HMS Ursula (N59): The First British Torpedoes of the War

Constructed at Barrow

HMS Ursula was built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 19 February 1937, launched on 16 February 1938 and commissioned on 20 December 1938, a U-class submarine that would find herself making history within days of the war's outbreak.

A Historic First Shot

On 9 September 1939, just days after Britain declared war, Ursula fired the first British submarine torpedoes of the Second World War, attacking the German submarine U-35, though her target escaped. That December, she engaged the German light cruiser Leipzig and its escorting destroyers near the Elbe estuary, an action that earned her commander, Lieutenant Commander G. C. Phillips, the Distinguished Service Order, and also torpedoed and sank the escort vessel F 9 near Heligoland, in an attack her captain believed at the time had struck a light cruiser.

Mediterranean Service and an Unexpected Fashion Legacy

Transferred to Malta in early 1941, Ursula went on to sink the German merchant Heddernheim, the Italian auxiliary submarine chaser V 135, or Togo, and the merchants Sainte Marguerite II and Odysseus, and damaged the Italian tanker Beppe and merchant Sabbia.

In a notably unexpected footnote to her service, her navigating officer, Lieutenant Lakin, took to wearing a Barbour waxed cotton motorcycling suit, which Commander Phillips had adapted into a split jacket-and-trousers design with a hood, a practical piece of improvisation that eventually became standard Royal Navy submarine attire, a small but lasting legacy that long outlived the boat herself.

Service Under a Different Flag

HMS Ursula was transferred to the Soviet Union on 26 June 1944 and renamed V-4, serving under the Soviet commander Yaroslav Iosseliani, and remaining in Soviet colours for six years before being returned to Britain in early 1950 and scrapped at Grangemouth that May, closing out the career of a submarine that had fired the very first shots of Britain's undersea war.