A vast black plume of smoke drifts over Sheerness harbour on the morning of 26th November 1914. This grainy image captures the incendiary aftermath of a sudden and massive explosion aboard the Royal Navy battleship HMS Bulwark, the first of two cataclysmic blasts the Thames naval anchorage would suffer in the early stages of World War One.
HMS Bulwark was one of eight Formidable Class battleships built between 1898 and 1904. Although obsolete by 1914, these ‘pre-dreadnought’ battleships would play a significant role in Royal Navy operations during World War One, especially in the Mediterranean theatre. At the outbreak of war, HMS Bulwark and her sisters were assigned to the 5th Battle Squadron of the Channel Fleet. This squadron also included HMS Topaze and Diamond; two “Gem Class” protected cruisers which can be seen in the above image. Before transferring to Sheerness in the middle of November, the 5th Battle Squadron had been patrolling the Channel out of Portland. It was here aboard the Bulwark that the court martial of Rear Admiral Trowbridge had been held between 5th and 9th November 1914.[1] Commanding the ship at this time was Captain Guy Lutley Sclater, son of the renowned ornithologist Philip Sclater, who had under his command 750 officers and men.[2].
At the time of the disaster, Bulwark was anchored in the River Medway in the vicinity of Kethole Reach, about four miles upstream from Sheerness. Shortly before 8am, a rumbling explosion reminiscent of a thunderclap was heard across the Medway estuary. Witnesses aboard nearby ships attested to a bright yellow flash in the after part of the battleship and a sudden lifting of her stern. Almost instantaneously the ship became enveloped in a dense cloud of smoke. As this smoke started to clear, onlookers were shocked to see that the ship had almost entirely disappeared. It was only at low tide later in the day that any large pieces of the wreck could be seen above water. Debris from the ship, which included ‘hammocks, furniture, boxes and hundreds of mutilated bodies’, fell over a 10 mile radius [1]. The sound of the blast resounded across the Thames Estuary, being heard by the inmates of German prison ships moored off Southend Pier[3], while at Westcliff, residents observed “a dense volume of greenish smoke which lasted for about ten minutes” [1]. Rescue boats were quick on the scene but such was the devastation, only a dozen survivors were pulled from the water.
Although the port rumour mill immediately started turning with stories of sabotage and submarine periscopes sighted in the Medway, the official view of the likely cause of the explosion was made public within hours by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, speaking in the Commons:
“I regret to say I have some bad news for the house. The Bulwark battleship, which was lying in Sheerness this morning, blew up at 7.35 o’clock. The Vice and Rear Admiral, who were present, have reported their conviction that it was an internal magazine explosion which rent the ship asunder. There was apparently no upheaval in the water, and the ship had entirely disappeared when the smoke had cleared away. An inquiry will be held tomorrow which may possibly throw more light on the occurrence. The loss of the ship does not sensibly affect the military position, but I regret to say the loss of life is very severe. Only 12 men are saved. All the officers and the rest of the crew, who, I suppose, amounted to between 700 and 800, have perished. I think the House would wish me to express on their behalf the deep sorrow with which the House heard the news, and their sympathy with those who have lost their relatives and friends.”
Although rare, the potential for catastrophic explosions aboard warships was well-known to naval authorities. One of the Royal Navy’s earliest losses from a magazine explosion had occurred in 1881. While anchored off Punta Arenas, the screw-sloop HMS Dotterel had blown up and sunk, taking most of her 150 crew. Although the cause of the initial blast was determined to have been the ignition of fumes from a chemical called ‘xerotine siccative’, used in anti-corrosive paint, it was the secondary ignition of the ship’s forward magazine that had proved fatal to the ship. And then there was the USS Maine, which blew up in Havana Harbour in January of 1898. Discounting the biased initial investigations, which were used to justify going to war with Spain, it is generally concluded that the ship was lost as a result of a secondary magazine explosion sparked by a fire in an adjacent coal bunker.
Magazine explosions increased in frequency with the introduction of cordite and other ‘smokeless propellants’ in the world’s major fleets from the 1890s onwards. The advantages of smokeless propellants were that gunners would no longer have their view of targets obscured by gun-smoke, and their location would be made less conspicuous to the enemy. However, the nitro-cellulose chemical base of this product was unstable and susceptible to spontaneous ignition, and required the addition of chemical stabilizers. Unfortunately, this chemical technology lagged behind the rapid increase in demand for smokeless propellants in the lead up to the Great War.
The dangers of smokeless propellant were first exposed in the ‘Marine Nationale’. The French navy relied on a propellant known as ‘Poudre B’, invented by the chemist Paul Vielle in 1884. In March 1907, the 11,500 ton battleship Iéna was dry-docked in Toulon when a series of explosions occurred in her secondary magazines. Attempts to save the ship by flooding the remaining weapons spaces were obstructed by the ship being out of water; and she was only saved from total destruction by forcing open the sluice gates of the dry-dock. Even then, 120 crewmen perished and the ship became a constructive total loss. An investigation concluded that most of the Iéna’s magazine propellant was in a dangerous condition.
The subsequent ‘affaire des poudres’ cost the Navy Minister Gaston Thomson his job, but it did not immediately solve the underlying instability problem with Poudre B. In 1911, after a five-year catalogue of smaller explosions and catastrophic near-misses, another French battleship, Liberté, blew up at Toulon. The primary blast was so powerful that the ship’s upper decks amidships, including an entire 7.6 inch gun turret, were tossed ‘up and aft, curled back like the top of a sardine can’ [2], and a 37 ton fragment of armour plate was hurled onto the battleship République 700 yards distant, instantly killing 20 men [3]. Of the 300 fatalities, a third occurred on vessels in the vicinity of the blast.
At this time, the British were using their own form of smokeless propellant. Cordite was so called as it was made up of ‘cords’ of guncotton; a combination of nitrocellulose, nitro-glycerine and petroleum jelly; the latter acting as a stabilising agent. Cordite Mark I was first used in British naval guns in the mid-1890s, a more efficient ‘Modified’ (MD) propellant being introduced in 1901. Like the French Poudre B, cordite was susceptible to self-ignition as a result of chemical degradation and exposure to heat. To counter this known risk, batches of cordite were meticulously catalogued during production and ship stowage, and subjected to regular ‘heat tests’, which assessed the compound’s temporal resistance to high temperatures. Older batches of cordite were carefully labelled ‘Fire First’ (FF) or ‘First Use’.
The spontaneous combustion of FF cordite leading to a catastrophic magazine explosion was the initial suspect in the case of the Bulwark, and would be blamed for later Royal Navy sudden losses such as the armoured cruiser HMS Natal and the dreadnought HMS Vanguard. However, the subsequent Admiralty enquiry settled on human error as the most likely cause. In the hours prior to the explosion, gunnery parties had evidently been at work sorting out mixed-up batches of cordite in the fore and aft ammunition passages of the ship. During this procedure, cordite charges, which were contained in silk bags, had been hung in close proximity to 6-inch shells belonging to the ship’s casemate armament. Possibly raised temperatures in the ammunition passages had caused the cordite to self-ignite, in turn setting off the shells and thence the other eleven of the warship’s magazines. However, an equally plausible explanation is that a sailor had been careless with a cigarette, many of the crew having just been taken off-duty, and thereby given permission to smoke. The following verdict was reached by the court of enquiry held shortly after the event:
The Court regretfully comes to the conclusion that blame is attributable to the dead Officers responsible for the Gunnery Department of the ship for allowing cordite charges not in cases and uncovered to be left in the ammunition cross passages when the men went to their breakfast.
As has been mentioned, Bulwark was not the last warship to be lost to internal combustion. In fact, Sheerness itself was to experience a second catastrophic warship explosion at a time when bodies of the earlier disaster were still washing up on the marshes of the Medway.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 