HMS Chatham: The Cruiser That Cornered the Königsberg, and Gave New Zealand Its Football Cup

The Build: Her Own Namesake Dockyard

HMS Chatham was built at Chatham Royal Dockyard, her keel laid on 3 January 1911, launched on 6 November that year, and commissioned in December 1912, a Town-class light cruiser of the Chatham sub-class, fittingly constructed at the very dockyard whose name she carried.

Displacing 5,400 tons normal and up to 6,100 tons at full load, she carried eight BL 6-inch guns and two submerged 21-inch torpedo tubes, driven by machinery producing 25,000 shaft horsepower for a design speed of 25.5 knots, comfortably exceeded on trials at 26.1 knots.

Hunting Two German Raiders

HMS Chatham transferred to the Mediterranean in July 1913, and with the outbreak of the First World War took part in the dramatic search for the German battlecruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau in August 1914, two of the most consequential German warships at large in the Mediterranean, whose eventual escape to Ottoman Turkey helped draw the Ottoman Empire into the war on Germany's side. Chatham herself drew the job of searching the Straits of Messina on 3 August, and once the Germans had slipped through to Constantinople she was detached for altogether quieter duties in the Red Sea on the 13th.

HMS Chatham's most significant single achievement, however, came off East Africa in the autumn of 1914, when, under her long-serving captain Sidney Drury-Lowe, she took part in the hunt for the German light cruiser SMS Königsberg, a commerce raider that had already sunk the British cruiser HMS Pegasus and been causing serious disruption to Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean.

Drury-Lowe's own detective work did much of the hard part: having captured the German tug Adjutant and gone through her papers, he intercepted the liner Präsident on 29 September and turned up an order for coal deliveries to the Rufiji River delta, evidence solid enough to send Chatham straight there. By the end of October her landing parties had spotted Königsberg's disguised masts poking above the mangroves, and on 2 November Chatham and her consorts spent an entire day shelling the German cruiser's position without managing a single confirmed hit on the ship herself.

Chatham was soon joined by HMS Dartmouth and HMS Weymouth, and between them the three cruisers sealed the delta shut, sinking the collier Newbridge in the main channel to make quite sure Königsberg had nowhere to go. Actually finishing her off took another eight months and two specially shipped-out shallow-draught monitors, HMS Severn and HMS Mersey, which closed in on 11 July 1915; under a hail of 6-inch shellfire the German crew scrambled over the side and their ship settled into the Rufiji mud, closing out one of the more drawn-out sieges of the entire war.

Sinking her turned out to be the easy part, and the least final. Within weeks the Germans were back in the delta salvaging what the monitors had not destroyed, and what they recovered was the whole point of the ship: ten 10.5cm guns, two 8.8cm guns and her ammunition, hauled out of the mud and dragged more than a hundred miles inland to Dar es Salaam. Some were remounted on their naval pivots as harbour defence at Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Mwanza and Kigoma. Some went onto gun carriages knocked up locally, and later onto proper carriages shipped out from Krupp. One went aboard the lake steamer Goetzen on Lake Tanganyika. One ended up on a railway mounting on the northern front. Around 180 of her crew went with them, into the Schutztruppe.

The consequence is that a cruiser the Royal Navy spent nine months and two purpose-built monitors destroying went on fighting for another three years, on land, several hundred miles from the sea, as the heaviest artillery available to General von Lettow-Vorbeck, the only German commander of the entire war who was still undefeated in the field when the armistice came. Three of her guns are still above ground: one outside Fort Jesus at Mombasa, one outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria, and one at Jinja Barracks in Uganda. Chatham found her, and she was still a nuisance in 1918.

Supporting the Gallipoli Landings

HMS Chatham went on to support the Gallipoli campaign between May and December 1915, including operations at Achi Baba Nullah and Suvla Bay, providing naval gunfire support to Allied troops fighting in one of the most gruelling and ultimately unsuccessful campaigns of the entire war.

Drury-Lowe's long stint in command, stretching back to before Chatham was even commissioned, wound down in stages from there: injuring his foot leaving a boat in a rough sea that November cost him the bridge temporarily to Commander Raymond Fitzmaurice, before he returned and formally handed over command for good the following March.

A Mine, and a New Flag

HMS Chatham struck a mine off the Norfolk coast on 26 May 1916, a truly dangerous incident that she survived, before being placed in reserve in 1918 as the war drew to a close. Between 1920 and 1924, she was loaned to the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy, and in December 1920 became the first Royal Naval vessel based at Bermuda to transit the Panama Canal, a small but notable navigational first.

That mine had a consequence the sentence rather buries. It went off on 26 May 1916, and it wrecked her badly enough that she had to be towed home stern-first, which is what you do with a ship whose bow structure will not take being pushed through the water. She was towed to Chatham, the dockyard she was named for and built in, and she was still there five days later. On 31 May 1916 the Grand Fleet met the High Seas Fleet off Jutland. Chatham was to have joined the 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron; the squadron went without her.

It is worth pausing on what that meant to the men aboard. Jutland was the battle the entire Royal Navy had been built, drilled and paid for over twenty years to fight, the one everybody had been waiting for since 1914, and it happened once. Two hundred and fifty ships were there. Chatham was in a dry dock with her bows opened up. She joined the 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron in about July and served as its flagship until 1918, and she spent the rest of the war doing exactly what everybody did after Jutland, which is patrolling the North Sea waiting for a second battle that never came.

A Lasting Sporting Legacy

Her loan to the New Zealand station from 1920 gave her exactly the sort of long stay that builds real goodwill, and it produced a gift that has outlived the ship by a century. She reached Auckland on 26 January 1921 after an epic delivery voyage out via the Azores, the West Indies, the Panama Canal, San Diego, Honolulu and a string of Pacific islands, and was welcomed at Government House by the Governor-General, Lord Jellicoe, the very admiral who had commanded the Grand Fleet at Jutland, alongside Prime Minister William Massey, who told her assembled crew he hoped many of them would go on to make New Zealand their permanent home. A fair few did.

There is a specific reason it was Chatham that went, and it is not a flattering one. New Zealand had asked for HMS Canterbury, a newer and better ship. Canterbury burned oil. New Zealand, in 1920, had no oil-fuelling facilities anywhere in the country, so a modern oil-fired cruiser could have been sent out and then would have had nothing to burn. Chatham burned coal, and coal New Zealand had. So the founding flagship of New Zealand's own navy was chosen on the basis of what could be got into her bunkers, which is about as honest an account of how navies actually work as you will find.

She was commissioned into the New Zealand Naval Forces on 1 October 1920 and became flagship of the Commodore Commanding the New Zealand Station, working alongside the training establishment Philomel. Manning her was its own problem, solved with a piece of genuine cleverness: the Division offered Royal Navy ratings short three-year engagements rather than the usual long service, which was attractive enough to produce a nucleus of two hundred and ninety-three men, and around that nucleus New Zealanders were recruited and trained. That is how a national navy gets started, and it is why Massey's remark about hoping the crew would settle in New Zealand was not just after-dinner politeness. It was recruitment.

Over the following three years she trained recruits in the Hauraki Gulf, cruised New Zealand's ports, called at Pacific islands including Lautoka and Raoul Island, held annual gunnery practice at Trentham, and even carried the Governor-General on an official visit to, appropriately enough, the Chatham Islands.

On 14 December 1922, in a ceremony held aboard the ship herself, Captain Cecil Burnaby Prickett presented the New Zealand Football Association's president, Sir Charles Skerrett, with a sterling silver replica of the FA Cup, paid for out of the ship's company's own pockets at a cost of £150. The Chatham Cup has been contested every year since 1923, barring 1937 and the middle years of the Second World War, and Seacliff of Otago beat Wellington YMCA 4-0 in the very first final at Athletic Park, Wellington; it remains New Zealand's premier knockout football competition, a lasting and entirely unexpected legacy for a warship whose more conventional achievements included cornering an elusive German raider in an African river delta.

HMS Chatham left New Zealand waters for the last time on 10 May 1924, fittingly enough without any great fuss, sailing on to England later that month with 35 New Zealand ratings aboard for further training.

HMS Chatham was eventually sold for scrap on 13 July 1926 to Thos. W. Ward at Pembroke Dock, closing out a career that combined genuine wartime achievement with a piece of sporting heritage still celebrated in New Zealand more than a century later.

One more thing before the yard. She came home in 1924 and served a last stint as flagship of the 4th Light Cruiser Squadron before paying off in November 1925, fourteen years after she went down the slip. She had chased Goeben, found Königsberg, shelled Gallipoli, missed Jutland by five days and helped found a navy. Very few cruisers get through fourteen years with a record like that, and almost none of them are remembered chiefly for a football trophy.

One more thing about the yard that built her. Chatham Dockyard had been building warships for the Royal Navy for the better part of four hundred years by the time this cruiser went down its slipway, and it launched HMS Victory in 1765. It closed in 1984. The next ship to carry the name, the Type 22 frigate HMS Chatham, had to be built on the Tyne, because there was no longer a Chatham to build her.