Wreck of the cruiser Cochrane
- Category:
- Military
- Front:
- War at sea
- Date:
- 14 November 1918
- Author:
- Natalia
- Tags:
- Royal Navy, Great Britain, Russia
On 14 November 1918, three days after the armistice with Germany, the Royal Navy lost the armoured cruiser Cochrane. Not in battle, but on a sandbank. In the morning the ship was steaming in fog along the channel leading to the mouth of the Mersey, towards Liverpool and Birkenhead. At about 7.57 a.m. she ran onto the sandbank of Taylor’s Bank, grounded and soon broke in two. There were more than 700 men on board, but according to all accounts no one was killed.
Cochrane was one of the four Warrior-class armoured cruisers, built at the Fairfield yard in Govan in Scotland and commissioned in 1907. For most of the war she served with the 2nd Cruiser Squadron of the Grand Fleet and took part in the Battle of Jutland. In the spring and summer of 1918 she was stationed at Murmansk, where she supported the Allied forces in northern Russia, and in May she put a landing party ashore at Pechenga. In the autumn she returned to Britain.
According to the report of the subsequent trial, the ship, commanded by Captain James Farie, was going to Liverpool on a port visit and was being piloted by an experienced local pilot, George Sale. The fog was thickening and a strong ebb tide was setting the cruiser off course, yet the pilot did not reduce speed from about 12 knots. Where the channel turned, the heavy ship answered her helm too slowly, failed to clear the reinforced edge of the bank and ran aground.
The Admiralty decided that salvaging the old cruiser was not worth the cost and wrote her off. The wreck was broken up where she lay by June 1919. Captain Farie and the navigating officer, Lieutenant-Commander George Hastings, were court-martialled. According to the press of February 1919 both were found guilty of negligence for failing to stop the pilot from taking the bend too fast, and were reprimanded.
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