The home of the little mermaid, under rocket attack

On September the 2nd 1807 the Royal Navy destoryed the Danish navy while it sat at anchor in Copenhagen harbour, again. The first time that this had been done had been in 1801 by Lord Nelson (then a Vice-Admiral) under Admiral Sir Hyde Parker. It was in this battle that Nelson used the fact that he was blind in one eye to claim that he had not seen the signal to withdraw, as Admiral Sir Hyde Parker had expected when he put it up. The signal had been given simply to give Nelson the option of withdrawing without the danger of being shot like Admiral Byng. However as Nelson was one of the best examples of the rabid dog levels of aggression that had trained into naval officers since the incompetent Byng, so Admiral Sir Hyde Parker would have known it was an order unlikely to be followed.

The 1807 raid was conducted under the command of Admiral Gambier who ordered the city to be bombarded by mortars and rockets, unlike Nelson who had sailed his fleet right into Copenhagen Harbour to 'engage the enemy more closely' as he always signaled while fighting. The British bombarded the city for 3 days destroying almost a third of the city and killing 2000 civilians before the Danes surrendered.

Investigating HMS Investigator

The Franklin Expedition was a very Victorian expedition, and that is why it failed. The idea was to use to massive technological prowess of Victorian Britain to try and forge a way through the mythical Northwest Passage over the top of Canada. The two mighty warships of the Royal Navy that were given with the task were at the leading edge of what was possible. They had steam engines for when there was no wind. They could make their own fresh water. They were packed with enough food, preserved using the newly created tinning process, that they could last for years without fresh supplies. The officer's quarters were even nicely decorated with coloured tile. Towards the end those that were left started eating each other.

The Franklin expedition headed off from britain to the sound of cheering crouds, and was never seen again. Neither were the rescue missions that were sent to find them. Nor the rescue missions for the rescue missions. The artic just ate them up.

At least they were never seen again until modern archelologists started to find them. One of the latest discoveries is the wreak of one of the rescue expeditions HMS Investigator which has been found by Parks Canada and is producing a wealth of information on the lives of sailors in the mid-Victorian period.

William Hall

On 27 August 1904 William Hall died aged 75. He had spent much of his life in the Royal Navy rising to the rank of Petty Officer. So far so unremarkable, many people became petty officers during the Victorian period. However William Hall was special as he was one of the first people from the Royal Navy to win the Victoria Cross, and the first black man from any service to do so.

His parents had been slaves who had escaped during the War of 1812 (when the Royal Navy burned the Whitehouse) with help from the navy. They settled in Nova Scottia and worked in the dockyards. William too started working in the dockyards, and then on merchant vessels before joining the Royal Navy in 1852. However he really became famous for his bravery on land rather than at sea.

Sailor's serving on land was not unusual in the Victorian period, Hall himself had already served as part of the Naval Brigade in the Crimea, due to the way that it had become so utterly dominant at sea. In 1857 the Sepoys in India mutinied, and the mutiny grew into a full revolt against British rule. At the time Hall was an Able Seaman on board HMS Shannon heading for China. They were ordered to go to India instead so that their guns could be used to help put down the revolt. The ship was towed 600 miles up the Ganges before guns where dismounted transported by the sailors to the siege of Lucknow.

The guns from the Shannon were brought up close to the Shah Nujeff mosque with orders to breach and clear the walls. A hail of musket fire and grenades rained down on them killing or wounding everybody except Able Seaman Hall and Lieutenant Thomas James Young. Despite this between them Hall and Young kept the gun firing, and for their bravery they were recommended for the Victoria Cross by their Captain, Sir William Peel, who had himself won the VC in the Crimea.

Whitehouse Blackened

During the Napoleonic Wars with France America was on the side of the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys, a link that had existed since the American War of Independence when the colonists had been supported by France. As always they were late to the fight declaring war in 1812. To begin with the British and Canadians fought a mainly defensive war to repulse the American invasion forces. With the war against the military genius Napoleon coming to its conclusion all available resources were deployed defeating the bigger and more dangerous opponent on the other side of the Channel rather than getting caught up in an adventure on the other side of the Atlantic, so the strategy was to keep the Americans out of Canada and use the Royal Navy to blockade their trade routes. This proved a sucessful strategy. The army and their Native American allies largely kept the Americans out of Canada, helped by American mistakes, with the Navy doing so well on the ocean that they ended up being paid tribute by some of the coastal towns and even buring Washington DC on August 24 1814.

However this was to be one of the few major sucesses on American soil. The Americans had learned from their mistakes in Canada and proved to defeat on their home ground. The war ground on to a stalemate. Once Napoleon had abdicated Britain got rid of its trade restictions with France and stopped impressing sailor's as it wound down its military in order to reduce government spending so that it could try and pay off the enourmous debts that fighting the long war with France had created. With the reasons for the war gone and nobody in a position for a decisive victory a peace treaty was signed in 1815.

How to Tie a Fast Bowline

A very fast way to tie the most useful knot on the water.

Morse Code

Somebody has made an interesting way of decoding Morse Code by breaking it down by walking through a tree of possibilities.

What time is it?

Via Maritime Compassa simple diagram for working out how many bells it is and which watch it is.

Blowing up Boer-dom

As well as reenacting 1919 we also travelled back in time to the Second Boer War. This was an arena display with the Heilbron Commando taking the staring role together with several groups portraying British units. The Bluejackets were manning the artillery, unfortunately this meant that we also had to get it to the field of battle as well. Normally our gun would have had a crew of 18 to move it. We had 7. Even doing this over the fairly flat and smooth ground of the fields near Kelmarsh Hall certainly showed me how hard it would have been to maneaver one of these weapons though the South African veld.

The battle started with an Australian mounted partol coming across a Boer farmstead. At the point that we were reenacting the Boers
were heavily outnumbered by the British. They could not win in a pitched battle so instead they used their mobility to mount guerilla style raids on British infrastructure like railways and telegraphs. The members of a commando were recruited from the area that they operated in and wore no uniforms, so anybody of military age could have been one. Unable to tell friend from foe, or lure the enemy into an open battle which they could win, the British resorted to more extreme tactics. Remember, we didn't get such a huge empire by being nice.

In our demonstration the bread steallers find a man or military age in the farmstead and decide that he must be part of the Boer Commando that is terrorising the area. Since he was not in uniform they were going to treat him as a spy, but just as the execution was about to take place the real Beor Commando rides to the rescue. A Boer sharp shooter takes out the officer commanding the British contingent, there were many excelent snipers amoungst the Boer forces, and then the cavalry scatters the Aussies. The tables are turned and it could be all over for the British, but it turns out that the Australian partol is just a scouting party for a larger British contingent. Fresh British infantry marches in to engage the enemy, with supporting fire from a naval detachment. Outgunnned and outnumbered the Boers do what any good guerilla force does, they race off to fade into vast expanse of the veld ready to fight again another day.

A not so dazzling paint job

If you go to Portsmouth Historic Dockyards to have a look at the M. 33, the ship that I was reenacting a landing party from last weekend, you will see that she is currently painted as she was during the First World War in dazzle camoflage. At first sight you might think that painting high contrast geometrical shapes onto a ship's hull could not possibly be good camoflage, and you would be right. It doesn't actually work. The idea was to try and break up the outlines of the ship making it harder to target and came from observing herds of Zebra on the plains of africa. As they run and dodge to get away from preditors their stripes can create an optical illustion fooling their preditors to launch themselves at a places where the Zebra isn't. So it was decided to try doing the same thing with warships, but they forgot two things:

1. Warships are much slower than Zebra.
2. Warships are much bigger than Zebra.

Needless to say using dazzle paint camoflage didn't last long and was soon replaced by various shades of battleship grey after the war.

The train to fame

One of the technologies used by the British during the Boer War was the armoured train. Mostly the British tactics were to do with locking down territory using barbed wire and blockhouses then sweeping it clean or Boer. On the other hand the Boer were all about mobility. The armoured train was one of the few technologies deployed by the British to help keep them mobile, but it was not the first time they had been used.

In 1882 Jackie Fisher, then a Captain, assisted by Lieutenant Richard Poore built an armoured train for use by the Naval Brigade that they had landed in Egypt to gain control of the strategically vital Suez Canal. Fisher had always been a technology nut so this was right up his street, and proved to be very useful. In fact that it was so useful that it gained quite a bit of publicity for him back in Britian, however the role that Poore played was generally understated in the press. According to biographies that I have read this is something that Fisher felt bad about, and is the only time that I have every heard of Jackie Fisher ever feeling bad about getting all of the limelight.

Dial M for Missiles (and seasickness)

Last weekend I was reenacting a landing party from HMS M 33 in North Russia in 1919. Despite the slightly odd name the M 33 was a real ship and she did fight in Russian Civil War. She is also one of only two ships from the First World War left, which is a shame. Especially because she was such a poor sea holding boat like all the other ships of her class.

The M 33 was a Monitor, which meant that she was little more than a gun platform for a pair of 6 inch guns. She was designed to get in as close to shore as possible and bombard targets on land. To get in close the Monitors had a much shallower draft than any other ships of a similar size at barely 6 feet. This was great for getting in close, but that very shallow draft meant that she simply did not handle well out at sea.

If you would like to now how she was used then try this analogy. In any modern conflict the first thing that you will see on your TV is a ship firing off cruise missiles in order to soften up the enemies defences ready for an invation. That is what the M 33 did, she was the cruise missile of her day.

A warm weekend in Northern Russia

This weekend was the first major reenactment of the season at Kelmarsh Hall. I was with the Bluejackets group and for most of the day we were on our static display doing a detachment from HMS M. 33 in northern Russia in 1919. Most people do not realise that when the guns fell silent on the western front in 1918 there was still conflict in Russia, and the western powers were very much part of it. Russia had stopped fighting with the central powers after their first revolution in February 1917. Getting out of that meat grinder had been one of the principal reasons for the revolt. This allowed the Germans to free up men for what was to be their final push on the western front before the naval blockade imposed by the Royal Navy finally staved them into surrender.

In the end the Entente Cordial powers won the First World War not because they were victorious on the feild of battle but because they had better logistical support. The British Empire could draw in material from the four corners of the globe to supply it, and its navy could block off the sea lanes to prevent the German Empire trading with anybody that did not share a land border with it. Once the almost unlimited resources of the United States were finally brought to bear there was simply no way that Germany and Austro-Hungary could realistically expect to win anymore.

However the Central Powers where not the only ones with resource problems. The Russian Empire was still basically an agricultural economy, and much of it still ran on a system which would have seemed familiar to the Feudal lord of the manor in Medieval England. They were not an advanced industrial power like their enemy Germany, but luckily for them they were allied to two of the biggest, France and Britain. So to try and make sure that Russia could continue to fight and so force the Central Powers into a war on two fronts Britain supplied Russia with the material that it could not have produced itself. This was shipped up through the arctic circle to the Barents Sea port of Murmansk. Before the war this had been nothing, barely even a village. The British soon changed that building it up into a port city with enough warehouse space to store the millions of tons of material that they were shipping in. Being British they also built a railway to connect this new city with the rest of the country.

When the Tsar fell from power and the Russians declared a cease-fire this left the other allied powers with a problem. They had been shipping all of this stuff into Murmansk and stockpiling it there so that there would still be material during the winter when the sea route closed. There where millions of tons of stuff there ready to be used by the Imperial Russian forces, but now there was no Imperial Russia. They could not ship it back out, there was too much stuff, and if Germany or their Finnish allies got hold of it then that could extend the war considerably. Murmansk needed to be defended, there was no Russian force that they trusted to do it, so they had to do it themselves; and because of that we slowly got drawn into the Russian Civil War on the side of the Whites. Britain continued to fight all the way into the 1920s before finally being able to disengage and retire home, leaving our White allies to the (non-existent) mercy of the Bolsheviks.

Airship ahoy

On this day in 1919 the first airship to make a return journey over the Atlantic landed in Norfolk, and surprisingly the airship in question was British.

U-boats get where you least expect them

There are many sunken ships around, including many sunken U-Boats. However one place you might not expect to find the wreak of a First World War U-Boat is at the bottom of Lake Michigan, but that is where U-97 ended up.

Medieval harbour discovered in Scotland

Archeologists in Scotland have found the remains of a sophisticated harbour and dockyards at Loch na h-Airde. One of the marine archaeologists at the site is reported to have said about it that:

This site has enormous potential to tell us about how boats were built, serviced and sailed on Scotland’s western seaboard in the medieval period – and perhaps during the early historic and prehistoric eras as well. There is no other site quite like this in Scotland.

The level of sophistication involved in the construction of the harbour, including a sill to maintain a constant water level inside no-matter the state of the tide. Of course up until the invention of the railways rivers and the sea was the best way to get anywhere on this island, and is still the way that the vast majority of all international trade is conducted.

Ramming speed!

During the late Victorian period it became popular to design battleships with rams following Rear Admiral Von Tegetthoff desperate, but successful, use of ramming during the Battle of Vis; and ramming did sink a lot of ships. one of them was the HMS Victoria which sank on June 22 1885 with 358 deaths including Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon. Unfortunately the ship which rammed her was HMS Camperdown, oops.

A long day in the Baltic

June the 21st is the longest day in the year. For Charles Davis Lucas June 21st 1854 must have been the longest day of his life, it was certainly one of the most important. He had joined the navy in 1848 when he was just 13. In 1854 he was serving as a Mate on board HMS Hecla in the Baltic. They were bombarding Bomarsund, a fort in the Åland Islands off of Finland. The soldiers manning the fort were not taking it laying down and were firing back on the Hecla and the other ships in the squadron. One shell from the fort slammed the Hecla and slithered across the wooden deck with its fuse still smoking. A shout went out immediately for everybody to get down, but Lucas didn't. He ran over to the shell and threw it overboard before the fuse had chance to burn down. It was a close run thing as the shell exploded even before it hit the water but thanks to his actions nobody was hurt. Seeing his actions his commanding officer immediately promoted him to Lieutenant. Two years later when the Victoria Cross was created Lucas was one of the first people to be given it. His captain of that day also later gave him his daughter's hand in marriage, but that is not really related to the incident. He ended his career a Captain, and was later promoted to Rear-Admiral when he was on the retired list.

Morse Code

On this day in 1840 Samuel F.B. Morse received his patent on what would become known as Morse code. One hundred years later Morse code would still be the system used for the Royal Navy's wireless transmissions. It was even used between aircraft and carrier despite the RAF having happily used voice for many years, but then the navy had never been very good at technological innovation. With the brief exception of HMS Dreadnough (and only then because it was being pushed so hard by the irrepressable technophile Jackie Fisher) the last time that the Royal Navy had had a real technological advantage was during the Elizabethian period when Drake and Hawkins were up against the Spainish Armarda.

The Canadian fleet is all surface

The Royal Navy might be completely without aircraft, but now the Canadian Navy has no submarines after HMCS Corner Brook ran aground on a training exercise has put it back in port for repairs. Oops.

Swimmers of the Lost Ark

For the first time since the aircraft carrier was invented the Royal Navy has none. As was found out in the defence of Crete during the Second World War a fleet without air support are sitting ducks, so this means that until the two carriers that have been ordered arrive, and the air groups to go on them, the Royal Navy will only be able to operate with either a allied fleet with carriers, or under the protection of RAF aircraft flying from a land airbase. This could mean that for the first time ever the Royal Navy is reliant for protection on the French.

However the scraping of the current carriers is definitely going ahead and their air groups went years ago. Tenders have even gone out asking for bids as to what to do with the Ark Royal. The tender document makes clear that they should not go to another fleet, and one option is to sink it to produce an artificial reef as a dive site off the Devon coast.

World Ocean day

Happy World Ocean Day to everybody!

Blackbeard returns

Well his ship at least, or rather bits of it. The anchor of the flagship of the pirate known as Blackbeard, who's real name was probably Edward Teach, or Edward Thatch, and born in Bristol in 1680, has been recovered. Like the pirate Captain Kidd, Teach started out as a Privateer. His letter of Marque was to attack French and Spainish ships during the War of the Spanish Succession. Also like Kidd he then went pirate and started to attack everything, but unlike Kidd he was actually rather good at piracy.

Blackbeard deliberately cultivated a fearsome reputation in order to try and get is prey to surrender without having to fight. This was the reason that he tied lite fuses into his beard before boarding ships: he wanted to look like something demonic and frighten people. It was also the reason why almost all pirates flew a black flag. They wanted to frighten people so they could capture their ships without a fight.

One interesting fact that this investigation has brought up as well as the anchor is ammunition used in the cannon. It appears that Blackbeard preferred to use improvised grapeshot. This shows that he wanted to take the ship's he attacked intact. If he wanted to damage or sink ship's he would have used round shot. To destroy rigging the chain shot would have been the weapon of choice. However grape shot flows over a broad area in a similar way to a shot gun blast and it was used principally to kill a ship's crew. Presumably if a crew wasn't willing to submit to him without a fight then he wanted to get rid of them and replace them with one he could trust when he added the ship to his flotilla.

The timing is rather strangely good for the new Pirates of the Caribbean film. Is an amazing coincidence that this recovery happened just at the correct time to get some more publicity for the film. If you're cynical you might even think they were connected, but if they are then I can only applaud the films PR department for helping an important and difficult piece of marine archeology.

Cockleshell Heros on Hayling Island

Via the blog of the Historical Maritime Society the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties, better known as Cockleshell Heros from the film that was made about their daring raid on Bordeaux in 1942, are getting a memorial erected on Hayling Island were they conducted much of their training. Currently it is little more than a huge granite block from which the eventual memorial will be carved, but once it is finished it could be a reason for going to the Island. Having been to Hayling Island once it would probably be the only reason to go.

The Ladyboy and the 12 pounder

I've just had a very good weekend doing some research into the 12 pounder Quickfiring Naval Gun at Newhaven Fort. The fort is a well preserved Palmerston era fortification designed to protect the harbour at Newhaven from the French. It was designed to make use of the contours of the hill it was on. It made sense from a construction point of view, but it did leave them the only sloping parade ground of that era. Parading on a hill must have made square bashing difficult.

It never fired a shot in anger against the French, but did against German aircraft during the Second World War. After the war the fort was used by the Royal Observer Corps, and the abandoned. It was sold to property developers who tried to bulldoze it, but found that the fort was simply to strong for them. They sold it on to another group that restored it to it's current state as a historical attraction. Unfortunately it was a historical attraction in Newhaven and despite being a very interesting site with plenty to do they could not make it a viable business, so it eventually ended up in the hands of Lewis County Council.

The staff at Newhaven Fort were very helpful not just letting me take measurements from their gun, they also let me read and copy some of the books in their archive which I will be digitising later.

As for the Ladyboy in my blog title? To get to Newhaven with enough time to do anything useful I knew that I was going to have to stay over somewhere. I could have found somewhere in Newhaven itself, except that ... well ... it was Newhaven. Instead just down the road are the bright lights of Brighton. Just opposite Brighton Pavillion a new show in town "The Ladyboy's of Bangkok", and when in Brighton do as the Brightonians do. It was great fun, and considerably less vulgar than you might think.

The canned beans and the Northwest Passage

On this day in 1845 an expedition under Sir John Franklin sailed down the River Thames bound for the icy wastes of the Arctic ocean. This was not Franklin's first trip to the Arctic. In 1819 he lead an expedition mapping another part of the mythical northwest passage along the northern coast of Canada. It was a disaster. Their supplies ran out and they found that there was not enough game to hunt in order to restock. Eleven of the party of 20 died with the remainder becoming so hungry they eat anything they could get their hands on, lichen from trees, their own boots, even their dead colleagues. That really should have been a hint that Arctic exploration was not Franklin's forte. However back in the warmth of the clubs where British the establishment gathered instead of a pitiful failure his story became one of a plucky adventurer battling the elements, he was even promoted.

The 1845 trip was much better equipped than his 1819 attempt with two ships (HMS Terror and HMS Erebus), more men, and enough food that it should have lasted them three years. However just as before the expedition was a disaster, but this time nobody survived. The ships were trapped in the ice and their supplies began to run low. The canned food that they had should have been enough for several years, but there was a problem with the canning process meaning that while the food was kept fresh lead from the solder used to seal the cans leached out into it slowly poisoning everybody that ate it.

Nobody really knows what finally happened in the end. In the end scurvy, cold, pneumonia, as well as the lead probably killed everybody. There were no survivors, and of the dead only an handful of bodies were ever found. Amongst those bodies that were found there was evidence of cannibalism, like on his first expedition. Further expeditions were sent to find Franklin and his men, resulting in even more deaths until the number of people killed on the rescue missions was even more than the number killed on the original one.

The enigma of HMS Bulldog

On the 9th of May 1941 Sub Lt David Balme of HMS Bulldog got on board the sinking U-Boat U110, and got out again with a priceless set of code books for the German Navy's Enigma machine. Most Enigma traffic could be decrypted thanks to the work of British code breakers working at Bletchley Park continuing the work of Polish code breakers. While the rest of the german military were a bit sloppy in their use of their encryption machines, a fact that Bletchley Park exploited ruthlessly. However the navy had much better cypher discipline, a code book to get keys from, and an Enigma machine with four encrypting rotors all of which combined to keep their messages secret. Bletchley Park knew all of this, and they knew that getting into the radio traffic to and from the German Navy's prowling U-Boats was vital if they shipping lanes were to stay open. If they didn't then Britain could loose the Battle of the Atlantic and be staved into submission. They knew how to break the Enigma. They knew how to figure out the settings on the extra rotor wheel. They even knew the from that the entries in the code book would take, but without the actual book there was no way that they could break the code. King George VI famously said that capturing the code book was the most important event in the war at sea, and Bletchley Park have just opened an exhibition on it including eye witness accounts from both sides.

Barbarians

Barbary pirates had been disrupting trade for years. Typically they captured ships, sold their cargo, and then either sold the crews into slavery or held them as slaves until they were ransomed. They would take ships all over the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic. They even went so far as to raid the coast of Ireland and southern England scooping up the populations of coastal villages to be sold as slaves.

Some European states bought them off by paying tribute to the rulers of the north African states that they operated out of. Initially the newly created United States of America tried doing the same and successfully established a treaty with Morocco to pay them off, however Morocco's neighbouring kingdoms got greedy and started demanding more money than the fledgling country could afford. Creating a navy and marine force to protect their traders must have seemed like the cheaper option, and that is exactly what they did so when Jefferson became President in 1801 he had a small fleet of 6 ships under his command. Jefferson had long been an advocate of not paying the tribute so when Yusuf Karamanli, the Pasha of Tripoli, demanded $225,000 he was in no mood to hand it over. So the First Barbery War began on May the 10th 1801.

The Barbary pirates were not used to fighting people with the ability to fight back and so were completely outclassed on the sea. However the US force was far too small to be able to do anything about fighting on land. To end this stalemate they hired a mercenary force and using this they were able to capture the city of Derna. This act proved a sufficiently powerful that they were then able to buy free all the captured Americans for much less money than had been initially demanded. The war did not solve the Barbary problem as soon enough the other Barbary states were taking American sailors as slaves again. It took a second war for America to prove itself too expensive a country to raid for slaves, and the conquest of the area by European powers before the African slave trade was finally brought to an end.

A battle and a liberation

Today in 1864 battle raged around the tiny island of Heligoland in the North Sea. Denmark was at war with Austria and Prussia, and not doing well. One area that they did have success with was to dispatch ships into the North Sea and English channel to harass their opponent's merchant shipping. A naval blockade is a powerful tactic. When used by the British against Germany in the First World War it is arguably the main reason that they were forced to surrender even though they were (slowly) gaining territory all the way up until the armistice was signed. The Austrians and Prussians obviously wanted to break the blockade and in March the Danes got intelligence that they were massing a fleet to do so.

The Danes and combined Prussian and Austrian fleets clashed off the small island of Heligoland on May the 9th 1864. The Prussian gun boats where not aggressive enough, always hanging back at long range which meant that their fire was not effective. This lent the Danes concentrate on the Austrian 51-gun screw frigate Schwarzenberg setting her on fire twice. Strangely for a small island off the coast of Germany and populated by German speakers Heligoland did not belong to either Germany or Denmark, but was part of the British Empire a fact that was used by the Austrian commander, Kommodor Wilhelm von Tegetthoff. He fled to the neutral waters around the island. The Danes could have followed and finished him off but for the fact that the British Frigate Aurora was observing the battle. Attacking the Schwarzenberg within British Territorial waters could well have caused a diplomatic spat with the world's most powerful nation. Under the cover of darkness the mangled Austro-Prussian squadron succeeded in returning to Cuxhafen. The Austro-Prussians had been pasted and did not manage to break the Danish blockade the honours, but that did not stop both sides from claiming victory!

After the battle Von Tegetthoff was promoted to Rear Admiral and conferred the Order of the Iron Crown. He next turns up in the historical record in 1866 as commander of the Austrian fleet against the Italians. He attacked the Italians in the Adriatic Sea near the island of Vis. His fleet was completely outclassed: he had fewer ships, which had less armour, and worse guns. He made up for this through a level of aggression that bordered on the insane. His plan was to get as close as possible to the enemy to make up for his inferior guns, and ram them if possible. One of his unarmoured ships, the Kaiser, engaged four Italian ironclads at the same time. He used his own ship to ram and sink the Italian Iron-Clads Re d'Italia and Palestro sinking both. This spectacular use of ramming lead to 50 years of naval designers fitting rams to their battleships, and ramming did sink many ships. Unfortunately they tended to be ships from the same fleet when the ships accidentally collided. Again both sides claimed victory, but as far as winning the war was concerned this engagement was completely irrelevant.

While Heligoland might no longer be British there is another British island off the coast of another country that has an important historical event today. For the Channel Islands today is Liberation Day. The Germans had expected the Channel Islands to be attacked, they were after all British. However the logic that had left them abandoned was still very much in force, they were still strategically irrelevant to the war. After the Normandy landings the allies needed to capture the Cotentin Peninsula to protect their flank, but the little islands just off its coast? They were no threat. The rocky coast and high cliffs make any invasion of the channel islands difficult. When you add in the way that they had been fortified the number of men that would have been lost to retake them was simply too high for the minimal strategic gain, especially since the redirection of resources would have slowed down the advance on the main front. So the German garrison on the Channel Islands was simply left to sit it out behind the meter thick concrete walls of their fortifications.

HMS Speedy and the navy's rise

It was during the Napoleonic period that the Royal Navy gained its position as the world's dominant naval force, a position that it was to maintain until the Second World War. It did not gain this position through technology as it was quite common for ships to pass through several navies during the course of their careers, normally ones on opposite sides. Nor did it gain this premier reputation due to simple weight of numbers, though it had many ships, or just the economic clout of the country behind it, though Britain was becoming more properous. One thing that it did have over all of its rivals at that time was the attitude of the people commanding its ships which can be best described as ... rabid.

During this period the form of regulated piracy that would become known as the Prize' system was very much in force. If managed to capture a lot of prizes then you could become very very wealthy. The money went up and down the chain of command from the lowest sailor up to the Captain (if they were sailing on an independent commission) or the admiral in charge of the engagement, the shares in the prize money was split up according to rank. Even in during the First World War, which marked the effective end of the Prize System the King's Regulations includes the number of shares that each man had in any prize money that the ship got as well as his regular pay. Nelson started his career the poor second son of a farmer, but he ended it hugely rich because of the prizes that he had captured.

The other spur to action was what happened if they failed to do their uppermost to engage the enemy. The regulations stated that the commander would have to answer for his actions to a Court Martial, and could even be executed. The Byng case showed that this was no empty threat, and that even Admirals could find themselves facing a firing squad. This combination of the carrot of huge rewards and the stick of harsh penalties lead to Royal Navy commanders being willing to attack anything, anywhere, anytime. If it floated it was a target, even if a more rational mind withdraw because they were up against an opponent that hopelessly out gunned them.

An example of this happened on this day in 1801 when Thomas Cochrane in HMS Speedy attacked and captured the Spanish frigate El Gamo despite it being four times their size and sporting 32 guns to Speedy's 14. The napoleonic period has many incidents like this, incidents so unlikely that if you where to fictionalise them you would have to tone things down to make them seem believable, and they set the tone for a century and a half of dominance.

Claude Choules Last WW1 Combat Veteran Dies

The BBC is reporting that the world's last known combat veteran of World War I, Claude Choules, has died in Australia aged 110.

He Royal Navy at 15 and went on to serve on HMS Revenge on which he saw action in the North Sea aged 17, going on to witnessed the surrender of the German fleet in the Firth of Forth in November 1918, then the scuttling of the fleet at Scapa Flow.

Having moved back to Australia and joining the Royal Australian Navy in 1932. During World War II he was chief demolition officer for the western half of Australia. It would have been his responsibility to blow up the key strategic harbour of Fremantle, near Perth, if Japan had invaded. After finishing his service Mr Choules joined the Naval Dockyard Police.

Despite his military record, Mr Choules became a pacifist. He was known to have disagreed with the celebration of Australia's most important war memorial holiday, Anzac Day, and refused to march in the annual commemoration parades.

His autobiography, The Last of the Last, which was published in 2009, the same year that last three WWI veterans living in Britain - Bill Stone, Henry Allingham and Harry Patch - all died.

HMS Sheffield

Yesterday marked the adversary of the sinking of HMS Sheffield by an Exocet rocket during the Falklands War. Rockets have been around as long as gun powder, but until the twentieth century they had never been that good. The chinese were the first to use rocket artillary, with their use spreading from China, through the Indian states and the Middle East. The British brought the idea back from india and used them during the Napoleonic Wars, with both Army and Naval Rocket artillary being used. However the cannon remained the principal form of artillary, simply because the inventions that rockets needed to transform them into a really effective weapon hadn't been created yet.

There were two main problems with rockets: they were not very efficient at turning the energy of the gunpowder fuel into movement, they were not at all accurate. Of course cannon was not accurate either during the napoleonic period, but the way that they were used meant that this did not matter. On land you just pointed it at one of the densly packed columns of men coming towards you and waited until you could expect to hit somebody. At sea broadsides needed to conducted at fairly close range in order to be able to punch through the thick hulls of their opponents. The main advantage of a rocket over a cannon is that the range is potentially greater, but all that does it means that it will miss by a greater amount.

These problems were solved during the twentieth century. The efficiency problem was solved by Goddard when he attached an exhaust nozel to his rocket that was tuned to the hypersonic speeds of the exhaust gasses. The accuracy problem was solved by the creation of guidence systems: starting with the primative ones developed by the Germans during World War 2, and then improved upon by everybody else subsequently.

The sinking of the HMS Sheffield vividly showed how dangerous guided missiles had become to surface ships; much like Toranto had demonstrated that the era of the Battleship was over though the technology that had made this so had already been in place for decades.

Salcombe Castle

One more interesting fact that I have learned about Salcombe's military history while I was there is how it's ruined castle came to be that way. I had thought that it was simple neglect. The estuary that it protected was not a real estuary like those of the Dart or the Exe. It does not contain a river, it is simply a valley that sank below the rising sea level at the end of the last ice age. Therefore unlike the Dart or the Exe estuaries it does not provide an easy way to trade with the interior of the country and is so less economically valuable.

However Salcombe's castle did not simply fall into disuse since it had only a limited trade to protect, it was actively pulled down by the Parliamentary forces at the end of the English Civil Wars. During those wars Salcombe, and most of the south western peninsular of England sided primarily with the Royalist cause, and as everybody knows they lost. Being on the loosing side of civil war is generally a bad place to be so those that could hold out did so, and having a castle that can be supplied by sea means you can hold out for quite a long time.

Castle Cornet back in Guernsey was somewhere just like that, a Royalist castle supplied by sea and trying to hold off the moment that it had to surrender. They did it rather well and in the end they were the last Royalist stronghold to surrender. Salcombe castle didn't hold out so long, but they did hold out long enough that it annoyed the Parliamentary forces so much that after they had captured the place they tore it down.

How Sailors Fight

For a little holiday reading I am reading 'How Sailors Fight' by John Blake. I was quite pleased that it described the 12-pounder as "perhaps for it's size the finest gun of the Navy" since I am planning a project with one this year, more of which later. One thing that is surprising me from a modern perspective was that there has been absolutely no mention of the growing power of Imperial Germany. The book was published in 1901 so only 13 years later Germany would become the British Empire's enemy in the largest war up until that point. All comparisons against potential threats are against France, which was to be on our side during that war. It was not until after 'The Riddle of the Sands' was published in 1903 that the power, and possible danger, of Germany would enter popular consciousness. The author event went so far as to imagine fictional engagements against various enemies to illustrate the points that he was trying to make; such as pitting the newly launched HMS Drake against the French armoured cruisers Montcalm and Admiral Gueydon in order to help with his argument that larger armoured cruisers were better fighting ship's than smaller ones. However no such fictional engagements were created against German ships, the ones the Royal Navy was next going to fight in reality.

Salcombe

Having sailed back across the English Channel yesterday we decided to take the shortest route, which lands in the beautiful little port of Salcombe. As a port it is fairly under developed being completely without any Marina facilities, though as a high priced toured destination I suspect that the golden sands and private coves have had just about as much money wrung out of them as is possible. There is not much in the way of historical interest in this particular port; just a small, ruined, Tudor block house that used to guard the mouth of the estuary. Not that the estuary needs much guarding, the reputation of the sand bar across it is generally enough to do it. This bar lies only a meter or two beneath the surface at low water, and during rough seas can have a meter of swell running over it. This means that if you get things wrong the sea will simply pick your boat up, then slam it down again breaking the vessel's back. This is exactly what happened to the collier Ensign on January 30th 1915 when they decided to try navigating over the bar without a local pilot and got it wrong. The ship sank instantly leaving just it's rigging above water. The reputation of the bar is also the reason for Salcombe Life Boat, operated by the RNLI. Over the century that it has been operating they have saved many lives in the most dangerous sea conditions, but not without tragedy for themselves.

On October 27 1916, the Salcombe lifeboat, William and Emma, was launched to go to the aid of a stricken Plymouth schooner Western Lass that was aground at Lannacombe Bay.

Fifteen men took her out in the teeth of a furious southwesterly gale. When they got to the ship the cox'n, Samuel Distin, could see the rocket line hanging off the schooner and in the pale light of dawn realised that there was no one left to save as they had already been rescued by the Prawle Rocket Company.

There was nothing left but to get safely back, though that was easier said than done with all the lifeboats crew were by now soaked right through and freezing cold. As they approached the Bar with its huge turbulent breakers they streamed a sea anchor from the stern and took in most of the sail, exactly as they had been trained to do. Just as these preparations were complete a massive wave hit the stern of the boat throwing it broadside to the waves. All the crew were thrown in a great heap to the other side of the boat so when the next wave hit, it just turned the boat over and threw all the men into the sea. Several of the men managed to hang on to the upturned hull of the boat for a while, but in the end all but two were swept away. 'Eddie' Distin and William Johnson were the only two to still be alive when the wreckage of the lifeboat was washed up under Rickham.

Not that this stopped the brave volunteers of the RNLI. Within months a new lifeboat was found and with it a new crew. The Cox'n was one of the survivors, 'Eddie' Distin.

There is not much military history in Salcombe, through it was used as one of the muster points for the US Army before D-Day. The only bit of Royal Navy history here is a rather more embarrassing story that happened just a few years ago. Britannia Royal Naval College has amongst it's stock of boats a number of Contessa yachts. These are mainly used for teaching the cadets about handling small craft and getting them used to the sea. However the cadets are also allowed to take them out during their free time for some leisure sailing. A group of cadets in several yachts decided one weekend to go to Salcombe. They navigated the bar and spent a pleasant evening in some of Salcombe's other bars before retiring to their boats for the evening. The next morning they must have decided to give the boats a bit of a scrub down using the hose pipes on the town quay before heading for home. The town quay has a channel beside it that is well dredged, and well marked: however just beyond the markers it goes very shallow very quickly. The young gentleman navigating one of the boats must not have known this and tried to cut the corner. His boat shuddered to a halt as it dug it's keel into the sand. They tried to used the engine to wiggle it free, but they were stuck fast so they had to wait, stuck in the sand, in front of the entire town for the next six hours for the tide to recluse them. The boat was undamaged, and there was no harm to any of the cadets; except perhaps a bit of bruised pride.

Cornet Castle

Just spent a very enjoyable day at Castle Cornet just across the harbour at St. Peter Port in Guernsey. It is a good place to look around anyway with hundreds of years of history layered on top of each other, but for the Easter weekend they were also staging a living history event. This was not like a living history event on the mainland as it was by a troupe of professional actors performing a series of plays to highlight some stories from the islands history. It certainly worked an really helped to engage with the audience. It might be good if the groups that I belong to could get together more regularly so as to be able to rehearse, but since we are entirely volunteers and from all across the UK that is much more difficult.

Privateering in the Channel Islands

In Guernsey at the moment and it is noticeable that there was a sudden influx of money at the start of the nineteenth century. The main evidence for this are the number of stone cottages with dates from around this period. The reason for this sudden wealth was the wars against Napoleon. The wars might have cut off the trade with France and destroyed the traditional trade routes, but it did bring with it a whole new way of making a living: privateering. Privateering is basically legalised piracy. A privateer carries a letter from the government allowing them to attack any and all shipping belonging to the enemy. The profit come if they capture anything because it gets taken as a prize so any cargo can be resold, as can the ship itself, which would raise a lot of money. Many privateers ran out of the Channel Islands harassing the French coastal shipping, and they brought back a lot of money. So much money that for a brief period these tiny islands became one of the worlds major maritime powers.

RAF Airmen in Torquay

It might seem a little odd for a hilly port without even the possibility of every having an airport built there but during the Second World War 55000 airmen were trained in Torquay. Many billeted in the Rosetor Hotel during their stay, and like the US Coastguard officers at Greenway House, they left their mark in this case by signing one of the shutters. When the Rosetor was demolished to make way for the Riviera Centre this shutter was saved by Ian Sampson. On his death in 2009 the shutter was to be donated to the Imperial War Museum to be displayed, but when it was found that the museum planned to simply lock it away in a drawer his friends rallied around to make sure that the spirit of his gift was honoured, and so it on the 22nd of April it was put on public display in the Rivera Centre itself close to where it was originally signed by those men 70 years ago.

Grand Opening at the Brixham Battery

While I will not be able to be there because I am sailing, the Brixton Battery Heritage Centre is having an event this Easter Sunday to celebrate the restoration of more parts of the battery. Dave will be opening the harbour defence pill box, or shelter rooms and tunnel, and restored 1940s cottage room. Volunteers in period uniform will be giving guided tours from 11 AM.

Off Sailing

I am in now off already few days to do some proper sailing, so hosting will be light. The idea is to use the long bank holiday break and go across the English channel, plus probably up to the Isle of White. We shall start on crossing bricks, where William of orange landed the last successful invasion of the British mainland, and strike out for the Channel Islands, the sight of the last successful invasion of the British Isles when they were occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940.

Observations at a vintage car rally

Last weekend I attended a vintage car rally in aid of the St John's ambulance. The stars of the show had this event were a 1928 Bentley and a 1936 MG that was built while across the Atlantic America was still in the throes of the great depression. It is strange to think that a beautiful sports car could have been built and sold during this period of economic turmoil. However the reason for this was that on the side of the Atlantic the great depression was not so great. In great question the great depression was not much more than an particularly bad recession, a fact that can be indirectly attributed to the Royal Navy.

While in America Herbert Hoover and then later Roosevelt spent huge quantities of money in an attempt to kick start their economy, in Great Britain in more orthodox approach was taken. The orthodoxy at this time was when the government did not have any money it have two cut back, and that a sound currency backed by gold was a vital part of running a sound economy. Terrified by the financial Armageddon that was enveloping them the government cut back hard, and it started with the Royal Navy.

The way that the government decided to cut the Navy was as simple as it was brutal. They decided that they would simply take one shilling from everybody's pay. It was decided to announce this cart while the home fleet was on manoeuvres off Invergordon in Scotland. It must have been hoped that occupying them with a set of fleet manoeuvres might help give them time for the news to sink in with the minimum of discomfort. However that is not what happened, what happened was one of the largest mutinies in the history of the Royal Navy.

Terrified that the most powerful fleet of war ships in the world at that point was suddenly going to become a fleet of putemkins And potentially trigger a revolution that could sweep away the old order the government back down. By biking down on the cuts they were forced to junk not one but both of their economic orthodoxies and leave the gold standard and allow the British pound to float freely on the markets. Had they not done so terrified investors could easily have drained the bank of England's gold reserves as they attempted to move their money to safer climes.

As it was allowing the currency to leave the gold standard was the best thing that the government could have done. The economy started to recover very shortly afterwards, in fact there is a strong correlation between when countries left the gold standard and when their economies started to recover. So had the sailors of the home fleet had not mutinied then the government would not have been forced to leave the gold standard, which would have meant that the economy would not have recovered as quickly as it did and the economic conditions might have meant that the beautiful 1936 MG that I was admiring this weekend might not have been built.

Open Water

Today was out of the Dart and around to Torbay to put the boat away in Torquay Marina. Like many estuaries of this kind the mouth of the Dart has two castles, one on either side, that have guarded the port since mediaeval times. One is now a holiday cottage, the other is owned by English Heritage. While small this castle is an interesting visit as you can see the way it has been rebuilt over the centuries to keep up with the changing technology of war. The oldest part is the high mediaeval wall on the landward side, and the most modern an observation post from the Second World War.

The observation post would have been used in conjuncture with an antiaircraft battery nestled on the hills above Kingswear. This battery was initially manned by cadets from the college after they had just passed out and were still waiting to find were they would be posted. According to one biography this actually considered quite a good duty to be given, especially during the summer, as it was a way of getting away from the strict discipline of the college. There was also very little chance of seeing anything right up until the fall of France. The former cadets would be able to go up there with their rations of sandwiches away from eagle eyes of there instructors and be able to have a very relaxed time until they were posted.

After that the Napoleonic period became the one with most importance. During that time Torbay had been a vital staging post for the Royal Navy as it was one of the largest, and deepest, bays in the area and one that was almost always offered safe and sheltered anchorage.

Before we entered Torbay itself we sailed past St. Mary's Bay where the Emperor Napoleon was held on board HMS Bellerophon while the British government decided what to do with him. There were those that said he should have been executed, though this might have transformed him into a Martyr, and one local man wanted to put him into the freak show he owned. In the end it was decided that he should be exiled to Saint Helena where he died in 1821. It was not the last time Bellerophon was to be used as a prison ship at Sheerness, though to less exulted prisoners, before eventually being broken up in 1836.

Looking down at St. Mary's Bay is the great Napoleonic fort at Berry Head. High up on the hill and guns placed there would have been able to rain fired fown on anybody attacking the harbour at Brixham, and without them deing able to elevate their guns enough to fire back. Much like the castles guarding Dartmouth it had been used and re-used over time with the last military outpost being a Royal Observer Corps observation post during World War Two with the main gun emplacements themselves moving down the coast to Battery Gardens on the other side of Brixham harbour.

Down the Dart

Sailing down the dart yesterday it is amazing how much history has taken place on a very short stretch of this waterway. Starting in Totness, home to one of the best preserved Motte and Bailey castles in the country, the boat was lifted in at Baltic Wharf where it had been stored over the winter. This was originally built for shipping timber out to the Baltic though now it is primarily a shipyard with the large sheds, built by the Americans during World War Two, home to a variety of craft in various stages of restoration.

Going down the Dart past Sharpham estate you eventually get to Galmpton Creek where you might just be able to see the hulk of a Fairmile motor gun boat. The one that lives hear is one of two owned by the Greenway Ferry company and is used as parts to keep the other operational so that it can take visitors from Torquay and Brixham to Agatha Christy's former home at Greenway.

The famous writer was not the only one to make their mark on that house as during the Second World War it was taken over by the US Coastguard, and still contains murals painted by one of the Coastguard officers.

She was not the only one that was forced to move by the war. Even the Brittania Royal Naval College was forced to change locations during World War Two to give up the college buildings to be used as the headquarters of the Free French.

The college was built in 1903 to replace the ageing hulks Brittania and Hindustan. Not that Dartmouth was their first mooring either. Originally Brittania had been based in Southampton, but the temptations of this busy port were considered bad for the cadets so it was moved: first to Weymouth, and then to Dartmouth, a small port that did not even have any routes in over land until into the twentieth century.

Royal Navy Reenacting

There are many groups that portray various formations of the Army and Airforce, you will see there members at various events across the country. However it is always rare to find anybody attempting to portray the man of the Royal Navy, and especially the ordinary sailors. This might be because the uniforms are difficult to get hold of, or that it is much easier to get your hands on a truck or jeep than it is a ship or boat, but that does not change the fact that Britain was an island nation presiding over a maritime trading empire and so the navy is as important as, or even more important than, the Army or RAF. The blog is hopefully going to record my small efforts to help maintain the memory of how much we owe to the men of the Royal Navy.