Sinking of the hospital ship Anglia

On 17 November 1915, shortly after noon, the British hospital ship Anglia, carrying wounded soldiers from France to Dover, struck a mine in the English Channel, about a mile east of Folkestone Gate, not far from Folkestone. The ship sank in about a quarter of an hour. Between about 130 and more than 160 people died, most of them wounded and sick soldiers. The mine had been laid by the German submarine minelayer UC-5.

Anglia was a fast passenger steamer, built in 1899–1900 at the Denny yard in Dumbarton, Scotland, for the London and North Western Railway. Before the war she sailed between Holyhead in Wales and Ireland. In 1914 the Admiralty requisitioned her as an armed boarding steamer, and in 1915 she was converted into a hospital ship. Only two weeks earlier, on 1 November, she had carried across the Channel King George V, who had fallen from his horse and been seriously injured while inspecting troops in France.

The disaster

According to the War Office communiqué there were 13 wounded and sick officers and 372 men on board, plus the crew, doctors, orderlies and nurses. At the coroner’s inquest it was said that there had been nearly 500 people aboard, including about 160 cot cases. The explosion occurred on the port side forward of the bridge. The bridge was destroyed and Captain Lionel Manning was thrown onto a lower deck. He survived, pulled unconscious from the water. Anglia went down by the bow, and her stern rose so high that the propellers were turning in the air. Many of the seriously wounded, lying in cots below deck, did not manage to get out.

Ships in the vicinity came to help: torpedo boat TB 4, the gunboat Hazard, the destroyer Ure and other vessels. One of them came right up under the stern of the sinking ship so that soldiers could jump onto its deck. The collier Lusitania, which lowered her boats to help the survivors, herself struck a mine and sank, but her crew was saved. Survivors told journalists of nurses who gave their lifebelts to the wounded and refused to get into the boats before the soldiers.

The victims

The number of victims varies from source to source. The first reports from Dover spoke of 85 dead. According to lists published later in “The Times”, about 164 people died in all: a nurse, 9 orderlies of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 4 officers, 125 other ranks and NCOs, and 25 members of the crew. The figure most often cited today is 134 victims. The King, an official communiqué said, was shocked by the news that the ship that had recently carried him across the Channel had sunk.

According to the press of the time, this was the first disaster of the war to befall a British hospital ship with wounded on board. A year earlier the Rohilla had been wrecked in a storm off Whitby, but she had then only been on her way to collect wounded. Public opinion was all the more shaken because the waters of the Channel had been considered safe. Although since the spring the Dover Strait barrage had deterred the larger U-boats, the small UC I-type minelayers of the Flanders Flotilla, operating from Zeebrugge, had been slipping into the area of Dover, Folkestone and Boulogne since August 1915. Each of them carried 12 mines. UC-5, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Herbert Pustkuchen, was the first of them to enter the Channel. By the end of her service UC-5’s mines had sunk about 30 ships, and Anglia was her most tragic victim.