HMS Adamant (1911): The Ship Built to Mother a New Kind of Weapon

A New Job for a New Weapon

Submarines in the years before the First World War were still very much an unproven experiment, and one of the many practical problems they created was simply logistical: a submarine has almost nowhere to store fuel, spare parts, food, or its crew's belongings, and needs somewhere to be properly maintained between patrols. HMS Adamant was the Royal Navy's answer to that problem, purpose-built under the 1910/11 Naval Programme to support a flotilla of three of the brand new D-class submarines, allowing them to operate away from a fixed home base rather than being tied permanently to a single dockyard.

It was, in its own unglamorous way, as important a piece of the submarine puzzle as the boats themselves. A submarine flotilla without a depot ship was a flotilla that could not go very far or stay away very long.

Built on the Mersey

Adamant was built by Cammell Laird and launched on 12 July 1911, before being commissioned at Portsmouth on 27 April 1912. She promptly joined the newly formed 8th Submarine Flotilla, the Royal Navy's offensive submarine force based in home waters, a role that placed her right at the heart of the Navy's efforts to work out what submarines were actually for and how best to use them.

Harwich, and a Brief Trip to Yarmouth

When war broke out in 1914, Adamant moved to Harwich as her flotilla's designated war station, settling into the steady, essential rhythm of keeping her submarines supplied and seaworthy. In November that year she was sent to Yarmouth to support a submarine detachment there and help establish what would become a permanent submarine base, before returning to Harwich once the detachment moved on in December. It was quiet, practical work, the sort that rarely makes it into popular accounts of the war, but without which none of the more dramatic submarine actions elsewhere could have happened at all.

Following the War to the Mediterranean

In March 1915, Adamant's war shifted decisively south. She left for Mudros on 27 March to support E-class submarines operating in the Eastern Mediterranean, a theatre that would occupy her for the rest of the war. Over the following years she moved between a string of Mediterranean and Adriatic bases as the submarine campaign against Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian shipping developed: Brindisi from January 1916, supporting operations against the Adriatic Squadron, back to Mudros by November of that year, on to Corfu and Govino in October 1917, and back to Brindisi again by the end of March 1918. When the Ottoman Empire signed its armistice, Adamant transited the Dardanelles on 11 November 1918 as part of the Aegean Force, a fitting final movement for a ship that had spent much of the war quietly enabling other vessels to do the fighting.

A Long, Quiet Retirement

Adamant remained in service for well over a decade after the war ended, a testament to how useful a well-built depot ship could remain even once the conflict that had defined her wartime career was over. She was finally decommissioned on 7 July 1932 and sold that September, bringing to a close a career built almost entirely around making other ships' work possible, a role with very little glory attached to it and a great deal of quiet necessity.