HMS A3: Fourteen Men Lost in the Solent, Then Sunk by Her Own Side

Britain's Own Submarines

The five Holland boats bought from America in 1901, whose story is told in HMS Holland 1, had shown that submarines worked. They had also shown that they were too small to be much use. The Navy's answer was the A class, the first submarines designed in Britain, and HMS A3 was one of the first of them.

She was laid down by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness on 19 February 1902, launched on 9 May 1903 and commissioned on 13 July 1904.

She was still a small and simple thing by any later standard: a single hull a little over a hundred feet long, a petrol engine for running on the surface, an electric motor and batteries for running dived, two bow torpedo tubes and a crew of eleven or so.

But she was bigger and more seaworthy than the Hollands, she had a proper conning tower to keep the sea off the men steering her, and she and her sisters were the boats in which the young Submarine Service learned its trade. The Service called itself "the Trade" for the rest of its history, and the A boats were where it served its apprenticeship.

It was a dangerous apprenticeship. The first of the class, A1, had been sunk off the Isle of Wight in March 1904 when she was run down by a liner while making a practice attack, and all eleven men in her were lost. The danger in these exercises was simple.

A submarine at periscope depth, running in to attack a ship, could see very little through a primitive periscope and could be seen even less, and the ships she was attacking were steaming at speed in the same patch of water. Sooner or later the two would try to occupy the same piece of sea.

2 February 1912

By 1912 A3 was one of the older boats of the Portsmouth flotilla, based at Fort Blockhouse in Gosport, later HMS Dolphin, and used largely for training. On the morning of 2 February she sailed from Portsmouth Harbour with several other A and C-class submarines for exercises off Bembridge, at the eastern end of the Isle of Wight.

Their parent ship, the old torpedo gunboat HMS Hazard, went with them, and the boats took turns to carry out dummy attacks on her.

A3 had fourteen men aboard, more than usual, because she was carrying officers under instruction. Lieutenant Ormand was temporarily in command, with Lieutenant Thornton as his second in command, and two more lieutenants, Campbell and Richardson, were aboard to learn the work.

It was the kind of quiet training day that the Submarine Service had every week.

Some time before eleven o'clock A3 completed her run and blew her tanks to surface. She came up two miles south-west of the East Princessa buoy, in the eastern Solent, directly in the path of Hazard.

The gunboat, of more than a thousand tons, struck her and tore a hole six to eight feet long in the top of her hull. A3 went straight to the bottom. There was no chance for anybody inside to get out. When the bodies were recovered later, a wristwatch on one of the officers had stopped at 10.53.

The evidence given afterwards suggested that the men in the submarine had not known Hazard was close until the last few seconds, and a block of timber was found jammed in her propeller.

Raised and Buried

The dockyard at Portsmouth took charge of the salvage. It was slow work in strong tides and bad weather, with divers passing hawsers under the hull so that she could be lifted between lighters, and it was five weeks before A3 was raised.

She was moved into St Helen's Bay on the Isle of Wight and then taken into Portsmouth, where the bodies of her crew were brought out.

The inquest was opened by the coroner Leonard Warner at the Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar, in Gosport. One of the witnesses was Charles Craven, a submarine officer who told the jury that death would have been very quick, and who later left the Navy to run the Vickers shipyard at Barrow where A3 had been built.

The jury found that the men had died by accidental collision, and attached no blame to anyone.

Thirteen of the crew were buried together in the naval cemetery beside Haslar hospital, after a long procession and under a great many wreaths. Their graves were laid close to those of the men of A1. Lieutenant Campbell was taken home and buried privately at Oban.

Queen Alexandra sent her condolences, and so did the French government, whose own navy had lost submarines and men in the same way. At Plymouth, where an obelisk already stood to the men lost in A8 in 1905, it was decided to add the names of A3's crew to it as well.

Sunk Again

A3 herself was examined and declared not worth repairing. The Navy did what navies do with ships they no longer need, and found one more use for her. That spring, in May by most accounts, she was towed out into the Channel off Portland and sunk as a gunnery target by the battleship HMS St Vincent.

It sounds a callous ending for a boat in which fourteen men had died a few months earlier, but nothing in the Navy of 1912 was wasted, and live firing at a real submarine hull was worth having. Within three years the same Navy would be trying very hard to sink German submarines.

Hazard carried on. She had been built at Pembroke as a torpedo gunboat in 1894 and converted in 1901 to look after the Holland boats, which made her the first submarine depot ship in the world, and she went on mothering submarines through the First World War, latterly with the flotillas of the Dover Patrol.

Her own end came close to where A3's had. On 28 January 1918, in thick fog in the approaches to Portsmouth, she was rammed by the merchant ship Western Australia and cut almost in two, and she sank so quickly that three of her men went down with her.

Her wreck lies upside down in two pieces in the eastern Solent, not far from the water where she had run down A3 six years before.

She went down about ten kilometres south of Worbarrow Tout on the Dorset coast, in about thirty-eight metres of water, and lay undisturbed until divers found her in 1989. In July 2016 she was given legal protection as a wreck site on the advice of Historic England, because she is one of only three A-class submarines known to survive anywhere. Diving on her now requires a licence.

The Price of Learning

The A class lost more than its share of boats and men. A1 was run down by a liner, A3 by her own depot ship, A8 foundered off Plymouth in 1905 and A7 dived into the seabed in Whitsand Bay in 1914 and never came up. That record says more about the job than about the boats.

Nobody had done any of this before, and the drills, the signals and the safety rules that later generations of submariners took for granted were written in these years, one accident at a time. The B class that followed them, whose story is told in HMS B4, were bigger and better, and the lessons had been paid for.

The postcard at the top of this page was published by Charles Cozens of Portsmouth, one of the photographers who made a living from the warships of the port. It shows A3 running on the surface with her crew out on deck. Along the bottom, added after the event, is the record of her loss.

It was the kind of card that people in Portsmouth and Gosport bought in 1912, because everybody knew somebody who had known one of the men in her.