CHAPTER VIII
Before the Great War the number of concerns specializing in salvage work were so few that probably all could be numbered on the fingers of both hands. Sweden had a fine salvage unit at Stockholm, a Danish company worked from Copenhagen, Germany possessed a very powerful salvage plant, while perhaps half a dozen salvage concerns operated in British waters, the most important being the Liverpool Salvage Association, the London Salvage Association and the famous firm of Henry Ensor, at Queenstown in Ireland.
In the number of marine salvage units she could muster, Great Britain was thus particularly fortunate. The dangers of our coasts have long been regarded as a drawback, yet in time of crisis they proved a blessing in disguise, for the yearly toll of wrecks on our shores has provided fine experience for our salvage experts and made them second to none in the world.
When the Germans hurled their challenge at humanity, all the salvage concerns operating in Great Britain were at once taken over by the Admiralty and placed under the command of Commodore F. W. Young. For long Commodore Young had acted as chief salvage officer to the Liverpool Salvage Association, and forty years’ experience of raising wrecks had given him a knowledge of the subject that was unique. Wandering round our shores in storm and shine, fighting to get ships off the rocks, struggling to save their cargoes, he learned to know our rugged coast better than the average man knows the lines on the palm of his hand. The reefs from which a ship might never escape, the sandy bays that provided shelter, the bars that lurked in wait for unwary ships, all were known to him. His knowledge was such that he was able to sum up the chances of a ship directly he heard where she was wrecked.
Whatever blunders may have been made in appointing other men to other commands, the First Lords of the Admiralty made no mistake in selecting Commodore Young to be Director of Naval Salvage. Generals came and went, Admirals were moved up and down, but this one man was in control of the Admiralty Salvage Section throughout the whole war, bearing the grave responsibilities of a most important post from beginning to end.
The first work of the Admiralty Salvage Section was purely naval. These were the men who laid the mines to guard our harbours, and upon them devolved the duty of laying down those long lanes of mighty nets to protect our troopships hurrying from England to France. When the Lion was so sorely stricken at Jutland, it was one of the section’s salvage steamers that helped her into port, and they were men of the Salvage Section who patched her scars and made it possible for her to limp home.
But the work of the Salvage Section changed completely with the coming of the unrestricted campaign of the German submarines. No longer was it purely naval in character. Thenceforward it became general, and the officers and men of the section had to stand ready to save merchant vessels as well as warships.
So grave a menace was the enemy submarine campaign that foreign shipowners refused to take the risks of sending ships to Great Britain, for no underwriter with any sense could be expected to insure ships when the Germans were torpedoing merchantmen at sight. Similarly no shipowner with any sense would send a ship here that was uninsured, for if his ship were torpedoed the whole loss would fall on him. For this reason alone there was a likelihood of diminishing supplies of food and munitions coming to our ports.
The British Government rose to the situation by becoming the biggest underwriting concern in the world and insuring every ship entering and leaving our ports. Great Britain accepted the responsibility for all losses, and the shipowners knew they were sure to get their money in the event of their ships being sunk. As a further precaution, the system of convoy was instituted, whereby half a dozen or a dozen ships journeyed together under the escort of some of our warships. An additional measure to cope with the marauding submarines was to arm our merchantmen so that they stood at least a chance of beating off an attack.
Shrewd as were the German calculations of winning the war by the submarine campaign, and nearly as the enemy succeeded, they reckoned without our Admiralty Salvage Section. While all the powers of the British Admiralty were concentrated on destroying the German underwater craft, the abilities of the Naval Salvage Section were focused on repairing the damage wrought by enemy torpedoes. From a comparatively minor position, the Salvage Section sprang into paramount importance. As the list of torpedoed vessels grew day by day, so our salvage organization was enlarged to grapple with the extra duties.
Directly a ship was torpedoed, the news was wirelessed to Whitehall, and the nearest available naval craft was ordered to stand by and render all the assistance possible until a salvage steamer arrived from the most convenient depot to take over. Salvage steamers and depots were dotted at various ports all round the coast, and as soon as particulars flashed through to the Director of Salvage he detailed his nearest available unit for the job. If a vessel still floated, he despatched powerful tugs to tow her to port; if she sank, he instructed a salvage officer to report on her position immediately.
No time was wasted, for the loss of one tide might easily have meant the total loss of the vessel. Within a few minutes of the report coming to hand, the Director dealt with the case and suggested how it should be treated.
Commodore Sir Frederick Young’s calmness was indeed amazing. I have vivid recollections of seeing him in his room at Whitehall when the submarine campaign was at its height. The newspapers were full of the tales of sinking ships, people were talking about it agitatedly, faces in the inner precincts of Whitehall were grave and obviously concerned, but the Director of Salvage remained quite unruffled. As I sat talking with him, the news came through of seven more ships being sunk; on top of it arrived the information that one of the salvage ships herself had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean. Yet the Director of Salvage did not turn a hair.
He asked one of his officers the whereabouts of another salvage craft.
The officer told him.
“Send her out to replace the ——,” and he mentioned the name of the sunken salvage ship, which I have long since forgotten.
He puffed quietly at his pipe, screwed a monocle into his eye, and scanned the telegrams with their bad news. Then he gave a few orders, and in a moment or two the wires were humming with instructions to various salvage units to hurry to the aid of the stricken ships.
It was all done so quietly and simply, without one sign of flurry or fuss on the part of the sturdy figure clad in a simple blue serge suit such as thousands of civilians wear to-day. Yet coming in and out and waiting deferentially on his word were naval figures resplendent in gold braid. The contrast emphasized the simplicity of the man controlling this supreme service. His unaffected ways and quiet manner masked an amazing cleverness, for no man alive was imbued with a greater genius for sea salvage work than this modest man sitting composedly at his desk by the pleasant window in Whitehall.
His big room was set off in the centre by a round polished table containing a bowl of flowers. Photographs of salvage ships dotted the walls, while various charts of the British Isles stuck full of coloured flags bristled with information to those able to read them. Other charts were concealed beneath spring blinds that sprang up at the touch of authority. By studying these charts, the Commodore was able to tell at a glance just how the situation stood, where ships were sunk, where ships were beached, where his salvage units were working. On a side-table was a big book of charts that could only be lifted with an effort, and another table contained a model ship showing the standard patch.
Called into being by the war, the standard patch certainly proved one of the greatest aids of the Salvage Section, for many a ship that would have ended her days at the bottom of the sea was brought safely into port under the protection afforded by this invention. The standard patch was formed of grooved timbers fitting one into another, something like matchboards, and in appearance it resembled the top of a gigantic roll-top desk. Owing to its construction, it was admirably adapted for fitting the curves of the hull of a ship.
In fitting a standard patch, the size of the hole in the hull was first ascertained, then the patch was made, bolted into position, and the edges were made watertight with cement. Many ships had to be beached at the nearest spot in order to save them from foundering, and the standard patch was then fitted to enable them to reach port and undergo permanent repairs. Other ships still remained afloat after being torpedoed, and it was no uncommon sight to see the ship’s carpenters constructing a standard patch upon the deck. When the patch was finished, it was lowered over the side, the bottom edge being weighted to make it sink in an upright position, while the divers guided it into place and secured it with bolts and nuts.
Despite its temporary character, the repair was strong enough to enable the ship to journey to the dock set aside for her reception. Yet many a ship met various adventures on the way, and her journey to port was rather a protracted affair. One such case was that of a large vessel torpedoed by the Germans. Luckily, she did not sink immediately. Her bulkheads held and her captain was able to head for the shore until she touched bottom and settled down. Along came the salvage unit, and, ascertaining the damage, worked desperately to fit a standard patch. The patch was duly put on, the many bolts screwed up, and the vessel pumped out and towed off to port.
The salvage officers were congratulating themselves on work well done when the unexpected happened. There was a dull explosion and a giant cascade against the side of the steamer. She had been caught a second time by a German submarine! Her nose was headed inshore and once more she touched bottom.
Quickly as they could, the salvors tackled her, for she was not the only ship on the sea receiving the unwelcome attentions of the Germans, and the salvors were in constant demand all along the coast. They sized up the new damage, made another patch, drilled the holes in the hull, fitted a felt bed for the patch to rest against and screwed it tightly home. Then the pumps were set going, the damaged hold was emptied and her keel came up from the sandy bed in which it had been resting.
The ship, which had survived two German torpedoes, continued her interrupted journey, but she had only been an hour or two on the way when another enemy submarine got her. Whatever the salvage men said and thought, they started to patch her up again, and in time they had the thrice torpedoed vessel continuing her slow journey to the dock where she was to be repaired.
Before they could get her home, however, her rescuers were compelled to beach her and struggle to save one or two very urgent cases. They accordingly put her ashore in a sheltered bay in the Isle of Wight where they knew she would be quite safe until such time as they could attend to her. She was months making a short trip of a few miles round the south coast, but she seemed to have as many lives as a cat, and eventually reached dry dock where the damage wrought by German torpedoes was properly repaired.
The remarks of the Germans must have been rather interesting when they discovered that they were torpedoing the same ship time after time. Probably they thought it was some trick the British were playing on them, some gigantic bluff to make them waste torpedoes. Anyway, although they tried and tried and tried again, the Admiralty salvage men, not to be outdone, managed to save the ship from the clutches of the Germans after all.
So long as the submarine campaign continued, it was indeed a gigantic tussle between pumps and patches and torpedoes. At first the torpedoes had it all their own way, but pumps and patches in the skilful hands of the Admiralty Salvage Section began to rob the Germans of more and more of their prizes, and they ultimately proved a most important factor in bringing home to the foe that the game was not worth the candle.
The demand for pumps of all types was tremendous. Motor pumps, steam pumps, electric pumps—all were required, and the pump-makers were kept busily employed night and day. The war brought out the good points of one pump known as the electric submersible pump. Invented in pre-war days by an electrical engineer named Macdonald, this invention did not attract the notice it deserved, and in the end the inventor sold out his rights and emigrated to Canada. Since then his pump must have been very successful financially, for one or two that happened to be aboard a battleship at the battle of Jutland did such wonderful service that the whole of the British Navy was fitted with them.
Many had tried to solve the problem of an electric pump, but generally they came to grief owing to the current short-circuiting in the water. Macdonald worked at the problem until he succeeded in overcoming it, and the result was a drum-like pump with the inner parts spinning at a high speed and forcing the water upwards through the pipe. Instead of fixing his pump at the top end of a suction pipe, Macdonald placed his pump at the bottom end of a pipe and dropped it into the water. The pump weighed about half a ton, and owing to the fact that it worked entirely under water, with water flowing all round and through its bearings, it was not liable to suffer loss of efficiency through air leakage. The tendency of the pump to overheat owing to the speed at which it worked was checked by the cold sea water always passing through it. It was, in effect, a water-cooled pump that was excellent for working at depths a little beyond the reach of the ordinary pump.
For touch-and-go cases the submersible pump was much in demand by salvage officers, but for cases that required long and steady pumping for days and perhaps weeks the wonderful Gwynne pumps were not to be excelled. Their extraordinary reliability is marvellous. So long as you give them the steam to work with, coupled with proper attention, they will do almost anything that you ask of them. They will pump steadily for days and even weeks without stopping, throwing overboard the specified number of tons of water an hour. They are, indeed, among the mechanical marvels of the age, practically as perfect as any machine is ever likely to be.
So sure are they, that salvage men will willingly put to sea in a badly leaking ship and set out on a voyage that may last a week or two. If the pumps stopped, the ship might founder in two or three hours. The men know it, but they do not worry. They have implicit faith in the pump, and although merely the power of the pump stands between them and death they carry on quite unconcerned. And while the water is finding its way into the breaches in the hull of their ship the pumps are steadily throwing it over the side.
As Henry Ensor, one of the cleverest salvage experts alive, once remarked to me: “For a long voyage in a leaking ship, give me the Gwynne.”
Pumps, indeed, played a big part in beating the German submarine, and it was the submersible type that figured in the case of the Westmoreland, for three placed in the hold of this vessel were left submerged for nearly three months and upon withdrawal worked quite as well as when they were put down.
No richer prize than the Westmoreland fell to the Salvage Section during the whole war, for ship and cargo were worth about £3,000,000. The vessel was steaming in the neighbourhood of St. Bees Head on her way to Liverpool when an enemy submarine let loose a torpedo. The missile ran true, and a moment later a terrific explosion told the Germans they had bagged their game. Whereat the attacking submarine, knowing the sea thereabouts was likely to be well patrolled for some little time to come, quietly slid off.
True as the torpedo ran, the Germans made a slight miscalculation. Though trifling, it made all the difference in the end. Instead of the torpedo hitting in that vital spot amidships and destroying the engines, it struck forward in No. 2 hold and tore an enormous hole in the hull of the ship big enough to drop a small house into. The heart of the ship, the engine-room, was untouched, and the captain still retained the power to drive his ship through the seas.
Slim destroyers slipped over the horizon and crowded round the torpedoed vessel. Fortunately her bulkheads held firm and, although the damage was such that it looked as if the ship might founder at any moment, the captain held his course in a valiant attempt to reach port.
Slowly the bow of the ship sank lower and lower in the water, until it seemed impossible for her longer to remain afloat. At last a destroyer manœuvred into position and took off captain and crew, and they stood by to see the last of the ship. Instead of sinking, however, she still hung there, and the captain and crew returned to her in order to try once more to get her to port. There was just a chance that they might succeed, and the captain was not going to lose that chance.
Engineers and stokers went below to give her steam, and she limped lamely along, continuing to go down by the head. As her bow went down, so her stern came up until it was obvious that if she did not soon sink she was bound to become unmanageable, for in a short time her screws would be clear of the water and churning the air instead of the sea. Heading her for the beach while there was yet time, the captain took her in until her propellers were right in the air and her bow scraped the bottom, then he and the crew were taken off and the Westmoreland quietly settled down.
If only she had settled at high tide, the Westmoreland might have proved an easy case for the Salvage Section to deal with. But with the usual perversity of things, she went down at low water, and as the tide rose, the sea began to pour out of the broken hold along the shelter deck and over the tops of the bulkheads into all the other holds. Unluckily her bulkheads had not been built right up to the top deck. Instead, they reached only to the previous deck, the shelter deck, and there was nothing to prevent the seas washing the whole length of the shelter deck, which was just what they did. The consequence was that the whole ship filled with water, and at high tide she was quite submerged, with her top deck 30 feet below the surface.
Commander Kay hastened to the spot and surveyed the wreck. Quickly he saw that the only way of raising the ship and getting her to port was to prevent the seas from washing out of the damaged hold into the sound holds. It appeared simple, but the men who began to strive to carry out the scheme had the struggle of their lives.
It was February, when the weather was just as bad as it could be. The heavy seas and strong currents effectually prevented any work being done for three or four days a week, and on the other days it was only possible to work for two or three hours at low tide. Watching their opportunities, the divers scrambled into the wreck and gradually timbered in a mighty hole, 40 feet across, that was blown in the shelter deck by the force of the explosion. The first step in their struggle with the sea was looked upon as won.
Barely was the work completed when the sea, frothing with fury, raged through the hole in the hull and battered continuously at the underside of the work until the timbering was reduced to matchwood. I have already mentioned that salvage men are sparing of words, and, if they said but little on this occasion, no doubt what they said was to the point.
With that patience which is beyond all praise, they resumed their efforts with a firm determination not to be again cheated by the sea, so they used steel to counter the force of the waves. Whenever tide and weather served, they worked with might and main to build watertight walls—or a steel trunkway, as the salvors called it—from the shelter deck of the damaged hold right up to the top deck in order to confine the sea to that hold and prevent it from washing over the tops of the other bulkheads. By then the salvors realized that it was quite hopeless to attempt to patch the hull of the ship to prevent the seas from entering, for no temporary work could withstand the full force of the Atlantic gales. Consequently, the divers concentrated on building their trunkway, and in a month it was completed and the water was effectually shut off from washing into the other holds.
The salvors determined now to try to move the ship to a more sheltered position where they would be able to work for longer periods and with fewer interruptions. Accordingly, pumps were set to work pumping out the water in the sound holds, and in time the Westmoreland swung clear of the bottom. The tugs caught hold of her and towed her inshore for a couple of miles, when she bumped the bottom again and was allowed to settle. It was 2 miles to the good, the water was much shallower, but even more important was the additional shelter which made it possible for the men to work more continuously.
So the divers toiled away with renewed vigour, hauling the cargo out of the ship to lighten her, hoisting out case after case of butter for which the people were clamouring. It was, fortunately, none the worse for its immersion, and I believe it duly reached the tables of the people, who had no idea that they were eating butter which had been at the bottom of the sea. If the true story be told, there is little doubt that a large quantity of food rescued from the clutches of Neptune was duly eaten by the British people without their being any the wiser. Necessity knows no law, and when famine is looming nigh, as it was then, butter that has been on the seabed is better than butterless bread. In any case the butter ration was so small—but two ounces a week—that no danger could possibly accrue through eating it.
Tons and tons of timber props were built into the ship to strengthen her in all directions. The problem of patching the vessel was again considered, but the weather was such as to render patching impracticable. So the salvors allowed the waves to thunder in through the gaping hole in her side, whence they gushed out of the top of the ship in fountains of spray. There was nothing else to be done in the circumstance. Had the salvors succeeded in covering in that mighty hole in the shelter deck strongly enough to keep back the seas, the seas would have raged about inside the damaged hold and smashed everything to pieces; consequently it was much wiser to leave them an outlet. The trunkway was a safety valve by which the seas escaped after tearing through the gaping wound.
Fourteen weeks after work was first started, Commander Kay decided that the time had come to make the final lift and get the Westmoreland to dry dock. The electric pumps were switched on and kept running until the waterlogged holds were cleared, and the torpedoed vessel rose off the sandy bottom and floated. Then cropped up the vital matter of balance. For weeks the divers had been fighting to rid the ship of water, and now, paradoxically enough, they found they had pumped out so much that her stern came up clear of the surface, while her bow was barely clear of the sand.
It was useless to attempt to tow her to port under such conditions, for in a short while she would have been digging her nose into the sand and sinking once more. Before the journey could be essayed, it was essential to balance her properly, and this could only be done by leaving a sufficient weight of water in the after holds to balance the water in the forward hold. They had to trim the ship by using water as ballast. Calmly they allowed the after holds to fill again, then they set the pumps going until she rose on an even keel. The stumpy tugs fastened on to her and did not let her go until she was safely in dock.
Altogether the Admiralty Salvage Section during the war salved nearly 500 ships, valued with their cargoes at about £50,000,000. While the submarine campaign continued, the British need for shipping was so great that all salvage efforts were concentrated on those ships that could be quickly salved and put into commission again. The easiest cases were dealt with first, and the more difficult cases were left until there was a reasonable opportunity of coping with them.
A careful list compiled by the Admiralty after the war showed that there were 416 war wrecks lying in less than 20 fathoms, or 120 feet, around the British coast, and of these it was estimated that one in ten might perhaps be raised. Actually 51 war wrecks were salved after the Armistice, but as some of these were lost in foreign parts the original estimate was not so wide of the mark.
These wrecks, upon which the British Government had paid out millions in insurance, were the property of the State, but the chances of raising them were accounted so slight that it was not considered policy to spend further money on them. Well-known salvage concerns, however, had no difficulty in obtaining permission to salve any ship which they had a fancy to raise. They had but to go to the shipping department concerned in order to win a sympathetic hearing. The terms of the contract were on the “no cure, no pay” principle, which meant that any salvage firm with the courage to risk a few thousand pounds in trying to raise a particular wreck was quite at liberty to do so. In return for the concession to work on the wreck, they agreed to give the Government a certain percentage of the value recovered, the percentage being arrived at by mutual agreement. All risk was consequently borne by the salvage concerns, who lost their money in the event of failure and shared their winnings with the Government if they were successful.
The high cost of shipping at that period led to considerable activity on the part of salvage concerns, for if luck happened to be with them there was the prospect of making a fortune out of one operation. But a shipping slump without precedent in all history quickly worked a tremendous revolution. Some new ships halved their value in six months, second-hand ships fell in price from £30 a ton to £7 or less a ton. One great shipping firm had to set aside a fund of half a million in order to write down the value of their new ships directly they were launched, for their new liners were worth more on the stocks than they were in the water. The only way of making their ships pay at all was to decrease their cost, and this could only be done by sacrificing the money saved and placed in reserve. In many cases shipowners paid huge sums to shipbuilders in order to be released from contracts, for they were able to buy new ships at half the price similar ships would cost to build.
This remarkable change was brought about by the great shipbuilding programmes forced on the Allies by the submarine campaign. Not until after the war was the full force of these programmes felt. The new ships coming off the stocks made up the lost tonnage in a few months. The seized German ships helped to increase the slump, and the world found itself richer by 11,000,000 tons of shipping than it had been in 1914. The war had destroyed the markets, the Continental nations had no longer any money with which to buy goods, and the result was the most dramatic change in history. Shipowners who a year previously had been clamouring for ships at any price, were compelled to let 8,000,000 tons of shipping lie idle.
Of course these conditions played havoc with salvage concerns. The fortunes that might have been locked up in war wrecks quietly vanished. It must be borne in mind that enemy torpedoes in the first place had done enormous damage to the sunken ships, and what the torpedoes had left undone the storms of the Armistice years had finished.
The immersion of a ship for a year or two in the sea, with the consequent rust set up in the metal, works sorry havoc, while sand and mud swirling about in the engine-rooms tend not to improve the engines. Every hour that a ship spends on the ocean bed she deteriorates in value. Mud is silting into her, sand and rust are gnawing away at her, the swell is shaking her continuously. The sea soon finds out the weak spots and hammers at them until the whole structure collapses into a fantastic mass. It can be imagined what some of the war wrecks were like after a thousand days of such treatment. They were not worth salving, for no salvage concern would risk thousands of pounds just to recover a little scrap metal. These factors eventually led to a cessation of salvage activity around our shores.
For long after the Admiralty Salvage Section had ceased to operate in home waters, one or two units were working on the Belgian coast, struggling to clear the harbours of Ostend and Zeebrugge from the ships that British sailors had so gallantly sunk in order to prevent the Germans from using them as submarine bases. When the Vindictive went down in her allotted place, she covered the British Navy with glory. All the might of Germany, all the skill of which she boasted, failed to move the sunken ship from the spot where the British had placed her. The Germans did their uttermost—for they were anxious to use the harbour—but they were beaten.
The genius of the Admiralty Salvage Section, Commodore Sir Frederick Young, studied the problem. The Vindictive was not only full of cement, which had set hard directly the water ran into it, but there were also many mines aboard, and no one knew whether all these mines had gone off or whether some of them were still alive. Added to the problem of the Vindictive was the fact that the Germans, in their retreat, had sunk all sorts of craft in the harbour to bottle it up completely, and ensure that the Belgians would never use Ostend again without going to an awful amount of trouble.
For months the divers of the Salvage Section were struggling with the wrecks in Ostend, clearing the channel, blowing tons of cement out of the Vindictive in order to lighten her, cutting away hundreds of tons of steel so that there should be so much the less to lift. Mighty steel cables were passed under the Vindictive by divers and attached to two lifting craft, one on either side of the ship; two giant pontoons were sunk into place and attached to the hull so that when the time came they could be pumped out and their power used to help lift the stricken ship off the bottom. Some of the compartments in the wreck were made watertight, and after about a year of strenuous toil the task of lifting the structure was undertaken. Pumps were set going, and as the tide rose the shattered British warship came off the bottom and was moved some distance before the falling tide baulked further endeavours. The next day saw the operations carried to a successful conclusion amid scenes of wildest enthusiasm.
The raising of the Vindictive signalized the last days of the Naval Salvage Section, but it was by no means the least of the many triumphs that crowned it during the war.