Shelling of Seaham

On the evening of 11 July 1916, at about 10.20 p.m., the German submarine UB-39 surfaced less than 400 metres from the harbour entrance at Seaham on the coast of County Durham in north-east England. Its crew opened fire with the deck gun towards the town and the colliery. According to the war diary of the 4th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, which was then guarding the coast, the shelling lasted a few minutes and between 20 and 40 shells fell. At about 10.30 p.m. the boat made off to the south-east. Local accounts speak of 32 or 39 shells and of a bombardment lasting about twenty minutes.

A coal port under fire

Seaham Harbour was a port from which coal from the County Durham pits was shipped, lying about 10 kilometres south of Sunderland. UB-39 was a small boat of the UB II type from the Flanders Flotilla, operating from the ports of occupied Belgium. She was commanded by Werner Fürbringer, later one of the better-known German submarine commanders. The day before, the boat had stopped and sunk a trawler 45 nautical miles east of the mouth of the Tyne, and in the following days she sank fishing boats in the waters off Whitby. According to the British diary, the targets of the shelling were a military camp, a wireless station and Seaham Colliery. Fürbringer later claimed that he had fired at an ironworks.

Most of the shells fell on fields beyond the town, some as much as a mile and a half inland. A few, however, hit buildings. One shell pierced the wall of a house in Doctor Street in New Seaham, passed through the kitchen, where the housewife was, and came to rest by the front door. It injured no one. Another hit a wagon of timber in a siding, and several broke windows. As she made off, the submarine fired a dozen or so more shells from the sea off Hawthorn Hive, towards the village of Murton, but these did no damage. According to the battalion diary, no military property was damaged.

The only victim

A shell that burst within the colliery grounds badly wounded with splinters in the face, arm and head 35-year-old Mary Slaughter, the wife of a blacksmith from Hebburn on the Tyne. She had come to Seaham to visit her cousin and was just crossing the colliery yard with her. She was taken to hospital in Sunderland, where she died the next morning. Two boys were also slightly wounded.

It was one of the few submarine attacks on the British mainland itself. Greater casualties had been caused by the bombardment of Scarborough and Hartlepool by German battlecruisers in December 1914, and in the summer of 1915 U-24 had shelled the coking works at Lowca in Cumbria. A submarine’s deck gun could not destroy a port, but the shelling reminded the people of the coast that the war could come to them at any moment. A memento of the attack is a shell recovered by soldiers of the Durham battalion and bearing a commemorative inscription, which is now part of the regiment’s collection of memorabilia.