HMS A9: Photographed by a Queen, Gassed by Her Own Engine

A Royal Photographer

Most of the photographs of early submarines were taken by professionals, men like Cozens and Symonds who made a living from the warships of Portsmouth. The photograph of HMS A9 at the top of this page was not.

It was taken by Queen Alexandra, the wife of King Edward VII, a keen amateur photographer, and it was published in 1908 in Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift Book: Photographs from My Camera, which the Daily Telegraph sold that Christmas to raise money for charity.

It shows A9 from above, presumably from the deck of a much larger ship, with her low hull almost awash and two men standing on top of her conning tower. It is a good photograph.

It also shows, more clearly than most, just how little of an early submarine was above the water, and why the men who served in them treated anything bigger than a ripple with suspicion.

Number Nine

A9 was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, launched on 8 March 1905 and completed on 8 May. She belonged to the second and larger group of the A class, the first submarines designed in Britain, which are described in HMS A3.

She was 105 feet long and displaced 180 tons on the surface, with a petrol engine for running on the surface, an electric motor for running dived, two 18-inch torpedo tubes in the bow with four torpedoes, and a crew of two officers and nine men. In those days the boats were more often known by their numbers than their letters, and she was often referred to simply as No. 9.

She was a busy boat with a busy wardroom. Between 1905 and 1915 she had at least twelve commanding officers, as the young Submarine Service used its small early boats to give as many lieutenants as possible their first command.

One of them, in 1913, was Lieutenant George Fagan Bradshaw, who would sink a German U-boat in G13 in 1917 and then lose his career when HMS K15 sank under him in Portsmouth Harbour in 1921.

Run Down Off Plymouth

A9's first brush with disaster came in 1906, outside Plymouth, when she was struck by the steamer Coath and went to the bottom. It was the danger every early submarine faced, a boat so low in the water that the officer on the bridge of a merchant ship could easily fail to see her until too late.

A9 was luckier than A1, which had been run down by a liner off the Isle of Wight two years earlier with the loss of everyone aboard. She managed to resurface, and nobody was hurt.

The Mice

The danger that came nearest to killing her crew was inside the boat. The A class ran on petrol, and their engines leaked fumes and exhaust gas into a hull that had no proper ventilation at all.

Some of the gas was petrol vapour, which could explode, and some of it was carbon monoxide, which has no smell and simply puts people to sleep.

The Navy had begun to understand this in 1903, when a naval surgeon named Stewart reported on cases of illness among submarine crews and attributed them to carbon monoxide poisoning. His answer was the mouse.

From July 1903 each submarine was issued with a mouse in a wire cage, kept near the engine and fuel tanks, because a mouse is far more sensitive to bad air than a man and would begin squeaking, or simply fall over, long before the crew noticed anything.

On 8 July 1903 one of the mice died, and when its blood was tested it was found to be about thirty per cent saturated with carbon monoxide, which proved Stewart's point exactly. The mice were carried as members of the crew.

Off Folkestone, July 1908

In July 1908 the submarine flotilla was exercising off Folkestone. According to the account taken from the Admiralty's own papers, No. 9 was seen to be falling behind the others, flying a signal of distress. A rescue party went across to her, opened her up, and found the men below lying unconscious.

Fumes from the engine had overcome them one by one, and the officers up in the conning tower, breathing fresh air, had no idea what was happening underneath their feet until there was nobody left below to work the boat. The rescuers got them out into the air in time, and they were revived.

The timing was unfortunate. Only a few weeks earlier, satisfied that the boats' ventilation had been improved, the Admiralty had ordered that the mice were no longer required, and they had been taken out of the submarines. The mice were soon back.

It should be said that the record of the Folkestone accident is not entirely clear. The account drawn from Admiralty papers says the crew were revived. A later history of the A boats says that petrol fumes killed four of A9's crew two years after the Plymouth collision, which would put it in 1908 too.

It is possible that the two are the same event told differently, or that there were two. What is not in doubt is that the A boats were poisoning their own crews, and that the cure turned out to be the diesel engine.

The first boat of the D class, launched in 1908, ran on diesel oil, which gives off far less dangerous vapour, and once the last of the C class were finished the Navy built no more petrol-engined submarines.

War and the End

By 1914 A9 was obsolete, but the Navy needed every submarine it had, and she spent the first part of the war with the 1st Submarine Flotilla at Devonport, guarding the approaches to Plymouth with the other old A boats. It was not glamorous work.

Boats like her sat off the ports and harbours in case German warships came close inshore, which they very rarely did, and in practice the A class spent most of the war training the men who went on to crew the new boats, a job that A9 was given formally by 1918. She outlasted the war, and was sold to be broken up in January 1920, fifteen years after she had first gone to sea.

She never fired a torpedo in anger, and the most dangerous thing she ever met was her own engine. But the young officers who learned their trade in her, and the lessons learned at the cost of her crew's lungs, went into every British submarine that followed.

The story of the five boats that came before her is in HMS Holland 1, and that of the B class that came after is in HMS B4.