Hospital ship Glenart Castle damaged

On the evening of 1 March 1917 the British hospital ship Glenart Castle was sailing from Le Havre to Southampton with wounded and sick soldiers from the front in France. At about 11.40 p.m., some 8 nautical miles north-west of the Owers lightship, stationed off Selsey Bill on the Sussex coast, a mine exploded under the ship’s stern on the starboard side. The British chronology of the war noted briefly that the ship had been damaged by a mine “between Havre and Southampton”.

The Glenart Castle was a passenger steamer of about 6,800 gross register tons, built in 1900 by Harland and Wolff in Belfast as the Galician for the Union Line, which soon became part of the Union-Castle Line. She sailed to South Africa. In the first weeks of the war she was stopped in the Atlantic by a German warship, whose officers examined her papers, took prisoner two army officers travelling aboard and let the steamer go on her way. In the autumn of 1914 she was converted into a hospital ship and given a new name.

After the explosion the engines were stopped. It turned out that the watertight doors to the engine room had buckled and could not be closed, and water was flooding the boiler room and one of the holds. The captain ordered the ship to be abandoned. According to surviving accounts, by about 12.50 a.m. all the patients – about 520 people, some 300 of them stretcher cases – as well as the medical staff and almost all of the 115-man crew had transferred to the boats and to trawlers that came alongside. Destroyers and tugs also helped. No one was killed or injured. The sea was exceptionally calm, so the damaged ship could be towed to Portsmouth.

The mines on this route were laid by German submarine minelayers from Flanders. According to lists of losses inflicted by submarines (including uboat.net), the mine that the Glenart Castle struck had been laid by UC-65, commanded by Otto Steinbrinck, one of the most successful German submarine commanders. Some studies point to another boat, UC-45. Hospital ships in the English Channel were particularly at risk at the time. A month earlier the Germans had announced that they would no longer tolerate hospital ships in the waters between Britain and France, claiming that the Allies were using them to carry troops and ammunition. Over the following weeks further hospital ships were torpedoed in these waters.

The Glenart Castle was repaired and returned to service in November 1917. She did not survive the war: on 26 February 1918, sailing from Newport to Brest to collect wounded, she was torpedoed in the Bristol Channel by the German submarine UC-56. About 150 people were killed, including all the nurses.