HMS C34: Torpedoed off Fair Isle, With One Man Saved by the Enemy

Chatham-Built

HMS C34 was built at Chatham Dockyard, laid down on 29 March 1909, launched on 8 June 1910 and completed on 17 September 1910. She was one of the last of the thirty-eight C-class submarines, the biggest class of British submarines of their day, the last to be driven by petrol engines and the boats that did most of the Navy's submarine work around the coasts in the years before 1914.

Their design and the hard life aboard them are described in HMS C16.

Interesting Captains

Her first captain, in 1910, was Lieutenant John Graham Bower, who later commanded the steam submarine K12 and wrote, under the pen name "Klaxon", some of the best-known books about British submarines in the First World War; his story is in HMS K12. In 1913 she was taken over by Lieutenant John Fenwick Hutchings, who went on to be the first captain of K5, the K boat lost with all hands in 1921.

In 1916 her captain for a time was Sydney Winn, who had already won the DSO and who also commanded B5. Small submarines like these were where the Navy trained its submarine captains, and C34 had her share of good ones.

The most famous of them all had her for a few months in 1916. Lieutenant Richard Douglas Sandford was twenty-five when he was appointed to C34 on 29 August 1916, his first command, when she was working from the depot ship Arrogant at Dover.

Two years later, on the night of 22 to 23 April 1918, he took her sister C3 into the Zeebrugge raid. C3 was an old boat packed with explosives, and her job was to blow a gap in the viaduct that joined the great harbour mole at Zeebrugge to the shore, so that German reinforcements could not reach the mole while the storming parties were fighting on it.

She had been fitted with gyro steering so that her crew could set her on course and leave her well short of the target. Sandford refused to use it. He drove C3 himself, with a crew of five volunteers, right in between the iron piles of the viaduct, under fire, lit the fuses, and got his men away in a small boat.

The explosion destroyed that section of the viaduct. Sandford was shot twice on the way out, and all six men survived. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. He died of typhoid in hospital on Teesside on 23 November 1918, twelve days after the Armistice, aged twenty-seven.

His VC is at the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.

A Collision With a Battlecruiser

On 17 March 1913, in Hutchings's time, C34 was in collision with the battlecruiser HMS Invincible. No details of the incident appear to survive beyond the bare fact. It cannot have been an even contest: C34 displaced about 290 tons, and Invincible more than 17,000.

Three years later, at Jutland, Invincible blew up and sank with all but six of her company. The little submarine outlived her by more than a year.

War

When war broke out in 1914 C34 was with the 4th Submarine Flotilla at Portsmouth, whose depot ships were the old cruiser Arrogant and the gunboat Hazard, the same Hazard that had run down and sunk A3 two years earlier. Like the rest of her class she spent the first years of the war on patrol around the British coast.

By 1917 she was working far to the north, around Orkney and Shetland, the waters through which the U-boats passed on their way round the north of Scotland to the Atlantic.

It was a kind of warfare that put submarine against submarine. The U-boats ran on the surface whenever they could, to save their batteries and make better speed, and so did the British boats hunting them. Whichever saw the other first would dive and attack.

It was a contest in which the hunter could very easily become the hunted.

17 July 1917

By July 1917 C34 was commanded by Lieutenant Ingleby Stuart Jefferson, who was twenty-four years old. On 17 July she was running on the surface east of Fair Isle, the small island between Orkney and Shetland, when she was sighted by the German submarine U-52.

U-52 was one of the most successful U-boats of the war, and her captain, Kapitänleutnant Hans Walther, was a very experienced officer. In August 1916 he had sunk the British light cruiser HMS Nottingham in the North Sea, and in November that year, off Portugal, the French battleship Suffren, which went down with all hands.

Walther saw C34 first, and torpedoed her. The little submarine sank almost at once.

Eighteen men died. Jefferson was twenty-four. Sub-Lieutenant Thomas Moore was nineteen. Two of the telegraphists, Cornelius McLaren and Henry Moss, were also nineteen. The oldest man aboard, Stoker Petty Officer Robert Keith, was thirty-nine.

Two of the crew, Leading Seaman Henry Mansfield and Chief Engine Room Artificer Harold Sillick, had been mentioned in despatches.

Frank Scoble

One man got out. Stoker First Class Frank Scoble was left in the water, and U-52 came across to the wreckage and her crew pulled him aboard. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in Germany, and he is understood to have come home after it, the only one of C34's crew who did.

There was a certain grim courtesy in it. Submariners on both sides knew better than anybody what it meant to be trapped in a sinking boat, and the rescue of Scoble was not unique: in 1915 Cecil Talbot in E16 had picked up survivors from the U-boat he had sunk off Norway.

In a war that had grown very bitter at sea, it was something.

Afterwards

U-52 survived the war and surrendered in November 1918, and she was broken up at Swansea in 1919. C34 lies somewhere off Fair Isle with the eighteen men who did not come home. Their names are on the naval memorials.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken by Oscar Parkes, a naval surgeon whose photographs of the Navy's ships are some of the best of the period, at some time between 1910 and 1917. It shows C34 crossing a busy harbour, with white chalk cliffs rising behind her and a group of her crew on the bridge.

She was based at Dover in 1916, and it is tempting to think the cliffs are Dover's, though the photograph does not say. It is a peaceful picture. It is worth looking at it and remembering who some of those young men may have been.