The Tattie Lads

by Ian Dear

  Unfortunately, this knee-jerk reaction was overtaken by events as later that year the government introduced a crash shipbuilding programme for merchant ships. This kept the shipyards working to full capacity, and at the end of September 1917 none of the tugs ordered had even been laid down. In any case, by this time the Admiralty construction department had been persuaded ‘that taking the plans of an existing commercial tug and collaborating with a builder to modify them for naval purposes was not the ideal way to design or build a rescue tug. In evaluating their requirements, the Admiralty felt that a smaller tug than the Frisky or Resolve types could handle the majority of mercantile casualty work more efficiently and economically. The Admiralty specification was discussed with several builders under the designation of ‘Rescue Type’ tugs, and the first drawings of the class appear to be the result of co-operation between Ferguson Bros of Port Glasgow and the Naval Constructor.’6

  The result of this collaboration was the 440-ton Saint class.7 They, too, were something of a compromise and had a number of design faults – though strongly built, their stability was not as good as it should have been, nor was their endurance – but they were the first to be designed from the keel up as a rescue tug. They were armed with a twelve-pounder gun and such ancillary equipment as smoke-generating apparatus and hydrophones, but the towing arrangements were primitive, and the lack of a motorboat showed the Admiralty had little appreciation of what the work of a rescue tug would entail. Sixty-four were ordered, of which forty-six were built. They were constructed between April and August 1918, seven of them in Hong Kong. It is doubtful if any of them were used operationally before the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, though a handful were deployed. However, some played their part during the next and far bigger conflict to come.

  On 3 February 1917, two days after the start of the second unrestricted U-boat campaign, the United States President, Woodrow Wilson, severed diplomatic relations with Germany. He may have still hoped to avoid war, but the famous Zimmermann Telegram put paid to that. This revealed Germany wanted an alliance with Mexico if the United States entered the war, a move that would have directly threatened American territory. With the destruction of shipping continuing, involving a further loss of American life, President Wilson declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917.

  The convoy debate

  Their Lordships at the Admiralty had determined that in the age of steam, convoys, which had a long history, were no longer the best method of protecting merchant ships. Convoys made them, the sceptics argued, a larger target; there were too few warships to escort every convoy, where the presumption was that the escorts had to equal the numbers of ships it contained;8 convoys created large areas of smoke that could attract the enemy; they took time to assemble; and the arrival of so many ships at a port at the same time would create congestion and incur further delays.

  A later analysis of U-boat warfare and convoys showed these arguments to be almost entirely fallacious,9 but to ship owners time was money, so the last two points had also made them opposed to convoys. So much better, they agreed, for merchant ships to sail on their own along routes patrolled by the Royal Navy. Besides, merchant ships had no experience in ‘keeping station’ within a convoy and of following the diversionary manoeuvres necessary to minimise attack.

  By voicing this last concern, convoy sceptics – of which the First Sea Lord, Admiral John Jellicoe, was one – gave the impression, at least to the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, that they considered the Merchant Navy not to have the ability or seamanship to learn convoy discipline. This was, as Lloyd George later scathingly commented, ‘simply the arrogance of superiority which induces the uniformed chauffeur of a Rolls-Royce to look down on the driver of what is contemptuously stigmatised as a “tin Lizzie”,’10 a comment that must have gone down well with their Lordships.

  The Merchant Navy’s official historian of the First World War, Archibald Hurd, wrote that the captains themselves had doubted their ability to maintain convoy discipline: ‘When the merchant captains were approached upon the subject of introducing ocean convoy, they answered that the thing was impossible. They could not do it. They and their ships were ill-fitted for such a system.’11

  This proved nonsense, though of course there were initial difficulties, and almost certainly similar encounters to the one recalled by a US Navy officer escorting a convoy from Gibraltar later in the war. On urging a straggler by megaphone to move back into position, the skipper, a ‘very canny Scot’, replied, ‘I dinna ken, I dinna ken into position. This ship is no liner; she is an auld box.’12

  The Admiralty had already introduced a number of other anti-submarine measures. Merchant ships were being armed, and the Auxiliary Patrol formed to protect Britain’s coastal waters. Further out, the shipping routes were covered by small warships, such as sloops and destroyers, and Q-ships had early successes in luring surfaced U-boats close enough to sink them with their concealed guns. Depth charges were first used in 1916, but equipping warships with them took time, and hydrophones to detect a U-boat were never very successful. Minefields caused the U-boats some problems, particularly when in 1917 the Admiralty, with great reluctance, replaced British duds with ones based on a German design.13 As the war progressed aviation – particularly dirigibles – played an important reconnaissance role.

  But these measures could not counter the ferocity of the new unrestricted campaign. The increased numbers of U-boats14 was the main reason for its success, but there were other contributing factors: patrolling warships were spread too thinly to prevent attacks; U-boat commanders became adept at detecting Q-ships; and, as armed merchantmen became more common, their attackers rarely exposed themselves by surfacing before sinking them.

  Inevitably, the Admiralty’s objections to convoys came under ever-closer scrutiny, and when the cross-Channel coal convoys – or ‘controlled sailings’ as they were tactfully called to dampen the Admiralty’s scepticism – proved successful after they started in February 1917, some thought the argument won. But still the Admiralty sought other alternatives, and in March 1917 it arranged for ships with cargoes deemed of national importance to have dedicated routes within three triangles. The bases of these triangles were certain longitudes and their apexes the ports of Falmouth, Queenstown on the south coast of Ireland (modern-day Cobh), and Buncrana on Lough Swilly in Northern Ireland, which Archibald Hurd later named as the main bases for the new rescue tugs.15

  The scheme was initially supported by ship owners, but the areas soon proved too large for the number of warships available to patrol them. Of the eight hundred and ninety merchant ships assigned to them between March and May 1917, sixty-three were sunk – seven per cent of the total, a very high rate of attrition. In June it was even higher at eleven per cent,16 and ship owners now started to call them ‘death traps’.

  Another measure the Admiralty introduced – a reminder that the transition from sail to steam had still not been completed – was to introduce compulsory towing for commercial sailing vessels through zones where U-boats were known to operate. By their very nature these vessels were slow, and their routes erratic, making them difficult to protect, but they often carried valuable cargo the country could ill afford to lose.

  The TDC stipulated that the tugs undertaking this task were to be called ‘relay’ tugs, though they could act as ‘rescue’ tugs at the discretion of the senior naval officer (SNO) where they were based. ‘Rescue’ tugs, on the other hand, were to be employed solely for salvaging damaged merchant ships and could only be used for other work with the Admiralty’s permission. Slowly, the concept of a rescue tug was beginning to take shape.

  Convoy trials and tribulations

  While the Admiralty dragged its heels over convoys, the government introduced measures to counter the very real threat of Britain being starved into submission: non-essential imports were reduced to a minimum, or stopped completely, and the use of existing tonnage was reorganised to concentrate more merchant shi
ps on the shorter North Atlantic routes to increase the stockpile of imported wheat. It was less dramatic, short-term measures like these that probably saved Britain from immediate collapse, as one historian has plausibly argued.17

  However, according to Lloyd George, it was political pressure to establish ocean convoys that eventually saved the day. In his memoirs, he wrote caustically that had ‘we not found some means of dealing with the menace not then visible to the fear-dimmed eyes of our Mall Admirals, and had we not put into operation ideas which never emanated from their brains and some of which they resisted, others of which they delayed’, he had no doubt that his government, as the Germans had already predicted, would have been forced to sue for peace within a matter of months.18

  On 10 April President Wilson’s naval representative, Rear Admiral William Sims, arrived in England. Sims, whose role was to foster naval co-operation between the two countries, was a good choice. He was a known anglophile and had a long-standing friendship with Admiral Jellicoe. But when he arrived in Whitehall a shock awaited him. Up to that point, all the evidence available to him had seemed to indicate an Allied victory. But what Jellicoe frankly told him, as he handed Sims the tonnage losses for the preceding few months, revealed a very different state of affairs. Sims later wrote:

  It is expressing it mildly to say that I was surprised by this disclosure. I was fairly astounded; for I had never imagined anything so terrible…

  ‘It looks as though the Germans [are] winning the war,’ I remarked.

  ‘They will win, unless we can stop these losses – and stop them soon,’ the Admiral replied.

  ‘Is there no solution for the problem?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely none that we can see now,’ Jellicoe announced.19

  On 14 April Sims cabled Washington these unpalatable facts. He recommended that base personnel and the maximum possible number of destroyers be dispatched to Queenstown from where patrols could be instituted to the west of Ireland. He also requested sea-going tugs be sent to the war zone, and throughout the conflict he urged that more be sent, stressing they would ‘save valuable tonnage by rescuing torpedoed and stranded transports’,20 showing he was an early, and influential, supporter of a rescue tug organisation.

  Sims’ advice to send destroyers was promptly taken and the first six arrived at Queenstown on 4 May 1917. But despite his characterisation of the United States as ‘the country of tugs’,21 it seemed that few were available, and by August 1917 the US Navy Department had only managed to purchase twelve. By October seven of these had arrived in Europe and were assigned to French territorial waters, and to Genoa, Gibraltar and Queenstown. The British situation was no better and in November 1917, when the TDC reviewed the number of rescue tugs available, only forty-seven were in service in home waters and just four in the Mediterranean.22

  Perhaps it was Sims’ influence that persuaded the Admiralty, on 27 April, to order a trial ocean convoy from Gibraltar, and when three more arrived in May/June without a single loss the sceptics were confronted with irrefutable proof that convoys worked, and that far fewer escorts than anticipated were needed to protect them effectively. Ship owners added to the mounting pressure by insisting that the ‘death traps’ be abandoned to free up escorts for more convoys. This also meant transferring more destroyers to the Atlantic, but Jellicoe’s mindset, as Lloyd George pointed out in his memoirs, was rooted in large fleet actions like Jutland, and he still refused to allow his Grand Fleet to be stripped of its destroyer protection.

  It was therefore not until the middle of August that westbound Atlantic convoys, escorted by American destroyers from Queenstown, were started, eastbound ones having been instigated earlier. From a high of more than 545,000 tons lost in April 1917, British tonnage losses now began to decrease and by December had been reduced to just over 253,000 tons.23

  Early operations

  In addition to Queenstown, Falmouth and Buncrana, rescue tugs were to be stationed at Berehaven, Milford, Scilly Isles, Portland and Plymouth, and elsewhere when new builds became available. In May 1917, it was decided to keep at sea fifty per cent of rescue tugs based at these ports, and in wireless touch with their SNOs. This arrangement, it was thought, would not only ensure more rapid assistance to damaged vessels but would help strengthen patrols in the area.

  There are few records of the activities of these early rescue tugs, but Archibald Hurd relates how in September 1917 the 184-ton Flying Falcon and the 283-ton Milewater left Lough Swilly (Buncrana) with sealed orders to meet a homeward-bound convoy.24 The weather was bad, but the next morning both tugs reached the convoy and took up positions behind it. By midnight a full gale was blowing and Flying Falcon was labouring badly. Off the Oversay Light (Islay) a tremendous wave broke over her, sweeping away the top of the companionway and sending water down below. A second smashed the hawser grating and washed the towing hawser overboard, which wrapped itself around the propeller. The engine stopped, leaving the tug wallowing helplessly. Another wave shifted the bunker coal to leeward so that she lay on her beam ends and nearly capsized.

  One of the boats was lowered, prior to abandoning ship. As this was being done, another wave swept the tug and washed the captain, some of the crew, and the boat into the water. Three of the crew and the captain managed to climb back aboard, but three others were drowned. Flying Falcon was now drifting helplessly towards the land and though the captain dropped both his anchors, their cables snapped, and the rescue tug was driven ashore. Luckily, all those on board were saved, but it showed the kind of savage weather these small vessels were expected to brave.

  Perhaps it was this incident that made the Admiralty change its mind, as the following month, October 1917, it advised the commander-in-chief (C-in-C) Devonport that in future he should use his discretion about sending out rescue tugs to meet homeward-bound convoys, and that in some cases, depending on the U-boat threat, it was better to keep the tugs in harbour until they were needed.

  A first-hand account by Captain TH Bull, serving in the Rescue Tug Service, in 1918 shows that tagging on behind convoys was the normal tactic. He joined the 1916-built 294-ton Sonia at Loch Ewe, then a base for convoy vessels, after she had been hired by the Admiralty as a rescue tug:

  Our duty on the Rescue Tug consisted in sailing in a position well astern of a convoy so as to take in tow any ship damaged or torpedoed and try to beach her. A sandy foreshore near Buncrana in Lough Swilly was used and temporary repairs could be made to enable the stricken ship to get to the shipyards at Belfast for a permanent job. The outward convoys were assembled at Lamlash, Arran, and we followed them out to longitude 20° West where, in turn, we met inward convoys following them in through the North Channel until they dispersed for their various destinations.25

  It was Sonia that tried to save the 32,234-ton British troopship Justicia, while the rescue tug was escorting a westbound convoy off Lamlash in July 1918. The three-funnelled Justicia, which had no troops aboard, remained afloat after the first torpedo struck her, and Sonia started to tow her towards Lough Swilly where it was intended to beach her at Buncrana. But the next morning, after several more torpedoes hit her – some sources say six in total – she sank. ‘It was a sad moment,’ Captain Bull recorded, ‘that after towing for so long, to watch the great ship slide down into the depths of the sea funnel by funnel and to realise our efforts were to go unrewarded.’

  The Scillies as a rescue base

  The Scilly Isles were close to the Atlantic convoy routes, but at first their strategic position seems to have been overlooked, as a list of the disposition of rescue tugs on 28 May 1917 only shows the 197-ton Sun II, built in 1909, being based there,26 and she was by all accounts totally inadequate. Later, it was realised that more rescue tugs were needed there before the winter, and by August 1917, Sun II had been joined at St Mary’s, the archipelago’s largest island, by the 214-ton Bramley Moore, the 154-ton Joseph Constantine, the 577-ton Atalanta III, the 283-ton Blazer, and by the 218-ton steel trawler, Zaree.
Built in 1904 and recently purchased by the Admiralty and converted to towing, Zaree was to play a significant role in making the Rescue Tug Service a viable concept.

  The Scillies was part of Rear Admiral William Luard’s Falmouth Command and it was under him that the Rescue Tug Service was primarily developed. Their position made them the ideal location for the nascent organisation to hone its skills, experiment with new methods and test untried equipment. Because so many damaged ships were towed to St Mary’s, or beached nearby, the Admiralty’s Salvage Department based a large contingent from its Devonport dockyard workforce there.

  One resident’s memories of this time is recorded in The Scillonian War Diary, 1914–18, a fascinating if labyrinthine source for, among other things, the types of ships and cargoes that the rescue tugs brought in:

  They were towed in just under Samson [a nearby uninhabited island] where the deep water is and the dockyard men mended them; everybody in Scilly had to take in these dockyarders [as we called them], we couldn’t refuse; if we had one bedroom and they had to share a bedroom, that was all there was to it, you had to take as many as you could take. They went out, they took their lunch and went out on the ships, carpenters and the lot, and mended the ships.27

  Once a ship had been made watertight she either made her own way, or was towed, to Devonport or other dockyards where she was repaired and returned to service. The Rescue Tug Service and the Salvage Department often worked hand in hand to salvage ships, and their responsibilities sometimes overlapped, especially if a vessel were stranded. Both organisations were entitled to salvage money, an age-old concept that if men risked their lives to save a ship and her cargo it was only right that they be compensated for doing so, and this was continued during the Second World War.