For some five decades from 1866, when the naval battle of
Lissa, when victory was secured by the Austro-Hungarian fleet over its Italian
enemy by means of ramming, naval architects were to be fixated on designing ram
bows into warships of all sizes. They ignored the fact that victory at Lissa was
possible only because of short effective gun ranges and that this factor was soon
obviated by progress in gunnery and torpedoes. The ram, as a design feature, was
to prove more dangerous to friends than to enemies and three of the four major
disasters this occasioned have been discussed on earlier blogs (see links to these
articles at the end of this one). There was however one serious ramming in which
disaster did not follow, as a result of prompt and efficient damage control.
This instance, which involved two British Pre-Dreadnoughts, offers interesting
insights into the efficiency of the Royal Navy at the start of the 20th
Century.
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| HMS Hannibal - contemporary postcard |
HMS Hannibal and
HMS Prince George both belonged to the
nine-ship Majestic class and brought
into service in the late 1890s. These 16,000-ton, 421-feet long vessels were
among the most powerful afloat when first commissioned. Capable of steaming at maximum
16 knots, and with a crew of 672, they could each bring into action four
12-inch and twelve 6-inch guns as a well as many smaller weapons and five
18-inch torpedo tubes. Heavily armoured, they had one great vulnerability that
would apply to all ships afloat until the invention of radar – they were blind
in darkness.
On the night of 17th October 1903 Britain’s Channel
Fleet, under the command of Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, was engaged in
manoeuvres without lights off Cape Finisterre. The force included both Hannibal and Prince George (the latter named in honour of the future King George
V). The idea of such monsters manoeuvring in close proximity in near total
darkness held the seeds of disaster – and so it proved. At 2130 hrs two off-duty
midshipmen of the Prince George were playing
cards in the ship’s gunroom, close to the stern, when the bows of the Hannibal’s bows came crashing through.
Both young escaped without injury but the damage was serious.
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| HMS Prince Geroge in splendid Victorian livery |
Hannibal instantly
signalled, "Have collided with the Prince
George," by flashing lights – radio had also not yet made its appearance
– while measures were put in hand to assess the full extent of the damage. By
2210 hrs Prince George could signal
that there was a large hole in her gun-room, and that the submerged steering
compartment were full of water. Hannibal
had impacted at a speed of nine knots, and had caused an 18-inch deep indentation
in Prince George’s side. It was in the
form of an inverted pyramid, the apex at the level of the protective steel
deck, the base level with the upper deck, 24 feet in height, and over 6 feet across
at the upper deck, and diminishing to a crack at the apex. In the centre of the
indentation was a triangular rift, over three feet long and 18-inched wide at the
top.
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| Beresford |
Admiral Beresford – a controversial figure, but never one to
fail to rise to a challenge – crossed to Prince
George, examined into the damage and made a general signal to the Fleet to order
all hand-pumps and 14 foot planks to be sent on board. Prince George’s Captain F. L. Campbell had ensured maintenance
of perfect discipline. A collision mat had been placed over the injury and the crew
were already working with hand-pumps and baling out with buckets.
The most serious problem was however that the rudder was out
of action as the steam-lines leading to its operating mechanism were full of
water. The helm was however amidships and had the rudder jammed to starboard or
to port, the fine-manoeuvring that would follow later would have been
impossible. The bulkheads adjoining the flooded
compartments, and all horizontal water-tight doors, were shored up with baulks
of timber. Water was still entering however because, owing to the indentation
in the side of the ship, the collision mat did not fit tightly.
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| The approach to Ferrol - the inlet's intricacy is obvious (with thanks to Google Earth) |
Beresford ordered the fleet to proceed to the nearby Spanish
naval base of Ferrol. This lay about half-way up a narrow ten-mile inlet which
was known for sunken rock hazards. An earlier British battleship, HMS Howe, had gone aground there in 1892 and
had been rescued only with difficulty, and three lesser ships had suffered the
same indignity thereafter. Beresford was taking no chances and he sent a vessel
ahead to mark known rocks by buoy. A
message was also conveyed to the Spanish authorities to explain the situation.
Captain Campbell of the Prince
George was now responsible for a very impressive piece of seamanship. He
brought the ship up the tortuous channel to Ferrol harbour, without benefit of
a rudder and steered by engines alone. This involved proceeding a slow speed, sometimes
with both screws ahead, sometimes astern, sometimes on ahead and the other in
reverse, according to which way it was necessary to turn his ship’s head. His
handling was faultless, despite the fact that during these operations Prince George was heavily down by the
stern, drawing 25 feet forward and 34 feet aft. Her stern walk was flush with
the water.
Prince George arrived
in Ferrol harbour on 18th October. Divers and working parties were
sent to her from all the other ships, and the Spanish Government made dockyard resources
available. The working parties laboured day and night for the next five days.
On 19th October the armoured cruiser HMS Hogue, was placed alongside the Prince
George to make her salvage pumps available.
In his memoirs Beresford gives a fascinating insight to the
measures now undertaken. The first objective was to prevent further flooding
and to pump out the water already on board. He wrote that “Mats were made of canvas, ‘thrummed’ with blankets, and these, with
collision mats cut up, and shot mats' were thrust horizontally through the
holes in the ship's side and wedged up so that the ends of the mats projected
inside and out; and the moisture, causing them to swell, closed up the holes.”
In parallel with this a cofferdam was being constructed against
the side of the ship, around the rupture. This was a formed a chamber “which was filled up with all sorts of
absorbent and other material, such as seamen's beds, blankets, rope, hammocks,
pieces of collision mats, gymnasium mattresses, cushions, biscuit tins, etc.
Thus the coffer-dam formed a block, part absorbent and part solid, wedged and
shored over the site of the injury.” Beresford also recorded that the work
involved 24 engine-room artificers, 24 stokers, 88 carpenter ratings, 27 divers
and 16 diver-attendants. By 1903 a ship’s
“carpenter” was no longer concerned with maintenance of wooden structures but
with the ship’s steel framework and plating. The divers were drawn from all
ships in the fleet and they, like the other staff involved, operated on a
three-watch system so that the work proceeded night and day. While this was in
progress over 145 tons of ammunition and stores were shifted in order to trim
the ship. The total cost of the stores purchased at Ferrol was £116. 2s. 4d –
one can only be impressed by the exactitude of the two shillings and four pence!
On 24th October, just one week after the collision,
Prince George departed Ferrol for
Portsmouth, escorted by the armoured cruiser HMS Sutlej. The integrity of the cofferdam was attested by the fact
that despite rough weather being encountered the total amount of water shipped
during the voyage was estimated at one gallon.
Once repaired at Portsmouth Prince George was soon back in service. She seems to have been
accident-prone as she suffered minor damage in another collision, this time
with the German armoured cruiser SMS Frederick
Carl at Gibraltar in 1905. She also suffered moderate damage in 1907 when
she broke free from her anchorage at Portsmouth and struck the new armoured
cruiser HMS Shannon. She was to prove lucky however in WW1 when she
survived hits by Turkish shells at the Dardanelles and by a torpedo which failed
to explode. Pieces of her still exist – she was sold to a German firm for scrap
in 1921 but broke free from her tow and ran ashore off Kamperduin, on the Dutch
coast. Firmly aground, she was stripped of valuable material and left in place
as a breakwater of which glimpses can still be seen at low tide.
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| SMS Friedrich Carl |
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Click on the links below to read about other peacetime
ramming incidents:
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