out more about the loss of King John’s regalia in the Wash, leading to finding out about a buried medieval bridge in Holbeach [1], Holbeach as a minor port and the wreck of a ship on Holbeach Marsh in November 1810. [2] (It was this research detailing her cargoes, masters, voyages and events during her lifetime that led to the booklet!)
Initial reports named her as the Sea Venture, a 100-year-old Whitby collier built in the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14). Both her name and age proved to be incorrect. Sea Adventurewas her correct name [3], and a Jarvis Coates built her in his Whitby yard in 1724 under George I. [4] This year of 2024 is therefore the tercentenary of her construction.
George Young in his 1817 History of Whitby wrote, while the ship was still in recent memory:
”The strength and durability of the Whitby ships may be inferred from the great age some of them have attained. The Sea Adventure is a noted instance; that vessel braved the storms of 86 years, having been built in 1724 and lost in 1810; nor did she go to pieces even at the last , but was carried up by the violence of the wind and of the flood tide into the midst of a field, where she was left high and dry, a good way from the sea on the coast of Lincolnshire.”
The construction of Sea Adventure was that of a ‘cat’ collier with round bluff bows, a deep waist and ‘pinked’ or tapering at the stern. The Earl of Pembroke which became Captain Cook’s Endeavour was such a ship, all of which were built more than 40 years after Sea Adventure, in Whitby. To the disgust of some, he chose these ships over sleeker vessels as they were robust, seaworthy and easily repaired on shore, especially in exotic parts. [5]
Whitby was a bustling port in the 18th and 19th centuries [6], building many ships for its shipowners and for those of many other ports. It was the seventh largest ship building port in the UK. Many ships were employed on the North Sea and Baltic routes. These were treacherous, with severe storms, rocks, sandbanks, and the threat of pirates and the press gangs. [7] R Weatherill counted more than 400 ships off Whitby at one time, with many from the north-east. He was also told that up to 800 would arrive in the Thames on one tide if there was a favourable wind. It is no wonder there were often collisions both in port and on the open sea. [8]
Whitby Harbour scene, by permission of the Whitby Literary & Philosophical Society
In 1794, during the war with France, Whitby was deemed important enough to warrant fortification against attack from seawards . There were also seamen’s strikes in Shields, broken up by the Royal Navy. Some colliers includingSea Adventure, sailed the Baltic routes.
It is interesting to note the fact that the French and Dutch navies were collaborating from 1786 onwards in the fortification of Cherbourg as a port from which to safeguard the Channel, keep a watchful eye on England’s main naval base of Portsmouth, and potentially attack England. [9]
Francis Gibson’s plan for the defences of Whitby, c1794, with Board of Ordnance ‘broad arrow’ stamp. A version of this map exists in North Yorkshire archives, with two significant differences: the defences of the Half Moon Battery, unspecified in this version, are shown in the North Yorkshire version, with 12 x 18pdrs en barbette and a ‘bomb-proof’ magazine, while the ships shown here ‘running inshore for shelter’ have grounded for ‘want of tide to carry them into harbour’ in the other version. Both versions show the line of fire afforded to an ‘enemy ship’ approaching Whitby(marked in red here). MP/WHA0096 Source Historic England Archive
Her (Very Long) Times – the longevity of ships
Sea Adventure was not unique in being lost at 86 years of age as there were several vessels which operated over 100 years.
Perhaps the most famous was Betsy Cains, built in the King’s Yard in 1690 or 1699, but which had become erroneously associated with bringing over William of Orange in 1688. Her actual history was trading with the West Indies, then transfer to the London and Baltic coal routes, followed by hire as a government transport over 1808-10, during the Napoleonic Wars. On 17th February 1827 she was wrecked at around 130 years old on the notorious Black Middens rocks while leaving her home port of Shields, laden with coal for Hamburg. Many people took pieces of her venerable timbers to make snuff boxes and other souvenirs, and Orange Lodges in particular were keen to have a memento, given the mythical association with William of Orange. [10]
Liberty and Property(known in Whitby as Old Liberty and Property) was built in 1752 and sailed the East Coast and Baltic routes, remaining on the Whitby Register until 1840. Later she transferred to Shields and was eventually wrecked in 1856 in Gotland, Sweden – at 104 years old. Her goods were sold for the benefit of the underwriters. She was described as ‘being engaged in the coal, Baltic trade and transport service – a strange old-fashioned looking craft, attracting a good deal of attention in the Thames and other ports she visited.’ [11]
In 1888, the little schooner Lively ended her days wrecked on the Norfolk coast near Cromer. Built at Whitby in 1786, she was more than 100 years old at the time of loss, and was described in an advert for sale as being suitable for beach landings. The Whitby Gazette of 2nd June 1888 carried a full report and a ‘lament’ to the much-loved old ship, the last lines of which read:
When through the bridge away she glides to find her ancient moorings Old Whitby’s ships and tars have gone, one after one in order Yet Whitby’s sons are still the same in courage and in valour. AN OLD FRIEND.
There were other ships which may have gone on to reach their century, such as theWilliam and Jane, built Whitby 1717, and transferred to Newcastle in 1789, or the Content’s Increase, built Whitby 1750 and sold to Newcastle in 1835.
Her demise – the wreck of Sea Adventure
‘Dreadful Storm’ is how newspapers described the weather event of 10 November 1810, when raging winds from the ESE forced many ships on shore between Whitby and Great Yarmouth. There was a minimum of 61 shipwrecks that night, with around 40 lost on the east coast. [12]
Model of a ‘shipwreck in a bottle’: the wreck of the Sea Adventure on Holbeach Marsh in a lightbulb some 1.5km over the salt marsh. G Leach, by permission of the Whitby Literary & Philosophical Society
That was the night which saw the loss of the Sea Adventure, bound from Shields for London with coal, a southbound voyage with land to the west on the vessel’s starboard side, which, in an ESE storm simply drove her towards shore.
The label on the ‘shipwreck in a bottle’ says the Sea Adventure ‘must have been sailed goose-winged i.e. downwind with the foresails on one side of the vessel and the mainsail on the other, leaving it too late to reduce sail, which the maker recognised from a situation he had seen. Goose- or gull–winged is defined thus: on a fore-and-aft rigged vessel ‘the jib or staysail is boomed out on the opposite side to the mainsail in a following wind to present the largest possible area of sail to the wind’ (Oxford); wing and wing with a ‘sail extended on each side, as with the foresail out on one side and the mainsail on the other’ (Collins), i.e. a 180-degree angle to maximise the area of sail exposed. (This use is seen Kipling’s poem The Coastwise Lights: ‘we greet the clippers wing-and-wing that race the Southern wool’.)
It is interesting that G. Leach (the modeller) says that the same fate befell the Esk, a Whitby whaler wrecked on Redcar Sands in September 1826, while ‘running before a storm’ on her return from a season in Greenland. [13] The Esk had picked up some sailors from the Lively whaler lost in the ice and of the three sailors who survived from the Esk, one was a William Leach, carpenter’s mate (perhaps an ancestor of the model-maker?)
The label to the ‘shipwreck in a bottle’ also picks up something crucial that illustrates the impact of this storm: that the Sea Adventure was not only driven ashore, but driven a long way inshore.
RAF photograph taken 2 December 1944 at Holbeach, showing the vast expanse of the marshland to the north. Sea Adventure was driven inshore across the fields, possibly towards the bottom left of the present image. RAF_106G_LA_67_RP_3085 Source Historic England Archive
There were comprehensive reports of the loss of Sea Adventure in the London Chronicle of the 15th November, Stamford Mercury of the 16th, Hull Packet of the 20th, and Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 80, Part 2, of ships wrecked or affected by this storm (described by some as a hurricane or a tempest). Of the Sea Adventure it said she was, for the first time, ‘compelled to run for Boston Deeps’ and the crew, having struggled ashore in boats, were ‘denied even the indulgence of a barn as shelter from the pelting rain’.
Her end had come in one of the most severe storms to hit the east coast of England, which centred on nearby Boston itself. The London Chronicle reports that it started raining in Boston at 7am and continued all day. The ESE wind blew hard and from 6-9pm was ‘a perfect hurricane’. This combination of the hurricane force winds with a record height of tide in Boston – some 4 inches (10cm) above any previously seen – created a tidal bore or eagre of huge potency which swept away sea bank defences flooding the low-lying land. A vessel was deposited on the Turnpike Road near Boston town centre at Black Sluice, forced by the tidal surge up the River Witham.
Many sailors and some on land lost their lives, with reports of sailors who lashed themselves to masts as their ships sank, with other ships powerless to help them. Sixteen bodies were interred at Claxby (Stamford Mercury 23rd November), nine were picked up four miles from Lynn, and many, many more drowned with more bodies washed up on every tide (Hull Packet 20th November).
The meteorological explanation for the violence of the storm is discussed in an article [13] on storm-surge flood risk in eastern England:
The third category of surge is driven off the northeast side of a slow moving deep cyclone in the southern North Sea when isobars become concentrated owing to the presence of an anticyclone to the northwest of Scotland. Strong pressure gradients drive onshore winds directly onto the coasts of eastern England . . .
This report notes that the same climatology was associated with one of the highest ever high water levels reported at Boston, Lincs. on 10 November 1810, consistent with the loss of the Sea Adventure, the vessel deposited on the Turnpike Road at Boston, and other craft.
Extent of the storm – other ships driven ashore
The Hull Packet of 20 November reported that the Retfordof Gainsborough, with coals, was driven about a mile up the Marsh near Boston. Drakard’s Stamford News of 16 November reports that on the 10th ‘a barge drifted over the sea bank near the Scalp and may now be seen in the midst of pastures, with sheep grazing around.’
Three vessels were driven up the Fossdyke Washway , towards Spalding with one, the Ann, carried half a mile into the Marsh from the Fossdyke channel.
In the same report: ‘Near Sutton Wash are two vessels thrown upon a very high marsh, so they will not be got off but by cutting to the sea.” Captain Melion of theAmity, which was driven ashore near Lynn and went to pieces (he, his wife and children struggled ashore), reported that a light collier [i.e. in ballast] was left on the ebbing of the tide in the midst of a farmyard (Hull Packet 20 November).
Some sank at sea and at least one became a hazard: a Caution was issued to ‘Masters of Coasting vessels trading to Boston, Lynn and Wisbech, that six to seven miles West by North of the Sutton-on-Sea signal point the Masts of a Brig were above sea level on all but the highest Spring tides.’
Overall, most ships had a lifespan of 20-40 years, but relatively few ships were got off if driven hard into the rocks, sandbanks or shore, and even fewer which were deposited ‘high and dry’, as these ships were. Whatever their age, luck seems to have run out in the end.
After the wreck of Sea Adventure
Confusion over ship’s names, many having the same name, even from the same port, is not surprising and plays its part in the Sea Adventurestory. Many ships were called Adventure, othersSea Venture (as Sea Adventurewas in some early records) and the storm reports in papers.
But this was compounded by the fact that a ship Adventure, master Bullock, was wrecked on the same day, 10 November 1810, at Ingoldmells, north of Boston. Both ships were sold at auction but one advertisement for the later sale of theAdventureon 28 December, on the shore, referred to the Sea Adventure. Both vessels would have been broken up in situ and it is interesting to note thatSea Adventure carried 17 keels of Tanfield Moor coal (from the Durham coalfield) and was also armed, as guns were sold.
From the mid-18th century merchant ships of any size had been advised to carry arms to deter privateers. These were relatively light armaments, but in 1757 the Ann of Shields, carrying 5 guns and 8 men, saw off a French privateer of 14 guns, after a four-hour engagement. There were many other examples of successful defence; Captain Humble of the Milburn, North Shields, with 4 x 4-pounders and 13 men fought off a French schooner with 14 guns (Sun, London, 6 January 1801).
Then there wasLa Modeste, lost in the same storm as the Sea Adventure, but this is an interesting story in its own right and is a blog for another day . . .
Close-up of ‘shipwreck in a bottle’, with a figure visible on deck. Almost submerged by the waves, the boat can just be seen by the prow. By permission of the Whitby Literary & Philosophical Society
With many thanks to Mike for his blog and we look forward to his return with the Modeste in a later blog, and we would also like to thank the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society for all their help and support in creating this blog.
A full description of the life and voyages of the Sea Adventure is in a booklet Sea Adventure: A Sturdy Whitby Collier 1724-1810, by M A W Salter, available from the Whitby Literary & Philosophical Society and North Yorks Archives.
[2] Historic England Research Records maritime dataset, Sea Adventure, HOB UID 942792
[3] Sea Adventure ship’s registration 1786 & de novo 1800 (North Yorkshire Archives); Stamford Mercury, 23 November 1810, p3
[4] Cook Museum, Whitby; Gaskin, R 1909: The Old Seaport of Whitby (Whitby: Forth) p234
[5] Gaskin, op.cit.
[6] Smith, K & Keys, R 1998 Black Diamonds by Sea: North-East Sailing Colliers 1780-1880 (Newcastle: Newcastle Libraries & Information Service)
[7] Fraser, S 2023 “Documents Relating to the Official Dutch Naval Visit to Cherbourg, 8-10 September 1786”, The Mariner’s Mirror, 109:4, 461-468, DOI: 10.1080/00253359.2023.2264658
[8] Historic England’s maritime records are full of collisions in major rivers, particularly for the Thames, Humber and Mersey, as well as in the open sea, especially the North Sea, Straits of Dover, and the English Channel.
[9] Winfield, R 2005 British Warships in the Age of Sail 1793-1817 (Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing)
[10] Historic England Research Records maritime dataset, Betsy Cains, HOB UID 1031974
[11] Liverpool Mercury 11 October 1856; Weatherill, R 1908 The ancient port of Whitby and its shipping, with some subjects of interest connected therewith. Compiled from various registeres of shipping, periodicals, local newspapers and histories, etc. (Whitby: Horne) p56
[12] Historic England Research Records maritime dataset, 2024
[13] Historic England Research Records maritime dataset, HOB UID 937642
[14] Muir Wood, R, Drayton, M, Berger, A, Burgess, P, and Wright, T, 2005 “Catastrophe loss modelling of storm-surge flood risk in eastern England”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 363: 1407–1422 DOI: http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2005.1575
Today (4th March 2024) sees the 200th anniversary of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, founded as the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck.
That original name outlines the purpose of the institution: far too many people were being lost to shipwrecks. It was an occupational hazard of seafaring, as old as time, and our records show both that many ships went aground several times, getting off again, before finally being lost, and that individuals could likewise be shipwrecked several times in their careers with the same ship or across several ships.
The RNLI was much needed, and its foundation timely. We know that in English waters alone 220 losses were reported in 1820, 434 in 1821, 191 in 1822, 281 in 1823, and 287 in 1824. Two-thirds of those in 1824 were accounted for by two devastating storms in October and November that year, and they covered everything from small local vessels to large ocean-going ships and everything in between. Numbers of shipping losses fell back towards 171 in 1825. [1]
It’s important to say that the loss of ships and the loss of life isn’t always correlated and the purpose of the Institution was to save lives, not ships, and their foundation took place against an increasingly globalised trade which saw growing numbers of ships in English waters, in turn escalating the potential for wreck events to occur.
There are certainly events where the total loss of a ship also entails the loss of all hands – particularly where the vessel founders at sea, or gets into a very difficult position at the base of a cliff or upon dangerous rocks which make rescue nearly impossible. Sometimes, though, a vessel might go to pieces but all hands be saved. The inbound liner Suevic was wrecked off the Lizard in 1907 and to this day remains the RNLI’s biggest rescue, with over 500 crew and passengers successfully rescued, no-one being left behind. Her aft section was salvaged in the end, and rebuilt with a new bow, but the remains of her original bow still lie on the rocks from which the lifeboatmen rescued all hands over a hundred years ago.
Reading Room, SS Suevic, photographed in 1901, 6 years before the RNLI attended the wreck in 1907. Bedford Lemere BL 16481/003 Source: Historic England Archive
Conversely, a ship might remain intact but all the crew are lost, for example, swept overboard.
The RNLI and their volunteers helped sailors and passengers beat those odds, and they built on past efforts to improve the lot of the seafarer: from the lighthouses and light vessels operated by Trinity House that either warned ‘keep away, keep away’ or signalled ‘here is the safe light that guides you in’ [Our blog on Trinity House’s 500th anniversary in 2014] to the efforts of local communities and individuals. Services for coastal defence – the coastguard, the preventive and revenue men who made up the anti-smuggling forces, and the sea fencibles (coastal forces for home defence) – would often go to the assistance of vessels in distress where needed.
The impulse was always to help. It was traditional for ships to assist one another in distress where they possibly could as it was always recognised that they themselves might be in need another time. In the event of a collision, the colliding ship not stopping to assist the crew of the collidee, which would normally bear the brunt of the impact, was as strongly deprecated as a hit and run would be on today’s roads.
There were local boatmen who would always go to the assistance of others in various places, sometimes as a result of pilotage work, such as the Scillonian gigs and the Deal boatmen, a difficult and dangerous job: half the crew of a Scillonian gig were drowned going to the rescue of the Mary in distress in 1816, while in 1809 with the sea ‘dashing over them mountains high’ the crews of several wrecks, including the Admiral Gardner (now a protected wreck) driven onto the Goodwin Sands ‘were all collected on the poops waiting for that relief which the Deal boatmen seemed anxious to afford them.’ [2]
Elsewhere there might be local charitable organisations: we read in 1797 that the sole survivor of the John’s Adventure was brought ashore at Bamburgh, Northumberland, ‘much swelled’, having ‘nearly lost the use of his speech, sight and limbs, but by the care of the Dispensers of Lord Crewe’s noble charity, he is happily restored’. [3]
There were also technological innovations that arose out of particular tragedies. One tragedy at the mouth of the Tyne inspired a competition to build the first self-righting lifeboat that could be kept permanently on station wherever needed. In 1789 collier Adventure was returning to her home port at Shields from London, but a northerly gale prevented her from coming into port and despite her crew’s valiant efforts to weather the storm and keep trying ‘in a most tempestuous sea’ they were unsuccessful, ‘the sea making a free passage over her’ and she was wrecked with loss of life in full view of the local population on the notorious Herd Sand. [4]
The same conditions that made it so difficult for her to come in made it equally difficult for vessels to go to the rescue: ‘ . . . the waves ran so high that no boats durst venture to the assistance of the crew . . . ‘. This became a common theme of many later rescues by the RNLI: they often made they way to stricken vessels against almost insuperable odds.
In a similar vein, Captain Manby was inspired by other wreck events to develop his rocket apparatus, which fired a line establishing a means of communication with the stricken ship close inshore, to which a thicker rope could be attached to afford a means of escape. ‘His invention of throwing a rope to a ship stranded on a lee shore [i.e. with wind and tide flowing towards the land making it very difficult to get off again] proved the certainty of its never-failing success on the Elizabeth of Plymouth’ at Great Yarmouth in 1808. [5]
Each of these individual and collective efforts incrementally aided the safety of life at sea but they were all disparate efforts, either with specific purposes or locally focused. The establishment of the RNLI turned lifesaving into a nationally cohesive effort with specialist resources, harnessing that will to help others seen over the centuries and making it possible for members of the public to contribute to their work, as they still do today. They have always worked with local resources, crews and boats and other organisations, historical and modern, in what we today would call inter-agency working, their boats crewed by sailors who had intimate knowledge of local conditions and hazards, and whose efforts were always recognised on a national basis.
The records in the Historic England database of wrecks therefore include over 1,500 wrecks attended by the RNLI since 1824. [6] Without doubt the death toll in all cases would have risen but for their involvement. For example, we learn in October 1824 that the schooner Reuben, of and for Grangemouth, from the Baltic with oats, stranded at Cheswick Sands and went to pieces. The local preventive boatman and fishermen who came to the rescue were awarded £2 each by the Institution – not everyone on board could be saved, but their attendance prevented a loss with all hands. [7]
In peace and in war the RNLI has come out to rescue crew and passengers, and over the history of this blog we have covered a variety of events they have attended. For example, the perils of the sea, of hidden dangers and high winds, were exacerbated during the two World Wars both for the rescuers and the rescued, amongst minefields and under aerial bombardment. We have twice paid tribute to the ‘greatest lifeboatman of them all’ Henry Blogg, in his rescue of the crew of theFernebo in 1917 and the wreck of the Monte Nevoso in 1932.
It is always worth reiterating that the conditions that see ships coming to grief are the very same conditions lifeboat crews have to battle, sometimes from the opposite direction, making rescue operations extra arduous. A lee shore or high seas – or both – could mean that local lifeboats had great difficulty putting out, and it was always a race against time before a ship broke up or sank.
Sadly the rescuers could also become victims, such as in the Mexicodisaster of 1886 off Southport, in which all the crew were ultimately rescued (and the ship recovered to be wrecked once more as the Valhalla) by the Lytham lifeboat, the Southport and St. Annes lifeboats having been lost while attending the same wreck.
Historic England’s records of shipwrecks have enabled us to appreciate not only the activities of the RNLI in and of themselves, but also the documentary record they have left behind.
A very typical characteristic of wreck reports over the centuries is that they vary enormously between sources, literally between viewpoints. The view of events from witnesses on land is very different from those at sea, and we frequently reconcile reports that come in from different coastal settlements that will describe the same location of loss very differently: 2 miles east of one, 3 miles west of another, for example. Conflicting testimonies are often given in Board of Trade inquiries into wreck events, particularly in the event of collision, where each side will seek to blame the other. Ships in convoy will each have a different understanding of what is going on during a convoy battle or naval engagement, each holding their own while rendering assistance to another, while unable to see the whole, widely-dispersed battlefield and individuals on those ships will similarly have a different understanding of what is happening according to their rank, station, activity and location. All of this can be exacerbated by literal fog or the ‘fog of war’.
The perceptions of rescuer and rescued will also naturally vary, but this is where the records of the RNLI come into their own for the purposes of shipwreck documentary research (as well as human and historic interest) and greatly increase our understanding of events, of timelines, weather conditions, and the disintegration of the vessel, recorded in great detail.
For example, in our recent blog on theSolstadin January 1944, it is the RNLI’s record of attendance that sheds more light on the event than official convoy records, and as these events slip out of living memory, the documentary resource they represent becomes ever more important in our understanding of archaeological remains.
The rich heritage of lifeboats can be found everywhere on the English coast – from listed lifeboat stations to memorials to those lost in ships and from lifeboats, and the archaeological remains of ships which were attended by the RNLI. Why not go to the Heritage List for England and Historic England archives using the keyword lifeboat to discover that heritage in our listed buildings, protected wrecks and photographic records, or visit the RNLI’s History pages?
Happy Birthday RNLI!
Footnotes
[1] Information from Historic England’s wreck database, 2024
[2] Widely reported in the press in these words, for example London Packet and Lloyd’s Evening Post, Friday January 27 to Monday January 30, 1809, No.6400, p2
[3] Newcastle Courant, 11 February 1797, No.6,297, p4
[4]Newcastle Advertiser, 21 March 1789, No.21, p2
[5]British Gazette and Berwick Advertiser, 12 March 1808, No.11, p3
[6] Information from Historic England’s wreck database, 2024
[7] British Gazette and Berwick Advertiser, 4 December 1824, No.884, p4
