HMS Hampshire (1903): The Cruiser That Took Lord Kitchener to the Bottom

Built at Elswick

HMS Hampshire was laid down by Armstrong Whitworth at their Elswick shipyard on 1 September 1902, launched on 24 September 1903 and completed on 15 July 1905, one of six Devonshire-class armoured cruisers built for the Royal Navy.

She displaced 10,850 long tons, measured 473 feet 6 inches in length, and carried four 7.5-inch guns alongside six 6-inch guns, driven by triple expansion engines producing 21,000 indicated horsepower for a top speed of 22 knots, with a crew of 610 officers and ratings.

HMS Hampshire joined the 1st Cruiser Squadron of the Channel Fleet on completion, before a refit in December 1908 and a spell in reserve with the Third Fleet from August 1909.

She recommissioned in December 1911 for the Mediterranean Fleet's 6th Cruiser Squadron, and transferred to the China Station in 1912, a fairly typical career for a cruiser of her generation, shuffled between fleets as newer and more powerful ships came into service.

Hunting Raiders and Escorting the ANZACs

HMS Hampshire was stationed at Wei Hai Wei when war broke out in August 1914, and spent the opening months of the war hunting German commerce raiders in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, including a close encounter with the notorious German cruiser SMS Emden.

She went on to escort ANZAC troop convoys through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea to Egypt, particularly vital work protecting the vast movement of Australian and New Zealand forces to the war, before returning to home waters late in 1914.

HMS Hampshire joined the 7th Cruiser Squadron in January 1915, and took part in the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 as part of the 2nd Cruiser Squadron, firing four salvoes at the German II Scouting Group that fell well short of their target, a comparatively minor role in the largest naval battle of the war.

One of her own crew remembered the day rather more dramatically. In an account published a few years after the war, he recalled the ship delivering the finishing blow to an already-crippled German light cruiser, ramming what was taken for an enemy submarine in the confusion, and being sent off to search for the stricken HMS Warrior, memories that sit awkwardly against the ship's own official gunnery log but capture rather well just how confusing and fog-bound the battle felt from below decks.

Her survival at Jutland is worth dwelling on for a moment, because ships of her type did not generally manage it. The armoured cruiser had been the answer to a question of the 1890s: a big, fast, moderately protected ship for trade defence and for scouting ahead of a battle fleet. By 1916 the battlecruiser had made the whole idea obsolete, and nobody had quite got round to saying so, with the result that the Grand Fleet took a squadron of them to Jutland and put them where the shooting was. Three were destroyed in about twenty minutes: Defence blew up with all hands, Black Prince blundered into the German battle line in the dark and was shot to pieces, and Warrior was so badly damaged she foundered the next day. Hampshire fired four salvoes that fell short and came home. Six days later she was on the bottom off Orkney, which is a reminder that the difference between a lucky ship and an unlucky one is often nothing more than a week.

A Mission to Russia

HMS Hampshire was ordered, immediately after Jutland, to carry Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, on a diplomatic mission to Russia via Arkhangelsk, departing Scapa Flow at 16:45 on 5 June 1916 with two destroyer escorts, HMS Unity and HMS Victor.

The mission had originally been pencilled in for a day later, but the schedule moved forward, and Kitchener's party of thirteen boarded a destroyer at Thurso before lunching aboard Admiral Jellicoe's own flagship, HMS Iron Duke, at Scapa Flow. Among them was the diplomat Hugh O'Beirne, a fluent Russian speaker with nine years at the St Petersburg embassy behind him, who very nearly missed the whole journey and only caught a special train south just in time to join the party.

Why he was going, and why nobody stopped him, is the part of this that has been rather crowded out by the manner of his death. Russia in the spring of 1916 was in trouble: short of rifles and shells, financially dependent on British credit, and under a Tsar who had taken personal command of his own armies in the field, which meant that anybody wanting a decision had to speak to Nicholas II himself. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald McKenna, proposed in May that Kitchener go out and talk to them about munitions, strategy and money; a formal invitation from the Tsar arrived on 14 May. There was also a domestic reason nobody put in writing. Kitchener's standing in the Cabinet had collapsed: he was blamed for the shell shortage of 1915 and for Gallipoli, and responsibility for munitions had already been taken off him and handed to Lloyd George. What he still had was the public, in enormous quantities, and the poster with his face on it had raised the army the country was now fighting with. He could not be sacked and he could not be ignored. Sending him three thousand miles to talk to the Russians solved a good many problems at once.

Admiral Jellicoe himself had chosen the unusual route close to Orkney's western coast, reasoning, in his own later account, that a north-easterly wind meant a calmer sea and a better chance of the escorting destroyers keeping pace, that the route's short hours of summer darkness made it practically impossible for a surface minelayer to have swept in and mined it undetected, and that it was a route regularly used, and therefore regularly watched over, by the fleet's own auxiliary vessels. It was, by any reasonable standard, a carefully reasoned choice.

As gale force conditions worsened, and with the destroyers barely able to make 10 knots against a rising north-easterly, Captain Herbert Savill signalled Unity and Victor to return to Scapa Flow, a call logged as the cruiser's own order rather than any decision by the destroyers to turn back of their own accord, made because he judged submarine activity unlikely in such weather, leaving HMS Hampshire to continue alone, a decision that would prove catastrophic all the same.

737 Lost in Fifteen Minutes

HMS Hampshire, sailing alone in heavy seas roughly 1.5 nautical miles off the Orkney mainland between the Brough of Birsay and Marwick Head, struck a mine at 19:40 that evening, laid eight days earlier, on the night of 28 May, by the German minelaying submarine U-75.

The explosion holed the cruiser between her bow and bridge and knocked out her lights and wireless in the same instant, and in the appalling conditions, the lifeboats were smashed against her hull as they were lowered, while her larger boats, which needed electrical power to launch, could not be freed at all and went down with the ship.

As the ship began to settle, her Gunnery Officer, Lieutenant Matthews, was heard shouting "Make way for Lord Kitchener!" as the Field Marshal was helped up to the quarterdeck; he and every member of his mission staff, including Hugh O'Beirne, went down with the ship. HMS Hampshire sank within fifteen minutes.

Of the 735 crew and 14 passengers aboard, only 12 men survived, eleven seamen and a single petty officer, clinging to one overloaded Carley float carrying some 48 men at once, submerged almost to the surface under their combined weight, before it was finally cast up on the rocks close to midnight; 737 men died in total, one of the most sudden and devastating single losses of senior military leadership Britain suffered in the entire war.

Among the dead were all 85 Royal Marines of Hampshire's own detachment, not one of whom survived, including their commanding officer, Captain C. S. Hazeon, who had already lived through one shipboard disaster, the internal explosion that destroyed HMS Natal in 1915, only to lose his life in his second.

HMS Hampshire's loss spawned genuine and persistent conspiracy theories: the Boer-German spy Fritz Joubert Duquesne later claimed to have infiltrated Kitchener's party and signalled a waiting U-boat, though historians have found his account riddled with improbabilities and entirely unsupported by any corroborating record.

The far better documented truth is that she struck one of a field of twenty-two mines U-75 had laid off Marwick Head on the night of 28 May, moored, by pure bad luck, at a depth intended to catch nothing bigger than an auxiliary vessel. In calmer conditions, or at a different state of the tide, a warship riding as deep as Hampshire would ordinarily have passed safely over them; it took that one particular gale, at that one particular moment, to bring them into her path. A search of the coast recovered a group of the mines on 8 June, three days after the sinking, and Germany's own after-battle report, a copy of which turned up after the war aboard one of the German warships interned at Scapa Flow, confirmed the rest, settling the question for good.

The mines themselves were in the wrong place for the wrong reason, which is the most uncomfortable part of the whole business. U-75 laid her field on the night of 28 and 29 May 1916 as part of a German plan in which three submarines were to lie off the Orkney exits and torpedo the Grand Fleet as it came out, while the High Seas Fleet drew it into a trap. The plan half worked and half did not: the fleet came out, the submarines never received the signal to attack, and the battle that followed, Jutland, was fought without them. Her commander, Curt Beitzen, laid his mines off Marwick Head under the impression that he was off Hoy, several miles from where he meant to be, and then went home. So the field that killed Kitchener was laid for a battle it missed, in a position its own captain had got wrong, by a boat whose entire operation had already failed. Hampshire went over it a week later because a gale had pushed her onto the one route in Orkney that nobody thought needed sweeping.

One persistent Orkney story deserves handling carefully, because it has been repeated for a century and the evidence does not support it. The tale, in various forms, is that islanders who went down to the shore to help were turned back by soldiers, and that men died in the water while a cordon kept rescuers away. The Orkney Heritage Society went through the accounts in detail for the centenary and concluded that the stories are almost certainly myth, with only two recorded incidents having any real basis; most of them come from Birsay, which was nearest the wreck but not where the survivors actually came ashore. That happened a few miles south at Sandwick, where local people pulled men off the rocks, took them into farmhouses and put dry clothes on them. It is worth saying plainly, because Orkney has carried an unearned reputation over this for a hundred years, and what the islanders actually did was rather the opposite.

Remembering the Lost

HMS Hampshire's wreck, protected under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986, lies upside down at a depth of between 180 and 230 feet off Orkney. Limited salvage work in 1983 recovered a propeller and drive shaft, and three of her 3-pounder guns are now displayed at the Scapa Flow Visitor Centre.

The people of Orkney erected a memorial tower on Marwick Head in 1926 in memory of the 737 who died, and the Hampshire, Isle of Wight and Winchester War Memorial near Winchester Cathedral also commemorates the disaster, a lasting tribute to a loss that shook Britain at one of the most difficult moments of the First World War.

The memorial itself has a history worth knowing. The tower on Marwick Head is forty-eight feet high and was paid for by public subscription, raised, as the inscription says, by the people of Orkney: a community of some twenty-odd thousand putting up a monument to a disaster that had happened on their own doorstep to men who were not theirs. For eighty years it named only Kitchener. In 2016, for the centenary, the Orkney Heritage Society raised the money for a curved wall alongside it carrying every one of the 737 names, and added nine more: the crew of HM Drifter Laurel Crown, a requisitioned fishing boat blown up later that same month while sweeping the very field that had sunk Hampshire. It took a hundred years for the men to be recorded alongside the Field Marshal, and the people who eventually did it were the same people who had put the tower up in the first place.

Divers from Huskyan Charters returned to the wreck in June 2023, working under a Ministry of Defence licence alongside the Scapa Flow Museum, to capture fresh photogrammetric imagery of her shattered stern for an updated digital 3D model, a way of continuing to study and tell the story of the disaster without disturbing the war grave itself.