HMS C14: Sunk in Plymouth Sound, and Nobody Died

One of Thirty-Eight

HMS C14 was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 4 December 1906, launched on 7 December 1907 and completed on 13 March 1908. She was one of the thirty-eight boats of the C class, the last of the Navy's petrol-driven submarines and, for a few years before the First World War, the workhorses of the Submarine Service in home waters.

What they were like, and what their war was like, is described in HMS C16.

Like every small submarine of her day, she was a school for young officers, and two of the men who commanded her went on to remarkable careers. Lieutenant Robert Raikes had her in 1911.

In the war he commanded the much bigger E54, and in her he sank two German U-boats, UC-10 in August 1916 and U-81 in May 1917, winning the DSO and a bar. He ended his career as Admiral Sir Robert Raikes, Commander-in-Chief of the South Atlantic.

In 1912 she was commanded by Lieutenant Cecil Talbot, who sank a German torpedo boat and a U-boat in E16 in 1915 and whose story is told in HMS B5. Another of her early captains, Gilbert Venning, later commanded the steam submarine K12.

The Ones Before Her

By the end of 1913 the Royal Navy had been operating submarines for twelve years, and in that time a grim list of them had sunk by accident. A1 was run down by a liner off the Isle of Wight in 1904. A8 foundered off Plymouth in 1905.

C11 was sunk by a steamer off Cromer in 1909. A3 was rammed by her own depot ship in 1912, and B2 was cut in half by a liner off Dover the same year. Each of these accidents had cost lives, usually the whole crew, and only weeks after C14's turn came A7 would dive into the seabed in Whitsand Bay and never come up.

The lesson every submariner drew was simple. A submarine that sank usually took her men with her, because a small steel hull full of water and machinery gave them almost no chance to get out.

10 December 1913

On the evening of 10 December 1913 C14 was heading in to Plymouth, part of the submarine flotilla based at Devonport. In Plymouth Sound she was in collision with a dockyard hopper, Government Hopper No. 27, one of the barges that carried spoil out from the dredgers working on the harbour. The hopper holed her, and she began taking in water fast.

What saved her crew was where it happened. The collision was within sight of land, in a busy anchorage, and help arrived almost at once. C14 was going down by the stern, but she did not go straight to the bottom as A3 had, and in the ten minutes she stayed afloat her whole crew got out of her and were picked up.

Then she sank. Nobody was killed and nobody was seriously hurt.

It is recorded as the seventh accidental sinking of a British submarine, and the first in which nobody died. That does not sound like much of a record, but at the time it was a genuine comfort to the Submarine Service, a demonstration that a boat could sink and her crew could live, provided that they had a little time and somebody close by.

Raised and Repaired

Because she had gone down in sheltered water close to a dockyard, C14 was not hard to recover. She was raised, taken into Devonport, repaired and put back into service, which is more than could be said of most submarines that went to the bottom in those years.

By the summer of 1914 she was with the 3rd Submarine Flotilla at Devonport again, and she was there when war broke out.

The War

As "Klaxon" put it in his history of the submarine war, the B and C classes were used for local patrols and the defence of the coasts and ports, and that was C14's war. She was too small and too short-legged to go across the North Sea to the German coast, where the new E-class boats did the fighting, so she patrolled the approaches to the home ports in case German raiders or U-boats came close inshore.

It was dull, wet and cold, and the petrol engine never stopped being dangerous: A9 had shown in 1908 what its fumes could do to a crew. On 22 January 1917 there was an explosion in C14's crank pit, inside her engine, and Leading Stoker Michael Forrest was killed. He is the only man recorded as having died in her.

In 1917 she was taken over by Lieutenant Thomas Powell, her last captain of the war. She came through it, and on 5 December 1921 she was sold to be broken up.

The Photograph

The photograph at the top of this page was taken by Symonds and Co at some point between 1908 and 1918. It shows C14 running through a lively sea, with "C14" painted on her bow casing and her pennant number 44 in large figures on her conning tower, and three of her crew on the open bridge, one of them in a white jacket.

It is worth looking at how little of her was above the water and how much spray was coming over. In weather like that the bridge of a C boat was a wet place to be, and the hull below it was a cramped steel tube full of petrol, batteries and sixteen men.

It took a certain kind of person to volunteer for it, and plenty did.