Act of Remembrance to the Victims of HMS Royal Oak

HMS Royal Oak was built at Devonport Dockyard being laid down on 15 January 1914, launched on 17 November 1914 and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 1 May 1916. A battleship of the Revenge class, and with a standard displacement of 29,150 tons, she was armed with 4 x twin 15 inch guns, 12 x 6 inch guns, 4 x 2.5 inch guns, 16 x anti-aircraft guns and 4 x 21 inch torpedo tubes. At the time of her launch, she was one of the Navy’s largest units and most impressive ships.

She saw action in the latter half of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War (when she was tasked with “non intervention patrols” of the Iberian Peninsula but was attacked by both Republican and Nationalist forces!) and the very early part of the Second World War when she was attached to the Home Fleet. Between the wars she was attached to the Mediterranean Fleet and became infamous in 1928 as the ship which experienced what the press of the day dubbed “The Royal Oak Mutiny”. It was hardly a mutiny, more a trifling argument between the Captain and Executive Officer (respectively Captain Kenneth Dewar and Commander Henry Daniel) of Royal Oak and their Flag Officer (Rear Admiral Bernard Collard) about the provision of a dance band for a wardroom dance. It escalated into a bitter personal feud and lead to all three being relieved of their posts, to the Courts Martial of Dewar and Daniel and to Daniel and Collard being prematurely released from the service. Dewar alone kept his job but he was subsequently appointed to a series of minor commands and was promoted to Rear Admiral one day before he retired in 1929.

HMS Royal Oak was at anchor at Scapa Flow when war was declared on 3 September 1939. By then she was obsolete – later additions to her armament and armour had slowed her considerably and she was barely able to keep up with newer ships when she joined the hunt for the German battlecruiser Gneisenau in October 1939 in the North Sea. She limped back into Scapa Flow in Orkney with storm damage. In early October German reconnaissance planes were noted scutinising Scapa Flow. Its location and aspect, a large lagoon in the centre of the Orkney Islands, had made it ideal as a secure anchorage for British warships in the First World War. With the hasty addition of block ships and floating booms as makeshift defences, Scapa Flow was returned to its former role of secure anchorage for elements of the Home Fleet in the early months of World War 2. The German reconnaissance flights caused the Admiralty to suspect an air raid on the anchorage and Home Fleet Admiral, Charles Forbes, ordered the bulk of the fleet there to disperse to better protected ports. Royal Oak was however left in Scapa Flow because of her superior anti aircraft defences – a useful addition to an otherwise poorly defended anchorage.

On the night of 13 / 14 October 1939, and after a couple of false starts which lead to a brief grounding and entanglement in a boom wire, German U Boat U-47, under the command of Kapitanleutnant Gunther Prien (who had been hand-picked by Admiral Donitz for the job) entered Scapa Flow under cover of darkness. The mission was deemed as so dangerous, every man in the crew was a volunteer. At the entrance to Scapa Flow, Prien stopped the boat and addressed his crew and again reminded them they were volunteers. He added he would release any man with second thoughts into a boat before the raid they were about to undertake. Not a man left his post. When they finally found the way round the defences and into Scapa Flow, the anchorage was virtually empty and he missed the chance to attack the Navy’s newest cruiser HMS Belfast (now a museum ship on the Thames) which was present. Eventually he spotted the elderly HMS Royal Oak and attacked with torpedoes twice. The first attack damaged the bows and severed the anchor cable but the second attack was devastating – all three torpedoes hit her midships on the starboard side, ignited a magazine and she rolled over, and sank with the loss of 833 souls (from a total crew of 1,234) in 13 minutes. Of those who died, virtually the entire complement of ship’s boy seamen (between 15 and 18 although some were suspected of being even younger) were killed.

Prien and the crew of U-47 escaped and returned as heroes to Germany. He was nicknamed the “Bull of Scapa Flow” and feted in Berlin by the German High Command including The Fuhrer. However, U-47, Gunther Prien and his entire crew were lost on 7 March 1941 whilst attacking a convoy to the west of Ireland.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill told Parliament about the loss on 17 October and conceded the raid had been a “remarkable exploit of professional skill and daring”. In the ensuing debate he had to defend the practice of sending boys to sea in the Royal Navy but it was discontinued very shortly afterwards. For the remainder of the War, boys under 18 years of age were only sent into active service in very exceptional circumstances.

Shortly after the raid, the wreck (which lies virtually upside down in very shallow water and can be seen beneath the calm waters of Scapa Flow) was marked by a green marker buoy and designated as a War Grave. Every year the Royal Navy replaces the White Ensign on the wreck as a mark of respect and a permanent memorial is maintained in St Magnus Cathedral in nearby Kirkwall. The memorial includes a book of remembrance listing the names, ranks and dates of birth of all the victims. A page of this book, which can be seen under a perspex cover, is turned every week and last time I visited a couple of years ago, one of the pages listing the Boy Seamen was displayed which brought home to me the even greater tragedy of such a high loss of young lives.

Following the sinking, the Admiral commanding Shetland & Orkney, Admiral Sir Wilfred French, was personally censured in the Admiralty Board Report for the lack of defences around Scapa Flow. This was perceived by many as a whitewash as French had warned the previous year about how the defences laid Scapa Flow open to an attack by submarine. In making his point he volunteered to personally take a submarine or small ship through the defences into the anchorage. In any event he was immediately retired. Churchill personally ordered the defences around Scapa Flow to be improved. The entrances to the east were sealed with concrete causeways which were laid between many of the islands and the Orcadian Mainland. The causeways, which subsequently became known as the Churchill Barriers, were largely built with the use of Italian prisoners of war who were incarcerated on nearby island, Lamb Holm. Whilst imprisoned there (actually in so-called camp 60) the PoWs fashioned an exquisite chapel which remains to this day – known as the Italian Chapel, it is the only part of the PoW camp that remains to this day and can be visited from Hebridean Princess in Kirkwall. The Churchill Barriers remain in place to this day – they form part of the road infrastructure of the area and carry the A961 between the various islands to the east of Scapa Flow. Again, they can be visited from Hebridean Princess in Kirkwall

On 23 July this year, Captain Brian Larcombe stopped Hebridean Princess close to the site of the sinking and he and Chief Purser Charles Carroll, accompanied by other crew members and all passengers, conducted a brief Act of Remembrance and laid a wreath on the waters in memory of the 833 men and boys who lost their lives so tragically that night in 1939. The focal point of the ceremony was the Captain reading the words of “Ode to the Fallen” from Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen” “...they shall not grow old...”

Written by Mike Deegan, Group Operations Director

Hebridean Princess visits the Orkneys including Scapa Flow (for visits to the Churchill Barriers and Italian Chapel) and Kirkwall (for visit to St Magnus Cathedral) on the following 2012 cruises:

27 June to 6 July 2012: North to Orkney (Oban to Invergordon)
6 July to 15 July 2012: The Northern Isles (Invergordon to Invergordon)
15 July to 24 July 2012: Home From the North (Invergordon to Oban)

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