The Blooding of the Guns
Page 1
The Blooding of the Guns
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Publisher’s Note
Epigraph
Author’s Note
The Grand Fleet
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Copyright
The Blooding of the Guns
Alexander Fullerton
Publisher’s Note
This book includes some views and language on nationality and ethnicity that were common at the time in which it is set. The publisher has retained this terminology in order to preserve the integrity of the text.
Iron Duke
18th June 1916
The Secretary
of the ADMIRALTY,
SIR,
Be pleased to inform the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty that the German High Sea Fleet was brought to action on 31st May 1916, to the westward of the Jutland Bank, off the coast of Denmark.
(Opening paragraph of Sir John Jellicoe’s despatch)
Author’s Note
To provide homes for fictional characters, three fictional ships – HMS Nile (battleship). Bantry (cruiser) and Lanyard (destroyer) have been added to those which actually fought at Jutland.
All other ships and their movements are as recorded in despatches, narratives, personal reminiscences et cetera, and are described as the fictional characters would have seen them from their own areas of the battle.
For readers who may find it useful or of interest, a ‘cast’ of the Grand Fleet’s ships, squadrons and flotillas may be found overleaf.
Finally, two technical assurances to readers whose own more recent naval experience may suggest that – as the instructors used to say – ‘error has crep’ in’. (1) It is a fact that at the time of the 1914–18 war a port helm order was needed in order to produce a turn to starboard; (2) it is also a fact that at this time four-inch and even smaller calibre ammunition was separate, not ‘fixed’.
The Grand Fleet
Squadrons and flotillas as on 30th May 1916
(A) AT SCAPA AND CROMARTY
BATTLE FLEET
(Fleet flagship Iron Duke)
2ND BATTLE SQUADRON (at Cromarty)
1st Div: King George V ‒ Ajax ‒ Centurion ‒ Erin
2nd Div: Orion ‒ Monarch ‒ Conqueror ‒ Thunderer
4TH BATTLE SQUADRON
3rd Div: Iron Duke ‒ Royal Oak ‒ Superb ‒ Canada
4th Div: Benbow ‒ Bellerophon ‒ Temeraire ‒ Vanguard
1ST BATTLE SQUADRON
5th Div: Colossus ‒ Collingwood ‒ Neptune ‒ St Vincent
6th Div: Marlborough ‒ Revenge ‒ Hercules ‒ Agincourt
BATTLE CRUISERS
(Temporarily attached, ex Rosyth force)
Invincible ‒ lnflexible ‒ Indomitable
CRUISERS
1ST CRUISER SQUADRON (at Cromarty)
Defence ‒ Warrior ‒ Duke of Edinburgh ‒ Black Prince
2ND CRUISER SQUADRON
Minotaur ‒ Hampshire ‒ Cochrane ‒ Shannon ‒ Bantry*
LIGHT CRUISERS
4TH LIGHT CRUISER SQUADRON:
5 ships, plus 6 temporarily attached
DESTROYERS
4TH FLOTILLA
19 ships
11TH FLOTILLA
16 ships
12TH FLOTILLA
16 ships
(B) AT ROSYTH
BATTLE CRUISER FLEET
(Fleet flagship Lion)
1ST BATTLE CRUISER SQUADRON
Lion – Princess Royal – Queen Mary – Tiger
2ND BATTLE CRUISER SQUADRON
New Zealand – Indefatigable
5TH BATTLE SQUADRON (Queen Elizabeth class battleships)
Barham – Valiant – Warspite – Malaya – Nile*
LIGHT CRUISERS
1ST LIGHT CRUISER SQUADRON
Galatea plus 3
2ND LIGHT CRUISER SQUADRON
Southampton plus 3
3RD LIGHT CRUISER SQUADRON
Falmouth plus 3
DESTROYERS
1ST FLOTILLA
10 ships
9TH FLOTILLA
8 ships
13TH FLOTILLA
12 ships including Lanyard*
* fictional ships
Chapter 1
‘Sub!’
Nick took his eyes off the wilderness of black, grey-flecked sea. It was still dark, but greyer eastward as dawn approached. The glow from the binnacle lit the bony sharpness of his captain’s face.
‘Sir?’
‘What’s the date?’
‘May thirtieth, 1916, sir.’
All destroyer captains were mad. One knew that; everyone did.
‘Sure it’s not the thirty-first?’
‘What’s the displacement of this ship?’
‘Eight hundred and seven tons, sir.’
‘How d’ye know that?’
‘Looked it up, sir.’
‘Devil you did… Where were we built?’
‘Yarrow, sir.’
‘What’s our horsepower, d’ye look that up?’
Sub-Lieutenant Nick Everard, Royal Navy, with salt water streaming down his face, neck and inside his shirt nodded as he grabbed at a stanchion for support. ‘Twenty-four thousand, sir.’ Lanyard lurched, staggered, her stubby bow seeming to catch in a trough of sea like a boot-toe in a furrow; spray rattled against splinter-mattresses lashed to the bridge rail. Nick had forgotten, until now, that the bridge of an eight-hundred-ton torpedo-boat destroyer, when she was steaming head-on into even as moderate a sea as a Force Four wind kicked up, was like the back of a frisky horse only wetter. Mortimer, her captain, spat a lungful of salt water down-wind; he’d appeared on the bridge a few minutes ago wearing a long striped nightgown and a red woollen hat with a bobble on it; he’d looked like something out of a slapstick comedy even before the nightgown had been soaked through, plastered against his tall, angular frame like a long wet bathing-suit. He spat again, and laughed.
‘You’re wrong, Sub! Twenty-four thousand five hundred!’
The inaccuracy seemed to have elated him. Nick stared back, not yet sure of him, wary that what looked like a friendly grin might turn out to be a grimace of fury. One couldn’t be sure of any of these people yet. Nick had joined Lanyard only forty-eight hours ago ‒ he’d been ordered to her suddenly, without any sort of warning, transferred at a moment’s notice from the dreadnought battleship that had housed him for the last two years. It had seemed so unbelievable that there’d had to be some snag in it. In spite of the sensation of relief and escape, he was still ready to find the snag, and meanwhile all his experience of officers senior to himself warned him to be cautious, to look every gift horse in the mouth.
‘Everard’
‘Sir?’
‘My first lieutenant informs me that you have the reputation of being lazy, ignorant and insubordinate. Would you dispute that?’
Nick stared straight ahead at the empty, foam-washed sea. Johnson, Lanyard’s first lieutenant, was a contemporary and friend of Nick’s elder brother David. He was standing behind, and holding on to the binnacle, beside Mortimer and within about three feet of Nick’s own position. You couldn’t be very much farther from each other than that, on a bridge about as large and which seemed just about as solid as a chicken-house roof. Johnson was officer of the watch, and Nick, who lacked as yet a watchkeep
ing certificate, was acting as his dogsbody. In the last few minutes the first lieutenant had been listening to Nick’s exchanges with Mortimer while pretending either not to hear or to have no interest in them.
Nick said stiffly. ‘No, sir.’
‘You don’t dispute it?’
‘I’d rather not contradict the first lieutenant, sir.’
‘Hear that, Number One?’ Johnson nodded, poker-faced. He had a thin, pale face, dark-jowled, needing two shaves a day by the looks of it. Rather a David-type face, Nick thought gloomily. Lanyard had her bow up, scooting along like a duck landing on a pond; Mortimer asked Nick. ‘What’s cordite, when it’s at home?’
‘Blend of nitro-glycerine and nitrocellulose gelatinised with five per cent vaseline, sir.’
‘Vaseline?’
‘Petroleum jelly, sir, to lubricate the bore of the gun.’
‘What’s the average speed of a twenty-one inch White-head torpedo when it’s set for seven thousand yards?’
‘Forty-five knots, sir.’
He was wondering when the difficult questions were going to start. But Mortimer was apparently satisfied, for the time being.
‘Number One!’
Johnson turned to him. ‘Sir.’
‘I suspect you may have been partially misinformed. This officer is neither wholly ignorant nor pathologically insubor-dinate. Only time will tell us whether or not he’s lazy. Give him plenty to do, and if he shirks it kick his arse.’
‘Aye aye, sir…’ Johnson pointed out over the starboard bow. ‘Everard. Fishing vessel there, steering east, bearing steady. What action if any would you take?’
‘Alter course to starboard, sir, until past and clear.’
‘Right. Come here.’
Nick stepped closer.
‘Our course is south fifteen west two hundred and sixty revolutions. Take over the ship.
‘Aye aye, sir.’
‘I’ll be in the chartroom.’ He tapped the starboard voicepipe’s copper rim. ‘This pipe. Let me know the minute we raise May Island.’
Nick watched Johnson and Mortimer leave the bridge together. Things really did seem, so far, to have changed quite strikingly for the better!
Not that one could count on it. Johnson, until he proved otherwise, was an enemy. He’d obey Mortimer’s orders to the letter, but whether or not a man was ‘lazy‘ was a matter for individual interpretation, and ‘kicks’ came in different shapes and sizes. Most disconcerting of all was the fact that this Johnson was a friend of brother David’s who was up in Scapa as navigating officer of the cruiser Bantry. Bright, successful, correct brother David, whom one tried not to let into one’s thoughts too often. Johnson’s decision to leave one up here alone in charge of the watch wasn’t any sign of trust or encouragement. An officer in a destroyer who couldn’t keep a watch was a semi-passenger, leaving a lesser number of watchkeepers on the roster, and since the only way to get a watchkeeping certificate was to acquire experience it was in Johnson’s interests to make sure he got some.
It was in Nick’s too, though ‒ for present convenience, not career reasons. He’d decided long ago that he’d quit the Service when he could. There’d been no point in mentioning it to any one, not even to Sarah, his stepmother, to whom he confided most things. As long as the war lasted, one was stuck; one could only think of it as something that mercifully wouldn’t last for ever. Like a prisoner sitting out a gaol sentence. And in those terms, the events of the past two days had left him feeling like a long-term convict unexpectedly offered parole.
He’d been in his battleship’s gunroom, writing a letter to Sarah, at Mullbergh. She was the only person he ever did write to. He wrote about once a month, and never mentioned the Navy or the war. What would there have been to say about it? There was no action – only pomposity and boredom. Somewhere distant, other men were fighting and being killed.
He wrote a lot about the Magnussons – he’d never told another soul about these Orcadian friends of his ‒ and fishing, and the landscape of the Orkneys, that kind of thing. The Magnusson family and fishing provided the escape which as a midshipman and then junior sub-lieutenant in a battleship in the Grand Fleet he’d so badly needed; escape from boredom drills, bugle-calls, and from such horrors, too as ‘gunroom evolutions’.
Being well able to look after himself physically, he hadn’t suffered much from the bullying rituals which were justified by the word ‘tradition’: but he’d had to witness them, and pretend to take part in them. And they’d be in full swing again now, in the gunroom he’d just left. When he’d been promoted sub-lieutenant and become mess president, he’d stopped it all: but he knew the man who’d taken his place, and there was no doubt the ‘evolutions’ would have been re-established; evolutions such as ‘Angostura Trail’. A midshipman would be blindfolded, forced to his hands and knees and made to follow with his nose a winding trail of Angostura bitters; if he lost the scent, all the others would lay into him. Or ‘Running Torpedoes’, which involved a boy being launched off the gunroom table as hard and fast as his messmates could manage it; if he tried to shield his head or break his fall, he’d be thrashed.
Nick thrashed a sub-lieutenant, once. The evolution had been ‘scuttle drill’. The victim had to haul himself out of one scuttle and swing along the outside of the ship to the next, and pull himself back into the gunroom through it, and only a well-grown midshipman had the length of body or arm-reach for it. The reigning sub-lieutenant was insisting on a particularly small lad ‒ barely fifteen, and undersized ‒ attempting to perform the impossible. The boy was shaking with fright, close to tears, and what broke Nick’s self-control was that in the faces of the other midshipmen, this small one’s friends, he could see the same sadistic excitement as in the sub-lieutenant’s. He grabbed the sub-lieutenant by an arm, swung him round and hit him: within a minute the mess president had been knocked down three times and lost several front teeth.
Midshipman Everard was awarded twelve cuts with a cane, and a dozen more unofficially with a rope’s end, and three months’ stoppage of shore leave. He was also given extra duties which meant that during those three months he had only short periods of sleep and never time to finish a meal. And with that, it was pointed out, he’d been let off lightly; for an attack on a superior officer he could have been court-martialled and dismissed from the Service.
There’d been two possible reasons for the leniency. One was that Nick’s uncle. Hugh Everard, had just returned from the Falklands battle, the destruction of Admiral Graf von Spee’s squadron. Only a week before he hit the sub-lieutenant Midshipman Everard had been summoned to pace the quarterdeck beside his godlike captain, and to listen to a summary of the battle and its results. What it had boiled down to had been that the name of Everard was in favour at that higher level; Nick, the captain told him, had ‘a great deal to live up to’. The other point was that the investigation into what had provoked the assault had established that the little midshipman could not have reached from one scuttle to the other, would therefore have fallen into the Flow, and quite likely might have drowned.
Killed on active service, would his family have been told? So many shams, right from one’s earliest memories. Mullbergh: being woken in that freezing mausoleum of a house with his father’s bellows of anger echoing through its corridors… Sir John Everard was a man of power and influence; Master of his own hounds, magistrate. Deputy Lieutenant of the county. He was a brigadier now, and doubtless he’d come back from France a major-general, covered in medals, even more of a respected figure. With his young wife ‒ Sarah was twenty-eight, closer to his sons’ ages than to his own ‒ at his side. So beautiful and so loved!
Poor, lovely, Sarah…
To whom he’d been starting a letter, two days ago. He’d sat down at the gunroom table which was no longer used as a launching ramp for human torpedoes and he’d got as far as putting the date, 28 May 1916, at the head of the first sheet of paper, when a messenger had arrived to summon him to the ship’
s commander. He’d hurried up two decks, to the senior officers’ cabin flat, and knocked on the wood surround of the commander’s doorway.
‘Sir!’
The commander was three parts bald; his face was dark red and he had ginger hair curling on his cheekbones.
‘You’re leaving us. Everard. Or did you know it already?’
‘Sir?’
The commander growled. ‘The destroyer Lanyard sails for Rosyth tomorrow. You will join her this afternoon. Now.’
Nick failed to understand.
‘Sir, d’you mean I’m taking passage to—’
‘Who the blazes said anything about taking passage?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I—’
‘You are joining Lanyard. You are to report aboard her forthwith. Pack your gear, then present my compliments to the officer of the watch and ask him kindly to provide a boat.’
‘Aye aye, sir!’
This was actually happening…
* * *
When those three months of stopped shore leave were over, he didn’t give the Magnussons any reason for his not having seen them recently. It would have been difficult to explain, something so foreign to them that it wouldn’t have made sense.
They’d probably thought he’d been away at sea and couldn’t speak of it. Ships came, ships went; there were so many of them, and why should the crofters know their names, or care?