HMS Hampshire

The Vessel

HMS Hampshire was a Devonshire-class armoured cruiser of the Royal Navy, commissioned at the Armstrong Whitworth yard at Elswick on 15 July 1905. She was 144 metres long, 10,850 tons standard displacement, armed with four 7.5-inch guns in single turrets and six 6-inch guns in casemate mountings. Her design speed was 22 knots on four-shaft triple-expansion engines.

The Devonshire class of six ships (HMS Devonshire, HMS Hampshire, HMS Carnarvon, HMS Antrim, HMS Argyll, HMS Roxburgh) was the Royal Navy's last class of armoured cruiser to be designed with the specific role of fleet-scouting for the main battle line. By the mid-1910s the class had been effectively superseded by the battlecruiser concept and by the modern light cruiser classes. Hampshire was assigned in 1916 to the Grand Fleet's 2nd Cruiser Squadron based at Scapa Flow.

Her commanding officer in June 1916 was Captain Herbert Savill, 53, a career Royal Navy officer. Her crew was 655 officers and ratings.

The Voyage

On 5 June 1916 HMS Hampshire was assigned the specific mission of carrying Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, on a diplomatic visit to Russia. Kitchener's mission was to meet with the Russian government to discuss Allied military coordination, to reassure the Russian government about continued British commitment to the war, and to review British military assistance to Russia. The mission was to have been conducted via Archangel on the White Sea; HMS Hampshire was to carry Kitchener from Scapa Flow to the Russian coast.

Field Marshal Kitchener embarked HMS Hampshire at Scapa Flow at 16:45 on 5 June 1916, along with his personal staff and approximately 30 additional passengers. The ship departed Scapa Flow at 17:30 on 5 June 1916, escorted initially by two destroyers (HMS Unity and HMS Victor) as the force sailed north through the Scapa Flow barrier and into the open North Atlantic.

The weather on the evening of 5 June 1916 deteriorated into a force-9 north-northeasterly gale. The seas in the Atlantic approaches to the Orkneys were estimated at 6-8 metres. Captain Savill's course, dictated by the Admiralty's specific routing order for the Kitchener mission, took HMS Hampshire along the western coast of Orkney rather than the more sheltered eastern coast. The western routing had been chosen for reasons that the Admiralty never publicly explained; the subsequent post-war speculation included suggestions that the western route was believed to be less likely to be mined.

At 18:45 on 5 June 1916, in view of the worsening weather, Captain Savill sent the two destroyer escorts back to Scapa Flow with orders to return to base; Hampshire would proceed alone. The decision was subsequently the subject of considerable Admiralty and public criticism: alone in heavy weather without destroyer escort against any possible submarine or mine threat, HMS Hampshire was operating at substantially increased risk.

The Disaster

At 19:40 on 5 June 1916, approximately 1.5 nautical miles off the western coast of the Orkney mainland (specifically off Marwick Head), HMS Hampshire struck a contact mine that had been laid by the German submarine U-75 on approximately 29 May 1916. The mine exploded beneath the forward starboard section of HMS Hampshire's hull. The damage was extensive: the forward engine room and forward boiler room were flooded immediately; her main electrical power was lost; her damage-control systems were unable to respond before the progressive flooding made her loss inevitable.

HMS Hampshire listed heavily to starboard within 90 seconds of the mine strike. Her list progressed at approximately 8 degrees per minute. By 19:50 on 5 June 1916 she was at 45 degrees of list. She capsized at 19:55 on 5 June 1916 at approximately 59°10′N 3°24′W in approximately 65 metres of water.

The HMS Hampshire loss was catastrophic for her complement. Of her 655 crew and 30 additional passengers (a total of 685 aboard), only 12 survived. Of the 673 dead, essentially all died in the freezing water of the North Atlantic within 30 minutes of the sinking. The weather conditions (force-9 gale, 6-metre swell, water temperature approximately 7°C) made survival in the water essentially impossible except for the few men who had reached life rafts or debris that could support them out of the water.

Field Marshal Lord Kitchener died in the sinking. He was last seen on the upper deck in his Army greatcoat, walking toward the quarterdeck, as the ship began her capsize. His body was never recovered.

The Legacy

The death of Field Marshal Kitchener aboard HMS Hampshire was one of the most politically consequential individual casualties of the First World War. Kitchener was, at the moment of his death, the most widely-recognised senior British government figure in the Empire and one of the two or three most recognised figures in the Allied cause (along with Sir John French and Haig). His image on the famous "Your Country Needs You" recruiting poster of 1914 had become, by 1916, the most widely-distributed individual image in British wartime propaganda. His death produced, for a substantial fraction of the British wartime population, a specific and personal shock.

The British government's subsequent handling of the Kitchener loss (the subsequent Kitchener Commission of 1917-1918 investigated the specific circumstances of the sinking and produced a report that was finally made public in 1926) had political consequences that extended through the remainder of the war and into the interwar period. The Commission's specific finding was that no fault attached to the Admiralty's routing decision or to Captain Savill's handling of the ship; the loss was attributed to the wartime mining operations of U-75. Many contemporaries and subsequent analysts disputed this finding.

The question of whether Kitchener's loss was the result of genuine enemy action or of deliberate British sabotage became one of the enduring conspiracy theories of British wartime history. The accusation of sabotage was initially raised by Winston Churchill (a political enemy of Kitchener's) and by various figures in the Irish independence movement; it was taken up by multiple conspiracy theorists through the 1920s and 1930s; it has continued to circulate in some quarters through the twenty-first century. The mainstream historical consensus remains that Kitchener's death was the result of U-75's wartime mining operation.

The wreck of HMS Hampshire lies at 65 metres depth off Marwick Head, Orkney, upside down on the seabed. She has been surveyed repeatedly since the 1970s, most recently in 2014 by a joint Orkney and Royal Navy expedition. She is a protected war grave under the UK Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.

The 673 dead of HMS Hampshire are commemorated at the Kitchener Memorial on Marwick Head, Orkney (a granite tower visible from the wreck site), on the Chatham Naval Memorial (for her ratings), and at Kitchener's personal memorial in St Paul's Cathedral in London. The 12 survivors of the sinking included no officer above the rank of Leading Stoker; the most senior surviving officer was the ship's lamp-trimmer.