HMS Kale (1904): Lost to Her Own Navy's Minefield

Built on the Tyne

HMS Kale was ordered under the 1903 to 1904 Naval Estimates and built by Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn-on-Tyne, laid down on 16 February 1904, launched on 8 November that year and completed in August 1905, a River-class destroyer named, in keeping with the class's naming convention, after the Kale Water, a modest stream in the Scottish borders rather than any grander geographical feature.

She displaced around 550 tons and was originally armed with five 6-pounder guns, upgraded in 1906 to a mix of 12-pounder guns alongside two torpedo tubes for 18-inch torpedoes.

The River class to which she belonged marked a deliberate break from the low, wave-piercing turtleback bows of earlier British destroyers, which looked handsome enough but tended to dig straight into the sea and left the men on an exposed bridge drenched in anything but a flat calm. Kale and her sisters were given a proper raised forecastle instead, with the bridge moved further aft out of the worst of the spray, a genuine improvement in seakeeping that came at the cost of rather less dash in silhouette. By the time she was lost, the class had technically been renamed again: a 1913 reshuffle that grouped older destroyers by letter saw the Rivers redesignated the E class, though old habits died hard and she went on being referred to as a River-class boat for the rest of her career.

A Decade of Peacetime Flotilla Service

HMS Kale spent the years before the First World War moving between various flotillas of the Home and Channel Fleets, joining the East Coast Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich on commissioning before transferring successively through the 3rd, 5th, 9th and eventually 7th Destroyer Flotillas as the Royal Navy periodically reorganised its destroyer forces. For much of this shuffling she carried only a nucleus crew, part of a wider peacetime economy that kept many destroyers only partly manned between commissions, and by 1911 to 1912 she found herself one of twenty-three River-class boats mustered together in the 3rd Flotilla at the Nore, a fair chunk of the entire class gathered in one place.

Her prewar service was not entirely without incident. In June 1905 she put to sea off the Tyne expecting to be back in harbour within a few hours, and instead spent twenty-four fog-bound hours out there with her stores running distinctly short, an inconvenience rather than a crisis, but a useful reminder of how quickly a routine trial could go sideways. Rather grimmer was the loss of Petty Officer MacAllister, who fell overboard at Portland in December 1906; his body was not recovered until the following January. Later incidents were more comic than tragic: two of her crew faced theft charges at Harwich in October 1911, and in February 1912 a collier ploughed into her during a snowstorm at Sheerness and damaged her propeller guard, small but sobering reminders that peacetime naval service carried its own everyday hazards even when nobody was shooting at anybody.

Patrol Duty Through the Great War

HMS Kale spent the First World War on patrol, anti-submarine and counter-mining duties off Britain's east coast. She was one of six Ninth Flotilla destroyers on station when war broke out in August 1914, and by January 1915 was helping cover the stretch of coast between St Abb's Head and Flamborough Head, a patrol line that only grew busier as the war went on. In October 1915 she transferred to the Humber-based 7th Destroyer Flotilla, which swelled from a handful of boats to nineteen by October 1916 and twenty-seven by January 1918, as the demands of escorting the growing East Coast Convoys, formally organised around the flotilla from June 1917, absorbed ever more of the Navy's destroyer strength.

It was steady, unglamorous work, the kind that rarely produced headlines but kept vital shipping lanes open through four years of a war fought as much in the shipping lanes as on any battlefield.

Lost in Her Own Navy's Minefield

HMS Kale met her end on 27 March 1918, when she struck a mine in the North Sea north of Harwich while operating alongside the destroyer HMS Exe, which also hit a mine in the same incident but survived, albeit with five of her own crew killed. HMS Kale herself sank with the loss of around forty of her ship's company, accounts vary between forty and forty-one, among them nineteen-year-old Signaller Edward Start, who had joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve at Bristol as a sixteen-year-old in 1915 and was posted to Kale in January 1916; he is remembered today on the Plymouth Naval Memorial.

The tragedy was made all the more bitter by its cause. The subsequent court martial, its records now held at the National Archives, found that her commanding officer, Commander Dennison, had steered a course some six miles east of the properly swept channel and straight into a prohibited area containing a British defensive minefield, details of which had been circulated weeks earlier, information he had apparently neither read nor checked against his own charts. He was found guilty on two of the three charges brought against him, severely reprimanded and dismissed from his command, though the Royal Navy evidently judged the lapse survivable: he was back at sea within a few years and went on to command the cruiser HMS Cleopatra from 1922 to 1923. For the forty-odd men who went down with HMS Kale there was no equivalent second chance, a notably painful reminder that in the crowded, heavily mined waters of the North Sea, a moment's navigational error could prove every bit as fatal as anything the enemy might do.