Dover in the First World War

Dover, a port in the county of Kent facing French Calais, lay at the narrowest point of the Strait of Dover and during the war was one of the most important military centres in Britain. The ships of the Dover Patrol were based in its harbour, the wounded came back from France across its quays, and the town itself, the nearest to the coast of occupied Belgium, became a target for German aircraft, airships and warships. In 1918 the ships of the Dover Patrol carried out the Zeebrugge Raid, the most famous action of the British navy in this war.

A fortress on the strait

The Admiralty began turning Dover into a great artificial naval harbour in 1898. The Admiralty Harbour, sheltered by breakwaters, was opened on 15 October 1909 as a base of the Royal Navy at the southern end of the North Sea. Above the town stood the medieval castle, still held by the army, and on the heights on either side of the harbour stood large barracks.

When Britain entered the war on 4 August 1914, Dover was turned into a fortress. The town could be entered only by rail and by three main roads, and passes were needed to come in or go out. The military could arrest and search, and the local newspapers were subject to military censorship. In 1914 a naval signal station was set up in a battery within the castle grounds; it controlled the movement of ships in the harbour and gave warning of enemy ships and aircraft. Dover became a military port, and civilian traffic across the Channel passed to neighbouring Folkestone.

On 13 August the first aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps flew from Dover to France. In the autumn, after the fall of Antwerp, the remnants of the Naval Division came back to the town from Ostend on 11 October, and on 12 October Rear-Admiral Horace Hood took command of the Dover Patrol.

Base of the Dover Patrol

For four years the harbour was home to the patrol, a mixed collection of destroyers, monitors, trawlers and drifters that guarded the barrages in the strait and fought off the raids of German torpedo boats from Flanders (their story is told on the page of the Strait of Dover). Monitors also sailed from the harbour to bombard the Belgian coast. Guns and searchlights stood at the harbour entrance, and gunners lived on the breakwaters.

Dover was also a haven for the wounded. The Dover Marine railway station on the widened Admiralty Pier opened on 2 February 1915 and throughout the war handled the ambulance trains carrying the wounded from the Western Front. Yet the waters off Dover were not safe. On 17 November 1915 the hospital ship Anglia, sailing with wounded from France to Dover, struck a mine, and on 27 February 1916 the liner Maloja sank on a mine at the harbour entrance.

On 16 September 1918 a magazine caught fire in the monitor Glatton inside the harbour itself. So that an explosion would not wreck the harbour and the town, Vice-Admiral Keyes had the ship sunk by torpedoes from his own destroyers.

Bombs and shells

Its closeness to occupied Belgium meant that Dover came to know the war from the air earlier than the rest of England. On 21 December 1914 a seaplane from Zeebrugge dropped two bombs into the sea by the Admiralty Pier, which was counted as the first German air raid on England. On Christmas Eve a bomb from a second aircraft of the same kind fell in a garden near the castle. It was the first aerial bomb dropped on land in England. In August 1915 the anti-aircraft guns over Dover hit the airship L 12.

On 2 September 1917 German bombers attacked the town at night without any warning, which the British official historian regarded as the start of the night raids by aeroplanes on England. Just after midnight on 16 February 1918 Dover was shelled from the sea. A thirteen-year-old girl was killed and seven people were wounded.

According to local records, 113 air raids were counted in the Dover district by the end of the war. 184 aerial bombs and 23 shells from German warships fell on the town, and 23 people were killed in these attacks. The inhabitants sheltered from the bombs and shells in caves in the chalk cliffs and in dugouts.

Zeebrugge and remembrance

On 1 January 1918 Vice-Admiral Roger Keyes took command at Dover. Just after midnight on 23 April the ships of the Dover Patrol struck at the ports of Flanders, Zeebrugge and Ostend, to block the exits used by the U-boats.

Nine men killed in the raid were buried in St James’s Cemetery in Dover. In 1943 Keyes was made Baron Keyes of Zeebrugge and Dover, and after his death he was laid to rest beside his sailors. In 1921 an obelisk to the Dover Patrol was raised at St Margaret’s Bay, near the town, and a second memorial stands on the French side, on Cap Blanc-Nez.