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 genuinely 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.

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. 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 genuinely 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, where her crew helped suppress rioting in Haifa and even operated the Haifa to Jerusalem railway. 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 genuinely 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.

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 loss of life was devastating: approximately 862 officers and ratings were killed, roughly two thirds of her entire crew, including her captain, Geoffrey Cooke. 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.

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 genuinely remarkable and sobering piece of historical record. 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 genuinely bizarre historical footnote: it became entangled in the case of Helen Duncan, a spiritualist medium who came to the authorities' attention after claiming to have contacted the spirit of a Barham sailor during the period the sinking was still officially denied, a case that eventually led to her prosecution and conviction under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, the last such trial in British history. 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.