HMS Barham (04): The Only Battleship Sinking Ever Caught on Camera

A Fast Battleship for a New Era

HMS Barham was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 24 February 1913, launched on 31 December 1914, and commissioned on 19 August 1915 at a cost of just over £2.47 million.

Named after Admiral Charles Middleton, 1st Baron Barham, she joined the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow that October under Rear-Admiral Hugh Evan-Thomas, a properly formidable Queen Elizabeth-class battleship displacing over 32,000 tons, armed with eight 15-inch guns in four twin turrets, and capable of nearly 24 knots, fast enough to operate alongside the battlecruiser fleet rather than the slower main battle line.

The Queen Elizabeths were the first British battleships built to burn oil and nothing else, and that decision reached a very long way beyond the fleet. Coal is dirty, slow to load and needs several hundred men to shovel, but Britain sat on a great deal of it. Oil doubles a ship's effective endurance, can be pumped aboard in hours instead of days, and takes far fewer people to handle, and Britain had none. Committing the newest and most powerful ships in the navy to a fuel the country did not produce was a deliberate gamble, taken by Churchill as First Lord on the calculation that the advantage was worth the exposure.

So the government went and secured it. In 1914, weeks before the war began, Britain took a controlling stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, putting the state directly into the oil business in order to guarantee fuel for the fleet. That company became BP. The line from a battleship's boiler rooms in 1915 to a century of British involvement in Persian and then Middle Eastern oil is a good deal shorter and straighter than most people realise, and it starts with ships like this one.

Jutland: One of the Fleet's Most Accurate Guns

Barham fought at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 as part of the 5th Battle Squadron under Vice-Admiral Beatty, opening fire on the German battlecruiser SMS Von der Tann at around 23,000 yards during the famous Run to the South before switching her guns to SMS Moltke.

The 5th Battle Squadron's part in the Run to the South is one of the great arguments of British naval history, and it turns on a signal. Barham and her three sisters were the fastest and most powerful battleships in the world, attached to Beatty's battlecruisers precisely so that their 15-inch guns would be there when the shooting started. When Beatty turned abruptly to the south east to engage Hipper, the signal to follow was made by flag, was not seen or not understood in time, and Evan-Thomas held his existing course. By the time the squadron turned it was miles astern, and Beatty fought the opening of the battle without them.

What happened next is the part worth remembering. Beatty lost Indefatigable and Queen Mary in that opening exchange, blown up with almost all hands. When the 5th Battle Squadron finally came into range it found itself steaming towards the entire German High Seas Fleet, and had to turn about under fire from a dozen battleships at once. Barham took six hits doing it. Her armour held, her guns kept firing, and she and Valiant between them put twenty-three or twenty-four heavy shells into German ships across the day. Two of Beatty's battlecruisers were destroyed and none of the 15-inch battleships was, which is the whole case for armour in a single afternoon.

Across the battle she fired 337 fifteen-inch shells, and historians believe she and her sister ship HMS Valiant achieved 23 or 24 hits between them, making the pair two of the most accurate ships in the entire British fleet that day.

Barham herself took six hits and suffered 26 killed and 46 wounded, a serious but far from crippling toll given the scale of the engagement. She was present, fittingly, at the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet on 21 November 1918.

Two Decades Between the Wars

Barham's interwar career was long and particularly eventful. She served as flagship of the 1st Battle Squadron from 1919, transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in 1924, and was sent to Alexandria during unrest in 1927 and to Palestine following the 1929 riots, anchoring in Haifa Bay under Captain Hamilton alongside HMS Courageous.

When Arab rioters attacked the city's Sephardic Jewish quarter near the railway station, Barham's marines opened fire to help bring the violence under control, and her sailors then stayed ashore for six weeks, patrolling the surrounding countryside in requisitioned lorries until order was restored.

A major refit between January 1931 and January 1934, costing £424,000, brought enhanced anti-aircraft defences, torpedo bulges and an upgraded superstructure. She returned to the Mediterranean in 1935, served off Haifa during the Arab revolt in 1936, and stood watch at Gibraltar during the Spanish Civil War, holding flagship roles for both the 1st Battle Squadron and the wider Mediterranean Fleet across these years.

A Difficult Start to a Second War

Barham's Second World War began badly. On 12 December 1939, she accidentally rammed the destroyer HMS Duchess in thick fog off the Mull of Kintyre; Duchess capsized and sank with the loss of 124 of her crew, a notably tragic accident amid wartime confusion rather than enemy action.

Just over a fortnight later, on 28 December, she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-30, killing four and wounding two, and required repairs at Birkenhead until April 1940.

She recovered to serve as flagship of Force M under Vice-Admiral John Cunningham during the Battle of Dakar in September 1940, engaging Vichy French forces including the battleship Richelieu and scoring a direct hit on her with a 15-inch shell on 25 September, though the wider operation was ultimately abandoned after HMS Resolution was torpedoed.

Matapan, Crete, and a Battleship Under Pressure

Barham went on to bombard Bardia alongside HMS Warspite and HMS Valiant in January 1941, and fought at the Battle of Cape Matapan that March, helping cripple the Italian destroyer Alfredo Oriani and the heavy cruiser Zara in a decisive night action.

During the evacuation of Crete on 26 May 1941, she was attacked by German bombers and struck by a 250kg bomb on her Y turret, starting fires and killing five of her crew, damage serious enough to require repairs at Durban, South Africa, before she returned to active service that August.

Three Torpedoes and a Fatal Magazine Explosion

Barham's end came on 25 November 1941. The previous day, the 1st Battle Squadron, comprising Barham, Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, had departed Alexandria with an escort of eight destroyers.

The following afternoon, the German submarine U-331, commanded by Oberleutnant Hans-Diedrich von Tiesenhausen, penetrated the destroyer screen after an ASDIC contact detected by HMS Jervis was mistakenly dismissed as too large to be a submarine.

At 4:25pm, Tiesenhausen fired all four bow torpedoes from just 375 metres, and three struck Barham amidships so closely together that they threw up a single massive column of water.

Fifteen seconds after the explosions, Captain Charles Morgan on the bridge of HMS Valiant saw U-331's conning tower break the surface barely 150 yards away, a sighting corroborated by Flag Lieutenant I. H. McDonald aboard Barham herself, who watched it hang there for perhaps half a minute before diving again, evidence that Tiesenhausen had fired his entire bow salvo at once and struggled to compensate with seawater ballast quickly enough.

Slipping past the destroyer screen unpunished, U-331 then plunged out of control to an indicated 265 metres, well beyond her 150-metre design depth, before her own crew regained command of the boat and brought her safely home to Salamis by 3 December, a narrow escape of a very different kind on the same afternoon.

Barham capsized rapidly to port, and as she lay on her side, roughly four minutes after being struck, a catastrophic magazine explosion tore through the ship and sent her to the bottom. A subsequent Board of Enquiry concluded the explosion had begun as a fire in the 4-inch magazines outboard of her main 15-inch magazines, which then spread to and detonated the main magazines themselves.

The magazine explosion that finished her has a longer history behind it too. Three British ships had blown up at Jutland from fires in the ammunition supply reaching the magazines, and the practice that caused it, cordite stacked in the handling rooms with the flash doors open to speed up the rate of fire, was recognised and corrected afterwards. Barham's Board of Enquiry found that the fire had started in her 4-inch magazines, the secondary armament outboard of the main ones, and spread inwards. She was lying on her side by then, with everything that had been stowed and secured for upright working now hanging in the wrong direction. Four minutes is what a capsizing battleship gave her people.

The loss of life was devastating: approximately 862 officers and ratings were killed, roughly two thirds of her entire crew, including her captain, Geoffrey Cooke, and 126 men of the Royal Marines detachment who formed part of her complement. HMS Hotspur rescued 337 survivors, including Vice-Admiral Henry Pridham-Wippell, and the Australian destroyer HMAS Nizam is believed to have rescued around 150 more.

Among those who did not make it off was Leading Wireman Maurice Hunkin, a 24-year-old from Mevagissey in Cornwall, one name standing for hundreds of similarly young sailors and marines whose families were told nothing beyond an urgent request for silence until the Admiralty's announcement almost two months later.

Filmed, Then Officially Denied

Extraordinarily, the entire sinking was captured on film by a Pathé News cameraman aboard HMS Valiant, producing what remains the only known footage of a battleship sinking during actual combat, a remarkable and sobering piece of historical record.

It is worth saying what the film actually shows, because it is not a distant silhouette. The Pathé cameraman aboard Valiant had his camera running for other reasons and simply kept turning as Barham heeled over: the hull rolling until the bilge keel is out of the water, men visibly sliding down the side, and then the explosion, which lifts a turret roof and puts a column of smoke thousands of feet into the air. It is the only footage in existence of a battleship being destroyed in action, and for many years it was shown without anybody mentioning that eight hundred and sixty-two men are dying in it.

The Admiralty, however, kept the loss secret for weeks, notifying next of kin only with an urgent accompanying request for silence, and did not make an official public announcement until 27 January 1942, following repeated German radio claims of the sinking.

Only once the British confirmed the loss did Tiesenhausen himself learn for certain that he had succeeded, and he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross that same day.

The wartime secrecy surrounding Barham's loss produced one bizarre historical footnote.

In the weeks before the Admiralty's official statement, Portsmouth medium Helen Duncan held a seance in which she named a Barham sailor and announced the ship's loss, a claim that put her firmly on Naval Intelligence's radar as fears grew that a medium who could apparently contact the recently dead might just as easily let slip something a living serviceman was never meant to know.

It was over two years later, in January 1944, with planning for the following year's invasion of Europe already underway, that police raided one of her seances in Portsmouth; tried at the Old Bailey that spring, initially held under the Vagrancy Act before being convicted under the largely forgotten Witchcraft Act of 1735, she was sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison, the last person ever jailed under that particular law.

A memorial bench in Nothe Gardens, Weymouth, today commemorates the crew of a ship whose destruction remains one of the most vividly documented, and for a long time most carefully concealed, losses of the entire Second World War.