HMS Edinburgh (16): The Cruiser Sunk With £1.5 Million in Soviet Gold Aboard

Built on the Tyne

HMS Edinburgh was built by Swan Hunter at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, her keel laid down on 30 December 1936, and she was launched on 31 March 1938, a Town-class light cruiser and, by the standards of that classification, a notably formidable one.

She displaced 13,175 tons at full load, could reach a sea speed of 32.25 knots (and exceeded that during trials in May 1940, touching 32.73 knots), and carried a heavier armament than almost any other light cruiser afloat: twelve 6-inch guns, twelve 4-inch anti-aircraft guns, sixteen 2-pounder pom-poms, sixteen Vickers .50 machine guns and six 21-inch torpedo tubes, protected by an armour belt up to 4.88 inches thick, the heaviest carried by any British light cruiser.

That armament was the answer to a specific problem, and it fell short of what was wanted. By the mid-1930s the Japanese Mogami class and the American Brooklyn class were each going to sea with fifteen 6-inch guns, and the Admiralty had nothing that could match them; the Liverpool-class ships then building carried twelve. So the constructors were asked for four quadruple turrets, sixteen guns, with the ammunition handling rebuilt to keep up with them. The quadruple mounting turned out to be more than the design could carry, and what emerged, in Edinburgh and her one sister, was four triples with the extra weight spent on armour instead. They ended up the largest, heaviest and best-protected light cruisers Britain ever built, and still with three fewer guns than the ships they had been drawn to beat.

The sister is the reason any of this can still be seen. HMS Belfast was Edinburgh's only classmate, built to the same drawings at Harland and Wolff, and she is still afloat, moored in the Pool of London between Tower Bridge and London Bridge with her main armament laid, as her guides enjoy pointing out, on a motorway service station well outside London. Anyone who wants to know what Edinburgh was can walk aboard her sister, go down into the shell rooms and stand in the same six-inch turret. There are two ships of the Edinburgh sub-class. One is a museum on the Thames and the other is 245 metres down in the Barents Sea with a war grave's protection over her.

She also embarked Supermarine Walrus seaplanes for reconnaissance, typically two of the three she was designed to carry. HMS Edinburgh commissioned in July 1939, joining the 18th Cruiser Squadron of the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow just weeks before war broke out.

Early War Service

HMS Edinburgh sustained minor damage during the Luftwaffe's first raid on Rosyth on 16 October 1939, though she avoided any direct hits, an early taste of the aerial threat that would define so much of her later Arctic service.

She went on to escort convoys to Norway, take part in the search for German surface raiders, and joined the enormous hunt for the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941, before spending much of the rest of that year on convoy escort duties spanning theatres as far apart as Malta and the wider Mediterranean.

Escorting the Arctic Convoys

HMS Edinburgh departed Scapa Flow on 6 April 1942, escorting Convoy PQ 14 towards Murmansk, one of the notoriously dangerous Arctic convoy routes supplying the Soviet Union.

Of the convoy's 24 ships, sixteen were forced back to Iceland by ice and foul weather, one was sunk by a U-boat, and just seven ultimately reached Murmansk on 19 April, a stark illustration of how much the Arctic environment itself, quite apart from the enemy, could cost a convoy.

HMS Edinburgh then served as flagship for Rear-Admiral Stuart Bonham Carter, commanding the return Convoy QP 11, seventeen ships that departed Murmansk on 28 April 1942 bound for Britain.

Crucially, HMS Edinburgh was also carrying a highly sensitive cargo for that homeward voyage: 4.5 tons of gold bullion, 465 ingots packed into 93 wooden boxes and worth around £1.5 million sterling at the time (equivalent to tens of millions of pounds today), representing Soviet payment to the Western Allies for wartime supplies.

Torpedoed Twice

On 30 April 1942, the German submarine U-456 struck HMS Edinburgh with a torpedo to her starboard side, hitting just forward of the very bomb room where the gold was stored, a strike of considerable irony given the cargo's importance. HMS Edinburgh began listing severely, but her crew closed watertight bulkheads quickly enough to prevent an immediate sinking.

U-456 was not finished, however, and delivered a second torpedo to her stern shortly afterwards, crippling her steering entirely and leaving the cruiser effectively helpless, dependent on tow and escort to have any hope of reaching safety.

HMS Edinburgh was taken under tow towards Murmansk, protected by an escort of destroyers and a minesweeper, and endured repeated attacks by German torpedo bombers along the way. On 2 May, three German destroyers, Hermann Schoemann, Z24 and Z25, attacked her off Bear Island.

HMS Edinburgh's gunners scored a telling hit of their own in this action, her second salvo striking Hermann Schoemann and leaving the German destroyer in a sinking condition, an impressive feat of gunnery from a ship that was, by this point, crippled and under tow.

Hermann Schoemann was so badly damaged that her own crew scuttled her shortly afterwards, 57 of them picked up by the German submarine U-88, a small note of symmetry in a story otherwise dominated by submarines sinking surface ships rather than rescuing their crews. Her escorts drove off the remaining two German destroyers, but HMS Edinburgh was struck yet again, this time by a torpedo intended for another vessel, hitting amidships almost exactly opposite the original wound inflicted by U-456.

Abandoned and Scuttled

With the ship now beyond any realistic hope of saving, her crew abandoned ship, HMS Gossamer taking off around 440 men and HMS Harrier roughly 400 more. Fifty-eight men were killed in the sinking, two officers and fifty-six ratings, a heavy but, given the extent of the damage HMS Edinburgh had absorbed across two separate torpedo attacks and a running battle with enemy destroyers, remarkably contained toll.

Attempts to scuttle the crippled cruiser with gunfire and depth charges failed to finish her off, and it ultimately fell to HMS Foresight to sink HMS Edinburgh with a single torpedo, fired by David Loram, bringing to an end the career of one of the most heavily armed light cruisers the Royal Navy ever put to sea, and sending her gold cargo to the seabed along with her.

A word about the admiral, because his fortnight is not one anybody would want. Rear-Admiral Stuart Bonham Carter had his flag in Edinburgh when she was torpedoed, fought under tow, hit again and finally sunk on 2 May. He shifted it to the cruiser HMS Trinidad, which was herself damaged, patched up at Murmansk and setting out for home. On 14 May a lone Junkers 88 came down out of low cloud and hit Trinidad close to the wound she was already carrying, and she was scuttled the following morning. Two flagships sunk under him inside a fortnight, in the same sea, on the same convoy route. The lower deck being what it is, the view rapidly formed that the admiral was unlucky, and it is very hard to argue that he was not.

Finding the Gold

HMS Edinburgh's story did not end with her sinking. The British government first offered salvage rights to the wreck to Risdon Beazley Ltd in 1954, but the project stalled amid Cold War sensitivities and the 1957 designation of the wreck as a protected war grave, a status that made any recovery operation both technically and diplomatically delicate.

It was not until the early 1980s that diver Keith Jessop's company, Jessop Marine, working with Wharton Williams Ltd and OSA, secured a contract to attempt recovery, agreed on a "no cure, no gain" basis under project manager John Clark: the consortium would receive nothing if the gold was never found, but 45 per cent of the value of anything they did bring up.

The survey ship Dammtor located the wreck on 30 April 1981, some 400 kilometres northeast of the Soviet coast, lying at 245 metres depth. Diving operations began that August under former Royal Navy officer Mike Stewart, and on 15 September 1981 diver John Rossier found the first bar of gold. To respect the wreck's status as a war grave, divers cut through four inches of armour plate by hand rather than using explosives to reach the bomb room where the gold was stored, working at that same depth from a saturation diving bell, breathing gas recycled by a gas-reclaim system efficient enough to recover up to 90 per cent of what they used, a genuine milestone in deep-sea salvage engineering achieved in the course of recovering one Arctic convoy cruiser's long-lost cargo.

By 7 October, when bad weather forced a halt, 431 of the original 465 ingots had been recovered, valued at over £40 million sterling at the time and divided by contract into three shares: 158 bars to the Soviet Union, 111 to the British Department of Trade, and 161 to Jessop's consortium. Not everyone involved came away satisfied; diving contractor Ric Wharton later complained publicly that the government's own treatment of the salvage team had been "petty and dishonest".

A further 29 bars were recovered in a follow-up operation in 1986, bringing the total retrieved to 460 of the original 465, with five ingots never accounted for.

The wreck itself is not entirely left alone. In September 2021, on the eightieth anniversary of the first Arctic convoy, the survey ship HMS Echo went into the Barents Sea and ran the first proper survey of Edinburgh in forty years, using a multibeam echo sounder to build a picture of the ship as she now lies; that deployment, and what else Echo found up there, is described in the article on HMS Echo (H87). She remains a designated war grave, with fifty-eight men aboard her, which is the part of the story that survives every retelling of the gold.

The wreck's story has not entirely stopped since. In September 2021, the Royal Navy survey ship HMS Echo returned to the site to carry out the first proper survey of HMS Edinburgh in forty years, gathering fresh hydrographic data and holding a service of remembrance over the wreck, a reminder that this particular patch of Arctic seabed has never quite finished giving up its history.