HMS B5: The Little Submarine That Trained Three Famous Captains

One of Eleven

HMS B5 was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, launched in the autumn of 1905 and completed on 25 February 1906.

She was one of eleven boats of the B class, the step up from the little A boats, and the design is described in full in HMS B4: 142 feet long, 287 tons on the surface, a petrol engine and an electric motor, two torpedo tubes in the bow with four torpedoes, and two officers and thirteen men inside a single steel tube with no bulkheads at all.

Her own record is one of the quietest of any British submarine. No collisions are recorded against her, no fires, no men lost and no torpedoes fired at an enemy.

When the war came in 1914 she was already obsolete, and she was kept in home waters with the 3rd Submarine Flotilla and its depot ship at Devonport, where she spent the war on the kind of patrol and harbour defence work that B4's article describes. The more adventurous of her sisters went to the Mediterranean, and their story is told in HMS B6.

What B5 did have was a remarkable list of captains. Between 1906 and 1917 ten lieutenants commanded her, and three of them went on to some of the most extraordinary careers the Submarine Service ever produced.

A School for Captains

In the years before 1914 the small early submarines were where the Navy taught its young officers to command.

A lieutenant of twenty-four or twenty-five would be given an A or a B boat, a crew of a dozen men and a great deal of independence, and after a year or two of making his mistakes in her he would move on to something bigger and hand her to the next man. HMS A9, an older boat, had twelve captains in ten years. B5 had ten in eleven.

The submarine officers who fought the First World War, the ones who took the E boats into the Baltic and the Sea of Marmara, had almost all learned their business in boats like these.

Harry Stoker

Lieutenant Henry Hugh Gordon Dacre Stoker, known to everybody as Harry, was an Irishman who commanded B5 in 1910. In 1914 he was lent to the new Royal Australian Navy to bring one of its two submarines, AE2, out to Australia, and in April 1915 he took her to the Dardanelles.

On 25 April, the day the Anzac troops went ashore at Gallipoli, AE2 became the first submarine to get right through the Straits into the Sea of Marmara, dodging minefields, gunfire and searchlights on the way, and Stoker signalled the fact back to the fleet at a moment when the landings were going so badly that it is said to have helped persuade the commanders not to withdraw.

Five days later, on 30 April, AE2 was damaged by a Turkish torpedo boat and Stoker had to scuttle her, and he and his crew spent the rest of the war as prisoners. He escaped once, in March 1916, from the camp at Afion Kara Hissar, and was on the run for eighteen days before he was caught. He received the DSO.

After the war he left the Navy and went on the stage under the name of Hew Gordon, playing Dr Watson to a stage Sherlock Holmes, appearing in Journey's End, and later turning up in films including Brighton Rock in 1947. He was recalled to the Navy in 1939, went back to the theatre afterwards, won the Irish croquet championship in his seventies, and died in London in 1966.

He also wrote a memoir, Straws in the Wind. No other captain of B5 had a career quite like it, and very few people of any sort have.

Claude Dobson

Lieutenant Claude Congreve Dobson had B5 the year after Stoker, in 1911. In the war he was given the old submarine C27, and in July 1915 she was working with a decoy trawler, the Princess Louise, in one of the Navy's early attempts to trap U-boats.

The trawler towed the submerged submarine behind her and fished, waiting for a U-boat to surface and attack her with its gun, and when one did, the submarine slipped the tow and went for it. On 20 July 1915, off Fair Isle, U-23 surfaced to sink the trawler, and C27 torpedoed her.

Twenty-four of her crew were killed and ten were picked up. Dobson received the DSO.

Four years later he won the Victoria Cross. On the night of 18 August 1919, during the British intervention against the Bolsheviks in the Baltic, he led a flotilla of small, fast coastal motor boats in a raid on the naval base at Kronstadt, going in past the forts and through the harbour entrance under heavy machine-gun fire.

From his own boat, CMB-31, he torpedoed the battleship Andrei Pervozvanny, then brought the boat out again. His VC is now at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. He retired as a rear admiral and died in 1940.

Cecil Talbot

Lieutenant Cecil Ponsonby Talbot commanded B5 in 1912 before moving to the big new E class. In August 1914 he had E6 in the Heligoland Bight, and he was among the submarine captains commended for their part in the battle there on 28 August, the first naval action of the war.

Later he had E16, and on 26 July 1915 she sank the German torpedo boat V188, which brought him the DSO. On the night of 15 September, off the Norwegian coast near Stavanger, he found the U-boat U-6 on the surface charging her batteries and sank her, then picked up five of her crew and brought them home to Harwich. He rose to be Vice Admiral Sir Cecil Talbot.

The End

B5's other captains led less public lives, as most naval officers do, but one, Sydney Winn, had already won the DSO by the time he took her over in 1916, and they all passed through the same school. She outlasted the war, and on 25 August 1921 she was sold to be broken up. The first buyer, A. J.

Andersen, sold her on, and in March 1922 she went to J. Smith of Poole.

The photograph at the top of this page shows her as she was for most of her life: in calm water, close inshore, with her crew busy on deck and the canvas screen rigged around her bridge to keep off the spray. It is not a picture of a ship going to war.

It is a picture of a ship where men learned how, and on that measure few submarines did more good.