From Ice Floes to Battlefields

by Anne Strathie

  Many of the [RND] men lacked overcoats, but their fighting equipment was efficient … If these men were ‘practically untrained,’ they must have had an abnormally high standard of training in naval brigades. The way they set about improving the Belgian trenches was a revelation to the Belgian sappers … If [their] parade drill was weak they showed no weakness in field work … The handy way in which the men handled their rifles left me no ground for questions … Mr F.B. Hulke’s tale may be told to the Marines. It will not be believed by anyone who saw the naval men in the trenches around Antwerp.

  While Campbell had been at Antwerp a steady stream of new recruits had joined the RND and begun their training. One of those assigned to Drake Battalion was Frederick Septimus Kelly (usually known as ‘Sep’).7 Kelly, who was 33, had been born in Australia to an Anglo-Irish family. After Eton (where Campbell had also been educated), he had gone on to Balliol College, Oxford. The fact he had been awarded a fourth-class honours degree did not signify a lack of intelligence, rather that he had spent much of his time rowing. This had paid dividends when, in 1908, he had won an Olympic gold for Britain. Kelly had also studied music, including in Germany, and had just been beginning to make his mark as a pianist and composer in London when war had been declared.

  Campbell, who had spent all his working life in the navy, had no particular reason to know anything about Kelly. But Kelly knew who Campbell was, as he had responded to a 1909 appeal for donations towards the costs of the Terra Nova expedition. 8

  Campbell, who was impressed by Kelly’s evident organisational skills, offered him the post of deputy assistant quartermaster-general. Kelly initially accepted, but, when he realised that his new duties might require him to stay in Britain rather than fight overseas, he requested a transfer to Hood Battalion, which his friend and fellow-musician Denis Browne had already joined.

  On 15 February 1915, at Blandford Camp, near Salisbury, the usually reticent Campbell showed Kelly and three other officers his photographs from the Terra Nova expedition; Kelly found Campbell’s description of his winter in the ‘igloo’ particularly interesting. Ten days later Kelly joined his friends in Hood Battalion and prepared to sail east.

  Notes

  1. Erskine, ‘Victor Campbell and Michael Barne in Svalbard’, pp. 120–21; additional information on Spitsbergen from Kruse, Frozen Assets, and Barr et al. Gold, or I’m a Dutchman and newspaper reports.

  2. Campbell had retired from active naval service soon after his marriage but often travelled partly, it is reported, due to his wife’s depression following the drowning, during a family holiday in Norway, of her sister.

  3. Kruse, pp. 244–5; The Press (Christchurch), 28 August 1913.

  4. Sellers, The Hood Battalion, p. 8.

  5. Quotations from newspapers are from the many reports based on the dispatches of ‘B.J.’ Hodson of Central News Agency; given the reports are virtually identical they are not individually cited but can be found by searching for Hodson’s byline on the British Newspaper Archive website.

  6. Descriptions of the siege of Antwerp are drawn from published and publicly available sources including Sellers, The Hood Battalion, and Royal Naval Division Journals; the latter includes detailed accounts of the siege by Campbell and others which were given at a later enquiry (National Archives, ADM116/1814).

  7. For more information on Kelly’s early life see Kelly, Race Against Time, and the Australian Dictionary of National Biography (available at http://adb.anu.edu.au). By coincidence Kelly was living in 29 Queen Anne Street at the same time as Pennell and Atkinson were living in 15 Queen Anne Street; in a journal entry of 13 October 1913 Kelly (Race Against Time, p. 304) refers to checking to ensure that his piano playing would not be heard by ‘the doctors’, as the building was not to be used ‘as a studio for music, singing lessons or other noise purpose’.

  8. Kelly’s donation to the expedition is mentioned in Kelly, Race Against Time, p. 20; Kelly, Kelly’s War, pp. 20-47 cover the period during which Kelly served under Campbell in Drake Battalion before joining Hood Battaltion.

  8

  ‘Antarctics’ on the Seven Seas

  At 1 a.m. on 5 August 1914, commanders of the British navy’s Mediterranean Fleet received signals confirming that Britain had declared war on Germany. By then Harry Pennell’s ship, the Duke of Edinburgh, had been on a war footing for a week. On the morning of 30 July Pennell and his shipmates helped erect a boom defence across Malta’s harbour. That afternoon their commanding officer, Captain Prowse, was recalled to England and replaced by Captain Henry Blackett, son-in-law of Churchill’s former First Sea Lord and close associate of Admiral ‘Jackie’ Fisher. On 2 August all leave was cancelled and all men recalled from shore or other leave. At 1.30 a.m. on 3 August Blackett opened ‘secret package A’ and gave orders to sail eastwards. On 4 August the only two German ships in the Mediterranean, Goeben and Breslau, began bombarding the North African coast, from where French ships, escorted by members of the British fleet, were bringing soldiers from their colonies in North Africa to fight in Europe. British battleships challenged and began pursuing the Goeben and Breslau; the German ships, although heavily outnumbered, used their superior speed to escape to the east, towards neutral Turkish waters.

  On 12 August, following a week of patrolling the Mediterranean, the Duke of Edinburgh was ordered to Aden. She would be based there for several months, escorting troopships carrying thousands of soldiers from India and other parts of Britain’s eastern empire to and from the Suez Canal. Two of the first troopships Pennell escorted were the Northbrook and the Dufferin, on which his friend Birdie Bowers had served during his time in the Royal Indian Marine.1

  On 13 August 1914 Britain claimed her first naval victory of the war. This morale-boosting engagement did not, as might have been expected, take place in the Mediterranean or the North Sea, but on Lake Nyasa, in Central Africa – where Harry Pennell’s sister Winifred was working at the missionary post on the island of Likoma. 2

  As Lake Nyasa was bounded by both British and German East African territories, both countries maintained a naval presence on its waters. The British ship, HMS Gwendolen, was named for a daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury; the German ship, SS Hermann von Wissmann, for a famous German explorer and slave-trade abolitionist. The two ships had, for many years, co-existed happily and efficiently, patrolling the lake for illegal slave-traders and collaborating in naval exercises – which usually involved one captain trying to catch the other unawares around the islands and inlets of the lake.

  When, in early August, Captain Rhoades of the Gwendolen learned that Britain and Germany were at war, he felt it was his duty to try to put the Hermann von Wissmann out of action. He entered the harbour where the German ship was being repaired and fired sufficient shots to ensure she would remain out of the water for some time. During the ‘attack’ his regular drinking companion Captain Berndt arrived to find out what was happening and was informed of Britain’s declaration of war. Rhoades sent a cable to the Admiralty in London, where newspapers, eager for good news, reported that Britain had won a small, but significant, naval victory in Africa.

  Back in Britain, the Grand Fleet had established its main base at Scapa Flow, Orkney, near where the North Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. Other British squadrons were based further south on the east coast or at Channel ports. The German High Seas Fleet, based at Jade Bay, off Heligoland Bight, was now effectively trapped within the confines of the North Sea.

  William Williams, Pennell’s stalwart of the Terra Nova engine room, had joined the battleship Lord Nelson, flagship of Vice-Admiral Sir Cecil Burney, commander of the newly formed Channel Fleet. The Channel Fleet’s first operation had been to escort the British Expeditionary Force safely to French and Belgian Channel ports. Now they were charged with keeping the BEF supplied with equipment, ammunition, provisions and reinforcements.

  During the early months of the war the world’s two greatest navies played ‘cat and mouse’ across the N
orth Sea. On 28 August a decoy force of British destroyers and cruisers put out from Scapa Flow with the aim of drawing their German opposite numbers into Heligoland Bight, where British submarines and battlecruisers were waiting. By the end of the day, thanks to battlecruisers HMS Lion, HMS Queen Mary and HMS Princess Royal, four German ships had been sunk and three more badly damaged. Three British ships had also been sunk and one damaged, but casualties had been well under a hundred; the Germans had lost considerably more men, including many who had been taken prisoner.3

  A second wave of Grand Fleet vessels had stood in reserve during the engagement. Bill Burton, a bastion of the Pennell’s Terra Nova engine room, had been on HMS Lowestoft.4 Henry Rennick and Murray Levick had been with the 7th Cruiser Squadron: Rennick, on the Hogue, had seen no action, but Levick, on the Bacchante, had been called on to treat injured sailors, including by amputating shell-damaged limbs.5

  On 22 September Henry Rennick’s ship, the Hogue, and two sister ships, the Cressy and Aboukir, set out on one of their regular morning patrols of the southern area of the North Sea. There was no sign of enemy ships.

  Suddenly the Aboukir was struck by a torpedo from an unseen German submarine.6 British cruisers had, in order to deter submarines, been ordered to zig-zag rather than sail straight courses, but the age and slowness of the Cressy class ships made it difficult for them to follow this command. When the Aboukir began to list, it became increasingly difficult, then impossible, to launch lifeboats. As it became clear that she was going to go under, the captain gave orders to abandon ship.

  The Hogue and the Cressy were already steaming towards their stricken sister-ship. Admiralty officials knew that such rescue attempts risked making ships a sitting target for the next torpedo, but to forbid them would run counter to the instincts of most mariners. As the Hogue and the Cressy lowered their lifeboats, those on deck threw lifebelts and anything buoyant they could find into the water, where men were struggling to keep afloat.

  At about 7 a.m. the Aboukir rolled over and began sinking. Minutes later the Hogue, which had by now brought aboard several Aboukir survivors, was hit by two torpedoes. As water flooded into the Hogue’s engine room, her gunners spotted a periscope above the waves. They and gunners on the Cressy opened fire but made no impact on their unseen target.

  By 7.15 a.m. the Hogue was sinking. Within minutes the Cressy, which had already picked up survivors from both her sister ships, was hit by two torpedoes.

  By 8 a.m. all three ships had sunk. Thousands of men were now swimming or floundering in the cold North Sea, trying to save themselves and help injured men; all around were floating bodies and wreckage from their vessels.7 Henry Rennick, who was a strong swimmer, began steering planks, oars and anything buoyant he could find towards those who seemed most at risk of drowning.

  When British fishing trawlers and naval vessels arrived at the scene a few hours later they found that most of the crew members of the Hogue, Cressy and Aboukir had died in explosions, drowned or died from exposure in the chill waters of the North Sea. Henry Rennick’s name appeared in the lists of those who were presumed to have died in the disaster.8 According to the Admiralty’s official report the long firing range of the German submarines and the age and slowness of the Hogue and her sister ships had contributed to the disaster.

  One survivor, Petty Officer Alfred Renwick, gave an interview in which he described what had happened as his ship began to go down:9

  Before the ship turned turtle the captain told us that it was a case of each one for himself and that we must take to the water. Being a good swimmer, I dived and caught hold of a piece of wreckage, with which I swam about for nearly four hours …

  One of the tars shouted out ‘Are we downhearted?’ and there was a chorus of ‘No’s’, followed by the lustiest singing of ‘God Save the King’ that I have heard for a long time.

  I saw Lieutenant-Commander Rennick, one of Captain Scott’s heroes, hand his lifebelt to an exhausted comrade, and shortly afterwards a huge wave swept him away. Such self-sacrifice I have never seen. All did their best to help one another.

  When Wilfred Bruce wrote to friends in New Zealand, he told them of the death of his friend, who had, earlier in the year, married a New Zealand girl:10

  You will have heard by now that poor Parny is gone. I lost my very best pal, and you will all be sorry, I know, but he finished splendidly… His wife will have something to look back to with pride. Of course, there’s practically no mourning here, but there are many heavy hearts, and I’m afraid we’ve barely started yet.

  Wilfred Bruce had news of other ‘Antarctics’ to pass on to his New Zealand friends:11

  Commander Evans is commanding the Mohawk destroyer, and was missed by 10yds by a torpedo from a German submarine one night last week. Commander Pennell is in the Duke of Edinburgh … Dr Atkinson is in the Saint Vincent, a first liner, somewhere in the North Sea. Dr Levick is on the Bacchante, whereabouts also vague. Staff-Paymaster Drake is in the new light cruiser [Undaunted]. Lieutenant Campbell is serving in the Naval Brigade, and was adjutant of the battalion that was interned in Holland; but I heard yesterday that somehow or other he was back in England.

  Evans’ ship, the Mohawk, was one of the ‘Tribal’ class fast destroyers which made up the majority of the Patrol Flotilla of the Dover Strait Fleet.12 When Campbell had been crossing the Channel on his way to Antwerp Teddy Evans had been on an escort vessel: as he watched his charges sail safely into harbour Evans felt envious of Campbell and also thought of Hood Battalion, named for the famous ancestor of Evans’ commanding officer, Rear Admiral Horace Hood.

  Bruce himself was serving on the minesweeper Halcyon, based at Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast. In the early hours of 3 November the Halcyon had challenged the German battlecruiser Seydlitz, one of several German ships which had weaved through the Great Yarmouth night fishing fleet and were fast approaching Lowestoft. As the two ships traded fire the Halcyon suffered some slight damage but was at more serious risk of being swamped by cascades of water raised by German shells over- or under-shooting their mark.

  By 8.30 a.m. the Seydlitz and several German ships were within firing range of Lowestoft. Four British destroyers and three submarines based in Yarmouth put out to try to chase the intruders away. As a North Sea fog descended, the Germans took advantage of the cover to head back to their base at Jade Bay. Reinforcements summoned from the Grand Fleet’s Scottish bases could do nothing but turn back. Casualties on the Halcyon were light but several submariners and fishermen died when their vessels hit mines left by the retreating German fleet.

  The Times reported that Yarmouth residents had felt the ‘reverberation of the guns and the clattering of windows and shaking of houses’.13 Several fishermen, assuming (in the absence of flags on the German destroyers) that the large ships passing through their midst were British vessels, had waved and saluted; they had been surprised when those on board the larger ships had responded by shaking their fists.

  In London, First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill had recently suffered a different kind of set-back. His First Sea Lord, Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, was German-born but a naturalised British citizen and a friend of Prime Minister Asquith. Those who had always felt that Battenberg’s family ties made him unsuitable to hold high-ranking naval office could now point to recent demonstrations against Germans living in Britain and the fact that Sir Edgar Speyer, another naturalised citizen, had been forced to resign from family businesses in the United States which traded with Germany.

  After Battenberg resigned, Churchill publicly thanked him for his long and valued service. He also mentioned that Battenberg’s son was serving in the navy and that his nephew had recently died in Belgium fighting the Germans.

  Churchill announced that Battenberg’s successor as First Sea Lord would be Admiral ‘Jackie’ Fisher. Although the vigorous septuagenarian and Churchill did not always see eye to eye, Fisher had helped shape the modern British navy on which the country now depended.


  On 7 November it was announced that German ships had sunk two British armoured cruisers off Coronel in central Chile. The engagement had involved only nine vessels but more than 1,000 British seamen had died in what was Britain’s first defeat at sea for over a century.

  Following the German victory, battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible and armoured cruiser Carnarvon (on which Browning of the Northern Party now served) set sail across the Atlantic to reinforce Britain’s naval presence in southern waters.

  On 8 December they arrived at the British supply port of Stanley in the Falklands, where they had planned to refuel. While they were in harbour they became aware that a German squadron, which clearly did not expect to find British ships so far south, was heading for the Falklands. The German ships, which were outnumbered, turned back. The British squadron gave chase and succeeded in sinking, capturing or scuttling six German ships for no losses.

  As the first year of the war drew to a close, Harry Pennell’s ship, the Duke of Edinburgh, was transferred to the British Grand Fleet at Orkney. Pennell’s final voyage on troop convoy duty had been the most eventful by some margin.

  The Duke of Edinburgh had left Aden for Karachi in late October, leaving again on 3 November followed by ten troopships carrying men of the 11th Indian Division to Suez. They would be assisting with the defence of the canal which linked the Mediterranean to Aden, India and points east.