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.

The turtleback the Rivers were built to escape is worth understanding, because it was one of the worst ideas in British naval architecture and it lasted twenty years. The first destroyers of the 1890s had a rounded forecastle curving down to the bow, on the theory that a sea coming aboard would simply run off it; what actually happened was that the bow buried itself, the ship drove through the wave rather than over it, and everything forward of the funnels, including the open conning position where the officer of the watch stood, was under a continuous sheet of water. The first destroyers and what they were like to be in are described in the article on HMS Hornet (1893). What the Rivers did was accept two or three knots less on trials in exchange for a proper raised forecastle and a bridge far enough aft to be usable, and the result was a ship that could actually keep station with the fleet in the North Sea in winter rather than having to slow down and take shelter. Every destroyer built anywhere since has that shape. The Rivers are the point at which the type stopped being a fast torpedo boat and started being a warship.

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.

Nucleus crews are worth explaining, because they are the reason the Royal Navy of 1914 looked so much larger on paper than it was in practice. A ship in the reserve was not laid up and abandoned; she was kept with a proportion of her complement aboard, typically the engineering staff and enough seamen to move her, so that she could be brought forward to full commission quickly by drafting in the rest. It kept the machinery turning and the hull maintained at perhaps a third of the running cost. The difficulty was that a ship with a nucleus crew could steam but could not fight properly, and a ship's company that has never worked together at full strength is not a ship's company. The Navy discovered the limits of the system in the test mobilisation of July 1914, which happened, by an accident of timing that has been argued about ever since, in the same fortnight as the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. The fleet was already assembled when the war began, and the reserve crews simply stayed where they were.

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.

The east coast patrol she spent four years on was the least glamorous and arguably the most important naval task of the entire war. Britain's coal, its coastal trade and a large proportion of everything moving between the Thames and the industrial north went by sea rather than rail, and the Germans understood that perfectly: from the first weeks of the war they mined the approaches to every east coast port, first from surface minelayers and later from small submarines built specifically for the job. The British answer was the War Channel, a continuously swept and buoyed route running the length of the coast from the Thames to the Firth of Forth, kept open by hundreds of requisitioned trawlers and drifters sweeping it every day, with destroyers like Kale patrolling the line, escorting the convoys that were formally organised through it from 1917, and hunting the submarines laying the mines. It was relentless. Ships were sunk in it constantly, the sweeping went on in all weathers, and at the worst point in 1917 something like one in four vessels leaving a British port was not coming back. The wrecks are still there, in their hundreds, all the way up the coast.

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.

Signaller Start being named on the Plymouth memorial rather than buried anywhere is the ordinary condition of the naval dead, and the memorials exist precisely because of it. After the First World War the Admiralty settled on an identical monument at each of the three manning ports, Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth, so that a man lost at sea would be commemorated where he had been borne on the books rather than nowhere at all; the arrangement, and what the memorials look like, is described in the article on HMS Ivanhoe (D16). Start had joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve at Bristol at sixteen in 1915, which means he lied about his age or somebody chose not to ask, and he was nineteen when the ship went down. There were a great many like him aboard the small ships of the east coast patrols, and the reason so few of them have graves is that the North Sea is not in the habit of giving anything back.

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.

Before condemning Commander Dennison entirely, it is worth understanding how a destroyer navigated in 1918, because six miles is a smaller error than it sounds. There was no satellite positioning, no radar and no reliable radio direction finding. A ship at sea in the North Sea in poor visibility knew where she was by dead reckoning: her course from the compass, her speed from the log, her time from the chronometer, and whatever corrections the navigator could guess for tide and leeway, checked against soundings with a lead when the depth was distinctive enough to help. Errors accumulate steadily and quietly, and a few degrees of undetected current over several hours will put a ship miles from where her plot says she is. That is precisely why the swept channels were buoyed and why prohibited areas were promulgated in writing and had to be transferred by hand onto every ship's charts. The finding against Dennison was not that his navigation was inaccurate. It was that he had not read the notice, had not marked the area on his chart, and had therefore taken a course through water he had been told in advance not to enter. Forty men died of an administrative omission.

It happened a great deal more often than the histories suggest. By 1918 the seas around Britain contained an enormous number of British mines, laid to close the Channel and the northern exits to German submarines, and the Northern Barrage alone eventually absorbed something over seventy thousand of them; every one of those fields had to be charted, promulgated, avoided and eventually cleared, and the clearance went on for years after the Armistice. Mines do not distinguish between navies, they break their moorings in gales and drift, and the paper record of where they are is only as good as the last man who updated a chart. The Royal Navy lost ships to its own fields in both world wars and the pattern is always the same: an order changed, a signal missed, a chart not corrected. HMS Exe, mined alongside Kale that morning and losing five men, survived; her account is in the article on HMS Exe (1903).

She was thirteen years old when she was lost, which for a destroyer of her generation was elderly, and she had spent almost all of that time doing things nobody wrote down. She was too slow and too lightly armed by 1918 to be much use with the Grand Fleet, and so she did what obsolescent destroyers always do: escorted the convoys nobody else would be spared for, patrolled the same stretch of coast for years, and kept a channel open that the country could not do without. Then, on an ordinary morning off Harwich, she was killed by her own side's weapon because a piece of paper had not been read. There is no consolation in that and no lesson beyond the obvious one, which every navy relearns: the sea is dangerous enough without anybody helping it.