Shelling of Dover

Just after midnight on 16 February 1918 the inhabitants of Dover were woken by gunfire from the sea. The bombardment lasted three minutes at most. According to the records of the Dover Museum, 22 shells fell on the town, of which sixteen or seventeen hit houses and other buildings, mostly in their unoccupied parts. One person was killed and seven were wounded. A British chronology of the war and the British government attributed the attack to a German submarine.

The worst damage was to a house on Cowgate Hill, a steep little street below the Western Heights. Ellen Surrell lived there with four children from her first marriage, while her husband served as a stoker in the battleship King George V. Woken by the firing, the mother ran upstairs to the children’s bedroom and had just picked up her youngest son when a shell pierced the wall of the house next door and exploded in the room. Thirteen-year-old Gertrude Boorman died soon after being taken to hospital. Her fifteen-year-old brother William was seriously wounded in the leg, which was later amputated, and the younger children, eleven-year-old Amelia and nine-year-old Sydney, suffered lighter wounds. A neighbour was also slightly wounded, and one of the shells hit the roof of the infirmary of the local workhouse. The damage was estimated at a little over a thousand pounds. On the girl’s grave in St Mary’s cemetery it was inscribed that she was killed by a bombardment from a German submarine.

It is not known for certain who shelled the town. British sources do not give the number of the submarine. The large submarine U-155, sometimes suspected, was then far to the south. That same day it sank an Italian steamer south-west of Cape St Vincent off the coast of Portugal. According to accounts gathered by researchers of Dover’s history, some witnesses outside the harbour breakwater claimed that the firing came from a destroyer, not a submarine. It is also known that during the night of 15–16 February German torpedo boats from Flanders entered the Strait of Dover, sent to reconnoitre after the raid of the previous night. The available sources, however, do not connect them with the shelling of the town.

Dover, the main base of the British forces guarding the strait, had been a target of attacks before. Most often it was bombed by airships and aeroplanes, and from the autumn of 1917 also by night bombers. Bombardments from the sea were rare. In April 1917 German torpedo boats fired towards Dover, but according to local records only one shell fell on the town on that occasion. By the end of the war 23 shells from enemy ships had fallen on the town, almost all of them on the night of 16 February 1918.

On 20 February in the House of Commons the MP Arthur Lynch asked how it was possible that German surface ships and submarines were attacking successfully in the Channel right off Dover. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, Thomas Macnamara, declined to give details. He admitted that the “hurried visit” of German destroyers on Friday morning and the submarine attack on Saturday morning had cost the lives of men from the drifters, the death of a child in Dover and wounds to seven other people. He added, however, that on a dark night, with very poor visibility, such attacks could not be entirely prevented, even with complete command of the sea.