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St Vincent-class British dreadnought battleship Destroyed at anchor in Scapa Flow on 9 July 1917

On the evening of 9 July 1917, the British St Vincent-class battleship Vanguard lay at anchor in Scapa Flow, less than one nautical mile to the north of the island of Flotta. The Revenge-class battleship HMS Royal Oak lay at anchor nearby.

Without warning, at about 2320, a series of cataclysmic magazine explosions suddenly took place in Vanguard’s magazine. She sank immediately, and all but three of the 845 men aboard her at the time were killed. The loss of life was greater than either of Orkney’s other two famous war graves, HMS Hampshire lost in 1916 with 737 men, and the nearby Royal Oak, which would herself be lost in 1939 with 834 men.

Vanguard was laid down by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in Furness on 2 April 1908. She was the eighth ship to bear this name – a name that is enmeshed in the history of the Royal Navy. The ninth to bear the name Vanguard was launched in 1944, but only completed in 1947, after the war had ended; she was the biggest and fastest British battleship ever constructed, with 15-inch guns and a speed of 30 knots. But the era of the battleship was over and when she was scrapped early after only 13 years’ service in 1960, she was the last British battleship afloat. Today the eleventh Vanguard is the lead boat of the UK’s Trident ballistic missile submarine fleet based at Faslane.

The 19,700-ton St-Vincent-class dreadnought battleship HMS Vanguard.

The eighth Vanguard was launched on 22 February 1909, and after fitting out afloat she was commissioned on 1 March 1910. She displaced 19,700 long tons standard and 22,800 tons deep load, and was 536 feet long with a beam of 84 feet.

Vanguard was fitted with ten breech-loading (BL) 12-inch Vickers Mk XI guns set in five twin turrets: the foremost, A turret, on the centreline forward of the bridge on the fo’c’sle deck; then P and Q turrets set one either side of the bridge superstructure; and two more aft on the centre line, X and Y turrets. The port wing turret was called P turret whilst the starboard wing turret was Q turret. These turrets had 11-inch face and side armour with 3-inch armour roofs.

These main battery 12-inch guns had a range of some 12 miles but suffered from bore erosion, short barrel life and poor accuracy due to inconsistent performance of the cordite propellant. The subsequent Mark XII evolution of these guns also suffered the same problems, and this led to the development of the 13.5-inch Mk V gun, which had much better performance.

Her secondary battery comprised 18 single Mk III BL 4-inch guns that were introduced in 1908 to deal with the threat of fast-moving, small and agile German torpedo boats. She carried four 3-pounder saluting guns and was fitted with three submerged 18-inch torpedo tubes.

Vanguard’s main vertical waterline armour belt was 10-inch thick Krupp cemented armour – and above the main waterline belt was a strake of 8-inch armour. Her transverse bulkheads, linking the main waterline vertical armour belts on either side of the ship forward of A turret and aft of Y turret to form the citadel, were 5 and 8 inches thick. The P and Q 12-inch main battery wing turret barbettes abreast the bridge had 10-inch-thick outer face armour, whilst the three centreline barbettes, A, X and Y, had 9-inch armour above the main deck that reduced to 5-inch armour below decks. Her horizontal armoured decks varied from 1.5 to 3 inches thick.

Propulsion was delivered by 18 Babcock & Wilcox marine boilers that fed two sets of Parsons steam turbines and drove her four shafts to give her a speed of 21.7 knots. She carried a standard ship’s complement of 823 officers and men – although at the time of her loss there were 845 men aboard.

Vanguard was initially based at Scapa Flow as part of the 1st Battle Squadron and when war broke out she began conducting North Sea sweeps and patrols from there before being attached, in April 1916, to the 4th Division of the 4th Battle Squadron just months before the Battle of Jutland.

During the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916, no German capital ship came within range of her big guns – but she fired 42 rounds at the crippled light cruiser Wiesbaden, claiming several hits. She also engaged German destroyer flotillas with her main and secondary batteries. Although enemy shells landed near her she was not struck during the battle.

On the morning of 9 July 1917, Vanguard had moved from her anchorage, just north of the island of Flotta, north across the vast expanse of Scapa Flow towards the north shore of the Flow as her crew practised ‘abandon ship’ training exercises. These were completed without incident, and after remaining at anchor to the north of Scapa Flow for the rest of the day, she weighed anchor at 1700 and headed back south across the Flow at 12 knots to her overnight anchorage, north of Flotta. On the way south, she practised deploying her minesweeping paravanes before anchoring off Flotta at 1830.

The evening went uneventfully until around 2320 when, without any previous warning, flames were seen coming up from below, just abaft her foremast. This was followed after a short interval by a heavy explosion deep within her. The flames greatly increased in intensity and wreckage was thrown up abaft the foremast in the vicinity of P and Q wing turrets, either side of the ship abaft the bridge.

This first explosion was followed after a short interval by a second, heavier, explosion that considerably increased the volume of flame and smoke. The ship was by now totally obscured by smoke and the exact location of this second explosion could not be determined.

When the huge cloud of smoke that had obscured the battleship drifted away in the gentle evening breeze, Vanguard was gone; 845 men had been aboard her at the time of the explosion – but only one officer and two ratings survived, one of whom subsequently died of injuries received. The total death toll of 843 included Commander Ito, an observer from the Imperial Japanese Navy – then an ally of Britain. Two Australian sailors from HMAS Sydney were locked in her cells when she went up and were also killed.

The bodies of her crew that could be recovered now rest in the naval cemetery at Lyness, and a memorial stands at the end of the gravestones, overlooking Scapa Flow where their destroyed dreadnought lies in the depths.

The subsequent Court of Inquiry took place on 30 July 1917 aboard the battleship HMS Emperor of India three weeks after Vanguard blew up. The court found that the likely cause of the explosion in either P or Q magazine was either (i) the ignition of cordite due to an avoidable cause or (ii) abnormal deterioration of a cordite charge subjected to abnormal treatment during its life.

Cordite is a smokeless propellant developed in the late 19th century to replace gunpowder in large military weapons such as tank guns, artillery and naval guns. High explosive gunpowder, used since the days of sail, produced a powerful detonation in the barrel that initially accelerated the projectile – but by the time the projectile was leaving the barrel, with the force of the explosion spent, the projectile was already decelerating. Gunpowder was very destructive of the gun barrel itself and produced a large quantity of black smoke.

In 1889, a new propellant consisting of nitroglycerine, gun cotton and petroleum jelly, was developed and manufactured in thin spaghetti-like rods. It was known initially as ‘cord powder’ – a name quickly abbreviated to ‘cordite’. Cordite was not designed to be a high explosive such as gunpowder: it was developed to deflagrate – that is, to burn and produce high-temperature gases. It was the rapidly expanding gas inside the breech that accelerated the projectile up the barrel, to such an extent that the shell was still accelerating as it left the barrel, unlike gunpowder where the shell was decelerating from the moment of detonation. This expansion of cordite gas was much less destructive of the gun barrel than gunpowder.

Cordite was stored for protection in propellant magazines, deep in the ship below the waterline. The magazines for the big 12-inch guns were clustered around the barbettes and ammunition hoists.

During World War I, the British kept all their big gun cordite propellant in silk pouches stored in flashproof copper Clarkson cases in the magazines. These Clarkson cases were 5-foot-high flashproof brass or steel tubes (like large cigar cases) with a carrying handle on the side and a circular lid at one end. The top half of the cases opened longitudinally to receive and safely transport cordite in silk pouches from the magazine to the gunhouse above via the ammunition hoists. Cordite propellant charges for smaller calibre guns were housed in rectangular brass-ribbed flashproof cases with a removable lid.

The early versions of cordite required to be kept at a temperature of less than 50°F (or 10°C) by a cooling system lest it become unstable – so on all warships, the temperature of propellant magazines had to be monitored.

The Court of Inquiry on Emperor of India heard evidence that on Vanguard the temperatures of all 12-inch and 4-inch magazines were taken daily every morning by means of temperature tubes. Additionally, thermograph charts were inspected weekly by the gunnery officer.

There was however, at this time, no standardised Royal Navy procedure for taking magazine temperatures – and systems and procedures varied from ship to ship in the fleet. Some ships like Vanguard took the temperatures once a day – whilst others took the temperature three times a day.

In reaching its verdict, the court recommended that the taking of magazine temperatures should be standardised throughout the fleet. The monitoring procedure should be conducted at more frequent intervals and should be carried out under the direction of the gunnery officer by the gunner of the ship, who should physically enter the magazines two or three times a day and inspect them.

The phenomenon of ‘hot pockets’ in magazines was already known about, and it was further recommended that the readings of fixed-temperature tubes should not simply be accepted as the temperature of the whole magazine. It was noted that when cooling apparatus was in use, the difference between temperatures registered by the thermometers in different parts of the magazine became accentuated. It was suggested that the circulation of cold air in their immediate vicinity unduly affected temperature tubes in certain positions in the magazines.

Amongst a whole raft of findings and recommendations it was noted that when turned to the storage position in the magazines, the lids of the smaller calibre brass flashproof cordite cases were often found to be loose – and in some cases to have fallen off altogether.

It was further noted that in Vanguard, coal sacks were stowed in fuel spaces adjoining the P and Q turret handling rooms. These fuel spaces had no ventilation when the access hatch was closed – as was normally the case. One of the 3-inch thick bulkheads to these fuel spaces actually formed the bulkhead between it and a 4-inch cordite propellant magazine (which was being used as a 12-inch magazine at the time) and a 12-inch shell room. Here, favourable conditions for a spontaneous combustion were produced if the 3-inch thick bulkhead became heated to a dangerous degree unnoticed. The court recommended that in all ships arrangements should be made such that a considerable rise in temperature in any compartment adjoining a magazine or shell room must be discovered within two hours.

Captain R. F. Nichols, (who was in command of Royal Oak at the time she was torpedoed in the Flow in 1939), was a young midshipman on Vanguard that night. He lived to command the Royal Oak in World War II, because on the night Vanguard exploded he had been attending a concert party presented by Royal Oak sailors on the theatre ship Gourko. The show had lasted longer than intended, and he had missed his boat back to the doomed Vanguard.

Commercial salvage work was carried out on the Vanguard in the late 1950s and subsequently in the 1970s. When hard-hat salvage divers initially went to examine the wreck in the 1950s they found that the main battery turret tops had been blown off and all the 12-inch gun barrels were blown out of their trunnion mounts. One main battery 12-inch barrel, weighing 67 tons, was found standing upright some 150 feet away from the wreck, its barrel buried 15 feet down into the seabed in much the same way that the 6-inch guns from Hampshire had impaled themselves into the seabed by their barrels.

They then found A turret, complete with its barbette, standing some way away from the bow, with sections of the tripod foremast and spotting top beside it.

At the stern, the propeller shafts were bent, and one of the ship’s propellers was found lying free of the ship and was lifted. The three other propellers were subsequently blown off and lifted to the surface.

The 10-inch-thick vertical main armour belt plates were very valuable and had been blown apart. This made them easy for the salvors to lift, in comparison to the German High Seas Fleet battleships nearby where the vertical armour belts were still firmly in place. On the German battleships, salvors had to blast their way into the ship through the unarmoured sections of hull bottom and get into the coal bunkers, which were directly behind the armour belt. Here, explosive charges were placed to blow the 25-ton plates off one by one, for stropping and lifting to the surface.

The 25-foot-long 28-ton condensers were blasted out and removed from Vanguard’s turbine rooms. A number of valuable Weir pumps were also recovered. These large pumps stood vertically inside the ship and at the top of the pump was a cylinder that held a piston powered by steam from the boilers. Weir pumps were used for pumping many different fluids around the ship, such as oil, firemain (water for firefighting), condensate and bilge. Weir pumps also fed water into the boilers to make steam and power the turbines – the boilers had to be regularly topped up with water recycled from the turbines via the condensers.

The three submerged torpedo tubes were also recovered: two beam tubes and one through the stern. The three tubes are noted as still being in place with the sliding doors in the closed position by salvage diver Frank Lilleker in Salvaging HMS Vanguard, 1958–59. A hole was blown near the stern tube door to get access to the tube, but once that was done an inspection revealed a circular flange against which a roughly shaped piece of plate was bolted, as though the tube itself had been removed for maintenance. The tube was believed to still be inside the stern, but had not been located by the time he finished his salvage work there.

To enable the torpedo to be fired from the beam, when the ship was steaming ahead a ram was first run out to cut a path through the water and allow the torpedo to clear the ship’s side without water pressure from the forward movement of the ship jamming the torpedo in the tube. These rams produced about 7 tons of gunmetal for the salvors when lifted and scrapped.

One of the ship’s bells was also discovered still hanging in a tangled mess of wreckage. It was lifted to the surface and was subsequently returned to the shipbuilders.

Following on from the good relations developed with the MOD and Royal Navy in relation to the Hampshire expedition, Emily Turton applied to the UK Secretary of State for Defence for a diving licence to use the same techniques to survey the Vanguard on the approach of the 100th anniversary of the sinking on 9 July 2017.

The licence was granted on terms similar to the Hampshire licence, and over the course of a preliminary one week’s diving the wreck during November 2016 and two further weeks diving during January/February 2017, Emily led a specialist team as they thoroughly surveyed and recorded the wreck with stunning atmospheric stills photography, video and 3D photogrammetry. As with the Hampshire imagery, once the photogrammetry results are ready they will be made publicly available for the common good. I was privileged to participate as a survey diver and videographer in the preliminary week of diving in November 2016.

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The wreck of this famous battleship lies in 30–35 metres of water less than one mile north of the tanker pier at Flotta to the south – the Vanguard east cardinal marker buoy swings nearby to the east. Although licensed salvage work was carried out on the wreck in the 1950s and 1970s, no diving has been permitted since the 1980s by virtue of Orkney Harbour Bye Laws and latterly by the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986. Now that I was part of a licensed survey team, after 35 years of diving in Scapa Flow but being unable to visit this wreck, I was now about to see this World War I dreadnought, hidden from sight for so long under the dark waters of Scapa Flow.

Preliminary sonar scans of the area revealed that the wreck lies with her bows to the north-east and her stern to the south-west. The two extreme sections of the wreck, the bow and stern, appeared to have survived largely intact. The fo’c’sle appeared to be sitting upright, detached from the rest of the wreck. The mid-section of the ship kept its ship shape on the sonar whilst the stern of the wreck appeared to be lying on its port side.

On Day 1 of the November 2016 expedition, the shotline was dropped to the seabed near the bow. After being aware of the history of this ship for so long, but never having dived it, I found it particularly moving to finally descend through the water column and see the majestic bow of this great dreadnought materialise in the depths below.

The bow section, from the stem back for some 60 feet, was sitting upright, with a least depth of about 25 metres at the top of the stem. The intact stem rose up from the seabed for about 11 metres but as I began to swim aft on the fo’c’sle deck, it quickly angled downwards towards the seabed where the ship has seemingly been cleaved across – just forward of where the barrels of A turret would have ended. The two large fairleads immediately abaft the stem (seen in the archive black and white photo) were still present, and portholes, still with their glass in them, lined either side of the fo’c’sle, interspersed by the two starboard anchor hawses and the single port hawse.

One of the three anchor capstans was sticking up out of the deck, exposing its axle – the collapsing of the deck from the stem aft has thrust it upwards from its original position on the deck. There are empty holes in the deck where the other two capstans have been blasted out of the ship as she blew up. Thick teak deck planks still lined the fo’c’sle deck above what was the officer’s accommodation lit by a large centreline deck skylight that was still in place. A very different arrangement for officer accommodation from latter classes.

Just aft of the anchor hawse pipes, the sides of the ship flared out from the fo’c’sle, and one deck level down the upper deck begins, widening out to the full beam of the ship as you go aft. The sides of the ship here at the beginning of the upper deck, although still present, have been blown outwards and separated from the inner ship – the vertical armour belt plates on the starboard side are smoothly bent outwards by an incredible force.

The bow section just ends abruptly as the sloping deck reaches the seabed. The very end of the decking has a lip that angles abruptly downwards as a result of the centre of the ship lifting as she exploded. It appears that the bottom of the ship here at the bow has been blown out – and that the uppermost section of the bow has been detached and moved to end up sitting on the sand. The base of the stem is blown out allowing views inside through a sizeable hole.

Moving aft, as the bow section ends abruptly, it gives way to empty flat seabed that is scattered here and there with small sections of ship – the bow is seemingly isolated from the rest of the ship. Out at a 120-degree angle from the starboard side of the bow over scattered sticks of cordite there is an open expanse of seabed for some 20 metres before you arrive at the remains of A turret barbette, which lies on the seabed just as Frank Lilleker describes in Salvaging HMS Vanguard, 1958–59. The barbette lies on its side with the gunhouse deck to the north. The circular roller path on which the gunhouse turned is complete, but the gunhouse and barrels are missing.

Immediately aft of A turret barbette, and partly lying on top of it, is a section of tubular foremast along with the two tripod leg supports and the spotting top platform, which lies on its starboard side. The foremast leads down to an armoured chamber, and it is believed that most of the bridge is still here in the mass of structure in this area.

It appears that A turret barbette has been blown out of the ship – or that the ship around it has been totally destroyed. The barbette has landed on its side, whilst the lower sections of the bridge superstructure immediately abaft of it have been devastated and blown away, allowing the section of tripod mast and spotting top, high above it, to fall directly down.

After a long swim of about 50 metres out north-east, on the starboard side of the wreck what is believed to be the Q wing turret can be found – lying upside down and in isolation but amongst scattered small sections of ship.

The ship is largely gone here in the vicinity of P and Q turrets, which the Court of Inquiry appears to have correctly found to have been the centre of the explosion. There is a marked shallow depression in the seabed here, as though the seabed was excavated by the explosion. This may be ground zero, and is a similar effect to what I have seen when diving wrecks carrying munitions in Truk Lagoon that were catastrophically destroyed in a single secondary munitions explosion.

South of Q turret and the depression, the ship begins to reform – scattered large sections of plate and hull appear at first, before the tangled confusion of the innards of the battleship abaft P and Q turret appear. The sides of the ship with the vertical armour belt are gone – blown out and the armour plates salved. There is a large section of the port side of the ship, lined with a single row of portholes, which is angled back towards the stern and rests upright on the seabed.

Within the ragged outline of the ship as you move aft, the first of the sets of Babcock & Wilcox marine boilers start to be found. The boilers are more intact and stacked upon one another on the port side, whilst they are more distressed on the starboard side.

An upright bulkhead separates the boiler rooms from the turbine rooms. Of the two sets of Parsons steam turbines, the port side turbine is in good condition, barring the obvious scars of salvage work to free up the condensers. The turbines in the starboard set are shattered. This is the highest section of the mid part of the wreck, and moving out over free water to starboard, a long section of intact hull bottom leads aft over clean seabed towards the stern section. A number of 12-inch shells can be found on the seabed to starboard here.

Abaft the turbine rooms is the area where X and Y turrets were located. There are a large number of 5-foot-long flashproof brass Clarkson cases piled up together. Some are intact, whilst others are blown open and flattened by the magazine explosion.