HMS Birkenhead

The Vessel

HMS Birkenhead was a British paddle-wheel iron troopship of the Royal Navy, built at the John Laird yard at Birkenhead on the Mersey between 1844 and 1846. She had originally been laid down as an iron-hulled steam frigate, but the Royal Navy's reassessment of iron warship construction during her building (specifically, the 1845 trials at Portsmouth which demonstrated that iron hull plates shattered catastrophically under solid shot impact) led to her completion as an unarmed troopship rather than a warship. She was 64 metres long, 1,405 tons displacement, and propelled by two paddle wheels driven by a 564-horsepower twin-cylinder steam engine.

Her conversion to troopship role meant that her primary function was the transport of British Army personnel to imperial garrisons, predominantly along the eastern Atlantic and Indian Ocean trooping circuits. Her accommodation had been configured for approximately 620 embarked troops plus a crew of 125; the troop accommodation was located on her main deck with basic berthing arrangements, whilst the ship's officers and the senior army officers were quartered in the stern cabins.

Her master on her final voyage was Captain Robert Salmond, 43, an experienced Royal Navy officer who had commanded Birkenhead since 1850. Her senior embarked army officer on the final voyage was Colonel Alexander Seton of the 74th Regiment of Foot, who commanded the embarked reinforcement draft of officers and enlisted men bound for the Eighth Xhosa War in southern Africa.

The Voyage

HMS Birkenhead departed Cork on 7 January 1852 bound for Cape Town, carrying a reinforcement draft of approximately 480 soldiers from 10 different British Army regiments, approximately 25 civilian women and children (the families of officers and senior non-commissioned officers), and her crew of 125. The reinforcement draft was intended to support the ongoing British military operations against the Xhosa in the Cape Colony frontier.

The passage south along the West African coast proceeded without substantial incident. She paused at Funchal, Madeira (12 January) and St Helena (28 January) for coaling and provisioning; by late February 1852, she was entering the southern approaches to the Cape of Good Hope.

On 25 February 1852, Birkenhead arrived at Simon's Bay (now Simon's Town), the British naval station on the Cape Peninsula. She was to disembark a small portion of her draft at Simon's Bay and then continue east along the South African coast to Algoa Bay (now Port Elizabeth) for the disembarkation of the main body. She departed Simon's Bay at 18:00 on 25 February 1852.

Captain Salmond's navigation plan for the Simon's Bay to Algoa Bay passage was based on the standard Admiralty chart of the South African coast, which at the time did not accurately represent the submerged rocks off the coast near Gansbaai, approximately 140 kilometres east of Cape Town. Salmond's plan called for a course maintained at approximately 5 kilometres offshore to use the coastal current and to provide a margin against the known inshore hazards.

The Disaster

At approximately 01:55 on 26 February 1852, HMS Birkenhead struck a previously uncharted submerged rock near Danger Point, approximately 2.5 kilometres offshore. The impact holed her hull below the waterline on the port side; her forward watertight compartment began flooding immediately. The second compartment breached within approximately 90 seconds of the initial impact. She began to settle by the bow.

Captain Salmond's assessment, made within approximately three minutes of the impact, was that the ship could not be saved. The seas were moderate, the air temperature was approximately 18 degrees Celsius, the water temperature was approximately 15 degrees Celsius, and the shore lay approximately 2.5 kilometres to the north. The ship carried three serviceable lifeboats; together they had capacity for approximately 120 people, far fewer than the 630 aboard.

The specific response that made Birkenhead historically significant was the conduct of her embarked army officers and ranks. Colonel Seton, commanding the embarked troops, assessed the situation and ordered his soldiers to assemble on the upper deck in parade formation. The standing orders given to the troops were explicit: the lifeboats would be loaded exclusively with the women and children aboard, followed by such sailors as were required to man the boats; the soldiers would remain in parade formation on the sinking ship until the boats had cleared.

The soldiers obeyed the order. All 25 civilian women and children were successfully loaded into the lifeboats; the lifeboats cleared the sinking ship before Birkenhead broke in half and sank at approximately 02:20 on 26 February 1852, approximately 25 minutes after the initial impact.

Of the approximately 630 aboard, approximately 450 died: primarily the embarked soldiers who had remained in formation on the ship until she sank, and subsequently either drowned or were killed by the shark population of False Bay. Approximately 180 survived: the 25 women and children in the lifeboats, plus 68 soldiers who reached shore by swimming or by clinging to floating debris, plus approximately 87 additional survivors rescued by the passing schooner Lioness on the morning of 27 February.

The Legacy

The conduct of the embarked soldiers of HMS Birkenhead in their final minutes became, within months of the disaster, one of the foundational narratives of nineteenth-century British military and imperial culture. The specific notion of "women and children first" as an operational protocol of naval evacuation dates, in codified form, from the Birkenhead incident; the protocol had existed informally before 1852, but the specific disciplined enforcement of the protocol by Colonel Seton's soldiers under imminent threat of death established it as a normative standard.

The conduct was formally commemorated by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who ordered the Birkenhead story read to every regiment of the Prussian Army as an example of military discipline. Queen Victoria commissioned a full-size painting of the sinking (Thomas M. Hemy's The Birkenhead, completed 1892); Rudyard Kipling's poem Soldier an' Sailor Too (1896) invoked the Birkenhead precedent; the phrase "the Birkenhead drill" entered the British military lexicon as shorthand for disciplined conduct in extremity.

The cultural ramifications were substantial in specific ways. The subsequent British Board of Trade regulations governing merchant marine evacuation, codified progressively through the later nineteenth century and culminating in the 1894 Merchant Shipping Act, incorporated the "women and children first" protocol as a formal regulatory standard. The 1912 Titanic disaster's specific evacuation protocol, in which the women and children of first and second class were loaded preferentially, was a direct inheritance from the Birkenhead precedent.

The subsequent Admiralty inquiry into the Birkenhead loss identified the specific navigational failure: the submerged rock at Danger Point was not on the Admiralty charts of 1852. The Admiralty's response was a comprehensive re-survey of the South African coast, conducted between 1853 and 1857 by the survey ship HMS Herald, which produced the first accurate British charts of the coast from Cape Town to Durban.

The wreck of Birkenhead was located in 1893 by Royal Navy divers off Danger Point. Subsequent recovery operations between 1958 and the 1990s recovered a portion of the estimated 3 tonnes of gold specie (approximately 240,000 pounds sterling at 1852 value) that had been aboard for the British military pay chest. The wreck site is now protected under South African cultural heritage legislation.

The 450 dead of the Birkenhead are commemorated by a memorial at the Chelsea Royal Hospital, London, and by the Birkenhead Memorial Obelisk at Danger Point, South Africa (erected 1936).