Shelling of Scarborough (1917)

Early in the evening of 4 September 1917, at about 6.45 p.m., a German submarine surfaced a few kilometres off the seaside resort of Scarborough in Yorkshire and opened fire with its deck gun. The shelling lasted about ten minutes. Three people were killed and five or six wounded. It was not the first time the townspeople had come under fire from the sea. In December 1914 Scarborough had been shelled by German battlecruisers, which killed more than a dozen people.

A boat from the North Sea

The attacker was UB-21, a small coastal submarine of the UB II type, commanded since November 1916 by Oberleutnant zur See Franz Walther. The boat knew these waters. In July it had landed two men near Robin Hood’s Bay who were to damage the railway line near Whitby, but they lost their way and were captured. According to witnesses, on 4 September the boat surfaced about three miles from the shore, in Cayton Bay, towards Filey. Local historians suppose that its target was the minesweepers lying in the town’s South Bay.

Accounts differ as to the number of shells. According to the first reports, the boat fired 30 rounds, about half of which fell on land and half into the sea. Other accounts speak of a dozen or so shells. Most, as it later turned out, fell into the water. Several, however, struck houses in the northern part of the town, on Hoxton Road, Queen’s Terrace and Pavilion Square, and near the Rose and Crown inn. In one of the houses on Hoxton Road not a single piece of furniture in a room was left intact.

The victims

Shell fragments killed three people. On Hoxton Road 39-year-old Elizabeth Scott, a policeman’s wife, was killed. Near the Rose and Crown inn 64-year-old cabinet-maker Thomas Temple Pickup was gravely wounded and died on the way to hospital. The third victim was Lance Corporal J. W. Parry from Manchester, wounded above the South Bay, who died in hospital. Among the wounded was 17-year-old Alice Appleby, seriously wounded in the leg.

After a few minutes the minesweepers returned fire and headed towards the submarine, which dived and made off. The coroner holding the inquest into the deaths said that the Germans believed that murdering children, women and old men would so terrify England that she would want a dishonourable peace. Some thousand townspeople later gathered on the pier to show their sympathy for the victims’ families. The shelling was a minor episode of the submarine war, but it reminded the inhabitants of the coast, as the shelling of Seaham had earlier, that the war could come to them at any moment. A few days later Walther took command of the new boat UB-75, with which in December 1917 he was lost with all hands on mines off the Yorkshire coast.