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 is worth saying what was new about the boats she was built for, because the D class changed what a submarine was. The prototype, D1, was built in secret by Vickers at Barrow and launched in May 1908, and almost everything about her became standard afterwards: she was the first British submarine with diesel engines instead of petrol, which removed the constant risk of an explosive vapour in a sealed hull; the first with twin screws; the first with saddle tanks and a full deck casing; and the first carrying wireless that could transmit as well as receive, so that a boat at sea stopped being deaf and dumb the moment she left harbour. She also carried a 12-pounder gun on deck, which is the beginning of the idea that a submarine might fight on the surface as well as under it.

One number explains the whole business, though, and it is the reason Adamant exists. The A class of 1902 could cruise about three hundred and fifty miles on the surface. A D boat could manage something like two and a half thousand. At three hundred and fifty miles a submarine is a coast defence weapon that never really leaves home and can be looked after by the dockyard she belongs to. At two and a half thousand she can cross the North Sea, sit off an enemy coast for a fortnight and come back, and at that point she needs somebody a long way from Portsmouth with fuel, torpedoes, spare parts, a workshop, a doctor, hot food and a bunk that is not eighteen inches from a diesel. Multiply the range by seven and you have invented the depot ship. Adamant was ordered under the 1910 programme, two years after D1 went down the slip, which is about as fast as an admiralty ever responds to anything.

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.

Adamant displaced 935 tons, had a beam of 32 feet 6 inches, and carried no armament of her own, relying on a single triple-expansion engine and Yarrow boilers for a top speed of 14 knots and a complement of 63 to keep three submarines fed, fuelled and repaired.

One thing about a depot ship is easy to miss from the outside: commanding her generally meant commanding the submarines as well. Almost every officer appointed to Adamant appears in the Navy List with the phrase for duty with submarines attached, and several of them were also Commander (S) of the flotilla she was feeding. Twenty officers held her over twenty years, and the list reads like a roll call of the early submarine service rather than the crew list of a supply vessel.

Two names stand out. Noel Laurence took her in March 1919 and held her until the following January, before going on to command the Fifth Submarine Flotilla. Four years earlier he had taken the submarine E1 into the Baltic and put a torpedo into the German battlecruiser Moltke in the Gulf of Riga, an exploit that earned him a DSO and eventually a knighthood and flag rank. Philip Ruck-Keene had her briefly in 1932, and in 1946 chaired the committee whose report on submarine escape arrangements rewrote how the Royal Navy expected men to get out of a sunken boat. A ship whose whole purpose was looking after submariners kept being handed to the officers who cared most about 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 on 21 December once the detachment moved on.

She carried the pennant number P37 throughout this period, changed to P00 on 1 January 1918. Not every loss aboard Adamant came from enemy action: Stoker First Class Alfred Charles Moy died on 5 June 1918, struck by a train on his way to rejoin his submarine, a reminder that a depot ship's war could claim lives in entirely mundane ways too.

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, and one that later earned her the battle honour Dardanelles 1915.

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 not, in fact, sitting quietly anywhere. At the end of 1919 she joined the Atlantic Fleet's Ninth Submarine Flotilla as second depot ship to its eight L-class boats. She recommissioned at Portsmouth on 5 January 1925 and went out to support the Second Submarine Flotilla in the Mediterranean, recommissioned again at Devonport on 12 November 1926, and was still looking after the Second Flotilla's submarines in the middle of 1931. Twenty years after she was launched to mother three experimental D-boats, she was still doing the same job for a generation of submarines that had not been imagined when she was designed.

She was finally decommissioned on 7 July 1932 and sold that September to the shipbreakers Rees of Llanelli, 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.

There is one small postscript. In June 1933 her bell was among about a hundred surplus ships' bells the Admiralty put up for sale at prices between one and ten pounds, with preference given to men who had a particular attachment to the ship in question. Nobody appears to have taken it, because the bell was offered again in 1935, this time at between one and five pounds, to any officer or rating who could state a special claim to it. It is an oddly moving way for a ship to end: not a battle, not a scrapyard headline, just an advertisement inviting the men who had served in her to buy back the thing that had rung for their watches.