Sinking of HMS Drake

On the morning of 2 October 1917 the British armoured cruiser Drake was returning from the Atlantic after escorting convoy HH 24, one of the regular convoys sailing from Hampton Roads in Virginia to Britain. Off the northern coast of Ireland the convoy split into groups bound for different ports, and the destroyers escorting it departed. Drake sailed on alone. A few miles from Rathlin Island in the North Channel she was hit by a torpedo from a submarine that no one on board had seen.

Drake was a distinguished but by then obsolete ship. She had been launched in 1901 at the naval dockyard in Pembroke and gave her name to a class of four large armoured cruisers. The same class included Good Hope, which was lost with all hands at the Battle of Coronel. The ship displaced about 14,000 tons and carried two 234 mm guns and sixteen 152 mm guns. Before the war her commanders included the future commander of the Grand Fleet, John Jellicoe. In the first year of the war Drake served in a cruiser squadron of the Grand Fleet, and later on the North America and West Indies station. In 1916 she hunted the German raider Möwe in the Atlantic. In the summer of 1917, when the regular convoy service began, she became one of the cruisers escorting convoys across the ocean.

The torpedo struck a boiler room. Water flooded part of the boiler rooms and engine rooms, and the ship took on a list and lost her steam steering. Eighteen men were killed, according to the naval casualty list almost all of them stokers and engine-room ratings working below deck. The ship’s captain, Captain S. H. Radcliffe, found, however, that Drake could still steam under her own power, and decided to make for the sheltered Church Bay on Rathlin Island. He called up by wireless the destroyers from which he had just parted. According to the British official history of the war at sea, within a little over an hour eight destroyers were alongside the cruiser, followed by four sloops. They formed an anti-submarine screen around her. On the way the damaged Drake, manoeuvring with difficulty, collided with the steamer Mendip Range, which then had to be beached to avoid sinking.

At about noon Drake anchored in Church Bay, but her list was increasing rapidly. It was decided to abandon ship, and the crew were taken off by the destroyer Martin and the sloop Delphinium. In the afternoon the cruiser capsized and settled on the bottom of the bay at a depth of a dozen or so metres. The attacker was U-79, a large minelaying submarine commanded by Kapitänleutnant Otto Rohrbeck. During the same patrol it had laid mines in the strait between Rathlin and the Irish coast, and that day they claimed further victims. The steamer Lugano, sailing from America to Liverpool, struck a mine and sank; her crew survived. The destroyer Brisk, one of the ships sent to help the cruiser, also struck a mine. She stayed afloat and two trawlers towed her to Lough Foyle, but more than thirty sailors were killed on board, more than on the cruiser itself.

A court martial found that Captain Radcliffe had been entitled to sail on alone, because his orders required it. According to Newbolt, however, the judges made it clear that the cruiser should have been given her own escort. There were not enough ships for that: that day all the destroyers and sloops from the Buncrana base were escorting convoys, and some were under repair. The Admiralty nevertheless at once ordered that two destroyers be given to each of the cruisers escorting the next convoys the following day. In October the British lost two more ocean escort ships which, like Drake, were as defenceless against submarines as the merchant ships they were escorting. The wreck of Drake still lies in Church Bay and is a popular diving site.