Sinking of the Glatton

On 16 September 1918, at about a quarter past six in the evening, an explosion was heard on board the British monitor Glatton, lying in Dover harbour. In the midships magazine for the 6-inch guns cordite had caught fire, and the flames burst through the roof of one of the turrets and began to spread towards the stern. The ship, which had not yet fired a single shot at the enemy, had become a bomb threatening the whole town. Two hours later she lay capsized on the bottom of the harbour, sunk by the torpedoes of British destroyers.

A ship for Norway

The Glatton began life as the coastal defence ship Bjørgvin, ordered by Norway in 1913 from the Armstrong Whitworth yard at Elswick on the Tyne. She was launched on 8 August 1914, a few days after the outbreak of war. The Admiralty requisitioned her together with her sister ship Nidaros, which also joined the Royal Navy as Gorgon, and refunded to the Norwegians the money they had already paid. Construction was suspended in 1915 in favour of more urgent ships and resumed only in September 1917 to a new design, with large anti-torpedo bulges along the hull. Armed with two 9.2-inch and four 6-inch guns, the Glatton was commissioned at the end of August 1918 and arrived at Dover on 11 September. She was to provide fire support for the offensive in Flanders planned for the end of the month.

Torpedoes into their own ship

At the time of the explosion the ship’s captain, Captain Neston Diggle, was walking on the cliffs with the commander of the Dover Patrol, Vice-Admiral Roger Keyes. Both immediately returned to the harbour. Diggle went aboard the burning ship and found only one officer alive, a young surgeon. He took command and ordered the magazine flooding valves to be opened. The forward magazines were flooded, but the valves of the after magazines could not be reached through the fire. There was a danger of an explosion that could destroy a large part of the harbour and the town, all the more so because less than 150 metres away lay the ammunition ship Gransha.

Keyes decided to sink the Glatton. A torpedo was fired at the burning monitor from the destroyer Cossack, but, launched from too close, it failed to explode. The second, at about 7.40 p.m., blew a hole in the side, but its warhead proved too weak to pierce the anti-torpedo bulge and sink the ship. Only at about 8.15 p.m. did the destroyer Myngs hit the same hole with two heavier, 21-inch torpedoes. The Glatton capsized and settled on the bottom of the harbour on her masts and superstructure, and the water put out the fire.

Casualties and the inquiry

Losses were heavy, and the sources give different figures. According to the British historian Paul Kemp, 60 men were killed outright and 124 injured, of whom 19 later died of burns. The Admiralty’s official account spoke of 79 killed and 105 injured. The Royal Navy casualty lists of the following weeks are full of the names of Glatton sailors who died in hospital. Among the rescuers the ship’s surgeon Edward Atkinson, a member of Robert Scott’s Antarctic expedition, distinguished himself. Although the explosion stunned and burned him and left him almost blind, he carried several wounded men out of the fire. He was awarded the Albert Medal for this.

The board of inquiry established that the explosion began in the midships magazine, located between the boiler room and the engine room. The stokers were in the habit of dumping hot clinker from the boilers against the bulkhead adjoining the magazine to let it cool. In April 1919 the board concluded that the cause was the slow smouldering of the cork insulation of the magazine walls, which finally ignited the cordite. The wreck of the Glatton was partly broken up in 1926 and moved to a corner of the harbour, and later buried during the construction of a ferry terminal.