HMS Natal (1904): Lost to Her Own Ammunition While Hosting a Children's Film Party

A Cruiser Funded by Her Namesake Colony

HMS Natal was laid down on 6 January 1904 at Vickers, Sons and Maxim in Barrow-in-Furness, christened on 30 September 1905 by Louisa Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, and completed on 5 March 1907 at a cost of £1,218,244.

A Warrior-class armoured cruiser displacing 13,550 tons standard and armed with six 9.2-inch guns, she was named for the Colony of Natal, whose own inhabitants contributed substantially towards the cost of her construction, a notably touching piece of imperial generosity from a colony grateful for the protection the Royal Navy provided.

Escorting a King to India

HMS Natal joined the 5th Cruiser Squadron in 1907 and transferred to the 2nd Cruiser Squadron in 1909, and between 1911 and 1912 escorted the ocean liner RMS Medina, then serving as the royal yacht for King George V's voyage to India to attend the Delhi Durbar, a remarkably prestigious duty for a relatively young cruiser.

Her crew later gave her the rather grim nickname the Sea Hearse, after she carried the body of the American ambassador Whitelaw Reid back to New York in December 1912.

Into the Grand Fleet

HMS Natal joined the Grand Fleet at the outbreak of the First World War, was refitted at Cromarty in January 1915 and spent most of that year on North Sea patrol duty, before undergoing a further refit at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead beginning 22 November, rejoining the 2nd Cruiser Squadron at Scapa Flow on 5 December 1915, just weeks before disaster struck. The stores taken on during that final refit included fresh cordite charges, propellant that would come under grave suspicion within a matter of weeks.

A Film Party for Officers' Families

HMS Natal lay at anchor in Cromarty Firth under the command of Captain Eric Back on 30 December 1915, hosting a film party aboard for officers' wives and children, along with civilian guests and nurses from the nearby hospital ship HS Drina, entertained by the band of the Royal Marines, a warm and entirely ordinary social occasion of the kind that punctuated wartime naval routine wherever ships lay in relatively safe home waters.

Among those aboard were seven women, one civilian man and three children, guests who had no reason whatsoever to imagine the afternoon would end in catastrophe.

More than a hundred of Natal's crew were safely out of the way ashore at a football match in Cromarty that afternoon, an escape they can have had little idea was one at the time. Those still aboard were rather less fortunate: the captain was already making arrangements to ferry his guests back to shore when the ship exploded beneath them, a piece of timing so cruel that survivors later reckoned a delay of only five more minutes would have seen every civilian guest safely off the ship.

Torn Apart Without Warning

HMS Natal was torn apart shortly after 15:25 that afternoon by a series of violent explosions in the rear part of the ship, and capsized within five minutes, an almost unimaginably rapid disaster for those aboard.

The Fleet's own signal log traces just how fast it all happened: "Ship on Fire" logged at 15:25, Natal already showing her bilge keel and turning over by 15:30, and "Natal sunk" recorded at 15:45. One officer thrown clear by the blast later recalled being knocked onto the deck with the smell of cordite overpowering, a detail that, in hindsight, told its own story long before any formal inquiry did. Nearby ships raced to help: the cruiser HMS Achilles alone hauled 126 survivors aboard, six of them needing to be carried off in cots, while the hospital ship Drina took on two officers and 43 men.

There is a detail in that paragraph worth pausing on. Achilles was not a passing stranger; she was Natal's own sister, one of the four Warrior-class armoured cruisers. The class did not do well. Warrior took so much punishment at Jutland that she had to be abandoned and went down on 1 June 1916. Natal blew up at her anchor. Cochrane ran aground in the Mersey estuary on 14 November 1918, three days after the Armistice, broke her back and was broken up where she lay. Achilles, who pulled a hundred and twenty-six of Natal's people out of the Cromarty Firth, missed Jutland in refit, finished the war as a stokers' training ship at Chatham and was the only one of the four to reach a breaker's yard in the ordinary way.

Early speculation understandably pointed to a German U-boat attack or a mine, given how sudden and catastrophic the destruction had been, but subsequent examination of the wreckage told a far more painful story: divers investigating the wreck determined that the explosions had begun in either the rear 9.2-inch shell room or the magazine housing 3-pounder and small arms ammunition.

The subsequent court martial concluded that the disaster resulted from an internal ammunition failure, quite possibly caused by faulty cordite, the same treacherous propellant that would later be implicated in several British warship losses at the Battle of Jutland only months afterward.

The propellant deserves explaining, because Natal was not simply unlucky. Cordite MD had been reformulated with a high nitrocellulose content, around sixty-five per cent, chiefly to cut the wear it inflicted on gun barrels. It did that. What it also did was degrade in store, shedding a fine dust of nitrocellulose and iron pyrites, and both heat and damp made it worse, the two together worst of all. Charges that had sat too long, in a magazine that got too warm, could take fire without anybody doing anything to them.

Which is why she was the middle of a series rather than a one-off. HMS Bulwark went up at Sheerness in November 1914, with charges stacked against a boiler-room bulkhead, and out of some seven hundred men about a dozen lived. Natal went in December 1915. HMS Vanguard blew up at anchor in Scapa Flow in July 1917 and lost all but two of her company, an episode described in the article on HMS Brinton (M1114). Three ships and something close to two thousand men, and not one of the three was touched by an enemy.

The answer, when it came, was chemical: a new Cordite MC, using cracked mineral jelly in place of the petroleum jelly that had been used as a stabiliser. It arrived too late for Natal. What happened to the battlecruisers at Jutland five months later was a different failure, of handling rather than of chemistry, doors left open and charges stacked where they should not have been, but the same substance was at the heart of both, and the Royal Navy spent the whole of that war being killed by its own ammunition as well as the enemy's.

A Devastating Toll

HMS Natal's loss of life was properly severe, with estimates ranging from 390 to 421 dead, though the official Admiralty list recorded 390 deaths when it was published in January 1916. The gap between the two figures is grimly explained by the men who survived the initial blast only to later die of their wounds, and whose names were added to the roll afterwards.

The toll included not only crew but a number of the civilian guests who had come aboard that afternoon for nothing more than an ordinary social occasion, a tragedy made all the more painful by how entirely avoidable it should have been, and by how many of those lost had no connection to the war at all beyond the simple fact of being present on a warship that day.

Sixty-three of the dead were Royal Marines, several from the very band that had been playing for the film show minutes earlier, including bandsman Ernest Jamieson, whose body was never recovered. Among the civilian guests, one name stood out: John Henry Dods, a former Scotland rugby international capped eight times in the 1890s who had gone on to manage the nearby Novar Estate, died alongside his wife and all three of their children, an entire family lost in a single afternoon. Even the ship's mascot, a cat named Rudolph, went down with her. Wartime censorship kept the full scale of the disaster out of the newspapers for some time afterwards, one further small cruelty for families left waiting on news of the missing.

A Wreck Remembered for Decades

HMS Natal's hull remained visible at low water in Cromarty Firth for decades afterward, and it became Royal Navy practice, right up until the Second World War, for every warship entering or leaving Cromarty to sound the call Still and for officers and men to come to attention as they passed the wreck, a quietly moving mark of respect maintained for a generation.

Extensive salvage work took place over the following decades, and the remaining wreckage was finally demolished in the 1970s to remove it as a hazard to navigation, though the site remains protected today under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.

Memorials to those lost were erected in Durban in 1927 and at Invergordon, where a plaque was unveiled in 1992 and a memorial garden opened in 2000, ensuring that a disaster caused not by enemy action but by a single catastrophic internal failure has not been allowed to fade from memory. Many of those who could be recovered were laid to rest close to where they fell, including fifteen graves in Cromarty's own cemetery and further burials at Rosskeen and Kiltearn, quiet corners of the Highlands that still keep watch over men who never got the chance to fight the war they had signed up for.