Explosion of the battleship Vanguard

At 11.20 p.m. on 9 July 1917, in the main anchorage of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, the battleship Vanguard blew up. A series of explosions tore apart the middle of the ship, which sank almost instantly. 843 of the 845 men then aboard were killed. It was the deadliest of a series of internal explosions that destroyed British warships in their own harbours during this war.

Vanguard was a St Vincent-class dreadnought, launched in 1909 at the Vickers yard in Barrow-in-Furness and commissioned in March 1910. Armed with ten 12-inch (305 mm) guns, by 1917 she was no longer among the fleet’s most modern ships. She had served with the Grand Fleet since the beginning of the war, and at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916 she sailed in the battle line of the 4th Battle Squadron and fired, among other targets, at the crippled German cruiser Wiesbaden, without being damaged herself. She was commanded by Captain James Dick.

The disaster

It was an ordinary day. In the morning, while the ship lay off the northern shore of the bay, the crew practised abandoning ship. At five in the afternoon Vanguard moved to her station in the fleet anchorage and at 6.30 p.m. dropped anchor. According to the court of inquiry, nobody noticed anything alarming. Witnesses on neighbouring ships first saw a flame shooting up from below deck just abaft the foremast. After a short moment came a huge explosion, which threw an enormous mass of wreckage into the air in the area of the midships turrets, followed at once by a second. The ship vanished in smoke. Debris rained down on ships anchored nearby. A piece of steel plate measuring nearly two metres by one and a half fell on the deck of the battleship Bellerophon.

Boats from the ships, the first of them from the Australian cruiser Sydney, pulled only three living men from the water: Lieutenant-Commander Alan Duke, Royal Marine Private J. Williams and Stoker Frederick Cox. Duke soon died of his injuries. Captain Dick and almost the entire crew were killed. Among the dead were also two Australian stokers from Sydney who were serving a period of detention aboard Vanguard, and a Japanese observer, Commander Etō Kyōsuke, attached to the ship in August 1916 under the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Several officers who had been at a concert on another ship that evening survived. The bodies that were recovered were buried in the naval cemetery at Lyness on the island of Hoy.

The inquiry

Admiral David Beatty, commander of the Grand Fleet, set up a court of inquiry under Rear-Admiral W. C. M. Nicholson as early as 10 July. Its report of 30 July indicated that the first explosion had occurred in the magazine of one of the midships turrets. The two surviving sailors could say little, so the court questioned Vanguard’s officers who had been away from the ship at the time and officers of other battleships. It uncovered many failings throughout the fleet: magazine temperatures were measured differently in every ship, dust and rags lay in the ventilation ducts, and in Vanguard coal bags were kept in unventilated stores adjoining one of the magazines. The court concluded that spontaneous combustion might have occurred there, heating a bulkhead without anyone noticing. It also drew attention to the fact that Vanguard’s cordite had been landed for testing in December 1916, and that this matter needed further investigation.

In the end the court listed four possible causes: ignition of cordite from some avoidable cause, an abnormal distribution of a charge that had unnoticeably been badly stored, spontaneous ignition of unstable cordite, or the work of an enemy agent. It noted that Bulwark, Natal and Vanguard had all been Chatham-manned ships, but considered this “a curious coincidence”. No one was blamed. Later studies regard as the most likely cause the spontaneous ignition of overheated or decomposed cordite, which spread from a fire in a secondary-armament magazine to the main magazines.

The wreck of Vanguard still lies on the bottom of Scapa Flow, torn into pieces. After the war she was partly broken up for scrap, and since 1984 she has been a protected war grave on which diving is prohibited.