Wreck of the cruiser Argyll

In the early hours of 28 October 1915, at about 4.30 a.m., the British armoured cruiser Argyll ran in a storm onto the submerged Bell Rock, also known as the Inchcape Rock, off the east coast of Scotland. The reef lies in the North Sea, about 18 kilometres from the port of Arbroath, opposite the mouth of the Firth of Tay. For more than a hundred years a lighthouse had stood on it, but that night it was dark. The ship could no longer be saved, but her entire crew of about 600 men survived.

The dark lighthouse

Argyll, a Devonshire-class ship launched in 1904, belonged to a cruiser squadron of the Grand Fleet. She was returning from a refit at the Devonport dockyard and, according to the British official history, was bound for the base at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth. The first edition of that history stated that she was bound for Scapa Flow; the revised edition of 1940 speaks of Rosyth. She was commanded by Captain James Tancred.

During the war the lighthouses on the east coast of Britain were extinguished so as not to help German submarines navigate. They were lit only on special orders from the navy, when the navy’s own ships were due to pass nearby. On 27 October a request was sent for the light on the Bell Rock to be lit, because Argyll was to pass that way that night. The lighthouse, however, had no radio. It communicated with the shore only by visual signals from the signal station at Arbroath, or by boat. The attempts to pass on the message failed, and the night was stormy, with a strong south-easterly wind and poor visibility. No one informed the ship, whose crew expected to see the light. Argyll ran onto the reef, tore open her bottom over a considerable length and caught fire.

The rescue

Two destroyers of the 1st Flotilla from Rosyth, Hornet and Jackal, which had been patrolling the sea nearby during the night, were sent to the wrecked cruiser. They arrived at dawn. Argyll was stuck fast on the rocks on the north-western side of the reef, bows to the wind. Hornet’s commander, Barry Bingham, described after the war how the shallows gave little shelter from the waves, and Tancred feared that the ship might break up at any moment. Lowering boats in the heavy sea would have taken too long, so Bingham decided on a risky manoeuvre. After several attempts he brought the destroyer’s bows up to the cruiser’s stern, and Argyll’s sailors jumped onto her deck in groups of ten or twenty each time a wave brought the two ships together.

When there were about 500 men on Hornet’s deck, Bingham decided he could take no more. The rest were taken off by boat by Jackal, commanded by John Tovey. No one was killed or seriously injured. Hornet paid for it with bent and holed bow plates and spent the following week in the dockyard. Both destroyer commanders later had great careers: Bingham received the Victoria Cross for the Battle of Jutland, and Tovey commanded the British Home Fleet in the Second World War.

The wreck

The sea quickly broke up Argyll. The navy removed the guns and everything of value from the wreck, and salvagers took apart the rest of the hull. The remains still lie on the reef at a depth of a dozen or so metres and are visited by divers. The British official history counted the loss of Argyll as one of two disasters that seriously weakened the Grand Fleet’s cruiser squadrons at the end of 1915. The other was the magazine explosion in the cruiser Natal in Cromarty harbour at the end of December.