One key respect in which the conduct of the Second World War at sea differed from the First was the number of aircraft involved. Since the previous war, aircraft had evolved to become capable of significant offensive and defensive roles, reflected in the numbers lost over both land and sea. In and around English waters these included well-known aircraft on both sides, Spitfires, Hurricanes and Lancasters, Ju88s, Me109s and He111s, as well as many less familiar aircraft types.
Today, on the 80th anniversary of its loss on 24 February 1940, we feature our first case study of an aircraft lost at sea during the Second World War. (Others will follow in due course.) The reasons for aircraft loss were many and varied: aerial combat, mechanical failure, and training accidents among them.
We begin with L6111, an example of a lesser-known type, the Blackburn Botha, developed and built over 1936-8 as a reconnaissance aircraft and a torpedo bomber. In early 1940 the Botha was not yet on active service, but remained under test for the Air Ministry at the Torpedo Development Unit (TDU), RAF Gosport, Hampshire, to which L6111 was allocated. (1)
On the morning of 24 February 1940, L6111 was on torpedo-dropping exercises over the Solent between Gosport and Ryde, Isle of Wight, when the engine cut out and the crew were forced to ditch in the sea. All four men were providentially able to get into a dinghy before their aircraft sank. (2)
Not all Botha crews were so fortunate: exactly one year later, on 24 February 1941, Blackburn Botha L6262 crashed into the ground close to its destination airfield of RAF Detling, Kent, killing all four crew. (3) Even against the context of training and operational losses for all aircraft, these and other accidents ensured that the Botha was quickly rendered obsolete as a frontline aircraft. Only 580 were ever built, compared to the production runs for the more successful types such as the Spitfire (over 20,000 constructed).
Debris in the Solent off Fort Gilkicker was confirmed in 1990 as the scattered wreckage of an aircraft and would tally well with L6111‘s flight path. (4) As an aircraft having crashed on military service, it is automatically protected under the Protection of Military Remains Act, 1986. (5)
It also has some significance as one of 21 ‘extinct’ British and German aircraft types of the 1930s and 40s, with few or no surviving complete examples in any context. (6) (See also an earlier blog post on a Do17 ‘Flying Pencil’ recovered from the sea in 2013, another, more intact, example of one of these rare types.) By contrast more Spitfires were produced, served in action and survived the war: this means that more Spitfires likewise survive in preservation, including airworthy examples, or as archaeological remains within both the terrestrial and marine environments.
Friday 24 May 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birth. Her long reign (1837-1901) saw an expansion of worldwide trade, facilitated by innovations in ship construction. Brunel’s SS Great Western, for example, was launched only a few months into her reign in 1838, and paved the way for the transatlantic ocean liner that would dominate maritime traffic for over a century.
Queen Victoria herself and the great changes in shipping that took place during her lifetime are both well-documented. Perhaps less well known is Victoria’s intimate connection with ships, shipping and shipwrecks, despite the many Fleet Reviews of her reign that set a precedent for later monarchs.
Billiard table at Windsor Castle, fashioned from timbers recovered in the early years of Victoria’s reign from the 1782 wreck of the Royal George, Spithead. Bedford Lemere and Company, 1893. Source: Historic England Archive
Victoria kept a lifelong journal recording her interest in ships from an early age, beginning with her teenage visits to resorts on the Kent and Sussex coasts. She took a lively interest in all the ships and sailors she saw and took great pains to learn their names and nationalities. Then as now, press interest in royalty, was intense, including a stay at St. Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, in late 1834, which coincided with a spell of bad weather: ‘The weather has been very unfavourable, since the arrival of the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria for out-door exercise . . . ‘ (1)
On 20 November, a coal brig homeward-bound to nearby Rye sprang a leak off St. Leonards. A rescue party in a boat was swamped and all on board drowned, a loss that was made all the more poignant because the crew of the original wreck had in fact saved themselves by abandoning ship. The royal visitors ‘most liberally subscribed . . . towards the relief of the several families who have been thrown into great distress . . .’ (2) Victoria’s entry for 5 January 1835 describes an encounter with one of the widows: ‘As we walked along by the towers we met Mrs. Weeks, one of the widows, with her little girl . . . She looks as pale as death . . .‘ (3)
One of the most famous wrecks of the entire Victorian era occurred very early in the Queen’s reign, primarily because its heroine was a young woman not much older than the Queen herself. Grace Darling (1815-1842) won international fame by accompanying her father in the perilous rescue of the survivors of the paddle steamer Forfarshire, wrecked in 1838 among the Farne Islands, Northumberland. In her journal for 28 September 1838 Victoria records hearing of the ‘gallant behaviour of a girl called Grace Darling’ from Lord Melbourne. On a rather boisterous voyage to Scotland in 1842 aboard the Royal Yacht, Victoria was nevertheless eager to discern ‘ . . . Farne Island, with Grace Darling’s Light House on it, & curious rocky islands . . . ‘ (5)
The 19th century saw enormous gains in the matter of ship safety. From 1850 the Admiralty was responsible for compiling records of shipping losses, a duty which devolved to the Board of Trade through the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854. For the first time, registers and summary abstracts (Board of Trade Casualty Returns) provided a centralised record from which to distil a statistical overview of shipwrecks and identification of common trends in shipping casualties. Hazards which caused regular or frequent losses could be identified and mitigating measures adopted (such as building new lighthouses where needed). The Returns were very successful and were copied elsewhere, for example in Denmark, and have become one of our key sources for wrecks of the Victorian era.
Similarly, a further Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 enforced the compulsory marking of a load line on British ships to do away with the overloaded ‘coffin ships’ that all too often foundered with all hands or were sent to sea unseaworthy. The load line, which is still used in a much refined form today on modern shipping, is popularly known as the ‘Plimsoll line’ after the MP Samuel Plimsoll, who had campaigned for many years to achieve its adoption.
Not all the legislation in the world could avoid ‘stress of weather’, natural hazards, or tragic accidents. The sheer volume of naval, commercial and leisure traffic in the Victorian period ensured that collisions were a frequent occurrence in crowded waterways, in the Thames, Humber, and English Channel in particular.
On 18 August 1875 the Queen herself was involved in a wreck event when the Royal Yacht Alberta was involved in a collision in the Solent with the sailing yacht Mistletoe. Victoria’s journal gives a vivid impression of the event: ‘When we [n]eared Stokes Bay, Beatrice said, very calmly “Mama, there is a yacht coming against us,” & I saw the tall masts & large sails of a schooner looming over us. In an instant came an awful, most terrifying crash . . . ‘ (6) Victoria was then ‘horrified to find not a single vestige of the yacht, merely a few spars & deck chairs floating about . . . ‘ Some of those on board the Mistletoe had saved themselves, as was common in such incidents, by jumping aboard the colliding vessel. Three lives were lost, including Thomas Stokes, master of the Mistletoe, who was picked up alive and brought onto the Queen’s yacht, but soon afterwards died of his injuries.
The subsequent inquiries were, of course, much reported in the press, and generated much adverse comment on the conduct of the respective crews. Had the Mistletoe approached too close in order for her passengers to catch a glimpse of the royal party? Why had the Alberta not been able to avoid the Mistletoe?
Less than three years later another shipwreck occurred off the Isle of Wight, which again generated huge publicity. This time it was the wreck of the sail training ship Eurydice, homeward-bound from the West Indies, which capsized in a snowy squall off Dunnose Point on 24 March 1878 with the loss of some 300 lives, mostly young men. The priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) would paint a vivid word-picture in his poem The Loss of the Eurydice of the ordeal of one of the two survivors, Sydney Fletcher of Bristol:
Now her afterdraught gullies him too down,
Now he wrings for breath with the deathgush brown,
Till a lifebelt and God’s will
Lend him a lift from the sea-swill.
The Queen heard of the wreck at Windsor Castle: ‘Too awful! . . . Too fearful! Could think of little else.’ (7) Over the course of that year the Queen and other members of the royal family, in common with much of the country, would discuss the sad fate of the Eurydice on many occasions. She was presented with a copy of The Last Four Days of the Eurydice by Captain E H Verney (1878). (8)
Spending much of their time at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, or at that year’s Fleet Review at Gosport, the royal family regularly encountered the grim sight of the wreck: ‘As we steamed across, we saw the poor Eurydice, lying close off what is called “No man’s land”, just as we had seen her the day of the Review, in fearful contrast to the beautiful Fleet.’ (9)
This blog can only scratch the surface of the Queen’s intimate connection with the sea, one she shared with her people, including direct involvement in a form of shipping tragedy which, statistically, became more common over her reign as more people acquired the leisure for pleasure cruising. She became Queen at a time when many individuals and organisations worked tirelessly to improve both navigational safety and the lot of the ordinary sailor, and it was during her reign that the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, founded in 1824, took the name by which we know it today, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
Wrecks were interwoven into her life just as much as they were into the lives of Victorians, many of whom would have gone to sea in the navy, merchant marine, or in the fishing industry, or taken advantage of the new opportunities for passenger travel aboard the steam-powered liner. Others still were moved by what they saw for themselves, or read in the newspapers: the Queen shared all these experiences in common with everyone else.
For the first post of 2016 I am delighted to welcome our guest blogger, Amelia Astley, a PhD student at the University of Southampton, who has specialised in the study of shipwreck site formation processes through the use of multibeam bathymetry time-series. Here she describes one of the wrecks she has studied, the Algerian, lost a century ago on 12 January 1916.
Life of the Algerian
The Algerian, originally named Flintshire, was built in 1896 by the Sunderland Shipbuilding Company and made up part of the Shire Line [1]. She had a tonnage of 3815grt, length of 111m, beam of 13m and a service speed of 10 knots [2]. Following 21 years of service she was bought by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Co., where she remained for six years, before being purchased by the Ellerman Line Ltd. for their Levant service, under the name Algerian.
A photo of the Algerian. [3]Fate of the Algerian
At 8.20am on the 12th January 1916 the Algerian departed from Cowes Road, Isle of Wight, heading for Avonmouth [4]. After travelling just 26km along her 600km journey, at 10:15am, she hit a mine 4km southwest of the Needles. It was later determined that this mine had been laid by the German submarine, UC-5, almost three months earlier [5]. The contact mine exploded on her starboard side, abreast of No. 2 hatch [6]. All of the crew bailed into three lifeboats. However, after realising the vessel wasn’t sinking, the captain and a few other members of the crew re-boarded [4]. For now the flooding was contained to just holds No. 1 and No. 2.
Three Admiralty armed drifters responded to distress signals, as well as the SS Warden, a Trinity House vessel, which assisted in the tow for Southampton, as did the tug Walvisch. By 2pm the vessel was approaching the boom defence near Cowes [4]. The tide was running strong and there were concerns that the Algerian was set on course to collide with the boom vessel Magda. As a result the Algerian was ordered to drop anchor.
Route of the final voyage of the Algerian, showing the mine laid by UC-5, and the final wrecking position.
The No. 1 bulkhead finally gave way as the ship came to a standstill (it is not known whether or not this was a direct result of letting the anchor go). Attempts were made at securing tows to the beach, but these failed as the ship started to rapidly sink, bows first, causing the crew to again abandon ship. The vessel sank on her port side into a deep water channel to a depth of 22m just one mile off Egypt Point at a time of 2:30pm [6]. Fortunately all crew made it off the ship safely and the ship was in ballast at the time, so there was no cargo to retrieve [1].
Originally a diver was to be sent down to the wreck to ascertain the cause of the explosion (it was not yet confirmed to be a mine). However, the loss of the HMT Albion IIto a mine near the Needles the following day is thought to have satisfied the Admiralty that a mine was the cause, since there is no record of a diver ever visiting the wreck [4]. The wreck, like many others, lay undisturbed until the end of the war.
A series of attempts were made to disperse the wreck throughout the 1920s and her structure was reduced in height by approximately 6.5m [7]. Although the ship had a beam of just 13m, the wreck structure in 1978 measured 30m wide[7], suggesting that the ship lies directly on her side, and is consistent with the vessel’s hull depth of 28m.
Present day
The wreck of the Algerian is situated approximately 1.25km northwest of Gurnard, Isle of Wight, at a depth of 20 to 22m below chart datum and is aligned 61/241° (with its bow towards the north-east). The wreck structure measures 107m long, 28m wide and stands proud of the seabed by 5.8m at its highest point.
Location map of wreck of the Algerian and the location of the nearest Tidal Diamond and Wave Buoy, overlain on 2006 and 2011 MCA multibeam bathymetry (Contains public sector information, licensed under the Open Government Licence v2.0, from Maritime Coastguard Agency).
Five high-resolution multibeam bathymetry surveys spanning three years have been collected using the University of Southampton’s vessel Callista. These multibeam bathymetry time-series are used to study the evolution with time of the wreck structure and surrounding seabed. The site is remarkably sheltered and is situated on a bed made up of coarse gravels, which require strong currents to be transported. As a result the wreck site has undergone little change over the three year (2012 – 2015) observation period.
Nevertheless, divers have observed that the wreck frequently acts as a nucleus for the collection of traffic cones, patio chairs, drinks cans and other debris. [8]
[5] Naval staff monographs (Historical). Volume XV. Home waters – part VI. From October 2015 to May 1916. London: Admiralty; 1926.
[6] Larn R, Larn B. Shipwreck index of the British Isles: Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Sussex, Kent (Mainland), Kent (Downs), Goodwin Sands, Thames. London: Lloyd’s Register of Shipping; 1995.
[7] United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO). Hydrographic Office wreck index: Algerian (013503820). n.d.
