Southwold

The Paston Wrecks

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One family’s involvement in wrecks

Modern colour photograph of recumbent effigy of man in armour lying on a pillow on top of a tomb, seen in side profile view. Below his wife can be seen carved facing right. The image is partly obscured by the blue altar frontal covering the altar to the right, which also demonstrates that Sir Clement was buried as close as possible to the holiest location in the church.
Chest tomb of Sir Clement Paston (1508-1597) at St. Michael’s Oxnead, who features in the story below, navy man whose prior experience of ships was wrecks on his family’s lands.
The church is listed Grade II* in no small part due to this fine alabaster monument, which features his wife as a kneeling ‘weeper’.
Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0

One of the key landmarks of surviving English medieval letters is exactly that – a remarkable collection of letters sent to, from, and between members of the Paston family between 1422 and 1509. For such a collection of letters to survive from one family is remarkable enough. For that collection to survive from the Middle Ages makes the collection even more significant. Among the jewels of the collection is the first Valentine in English, sent by Margery Brews in 1477 to her betrothed, one of the Paston family. They illustrate Middle English in current use by real people, not literary English as we might think of it from staple texts such as the Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman, for example.

Another remarkable aspect of the collection is that it contains the first surviving account of a shipwreck in a letter in English – most of our medieval wrecks are known from official, usually legal or Parliamentary sources, or from material such as chronicles or accounts written by historians, which were often written either retrospectively or at second-hand, or both, sometimes also encompassing hearsay or more than a whiff of legend.

So when we read the words of William Pekoc (Peacock) written ‘in hast’ on 19 November 1477 to his ‘ryth worschepffull master’ [William consistently spells ‘right’, then often riht, ryht as ryth] Sir John Paston (John Paston II, 1442-1479), we see a description in the words of a witness, not couched, as so often, in legalese, by those hearing plaints at one remove. This is a servant speaking to his employer about something he has seen with his own eyes:

Also there is a grete chyppe go to wrekke be for Wynterton, and there came up on your several grownd gret plente of bowe stawys and waynescotte, and clappalde grete plente. [1]

[‘Also a great ship has been wrecked before Winterton, and an abundance of bowstaves and wainscot boards were washed up on your various lands, and also an abundance of cask staves’: translated into modern English by the author]

This brief snippet of information yields a great deal of detail – the cargo of worked timber and tar suggested that the voyage had originated in the Scandinavia/Baltic area. There is a useful parallel in the wreck of Le Cristofre, bound from Gdansk for Bristol with a cargo that included tar, boards, staves, and other goods such as pitch and wax, lost in 1389 near Great Yarmouth, not far from Winterton. What this also tells us is that both the wreck on the Paston lands at Winterton and the earlier wreck of Le Cristofre were also operating within the aegis of the Hanseatic League.

William Peacock hasn’t just seen the wreck for himself, he’s doing something about it, hiring carts to carry away the wreckage into town. He also lets John Paston know that his right to the wreck is being challenged: ‘Mastras [Mistress] Clere hath sent down hyr men’ to carry away the wreckage – as John’s tenant, she is claiming right of wreck, but, as William advises his master, ‘There is no maner in Wynterton but your; lesse your ryth now and lesse it for ever’. The manorial right to wreck was not in question in terms of whether it existed or not, but the question of who benefited was certainly a bone of contention: the tenant or the landlord.

William also urges John to issue a writ of trespass against the men of nearby Scroby who have taken barrels from the wreck, ‘or ellis it wool do yow meche harm here after’. William has also appraised the potential of the timber cargo: ‘The bordes had ben good for wyndowes and dores’.

Two weeks later this faithful servant, writing ‘ryth werey’ [‘right weary’] has sent word again to his master, naming the local men responsible for abstracting wreckage from the ship and exactly how much it was worth. He also appears somewhat – but not unduly – concerned, that there is a potential spanner in the works as there are five survivors from the ship. These survivors made it legally not a wreck, even though physically it was one.

In other words, as there were persons alive who could claim the wreck, or make claim on behalf of others, strictly speaking the wreck and its cargo were neither unclaimed nor unclaimable under medieval wreck law. Therefore, although there were clearly manorial rights to the wreck, neither John Paston nor ‘Mistress Clere’ had any real claim upon the wreckage, or at least not without enquiring further into the matter. It would have been different if there had been no survivors . . . but William Peacock refers to the survivors almost as an afterthought! [2]

Medieval wrecks usually survive in the documentary record because they were contentious in some way, often because of disputes over right to wreck – and this wreck is a case in point, even though it is recorded in private letters and not in official documents. William’s letters have left us a valuable trace in the records and all the more for what is unsaid as well as said – in his time, the vessel would have been easily recognised as a ship from the Hanseatic League, but it takes knowledge of trading patterns to recognise this feature, so typical of historic documentary records, which tell us things that were obvious to the reader at the time and so were not explicitly said. The cargo leads us to the implied voyage and origins of the ship, and the circles in which she was operating, and we recover much more detail.

Though the surviving letters stop in the early 16th century, members of such a literate family jealous of their rights and unafraid to exercise them were also bound to turn up in the official record, and they do. In documents that bring half-remembered history lessons at school to life, we learn that the Pastons and the Cleres resorted to the law over the right to wreck with cases heard in the Court of Star Chamber under Henry VIII. Both documents are undated: just at the point the letters peter out, Henry VIII has come to the throne and the two cases could refer to any time during his reign from April 1509 to January 1547.

The first case is clearer: Sir John Clere (1511-1557) brought a case against Sir William Paston (1479-1554) and others, including Sir William’s son Clement Paston (1508-1597) [4] for ‘forcibly obstructing him from enjoying his rights of wreck in the manor of Winterton’, so it seems that this feud between the two families had spilled over into another generation. [3] Sir John Clere succession to his father’s estates in 1529 seems a reasonable terminus post quem for the date of the incident, thus effectively halving the potential date range of the document: we now know the wreck must have taken place between 1529 and 1547.

If we accept the 1508 date for Clement’s (later Sir Clement’s) birth then he would have been 21 in 1529, so it is feasible for him to have been involved from that date onwards. Some of the later dates discussed elsewhere for his birth may make the 1529 date tricky – it is difficult to see him involved in his early teens but his later teens, perhaps. 1529 onwards seems secure, however, and perhaps a little later, as Sir John would not have mounted a challenge without legal title to his father’s estate.

A second case, this time brought by Sir William Paston against Sir John Clere, does not specify the location of loss, but as the two families had butted heads previously over wreck at Winterton in 1477 and in the other Star Chamber Case, it is reasonable to suppose it concerns right to wreck at the same manor, which is also a well-known location of loss with many wrecks historically documented there. [5] It is clearly a different wreck, as different persons are named outside the two principals (a counter-claim would have involved the same ‘supporting cast’, albeit in reversed roles) and must date to the same period – perhaps, if the numbering for the Star Chamber records is anything to go by, slightly later. This time there was an ‘assault on the plaintiff’s servants, arising out of dispute as to wreck.’ A possible terminus ante quem might be provided by Clement Paston’s biography in that he was at sea in the navy by 1544 and was therefore, no longer in Norfolk. [6]

Framing the chronology for the two wrecks in this way clarifies that Clement’s involvement in the first case has the hallmarks of youth and a young man still knocking around at home, so to speak and that 1529-ish is reasonably secure in the first case, and somewhat later in the second.

We therefore have three securely recorded wrecks involving Paston lands, but there may be more wrecks with a Paston connection – not involving their lands, but possible active involvement in what we would today class as piracy. These wrecks are securely recorded – it is simply that we can’t directly pin them on one of the Paston ancestors.

The Paston ancestry is shrouded in some obscurity, as the family was of peasant stock and worked its way up into the ranks of the gentry through education and marriage alliances. The first securely recorded Paston is William Paston (1378-1444) but the 1904 edition of the Paston Letters references a Constantine de Paston, who, in 1330, was part of a group of people engaged in inter-communal rivalry and piracy between Southwold and Dunwich. In two distinct events, at least, this group attacked at least five ships of John de Claveryng [7] and another ship belonging to a widow, Anastasia But [8], and some of these ships were wrecked or sunk. Anastasia’s was certainly sunk, and a detail in the Anglo-Norman texts of John de Claveryng’s complaint also indicates that his ships were wrecked: the word naufrerent is used – ‘they wrecked’ (cf. naufrage, ‘shipwreck’ in modern French), a detail lost in summarising the records.

It’s impossible to say whether Constantine de Paston was in truth one of the Paston ancestors (if so, he illustrates the Paston talent for controversy!) but these stories illustrate that local rivalry, whether of competing ports or adjoining landowners, enables preservation in the documentary record (and possibly also, in the Claveryng and But cases, causes them!) Of ordinary fishing vessels, ships without lucrative cargoes, or of other significance, or those that simply did not give rise to disputes, during the Middle Ages, we tend to learn very little.

This makes the preservation of a wreck record of 1477 in letters in ordinary everyday English that was neither literary nor legalese all the more precious. Without William Peacock we would know nothing about this particular wreck at all, and in all the cases we discover more when we read between the lines, or go back to the original language to see something ‘lost in translation’.

Footnotes

[1] Letter 807, repr. in Gairdner, J [ed] 1896 The Paston Letters, Vol. III, 1471-1509 [Westminster: A Constable and Co.]

[2] Letter 808, repr. in Gairdner, J [ed] 1896 The Paston Letters, Vol. III, 1471-1509 [Westminster: A Constable and Co.]

[3] Catalogue entry for STAC 2/10/25, Court of Star Chamber: Proceedings of Henry VIII, Folio 50, held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C7122306

[4] Clement Paston’s life is dated 1508-1597 in the family tree published on the Paston Footprints website, a collaborative endeavour between the University of East Anglia, the Paston Heritage Society, and Collisions Theatre, and represents the most recent available information; his biography in the History of Parliament Online states that he was born by 1523, which must be the earliest secure reference to his life; his tomb monument states that he lived ‘Twice fortie yeares & somewhat more’, which, if true, places his birth as 1516 at the latest. All this has ramifications for the date of the wreck involved in the subsequent discussion.

[5] Catalogue entry for STAC 2/29/121, Court of Star Chamber: Proceedings of Henry VIII, held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3978192

[6] Sir Clement Paston, MP for Norfolk, 1563, in History of Parliament Online

[7] Catalogue entries for SC 8/39/1929, in Petitions to the King etc., held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9062132 ; SC 8/178/8857, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9294725 ; SC 8/256/12800 Petitioners: John de Claveringg (Clavering). Name(s): de Claveringg (Clavering),… | The National Archives; Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, Vol. 2, 1330-34, p199; p235=6; Gairdner, J, (ed.) 1904 The Paston Letters 1422-1509, Vol. II, accessed online via Project Gutenberg

[8] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, Vol, 2, 1330-34, p62, pp134-5; catalogue entry for SC 8/39/1929 in Petitions to the King etc., held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9062132

HMTS Monarch III (1916-1945)

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Photograph of the third HMTS Monarch, taken in 1916 by an unknown photographer. Credited to Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson and sourced by K. R. Haigh, Cableships and Submarine Cables, Adlard Coles Ltd., 1968. Public Domain image. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS_Alert_(1890)#/media/File:CS_Monarch_(3).png

With accusations of sabotage of pipelines and cables in the news here is a topical wreck of the week. Written by Tanja Watson, Marine Research Specialist at Historic England.

Today marks the 80-year anniversary of the loss of HMTS Monarch (III), a cable repair ship built in 1916 for the General Post Office (GPO) – the institution in charge of the state postal and telecommunications systems between 1870-1969. [1] There are two main types of cable ships: cable repair ships, also known as cable cutters – which tend to be smaller and more manoeuvrable, still capable of laying cable but the primary job is fixing or repairing broken sections of cable; and cable-laying ships – which are wider and designed to lay new cables.

An elegant steamer of single deck construction in steel with two screw-driven, steam turbine 6-cylinder engines, the HMTS Monarch (III) was one of several cable ships built by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd at their shipyard in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear. [2] With a crew of 65 – measuring almost 68 metres in length, 10 m in breadth, and 1,150 gross register tons – it was equipped with three cable tanks and various specialist tools and features designed to sever and repair submarine telegraph cables in British waters for the next thirty years. [3]

Several of the early cable repair vessels were called HMTS Alert (I & II) and HMTS Monarch (I – V). This is about the third cable ship to be called the Monarch. The first one, built in 1830 as a passenger and cargo paddle steamer by Pearsons of Thorne for the Hull Steam Packet Company, was converted to a cable ship in 1853 for the Electric Telegraph Company, finishing as coal hulk and later broken up post 1874. The second was built in 1883 by Dunlop & Co, Port Glasgow, for GPO. It was sunk by a mine or torpedo off Folkstone in September 1915. Due to this event, the new vessel was named the Monarch (III). GPO had originally intended to replace the aging HMTS Alert (I), built in 1871 as The Lady Carmichael by A. McMillan & Son of Dumbarton, Scotland, and converted and used as a cable ship between 1890-1915, but the loss of Monarch (II) changed plans. The vessel was wrecked at Redcar (North Yorkshire), refloated and scrapped in 1932. [4]

Cable laying in the 1850s

The first telegraph cable across the English Channel was laid in 1850 by the English Channel Submarine Telegraph Company of Jacob and John Watkins Brett. [5] The following year, the British connected England, Holland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Another cable connected Italy with Corsica and Sardinia. By the mid-1850s, a 300-mile cable was laid across the Black Sea, allowing England and France to connect with their armies instantly (the Crimean war). In 1858, after numerous attempts, a telegraph cable was finally laid between Great Britain and North America. [6]

First World War

On 4th August 1914, within an hour of Britain declaring war on Germany, the HMTS Alert (I) was dispatched to cut the German communication cables in the Atlantic Ocean. Other ships would eventually eliminate the remainder of Germany’s cable network, but Germany was now forced to communicate by wireless transmission, which the British could intercept and decrypt. As the BBC describes it, the Alert undertook “one of the first strategic acts of information warfare in the modern world. A few hours later, the Alert had cut off almost all of Germany’s communications with the outside world. It had hit the kill switch.” [7]

Meanwhile, the Monarch (III) carried on with cable repair work around the British Isles throughout the First World War and in between the wars until she was requisitioned (or possibly charted) by the Admiralty in 1939. [8]

Photograph of HMTS Alert, by unknown photographer. Credited to Postmaster General of the United Kingdom and sourced by K. R. Haigh, Cableships and Submarine Cables, Adlard Coles Ltd., 1968. Public Domain image. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS_Alert_(1890)#/media/File:CS_Alert_(1).png

Second World War

The British Admiralty requisitioned and equipped at least seventeen cable ships for cable service during the war. [9] HMTS Monarch (III) being one of them, was tasked with providing a telephone connection to France during preparations for Operation Neptune, the naval component of Operation Overlord. [10] In the days and nights following D-Day, the cable ships Monarch (III), under Captain Arthur Troops, and St Margaret’s were used, together with a smaller cable barge, to lay a 160-mile-long telephone cable. [11]

Landing ships with barrage ballons putting cargo ashore on one of the invasion beaches during the Battle of Normandy. Likely similar to the barrage ballons used by the British cable ships, e.g. HMTS Monarch (III). Public Domain image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#/media/File:NormandySupply_edit.jpg

On Tuesday 13th June 1944, at around 1300 hrs, while the Monarch, equipped with a barrage ballon overhead to discourage air-attack, was being guarded by Trentonian (K368), a Royal Canadian Navy warship, the 1,000-ton Flower-class corvette – a squadron of US warships appeared in the vicinity. On approaching them, one of the American destroyers, USS Plunkett (DD-431), a 1,630-ton Gleaves-class destroyer, tried to contact them, first firing star shells to illuminate the area in the night, but no response was given by the Trentonian, who spotted that they were an ally and believed the signals were coming from German positions on the coast. The Canadians repeatedly flashed their recognition lights. However, these signals were missed by the USS Plunkett who opened fire on the Monarch, hitting the barrage ballon overhead. The Trentonian manoeuvred to make its identification as an Allied warship more visible, but the Americans continued to fire. About a kilometre away, while still desperately sending out messages by radio and signal lamp, the Trentonian finally moved between the Monarch and one of the US destroyers and only then did the firing stop.

The attack lasted about 10 minutes. The Monarch had been hit – the bridge was destroyed, its superstructure and steering damaged. Two of the crew were killed and 30 injured, including Captain Troops who later died from his wounds. The telephone cable the Monarch had been laying was lost over the side, and the Canadians were told not to share the incident with anyone. [12]

Four crew members standing on the deck of the HMTS Monarch (III) post the attack, surrounded by damaged cable-winding equipment and machinery.
The damage to Monarch was extensive; the broken structure to the right of the photo is Monarch’s bridge.  The communications cable she was laying was cut and lost into the channel. Source: “The Roger Litwiller Collection, courtesy Bruce Keir, RCNVR, HMCS TRENTONIAN.” (Warm thanks to Roger Litwiller for providing the image).

The following year both vessels went down by enemy action. The Trentonian was sunk by the U-1004 near Falmouth, Cornwall, in February; and the Monarch was sunk off Orford Ness, a foreland spit on the Suffolk coast, on 16th April 1945. Two crew members of the cable layer were lost. One of the survivors, Denis Simmons, stated in 2005 that they had been torpedoed on the starboard side by U-2324 (Kapitänleutnant Konstantin von Rapprad) while returning to Felixstowe, having repaired the Suffolk-Netherlands cable. [13] However, according to German sources, the U-2324 did not sink or damage any ships during its 37 day patrol between March and 9 May 1945. [14] Another crewman, Ernest Hunt, Seaman Cable Hand, who served on the Monarch ‘just prior to its sinking’, claims they “were sunk by an acoustic mine off the East Coast whilst returning to Harwich, April 1945”. [15] (A type of naval mine which monitors audio activity in its vicinity).

The wreck lies some 10 miles SE of Orford Ness, on a bed of sand, at a general depth of 30 metres. [16] It sits upright but it is very broken and is draped in marine cable. Giant cable-laying rollers lie at the bows. [17]

The Monarch almost survived the war. On the day it sank, the Allies announced that future operations over Germany would focus on cleanup rather than strategic targets, effectively ending the air war, and that Berlin was now surrounded by the Red Army. [18]

A rare type of vessel

Cable ships have always been a rare sight. In 1892, two-thirds of the world’s submarine cables were owned by Great Britain, yet in 1896, there were only 30 cable ships in the entire world, of which 24 were owned by British companies. The global telegraphic cable network was established around 1900. [19] Today there are roughly 60 cable-laying ships in the world, according to the International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC). [20] 99% of the world’s digital communications rely on subsea cables, with a global network of 1.4 million km (870,000 miles) of telecommunication cables on the seafloor. [21] The UK currently has over 70 active telecommunication cable systems, consisting of several hundreds of individual cables, managed by The Crown Estate. [22] All these, and the power cables needed to carry the electricity derived from wind, wave and tidal installations, the renewable energy, ashore – require these specialized types of vessels and remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) to repair and lay new ones.

Footnotes

[1] HMTS (His Majesty’s Telegraph Ship) was a prefix used for cable ships owned by the British General Post Office (GPO) before they became a public corporation, changing to CS (Cable Ship). 

[2] History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications, Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson, Ltd.

[3] Wrecksite, SS Monarch (III), [subscription required]

[4] History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications, Glover, Bill, CS Lady Carmichael/ HMTS Alert (1)

[5] History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications, 1850 Dover-Calais Cable

[6] Onfray, Robert, The Cable Cutters, 11 August 2023

[7] See note [5]

[8] History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications, Monarch (3)

[9] History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications, Eric Tate and the Admiralty Cable Ships 1944-1947

[10] Kemp, Paul, Friend or Foe: Friendly Fire at Sea 1939-1945, pp. 37–38, Pen and Sword, 1993, ISBN 0850523850.

[11] Mackenzie, Duncan S., PK Porthcurno, Monarch Under Fire

[12] Litwiller, Roger, White Ensign Flying: Corvette HMCS Trentonian, 2014

[13] See note [3]

[14] uboat.net, Kapitänleutnant Konstantin von Rappard

[15] History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications, Glover, Bill, HMTS Monarch (3)

[16] UKHO Wreck Report No. 10253 [subscription required]

[17] See note [3]

[18] History – How Stuff works, World War II Timeline: April 16, 1945-April 26, 1945

[19] Naval Historical Society of Australia, Clifton, Fairlie, Occasional Paper 95: Grandfather was a cableman (18 Nov 2020)

[20] DCD, Swinhoe, Dan, The cable ship capacity crunch (6 Dec 2022)

[21] Minds and Machines, volume 34, issue 3, 2024, Submarine Cables and the Risks to Digital Sovereignty, Volume 34, article number 31

[22] The Crown Estate, Marine: Cables and pipelines

Diary of the War: May 1917

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The Gena

In the second instalment of our double bill covering 30 April and 1 May 1917 we take a look at the Gena, sunk on 1 May. On the face of it, Gena was fairly typical in both vessel type and location of loss, a collier sunk in the North Sea while steaming south with her cargo from Tyneside.

Yet there are two things which are very unusual about this particular wreck site. The first is that the position of loss is very precisely specified in relation to a relatively small and impermanent seamark.

She sank “¾ mile S by W ½W of ‘A’ War Channel Buoy, Southwold”. (1)

Unsurprisingly, with this level of detail, the wreck site has a secure history of recording that goes back to the date of loss. (2) It also gives some clue to the location of one of the buoys marking out the East Coast War Channels, or safe swept channels, that kept the shipping lanes open and (relatively) free of mines, swept largely by minesweeper-trawlers such as the Arfon whose loss on 30 April 1917 was commemorated in yesterday’s post.

These War Channels have been the subject of recent investigations on behalf of Historic England  (2014) by Antony Firth (Fjordr), illustrated with maps and charts showing the extent of the War Channels. One unofficial chart marking the buoys further north up the East Coast is known to have been used by an airman providing cover for North Sea shipping (Fig. 7 in report).

If aircraft could provide cover for shipping, tracking U-boats and indeed collaborating with patrol vessels to destroy enemy craft, it followed that ships were also vulnerable to attack from the air. The Gena was the first ship within English territorial waters to be sunk by aircraft, torpedoed from the air by two Hansa-Brandenburg GW seaplanes of Torpedostaffel II, operating out of Zeebrugge. This was not the first aerial attack on merchant shipping by aircraft, but it was one of the first to successfully sink a ship.

So unusual was it that Lloyd’s struggled to fit it into an appropriate category in their ‘ledger’ of war losses. In the “How Sunk” column, the standard abbreviations S (sunk by submarine) and M (mine) were clearly inappropriate, and even this distinction was outdated, since ships had been sunk by mines laid by U-boats since 1915, so arguably fitted both categories (see earlier post on minelaying submarines, introduced in 1915). The only other category available was C (cruiser or raider), which was still inadequate, but it seems that a new category was not considered necessary, and ‘raider’ was at least appropriate in intent, if not in ‘vessel type’ as such. A marginal annotation clarified matters: “German seaplane”. (3)

The Gena was an armed merchant, however, and her attackers did not have it all their own way. Sunk by the planes, her gunner nevertheless managed to down Hansa-Brandenburg 703, whose two crew were rescued to become prisoners of war. (4) An interesting photo gallery of the Hansa-Brandenburg GW can be found here, including stablemate 700, a view of the torpedo loading bay, and film stills of the aircraft landing on the water.

The course of the war at sea was changing: terror could strike from above as well as below, and aircraft though slow, unreliable, and terrifying to fly by modern standards, were proving to be amphibious and adaptable. Finally, the increasing presence of aircraft at sea meant that wrecks at sea were no longer necessarily ‘shipwrecks’, although, on this occasion, the aircraft was also picked up for examination: (see previous double bill on Zeppelin wrecks from February 1916 and March 1916).

The whole incident was recognised at the time as ‘a new phase of warfare’  and a ‘noteworthy development of aerial craft’ (5) so that, unusually for the time, the Admiralty released details of the ‘duel’, in part because there was some propaganda value in demonstrating that the Gena had not gone down without a fight.

(1) Lloyd’s War Losses: The First World War: Casualties to Shipping through Enemy Causes 1914-18, facsimile reprint, Lloyd’s of London Press, 1990, p127

(2) United Kingdom Hydrographic Office record no. 10320

(3) Lloyd’s War Losses: The First World War: Casualties to Shipping through Enemy Causes 1914-18, facsimile reprint, Lloyd’s of London Press, 1990, p127

(4) for example: http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/241938-naval-historynet-bvlas-errata/

(5) Yarmouth Independent, Saturday 5 May 1917, No.4,529, p1