“Before the war, what submarines could do was one mystery,” wrote Winston Churchill in his book The World Crisis. “What they would be ordered to do was another.”
* * *
By the time Keyes had got his feet under the desk at HMS Dolphin, Boyle was preparing to get married. Marjorie Wales Leigh was born in Shortlands, near Bromley and brought up in Beckenham. Her father was a successful stockbroker. A search through the 1911 census finds the family in Tonbridge during Boyle’s Easter leave, with him staying as a guest, and we might imagine that the engagement took place then.
Whether it was then or not, they were married in Marylebone in the summer of 1912, the high noon of Edwardian heroic sentiment, just weeks after the Titanic disaster and the news of Captain Scott’s demise in the Antarctic. Boyle’ parents had recently moved to London (16 Onslow Square), perhaps in the hope of encouraging Courtney’s sisters to find husbands, though – if so – this was not a successful strategy. The war intervened and, like so many other young women of their generation, they never did.
The marriage is important to the story of E14, partly because it was not a success – and partly because it is very clear from Keyes’ letters home that it was Marjorie Boyle he was fond of, and Eva Keyes was especially so. Keyes never entirely trusted the husband, and worried – like other contemporaries – whether Boyle was just too laidback, or whether perhaps he lacked the determination. “I had a shocking suspicion that he was a bit bored by the navy in peacetime,” wrote Brodie later. “He did not pose, but seemed slightly aloof.”
Boyle’s confidential reports were positive, but as late as 1914, his commanding officer wrote that he had a “quiet, nice disposition. Somewhat lacking in authority and confidence. Not at present sufficient enthusiasm & leadership”. But Brodie’s remark that he “did not pose” may be a clue, and that same inability to strike an inauthentic note of action lay behind some of the other disapproval in Boyle’s official reports. What looked like honesty to him might have looked like boredom to his contemporaries and perhaps even to senior officers, despite his evident judgement and technical abilities that were to make his Dardanelles voyages so successful. Perhaps it was this that earned the outburst that Keyes made in a letter to his wife at the end of 1914:
“Addison tells me Boyle is not doing at all well and does not appear to take any interest. It will be awkward if I have to kick him out which of course I shall do – if I am not satisfied. I do wish that babas weren’t staying there!!! You know everyone says the same thing about him. The same when he was at sea in the St Vincent. I never would have given him that ‘E’ but for his first class reconnaissance, but that isn’t good enough; the boat has got to be put in order and kept in order, and that is where he fails – he wants a spur all the time.”
The reference to ‘babas’ usually refers to his children, and the implication is that one of them was staying with Marjorie Boyle at the time. The reference to Boyle’s reconnaissance was for taking his submarine D3 far into the shoal water off Sylt in the first months of the war. It was not that somehow Keyes doubted his courage. “E14 was incessantly hunted,” he wrote after the first Dardanelles exploit, “but it was clear from Boyle’s signals that he was not in the least perturbed, which did not surprise me, as in the whole of my long submarine experience, I never came across anyone more completely oblivious of danger.”
Boyle was the hero then, so we can discount some of this. What we can say is that maybe seeming oblivious to danger was part of the basic problem – that Boyle sometimes seemed oblivious to everything. The impression from other contemporaries is one of overwhelming reserve. “I served with him in 1917 in the Blyth flotilla, and later under him on the West Coast of Scotland,” wrote William Carr in his book By Guess and By God. “Boyle was tall and dark, with slightly greying hair, very reserved and immensely self-contained. Off duty you would find him immersed in some technical book or other most of the time. He had a sense of humour but it never ran away with him.”
It was this technical ability that kept him in the forefront of ‘The Trade’. Driving a submarine required a combination of technical skill and judgement, of carefulness and attention to detail but also daring. If surface ships could go forward or backward, submarines could go up and down and required the balance, the trim, to be perfect as well. Their commanders had to be able to cruise accurately underwater without any means to see or hear outside – this was before the invention of any kind of sonar or listening devices. And those skills would be required so much more for the sophisticated E class, which incorporated the lessons of the D class and became the ubiquitous British submarine design of the First World War, and which were that much bigger than any previous class.
There were 57 E submarines launched by 1916, including two which were given to the Australian navy (AE1 and AE2). While Courtney and Marjorie were getting married, the keel of his submarine was being laid in Barrow-in-Furness. Like the others, E14 would cost just over £105,000 to build. She weighed nearly 660 tons and was 181 foot long – three times the length of the original Hollands. She had two diesel engines for the surface and electric engines that drove when they were submerged, theoretically at the rate of 11 mph but actually rather less. E14 had five torpedo tubes; two in the front, one in the stern and two – though this remained top secret – in the beam. When the A, B and C classes had two officers and maybe a dozen men each, the E submarines had a crew of 30 cooped up in cramped quarters just over 15 feet across.
* * *
So come with me for a moment down E14’s forward hatch, which is a little wider to let in the torpedoes, and we will have a look around. Here we are in the forward compartment with the torpedo tubes and the torpedoes, looking like vast shiny pipelines along the sides of the submarine. There is a strong smell of oil and that rank odour of paint, polish, sweat and diesel that submarines reek of, and perhaps a whiff of cocoa, because here also is the electric cooking stove the officer’s use, plus a hotplate and the toilet.
E class submarines are the first to be fitted with a lavatory, rather than the oil-filled buckets which submariners had been expected to use before. The buckets are still there, because the toilet can hardly be used if we are submerged and trying to remain unseen, but it is available the rest of the time. The trouble is that it is extremely unreliable. If the compressed air is applied at the wrong moment then, instead of blowing the contents into the sea, it blows them back in your face. At least one commanding officer insists on squatting on the rail on deck every morning instead. It is hardly surprising that constipation is, along with alcoholism, a widespread submarine complaint. One E class commander insists that his crew takes laxatives every 48 hours in every circumstance.
There is also very little water for washing, almost no submariners clean their teeth on patrol and there is certainly no spare water for washing clothes, though the crew are issued with special soap that lathers in seawater. Most of the crew wear white jerseys which become increasingly greasy and grimy as the patrol continues. Despite the lack of water, the submarine is awash with condensation dripping down the bulkheads and instruments, on any long dive. Much of the time, “cold damp mists of condensation” hang in the air.
Now through the watertight door and into the control room, with its spaghetti of pipes, wheels, levers and tubes. Here is the equipment recognisable from any submarine film, but smaller – most of our submarine film memories are about the Second World War and we are a generation before. Here is the steering gear, the hydroplane gears which steer the boat up and down the water, the two periscopes with their moulded eye-pieces, and the valves for filling and emptying the ballast tanks. Here is the main electrical switchboard, the gyroscopic compass which is designed to be immune from the submarine’s electro-magnetism, and the log and a safe for all the code books and charts. The steel ladder is here that leads up into the conning tower, which is itself only eight feet above sea level – and will drench the officer of the watch in a medium North Sea swell. An alarm sound
s if the gyro-compass goes off course – a nightmare particularly for the navigating officer whose job it is to wake up and tackle the problem.
On either side, at the front of the control room, behind a discrete green curtain, are the bunks for the captain and first lieutenant, above the chart drawers and food locker (cabbage is banned by the navy because of the smell), a tiny washbasin and a chest with pistols and revolvers, some rifles and a machine gun. The dining table pulls out from under the starboard bunk and below that, there is a drawer which also pulls out as a spare bunk for the navigating officer. Anyone who has to go into the forward compartment while he sleeps has to step over him.
Go the other way now, go aft, stepping over the electric heater and folding armchairs the officers use, and the comfy chair reserved for the commanding officer – through the next watertight doors – and you can see the crew’s mess tables and stove, the beam torpedo tubes and spare torpedoes. Just behind them is the wireless room and the mess tables for the crew.
Then another watertight door and into the engine room, first the diesel engines to drive the boat on the surface, and there is a passage between the two engines, where the most junior members of the crew sleep, wrapped in coats on the steel floor. Only the officers have bunks, and a third of the crew are on duty at any one time. Right at the end, we find the stern torpedo tube, the crew toilet and the crew’s washbasin. Beneath our feet are the batteries themselves, our crucial lifeline when we are submerged. They are filled with lethal sulphuric acid, which emit poisonous fumes if the sea water gets in. “If you get covered in strong acid,” says the submarine manual, “it is a good thing to jump overboard and stay there until the doctor is ready.”
‘The Trade’ is a classless vocation, compared to the rest of the navy, a combination of loyal camaraderie and moments of shared terror and continual exhaustion. As many as 60 submarines out of 215 during the First World War are about to be lost, which is nearly a third – by far the biggest attrition rate in the navy – and most of those losses will be for unknown reasons.
Sleep is broken into four-hour periods so that the crew will still be alert if they have to wake in an emergency, which means that exhaustion is endemic on patrol, with the crew craving sleep and even more wretched thanks to the lack of oxygen. Headaches usually follow a long period submerged, because breathing foul air for an extended time period leaves the crew with symptoms like hangovers – but, for some reason, does not affect those who have real hangovers from the night before. There are air purification systems but they are far less effective than their German counterparts – like the periscope design and much else on board. There is no effective air conditioning which leaves those near the engines seriously overheated while the officers of the watch are drenched and frozen on the conning tower, kept sane by endless supplies of cocoa. That means that the smells from the toilet buckets, rotting food and diesel fumes can be overwhelming on long dives.
All that affects the whole crew, as it does on most British submarines. But by far the greatest pressure falls on the commanders – it will be recognised after the war that submarines need an extra officer to share the watches. That is why they succumb to mental and physical exhaustion faster than the other officers. On them lies the responsibility for the lives of everyone aboard and on them rests the greatest strain of all – to stay awake the longest and to suffer the extremes of fear and not show anything at all except calm composure. That is why submarine officers are hit so often by the common complaint of a mixture of fever headaches and “awful lassitude”. It is why so many of them suffer for years afterwards from alcoholism and nervous stomach complaints.
* * *
This is the submarine which went down the slipway at Barrow on 7 July 1914. Two days before, the German Kaiser had received a special envoy from the Austrian Emperor – one week after the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir – and promised him full support if they attacked Serbia in retaliation. The Kaiser then left for a cruise off the northern coast. By the time E14 was launched, two days later, the inevitable series of circumstances and mistakes were conspiring to bring about a universal war.
Boyle had set up home with Marjorie in Southsea (16 Helena Road, a large-red-brick Edwardian semi-detached, with an arch over the front door) but had been sent to Harwich at the outbreak of war and was called to sea on war patrol for the first time in D3 in 5 August. The early weeks of the war had been expected to see the fantastic clash between the two biggest battle fleets the world had ever known. In fact, the two fleets were only destined to meet once in the whole war – this was to be a small ship war and Keyes was making the most of the work of his top submariners, venturing ever closer to the German coast and beyond into the Baltic. He knew that the public needed a dramatic description of the submarines if anyone was going to recognise what his commanders were achieving. The result was what the Morning Post called an “astonishing document”, written within weeks of the outbreak of war, describing a submarine in a heavy storm:
“Ten fathoms down the great steel fish, with twenty or thirty men in her belly, was swung about like a bottle by the vast and incessant movement of the water. No one could stand or lie, to open the hatch and to breathe the wind again was to risk the sea water pouring into the hull. Sea-water mixed with petrol gas… form chlorine gas, which is fatal to life.”
It was within weeks of this despatch that Boyle had taken D3 further and more perilously into the shoal water of Sylt, off the German coast, and earned the temporary admiration of his commander – enough to be awarded command of one of the new E class.
It was an elite job. Horton would make his reputation in E9 in the Baltic, just as Lier would in E4 and Nasmith would in E11 and Cochrane in E7. Boyle took command of E14 in Liverpool and sailed her round the coast to Harwich, only to be attacked on one of his first patrols by the British cruiser Aurora and four destroyers. He tackled the destroyer captains about it in dock that evening. They said that they had noticed that his submarine had a long straight upper deck, in the British style, but they still thought she ‘might’ be German.
It was a peculiar life, in peril at sea but back home in the midst of civilian life a few days later. It was a strange modern kind of war, familiar to RAF bombers a generation later but unknown before then – and deeply stressful for families and friends. There were no battered warships returning to dock after action, no wounded soldiers travelling back from the front; if a submarine ran into the enemy and lost, they were just never seen again. The only sign that they had gone would be the brave and determined figures of their wives and partners staring hopelessly out to sea. It was a strange combination to be so near danger and yet be able to take weekends or days off relaxing in civilian clothes. Cecil Talbot, in command of E16, was even accused of being a shirker by two ladies in a railway carriage.
We know a little of the atmosphere among the submarine pioneers, especially those in the 8th Submarine Flotilla based at Harwich, because of the satirical magazine they published during the war called the Maidstone Muckrag, and started by Lieutenant Commander Stopford Douglas, on the flotilla staff. ‘Maidstone’ referred to the submarine depot ship where they lived in the harbour, and where Douglas was an officer, and the larger-than-life personalities come back to life in its pages – the antics of Horton, Feilmann, Nasmith, Cochrane and the others – using the kind of black, ironic humour that communities fall back on when some of their number go out and never come back.
“Yet another beard in the mess,” said the first edition, aiming at Herbert Shove, commanding C2, who used to keep a white rat called Cyril in his breast pocket when they dived. “Haven’t we enough hardships to undergo without having these insanitary soup-traps thrust upon us?”
There is then a long description of the kind of satire that exhausted, perhaps even traumatised, submarine officers might find amusing, about their shared struggle with the conning tower hatch in the North Sea in winter. Choose someone and designate them ‘IT’, says the Muckrag:
&n
bsp; “He is then given a pair of oilskin trousers to distinguish him from the others and driven up the conning tower. The boat then rises and IT opens the lid. The object of the game is for IT to wash down the players in the boat without wetting himself and for the players in the boat to thoroughly drown IT without getting wet in their turn.”
For ‘washing down’ the captain, IT can score 25 points. If IT gets his boots full of sea water, the other players score 5. “On the homeward trip, the scores are added up and the winner gets the spare egg or extra sausage.”
The Muckrag evokes a forgotten atmosphere of gin in the wardroom, the damp mist of the Harwich quay, and the strain, cold and loneliness of the North Sea and Heligoland Bight – and, of course, the boyish, enthusiastic and demanding presence of the submarine commodore, Roger Keyes:
“Awake, for morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the stone that put the stars to flight,
And lo, the Roger of the Quay ordains
That submarines shall seek forthwith the Bight.
By the start of 1915, with preparations under way in France for what turned out to be the Second Battle of Ypres, and with the Grand Fleet huddled in their anchorage escape Flow, the E submarine commanders were kept in the public’s attention by the sheer enthusiasm and determination of Keyes. Then, suddenly, Keyes was gone. “O where, O where is the commodore gone?” asked the Muckrag:
“With his manner so blunt,
and his head full of stunt,
O where, O where can he be?”
In fact, Keyes had been appointed to be Chief of Staff to the admiral commanding the Anglo-French fleet outside the Dardanelles. It was a critical appointment, and – unlike so many of his colleagues – Keyes believed in submarines and knew what they could do. So E11, E14 and E15 were ordered to sail immediately, with their depot ship Adamant through the Bay of Biscay and the Straits of Gibraltar, to follow him.
The Great War at Sea: 1914-1918 Page 46