Sinking of HMS Ascot

On 10 November 1918, the day before the armistice was signed, the German submarine UB-67 torpedoed the British minesweeper HMS Ascot in the North Sea. The ship sank off the coast of Northumberland in north-east England, near the Farne Islands. None of her crew survived. She was the last Royal Navy ship sunk by the enemy in the First World War and, according to historians of Britain’s heritage protection service, the last vessel anywhere in the world sunk in that war by direct enemy attack. The day before, at the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, the battleship Britannia had sunk; she is sometimes wrongly called the last British warship lost in the war.

Ascot was a paddle steamer, the first of 32 minesweepers of the Racecourse class, named after horse-racing courses. The Admiralty ordered them in 1915 under the wartime shipbuilding programme, because minesweepers had been in short supply since the first days of the war and requisitioned excursion steamers and fishing vessels were being used to clear coastal waters of mines. Built by the Ailsa yard at Troon in Scotland, Ascot, of about 810 tons displacement, entered service in January 1916. The paddle minesweepers had a shallow draught and could therefore work in shallow coastal waters.

On 7 November Ascot left Portsmouth for the minesweeper base at Granton on the Firth of Forth. On 10 November she was found by UB-67, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Hellmuth von Doemming. The submarine had left Heligoland on 25 October to take part in a planned major operation of the High Seas Fleet against the Royal Navy. It never took place, because the sailors refused to put to sea, but the submarines remained on station off the coasts of Britain, where they were allowed to attack warships. According to the Polish historian Andrzej Perepeczko, UB-67 fired a single torpedo while submerged in the evening. Hit, Ascot sank. The wreck lies at a depth of about 60 metres.

The number of dead varies between sources. The Admiralty communiqué spoke of 6 officers and 47 ratings, including two officers and eight men of the merchant navy. British nominal casualty lists and the uboat.net website give 51 dead. The Admiralty announced the loss of the ship only on 20 November, when the war was already over. UB-67 returned to Kiel and on 24 November was handed over to the British. The last victim of the war at sea was the Norwegian steamer Ener, which struck a mine on 11 November near Fair Isle, between Orkney and Shetland.