by Ian Dear
How much compensation was due was adjudicated by the courts and was based on the percentage of the value of the ship and what she was carrying. In the First World War, the crews of warships were also entitled to salvage money, as they were initially during the Second World War – though payment was confined to those ships damaged by the enemy (war risks), not by stress of weather or other natural causes (marine risks). Later in the war this, too, was stopped.
Nearly all the vessels assisted by the rescue tugs based at St Mary’s would have been damaged by war risks, and the base saw plenty of them. Some of the stories surrounding these casualties are amusing or dramatic; others are tragic. In the latter category was the 5525-ton British steamer Great City that was torpedoed thirty miles west of Bishop’s Rock, west of the Scilly Isles, on 16 June 1917 while en route from the US port of Newport News, Virginia, to London. She was loaded with wheat so it is not surprising that, remembering the acute shortage of food in Britain at the time, the C-in-C Devonport described her cargo as ‘valuable’ when ordering the rescue tugs Bramley Moore and Sun II to her estimated position.
She was brought in safely and beached at St Mary’s, and was then made watertight and refloated by the ‘dockyarders’, but on 31 August an entry in The Scillonian War Diary records a horrific incident aboard her:
Four men gassed on steamer Great City lying in the Roads. This dreadful happening cast a gloom over the Islands; for a week or two the smell of rotting grain from the cargo of the Great City had been distressingly apparent and if the breeze was in any way from the north it spread through the town and windows had to be shut to exclude the terrible odour of decaying grain.28
Some of the salvage men were below as there was still a lot of water in the holds that had to be pumped out. One of them bent over to pick up a piece of floating debris – a necessary precaution to avoid the pumps being blocked – and was immediately overcome. Others, thinking he had fainted, rushed to his rescue, only to meet the same fate. One would have thought anyone aboard from then on would be warned to keep clear of the lethal water-sodden cargo, but, astonishingly, the diary records that men also died from the fumes when the ship was later towed to Holyhead, and then to Liverpool.
An antidote to Great City’s noxious fumes was the cargo carried by the 4277-ton British steamer Eastgate. She was en route for New York from Le Havre when she was torpedoed a hundred and twenty miles south-west of Bishop’s Rock, and was brought in to St Mary’s while the Great City was still there. According to The Scillonian War Diary, ‘she turned the Islands into a bouquet of flowers’, as she was carrying a cargo of medical requisites, perfumery and also, it was said, Paris model fashions. The torpedo struck her, as the Diary put it, ‘in the perfumery department’. Bottles of scent were washed up on the beach along with cough mixture and hair dye, bundles of silk stockings and yards of lace, and the town, and the townspeople, reeked of perfume for weeks after the steamer had been beached there.29
Inadequate vessels
Once the United States entered the war, the increased numbers of ships arriving in British waters meant rescue work was unrelenting, and emphasised, as the year wore on, the continuing shortage of rescue tugs. Additional ones were requisitioned from their civilian owners but, initially at least, the Admiralty allowed some to keep control of their vessels, provided they gave satisfactory service. All the crews were volunteers, but using civilian crews and management in wartime was far from ideal. Nor were the tugs, with one or two exceptions, even remotely adequate for the task that faced them, as a Court of Enquiry into the loss of the 8557-ton British steamer Condesa revealed.30
On 7 July 1917, while bound for Liverpool with a cargo of frozen meat from South America, the Condesa was torpedoed about a hundred miles west of Bishop’s Rock. She had been zigzagging correctly while steaming at eleven knots, but this did not save her, and her escort immediately sent out an SOS. This brought several ships to the scene, including Joseph Constantine, Sun II and Atalanta III, as well as the Falmouth-based Triton, which was still under the management of her owners. The weather deteriorated as efforts were made to save the damaged steamer. Indeed, it became so bad that the court decided that Sun II and Atalanta III had been justified in turning back on account of it, an all too frequent occurrence.
The court’s first witness was the captain of the Scilly-based armed trawler Whitefriars. He was early on the scene, and he described his failure to tow the sinking Condesa in the high winds and a rough following sea, as the trawler was not properly equipped for towing. He therefore handed the task to Joseph Constantine when she arrived from St Mary’s, and she and the armed yacht Ravenska managed to tow the crippled steamer to within about thirty miles of the Scillies. But at 1.30pm on 9 July 1917 she sank, some forty hours after being torpedoed.
When the trawler’s captain – an RNR officer – was cross-examined, it soon emerged that if more suitable help had arrived earlier the ship might have been saved.
‘Do you know these tugs Joseph Constantine, Sun II, Triton and Atalanta?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which do you consider the best for sea-going purposes?’
‘The Triton is the best boat.’
‘Is the Sun II a sea-going tug, would you say?’
‘No, absolutely useless as a sea-going tug.’
‘What do you think of the Atalanta?’
‘I think she is worse than the Sun II. Not meant for a tug boat. She is a ferry boat or tender.’
‘And the Joseph Constantine?’
‘She is not an ocean tug.’
‘What is the Bramley Moore like as a tug?’
‘Not what you would call an ocean tug, but she is the best of the lot at the Scilly Isles.’
‘Is she better than the Triton?’
‘No, better than the Joseph Constantine, Sun II or Atalanta. She is a river tug and not a sea-going tug.’
Another witness, the Senior Naval Officer (SNO) of the Scilly sub-base, Commander Oliver RN, was even more damning. When asked if any of the four tugs stationed at the base were sea-going tugs, he answered:
‘No, not in my opinion, sir.’
‘Were they suitable for the work required of them?’
‘Certainly not.’
He explained to the Court that if a vessel were damaged in the Atlantic, a Scillies-based rescue tug typically had to cover about one hundred and twenty miles to find it, and that this required ‘both speed and power. These vessels are quite incapable of dealing with it. I have an order for next Monday, a secret one, where vessels have to go as much as 600 miles, 6 degrees [of longitude].’
It was, he said, a bitter disappointment to him when given such an order to find that when the time came the weather was too bad to send them out, or they were forced to return because of it. Besides, the tugs were not fitted out for ocean work – they didn’t even have sextants or chronometers to find their position at sea – and he always preferred to send trawlers if he could, but never had enough of them.
After asking if any of the tugs’ commanding officers may have turned back unnecessarily, and received a negative reply, the Court asked about the Falmouth-based Triton which Commander Oliver had specifically requested to help the sinking steamer. Her tug master, though experienced, was sixty-one years old and his crew were not exactly youngsters. Time was lost when the tug master argued it was his Sunday off and that Victor, another of the company’s tugs, should be sent. However, he eventually agreed to go – once the crew’s dinner of pasties had been delivered on board.
More time was lost when the tug master took Triton into St Mary’s. His W/T (wireless telegraphy which used morse code) operator was too seasick to function, but he wanted to know if the Condesa was still afloat. However, he agreed with the court when it was suggested to him that the best way to have found out would have been to follow his orders, though he had also decided the weather was too bad to continue. Commander Oliver had disagreed. He had the W/T operator replaced and ordered Triton back to sea
. Finding the weather even worse as he headed westwards, the tug master returned to St Mary’s. Again, Commander Oliver sent him back to sea, and told the court he had never been ‘more astonished in my life’ when Triton had returned a second time. Triton eventually reached the stricken Condesa, but had been too late to save her.
The Court of Enquiry then asked if there had been anything more he could have done, and Oliver replied:
‘I do not know of anything. It was simply a series of accidents. The vessels returned, and we practically lost 24 hours in coming and going without any assistance being rendered by them. I did not know they were coming back half the time.’
‘The accidents you refer to [are] the coming back on account of the weather?’
‘Yes, and the means I had. I do not think the boats are suitable for Scilly.’
In submitting the findings of the Court of Enquiry to the Admiralty, the C-in-C Devonport, who was in overall command of Falmouth, pointed out that the only tug really at fault appeared to be Triton, but nothing could be done about it as her master and crew were not under naval discipline. He suggested both Falmouth-based tugs should be requisitioned and commissioned into the Royal Navy, and to the annoyance of their owners this was done the following March. New officers and crews were recruited under the T.124T Agreement (see below), and Victor and Triton were renamed Ictor and Plunger respectively.
Merchant Navy and T124.T Agreement
These accounts, extracted from contemporary documents, show clearly the inadequacy of the vessels in which their crews had to operate, and says much for their skill and bravery. Many were recruited from the Trawler Reserve31 and some of them, wrote Archibald Hurd, ‘did so well that in five months they were promoted to second mate, and then to mate. Such men had before the war been skippers of sailing smacks with no experience of steam, but owing to their practical knowledge of sea-lore they made excellent officers.’ It was, he quite rightly emphasised, no easy task to find a sinking vessel in the Atlantic in foul weather, and to bring it to safety. ‘Such efforts demanded seamanship, daring, patience, and coolness of the first order. The Rescue Tug Service paid for itself many times over in the value of the ships and cargoes which were saved.’32
But the Merchant Service was a civilian organisation only answerable to the Board of Trade so, in ‘a military sense, the Merchant Navy was an undisciplined force. While the great shipping firms maintained a regular body of officers, they drew upon the labour market as necessary for manning the ships, men in the overseas trade signing on for the voyage and then being discharged.’33
This may have worked in peacetime, but in war it meant that if a seaman’s ship was sunk under him, or he was made a prisoner of war, his pay ceased immediately and he did not even receive any compensation for the loss of his belongings, an iniquitous state of affairs that continued until 1941.34
The solution was for the Rescue Tug Service to recruit volunteers under the T.124T Agreement. This was a variation of the T.124 agreement that the Royal Navy used to recruit Merchant Navy personnel in wartime for auxiliary vessels that the Royal Navy did not have the personnel to man. For instance, T.124X was the agreement for recruiting personnel into the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. Recruits signing the agreement agreed to serve for the period of hostilities and were subject to naval discipline, but they retained their Merchant Navy pay, which was higher than the naval equivalent, a cause for grievance in the Second World War, as will be seen.
If Merchant Navy officers held certificates as master or first-class engineer they were given temporary commissions as lieutenant or lieutenant (E) in the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR). Those not holding certificates were given the rank of temporary sub-lieutenant RNR. Later, T.124T was corrupted into ‘Tattie’ by those who served in rescue tugs. They became known as ‘the Tattie Lads’, and the nickname stuck. But rescue tugs in both world wars also had naval gunners aboard, as well as naval signalmen and W/T operators, so the crews came from both services.
The two cultures did not always mix easily, for merchant seamen were, and are, fiercely independent and, as will be seen in later chapters, not always amenable to discipline. Misunderstandings in terminology also arose as a Court of Enquiry in January 1918 revealed, when the master of the tug Victor, still managed by her civilian owners at that time, admitted he was unfamiliar with the naval method of giving a true bearing, and had therefore been unable to find a freighter that had been torpedoed just twenty-five miles off the Lizard.35 No wonder the Admiralty requisitioned Victor two months later.
Evelyn George Martin
The early development of the Rescue Tug Service was largely due to Lt Evelyn George Martin RNVR. A scion of the banking family of that name, he was educated at Eton and then at Oxford where he studied medicine, though he never qualified as a doctor. He was born in Worcestershire, and spent much of his time with relations in the Devon fishing port of Brixham as his father was in the Indian Army. A very tall, shy man – a life-long bachelor – he was a first-class yachtsman, had a golf handicap of two, and played cricket for Oxford and Worcestershire. He also possessed many artistic talents. The Isis magazine remarked that ‘on the ski and on the piano, with the paint-brush and with the dissecting knife, he is equally at home’.36
He sounds just the sort of upper-class gentleman amateur the public school system and Oxbridge was so good at breeding at that time. But there was nothing amateur about Martin. He was not a man who objected to getting his hands dirty, and before going up to Oxford he worked with Brixham’s fishing fleet and in local shipyards. What he didn’t know about working boats wasn’t worth knowing, and this knowledge was to serve him well in both world wars.
In November 1914 he joined the Motor Boat Reserve37 as a sub-lieutenant RNVR, and was given command of the Mayfair, a 55-ton motor yacht that would have been too small to be employed anywhere but in the most sheltered waters. Unfortunately, one dark night while there was a hunt for a suspected U-boat, one of the hunters rammed the Mayfair and she sank in thirty seconds, luckily without any loss of life. Martin, who was at the wheel at the time, later wrote about this unnerving experience in a yachting magazine,38 and put it to good use to explain how best to avoid a full-on blow that sliced through the Mayfair ‘as a knife slices a melon’.
He was then appointed to the stone frigate HMS Excellent, for a gunnery course, and later served in the monitor HMS Prince Rupert. While aboard her, he showed such technical ability that his service record noted: ‘Appreciation expressed for zeal and ingenuity in working out design of fuze setting device.’
At some point his peacetime knowledge of working boats must have come to the notice of higher authority, for on 10 June 1917 he was appointed to HMS President (the London depot ship for RNVR and RNR personnel) as an inspector of tug equipment. The following month, he was lent to the RA (Rear Admiral) Falmouth as ‘Inspector of Rescue Tug Equipment’ and put under the direct orders of the SNO of the Scilly base. He arrived at St Mary’s on 12 September 1917, with the Scilly base weekly report noting ‘that yacht Venetia [II] arrived with Lieutenant Martin RNVR. Yacht proceeded on patrol.’39
Martin had a gift for writing, and he later vividly described his wartime work in equipping and handling rescue tugs:
Many months were spent in finding out what gear was necessary and could be handled by small crews in rough water; in providing suitable hawsers, wires, swivels and shackles – all of which had to be specially made, tested to destruction, and proved at sea. Besides this, the right class of seaman had to be collected, a very difficult matter, for only the very best sailors are of any use in handling huge hawsers in small craft in bad weather; and guns, wireless, depth charges, smoke apparatus, line-throwing guns and many other things had to be arranged.
For every class of ship in the Navy there is an ‘establishment’ – in other words, an official inventory, and the dockyards are able to supply ships accordingly. Those who have experience of naval dockyards may guess the difficulty of fitting out complete a fleet of tug
s for which there was no ‘establishment’. For a long time the writer had little chance of getting to sea, but at last things were more or less in shape, he was given an assistant, and a ship of his own with charge of all rescue work at sea in the Western Area.40
From this description, and from the few surviving official reports relating to his wartime work, Martin probably spent the rest of 1917 and the early part of 1918 chasing round dockyards for what he needed, and going to sea for short periods to test equipment. But by the spring of 1918 documents show that progress was at last being made.41 ‘The tug Woonda is now being fitted as a rescue tug in readiness to be appropriated for that Service,’ the captain of dockyard and deputy superintendent, Devonport, informed the admiral superintendent on 2 March 1918; and on 18 March the C-in-C Devonport, in commenting on how rescue work would be controlled, informed the Admiralty that the rescue tugs in the Plymouth Command now totalled eleven: five at the Scillies, four at Falmouth and two at Plymouth, though he added that the latter ‘can scarcely be classed as capable of ocean work, or for work with convoys’, which makes clear that even the most unsuitable vessels continued to be used as rescue tugs.
On 6 April 1918, the R-A Falmouth submitted to the C-in-C Devonport reports from the Inspector of Tugs, Lt-Cdr EG Martin RNVR [he had been promoted the previous November], regarding the tugs now operating in the area. The printed forms, filled in and signed by Martin, recorded his comments on the equipment aboard each of them, including the condition of the tow ropes, W/T set, life rafts, depth charges and hydrophones. General quarters and fire practice had to be carried out at regular intervals on all the tugs as did practice at firing the guns now mounted on them.
On 8 April 1918, the SNO Scillies reported the routine the five rescue tugs based there followed. On returning from sea they would immediately take aboard coal, water and stores. Two of them would then be at immediate readiness and two at half an hour’s notice. When a damaged ship had been reported, the duty trot boat would give five blasts on her whistle to summon the tugs’ crews who all lived nearby. It then took them to their ships that lay about half a mile off the pier at St Mary’s, where they would await their orders to proceed to sea, and after doing so would communicate their position, course and speed by W/T every four hours.