HMS C22: A Leith Submarine and the Trawler Trap

A Quiet Record

HMS C22 was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 4 February 1908, launched on 10 October 1908 and completed on 5 May 1909. She was one of the thirty-eight boats of the C class, the last petrol-driven submarines the Navy built, whose design and hard life are described in HMS C16.

Her career is about as quiet as a submarine's can be. No collision is recorded against her, no fire or explosion, no man lost and no enemy sunk. She is one of the boats that history passed by.

That is worth saying plainly, because it was true of most of the men who served in the Navy in those years, and it does not make their service any less.

Her Captains

Her first captain, in 1909, was Lieutenant Robert Ramsay, who in 1916 stood by the building of the extraordinary M1, the submarine with a battleship's gun, as her first commanding officer. In 1910 she had Lieutenant Geoffrey Biggs, who later commanded C16.

Between 1911 and 1913 she had five captains in quick succession, as the Submarine Service passed its young lieutenants through command of the small boats as fast as it could. From August 1913 until August 1916 she was commanded by Lieutenant Edward Carré, who took her into the war, and then until June 1917 by Lieutenant Oliver North.

The Leith Boats

When the war began, on 5 August 1914, the Admiralty's list of the fleet placed C22 with the 7th Submarine Flotilla in the Firth of Forth. Its depot ship was the old Vulcan, and its boats worked from Leith.

As "Klaxon", the submarine officer John Graham Bower, later wrote, the C boats "were spread all up the East Coast, with a Channel guard at Dover and a large number of them at Leith". Their job was to defend the coast.

The Forth was the anchorage of the battlecruisers, and the C boats patrolled its approaches in case German warships or U-boats tried to get in.

Her log for the summer of 1915, from 26 May to 30 July, survives in the National Archives. It would show day by day where she went and what she saw, which was almost certainly nothing very much. Coastal submarine patrol in the First World War was mostly cold, wet and empty.

The Trawler Trap

It was in that summer that the Leith flotilla produced its one great idea. By 1915 the U-boats had taken to surfacing among the fishing fleets in the North Sea and sinking the trawlers with gunfire, since a trawler was not worth a torpedo. Somebody in Vulcan's flotilla suggested turning that against them.

As Bower put it, "one trawler of each fleet was to tow, instead of a trawl, a C-class submarine." The submarine would be dived, connected to the trawler by a tow line and a telephone cable. When a U-boat surfaced and began shelling the fishing boats, the trawler would tell the submarine where it was, the submarine would slip the tow, and the U-boat would find itself on the receiving end of a torpedo.

It worked. On 23 June 1915 the trawler Taranaki was fishing off Aberdeen with C24 towing beneath her when U-40 came up to attack. C24 torpedoed her, and only three of her crew survived.

Less than a month later, off Fair Isle, C27 did the same thing to U-23 from beneath the trawler Princess Louise, and her captain's story is told in HMS B5. It was, in Bower's words, the proof "that the theory worked out in practice".

But the U-boats soon became too careful, and before the end of 1915 the scheme was given up.

There is no record that C22 herself ever towed behind a trawler, and it would be wrong to claim she did. But she was one of the Leith boats, and the trick that sank two U-boats in a month was thought up in her flotilla, and tried by her sisters.

The End

She came through the war, which was more than some of her sisters managed: C14 sank in Plymouth Sound before it began, C16 sank off Harwich in 1917, and C34 was torpedoed off Fair Isle the same year. C22 was scrapped in February 1920.

The photograph at the top of this page, by Oscar Parkes, shows her lying quietly on the surface with a line of rounded hills behind her and a few of her men on deck. It is a fitting picture for a boat whose war was spent waiting.