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, genuinely 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.

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. As gale force conditions worsened, Captain Herbert Savill judged submarine activity unlikely in such weather and ordered the destroyers back to Scapa Flow, leaving HMS Hampshire to continue alone, a decision that would prove catastrophic.

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 days earlier by the German minelaying submarine U-75. The explosion holed the cruiser between her bow and bridge, and in the appalling conditions, the lifeboats were smashed against her hull as they were lowered, rendering them largely useless. HMS Hampshire sank within fifteen minutes. Of the 735 crew and 14 passengers aboard, only 12 crew members survived, using Carley floats to reach the shore; 737 men died, including Kitchener and every member of his mission staff, one of the most sudden and devastating single losses of senior military leadership Britain suffered in the entire war.

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 more mundane, and far better documented, truth is that she struck an ordinary mine laid as part of routine German minelaying operations off Orkney.

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.