HMS C16: The Message Tied to a Wrist

The Biggest Class of Its Day

The C class was the last and largest family of the Navy's petrol-engined submarines. Thirty-eight were built between 1906 and 1910, more than any other British class of the time, and in the years before the First World War they were the boats that did most of the Submarine Service's work in home waters.

They were about 140 feet long and displaced about 290 tons on the surface, with a crew of sixteen, two torpedo tubes in the bow, a petrol engine whose fumes are described in HMS A9, and an electric motor and batteries for running dived. They were small, slow and short of range, and by 1914 they were outclassed by the new diesel boats, but there were a great many of them, and they were kept busy.

HMS C16 was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 14 December 1906, launched on 19 March 1908 and completed on 5 June 1908. Her first captain was Lieutenant William Foster.

The Night C11 Sank

Her first close call came barely a year later. On the night of 14 July 1909 a group of C-class boats were on passage off Cromer on the Norfolk coast when C11 was struck by a passing steamer and sank, taking thirteen of her men with her; only three were saved.

In the confusion of the same night, C16 was in collision with her sister C17. Both survived.

It was a grim illustration of what a small, low submarine could expect on the surface at night in busy coastal waters, and a reminder of how closely the Submarine Service lived with sudden death, as HMS A3 would show again three years later.

War

When war came in 1914 C16 was with the 3rd Submarine Flotilla at Devonport, and later she worked from Grimsby, where the old cruiser Bonaventure served as a depot ship for the boats patrolling the East Coast. The C boats were too small to go deep into German waters, and they spent the war on coastal patrols, watching the approaches to the East Coast ports in case German raiders or U-boats came close inshore.

It was cold, wet and usually uneventful work, and it was not without its dangers even so. On 28 March 1915 Able Seaman James Hill fell overboard as the boat was being secured to a buoy and was drowned. His body was not found until May.

By 1917 C16 was at Harwich, home of the submarines that watched the southern North Sea, and her captain was Lieutenant Harold Boase. Her first lieutenant was an officer of the rank of Mate, Samuel Anderson, one of the men promoted from the lower deck under a scheme that gave able ratings a path to a commission.

16 April 1917

On 16 April 1917 C16 was exercising off Harwich, at periscope depth, making a dummy attack on the destroyer HMS Melampus. The two came together. The destroyer struck the submarine and damaged her conning tower, and C16 went to the bottom in about sixty feet of water and began slowly to flood.

From what was found afterwards, it seems that every man aboard survived the collision. They were sixty feet down, in a boat that was taking in water, with no way of telling the surface where they were. Sixty feet is not deep. It is about the height of a five-storey building. Boase and his men set about trying to get out.

Their first plan was to send a man up through one of the torpedo tubes. A torpedo tube is a steel cylinder about eighteen inches across, and the idea was to put a man inside, close the inner door, flood it and open the outer door, and fire him out with a blast of compressed air, as if he were a torpedo, so that he could reach the surface and raise the alarm.

Anderson was the man who went. Tied to his wrist in a waterproof bag was a message from Boase explaining exactly how to rescue them: "The way to get us out is to lift the bows by the spectacle and haul us out of the boat through the tubes." Anderson was fired out of the tube. He did not reach the surface alive.

When nobody came, the crew tried the only other way. They would flood the forward part of the boat until the pressure inside matched the pressure of the sea, and then open the fore hatch and swim up. It was the method of escape that the Navy would later teach every submariner, and it could work.

But as the water came in and they opened the hatch, something jammed it. The hatch would open only about ten inches, enough to let the sea in and not enough to let a man out. All sixteen men died.

What They Left

C16 was raised, and when the salvage party went inside they found that Boase had written an account of everything that had happened and everything they had tried, and had sealed it up so that it would survive. It was found near his body. Anderson's body was recovered with the message still tied to his wrist.

It is hard to read about either without being moved. These were men who knew precisely what was happening to them and spent the last hours of their lives doing the right things, calmly and in order, and writing them down so that the next crew might do better.

The Navy learned from it. Losses like C16 drove the work on submarine escape that went on between the wars, and the escape apparatus and training that later generations of submariners took for granted grew out of them.

Back to Sea

Remarkably, C16 herself was refitted and went back into service, and she saw out the rest of the war on patrol. There was no room in 1917 for sentiment about a hull that could still fight, and the men who took her to sea again knew what had happened in her. She outlived the war and was sold on 12 August 1922 to C. A. Beard of Upnor, on the Medway, to be broken up.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken by Symonds and Co, the Portsmouth photographers, at some point in her life between 1908 and 1917, with "C 16" painted on her forward casing and her number 46 on the conning tower, and a group of her crew around the bridge. It is not possible to say who they are.

Some of them, perhaps, were the men who were with her off Harwich.