Sinking of HMS Campania

On the morning of 5 November 1918 the British seaplane carrier HMS Campania sank in the Firth of Forth. She lay at anchor in the roads off Burntisland, on the northern shore of the firth, among the ships of the Grand Fleet, which had been based at nearby Rosyth since April 1918. A sudden, very violent squall tore the ship from her position and her anchor began to drag along the bottom. Campania struck the bow of the battleship Royal Oak, and then scraped along the side of the battlecruiser Glorious.

The collision with Royal Oak tore open the hull. Water flooded the engine room and the ship lost electrical power. Campania began to settle by the stern and sank after about five hours. The whole crew was taken off by nearby vessels; no one was killed. An Admiralty inquiry found the officer of the watch chiefly to blame, for failing to order the second anchor dropped when the ship began to drift.

Campania was a former passenger liner of the Cunard Line, built in 1892 by the Fairfield yard in Glasgow for the Liverpool–New York service. From 1893, as RMS Campania, she was one of the fastest ships on the Atlantic and won the Blue Riband. In the autumn of 1914 she was sold for scrap, but in November the Admiralty bought her back, and the Cammell Laird yard at Birkenhead converted her into a seaplane ship. She was commissioned in April 1915. A flying-off deck, later lengthened, was built over the bow, from which aircraft took off on wheeled trolleys. She was one of the first ships in the world from which aircraft took off from a deck rather than only from the water, and an important step on the road to the aircraft carrier.

Campania saw almost no action. When the Grand Fleet left Scapa Flow on 30 May 1916 to meet the German fleet, the ship did not receive the signal to sail, put to sea late and was sent back, so she took no part in the Battle of Jutland. Her worn-out engines could not keep up with the fleet, so she served mainly for training airmen and as a base for observation balloons. She sank six days before the end of the war. The wreck, broken up with explosives after the war, lies at a depth of more than 20 metres and is today a protected monument. According to the Scottish heritage service, she is the only aviation ship of the First World War not to have been completely destroyed.