HMS Holland 1: The Navy's First Submarine, Built in a Yacht Shed

A Contemptible Foreign Idea

At the end of the nineteenth century the Royal Navy was the largest and most powerful in the world, and it had very little interest in submarines. A navy that already ruled the surface of the sea had nothing to gain from a weapon that might let a weaker enemy sink its battleships from underneath, and a good deal to lose.

Plenty of senior officers also thought the whole thing ungentlemanly. To them the submarine was, in a phrase of the time, a contemptible foreign idea. Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, who would go on to be First Sea Lord, is reported to have said that the crews of enemy submarines ought to be treated as pirates and hanged.

The trouble was that other navies were building them anyway. The French had several, and in 1900 the United States Navy bought its first practical boat from an Irish-American schoolteacher called John Philip Holland.

Holland had spent decades working on submarines, and some of his early experiments had been paid for by the Fenian Brotherhood, who had hoped to use them against the Royal Navy.

His company had since been taken over by the businessman Isaac Rice, and in 1900 Rice persuaded the Admiralty in London to buy five improved Holland boats, to be built under licence by Vickers, Sons and Maxim at Barrow-in-Furness at about £35,000 each. The British were not converted. They simply wanted to find out what they were up against.

Pontoon No. 1

The work at Barrow was kept secret. The first boat was assembled in a building labelled the "Yacht Shed", and her parts were marked "For Pontoon No. 1", in the hope that anybody who saw them would think the Navy was building something for a harbour.

On 2 October 1901, eight months after the contract had been agreed, Holland 1 was pushed out of the shed and down the slipway without any ceremony at all. A Royal Navy launch normally meant bunting, a band and somebody important breaking a bottle on the bow. Britain's first submarine got none of it.

She was 63 feet 4 inches long and less than 12 feet in the beam, shaped like a short, fat cigar, with a small conning position on top. On the surface she ran on a 160-horsepower petrol engine, and dived she ran on a 70-horsepower electric motor and a set of lead-acid batteries.

She carried one torpedo tube in the bow and a crew of about eight. Some accounts say her engine was made by Wolseley, but a maker's plate recovered with her in the 1980s shows that it came from the Otto Gas Engine Works of Philadelphia, which is fitting enough, since she was American in almost everything but her ensign.

Learning the Trade

Her first captain was Lieutenant Forster Delafield Arnold-Forster, and he and a handful of men had to learn the business of submarine operating more or less from first principles, since nobody in the Navy had done it before. Holland 1 made her first dive on 20 March 1902, in the safety of an enclosed basin, and began trials at sea in April.

One early trial dive lasted more than two hours and the crew reported no discomfort, which was rather the point of the exercise. Underwater she handled well.

On the surface she was a misery: she sat so low that every sea broke over her, and her captain and coxswain could barely keep their footing on top of her in anything of a swell.

By September 1902 she was at Portsmouth, part of the Navy's first submarine flotilla under Captain Reginald Bacon, the officer given the job of finding out whether submarines were any use. The five Holland boats and the A-class boats that followed them were used to work out the drills, the signals and the tactics on which the whole Submarine Service would later be built.

They also discovered the dangers. Petrol gives off fumes, and a closed steel hull full of petrol fumes and electrical sparks is a bomb waiting to go off. On 3 March 1903 there was an explosion inside Holland 1 that injured four of her crew.

The early boats are said to have carried white mice as a warning, since the mice would be distressed by petrol or exhaust fumes long before the men noticed anything, and the mice were treated as members of the crew.

Off to Fight the Russians

Holland 1 came closest to a war in October 1904. On the night of 21 October the Russian Baltic Fleet, on its way to the Far East to fight Japan, mistook a fleet of Hull fishing trawlers on the Dogger Bank for Japanese torpedo boats and opened fire on them, killing two fishermen and sinking a trawler.

Britain was furious, and for a few days there was a real chance of war. On 24 October Holland 1 sailed from Portsmouth with the other Holland boats and three of the new A-class boats to attack the Russian fleet as it passed down the Channel. They were recalled before they found it.

If they had not been, the first British submarine attack in history would have been made by a boat that had been in service for two years and had never fired a torpedo in anger, against a fleet that was jumpy enough to shoot at trawlers.

Sold for £410

By the time the photograph at the top of this page was taken, in about 1905, Holland 1 was already old. Submarines were developing so quickly that each new class made the last look primitive, and within a decade the Navy had boats several times her size, with diesel engines, deck guns and the range to patrol off the German coast.

The story of where that led in only fifteen years can be seen in HMS K15, a steam-driven submarine more than five times her length. In 1913 Holland 1 was sold to the shipbreakers Thos. W. Ward for £410, on condition that her torpedo tube was put out of action, and she was taken in tow for a breaker's yard in Wales.

She never got there. In bad weather about a mile and a half off the Eddystone lighthouse, south of Plymouth, she began to sink. Nobody was aboard, and the crew of the tug let go of the tow rope before she could drag them down with her.

She went to the bottom, and for the best part of seventy years everybody forgot about her.

The Return of Holland 1

In 1981 the Plymouth historian Michael Pearn located her wreck. Because she had sunk under tow, rather than in an explosion or a collision, she was lying largely intact on the seabed, and in November 1982 she was raised and taken to the Royal Navy Submarine Museum at Gosport, across the harbour from Portsmouth, where the Submarine Service had made its home at Fort Blockhouse.

Her original batteries were sent to Chloride Industrial Batteries, who tested them, cleaned them and recharged them, and found them in good working order. They had spent sixty-nine years under the sea.

Her hull was a harder problem. Salt had soaked into the iron, and once she was out of the water the chlorides began to eat her from the inside.

From 1995 she was sealed in a huge tank of sodium carbonate solution to draw the salts out, and in 2001, for her centenary, she was moved into a climate-controlled gallery of her own, where she can be seen today.

It is an extraordinary survival. Holland 1 was built as a trial, to see whether the thing could be done, by a Navy that did not much want it done.

Within a few years of her launch the Navy that thought submarines were for pirates had dozens of them, and within fourteen years British submarines were patrolling in the Heligoland Bight and the Dardanelles. Little more than a century after that cigar-shaped boat crept out of her yacht shed, the nation's nuclear deterrent was being carried to sea in Royal Navy submarines.

Holland 1 is where all of it began, and unlike almost every other ship of her time, she is still here.