RMS Leinster

The Vessel

The RMS Leinster was a British mail steamer of the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company, built by Laird Brothers at Birkenhead in 1896. She was 113 metres long, 2,646 tons, twin-screw triple-expansion steam propulsion, designed for a service speed of 24 knots. She and her three sisters (Ulster, Munster, and Connaught) operated the Kingstown-Holyhead route, the principal Irish-English mail and passenger connection, under a mail contract with the British Post Office.

By 1918 the Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) to Holyhead route was the fastest sea passage between England and Ireland, four and a half hours at full speed, operated under wartime conditions with the four sisters in daily rotation and a strict mail-ship schedule. She carried on every outward sailing the British Army mail for Ireland, civilian mail in both directions, and passenger traffic averaging about 400 on each crossing.

Her master at the date of her final voyage was Captain William Birch, 62, a veteran City of Dublin Company officer with 35 years of Irish Sea experience. Her crew of 77 included stewardesses, stokers, a postal sorting staff of 22, and a Royal Navy signal party of six. She also carried, on every voyage, a Royal Naval Reserve gunnery crew manning her two 12-pounder defensive guns installed in 1917.

The Voyage

She departed Kingstown Harbor at 08:50 on 10 October 1918, four weeks and one day before the Armistice of 11 November 1918 that would end the First World War. She was carrying 771 people: 489 passengers, 22 post office sorters, 77 ship's crew, a Royal Navy signal party of 6, and 177 British Army and Royal Navy personnel returning to their units after leave in Ireland. Many of the passengers were women and children, mothers travelling with their children from Irish homes to visit their soldier husbands in English military hospitals, or returning from such visits.

The weather that morning was fine, the Irish Sea unusually calm. Leinster made the Kish Lightship at 09:30 and was proceeding on her normal outward course toward Holyhead at her service speed of 22 knots. The Royal Navy's anti-submarine escort convention on this route had previously required a destroyer sweep of the Irish Sea ahead of each mail sailing; by October 1918 this convention had been relaxed because the U-boat threat in the Irish Sea had been substantially reduced over the previous year. No destroyer escort accompanied her on 10 October.

The German submarine UB-123, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Robert Ramm, 29 years old and on his first command patrol, was operating in the Irish Sea approaches on 10 October. Ramm had deployed from Wilhelmshaven on 25 September 1918 and had sunk a single small British coaster earlier in his patrol. He sighted Leinster at 09:45 on 10 October, identified her as a possible troopship, and manoeuvred to attack position. At 09:50 he fired a single G7 torpedo from his port tube at 1,000 metres range.

The Disaster

The torpedo struck Leinster on her port side, forward of the bridge, at 09:50 on 10 October 1918. Captain Birch ordered the helm hard over and the ship turned through 180 degrees to attempt to return to Kingstown at reduced speed. Ramm followed her and at 10:02 fired a second torpedo that struck her amidships. The second torpedo detonated in her engine room; Leinster lost power immediately and began to list heavily to port.

She sank at 10:05 on 10 October 1918, fifteen minutes after the first torpedo strike. Her lifeboats, sixteen in number, mostly could not be launched from the listing deck. Of the eight that did launch, four were damaged by the rapid sinking or by the port-side debris. The water temperature that morning was approximately 9°C; survivors who reached the water alive had perhaps 30 minutes of functional swimming before hypothermia began to disable them.

The Royal Navy destroyers HMS Lively, HMS Mallard, and HMS Seal reached the site over the following two hours, responding to distress signals from the sinking. They pulled survivors from the water until mid-afternoon and returned to Kingstown with approximately 260 people alive. Over the following week the confirmed death toll grew as more bodies were recovered from the Irish Sea coast; the final figure settled at 564 dead and 207 survivors out of 771 aboard.

This was the worst single-day maritime disaster in the history of the Irish Sea, and the largest wartime loss of Irish civilian life of the First World War. Among the dead were Josephine Carr, 18, the first Wren (Women's Royal Naval Service member) to be killed in active service; and 21 of the 22 postal sorters, who had been working in the forward mailroom when the first torpedo struck.

The Legacy

The political context of the sinking made it peculiarly painful in Irish-British relations. Ireland in October 1918 was approaching the December 1918 general election at which Sinn Féin would win 73 of the 105 Irish parliamentary seats and begin the process leading to the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-1921 and the Irish War of Independence. The Leinster sinking was received in Ireland as a British wartime tragedy and also as an occasion for Irish political introspection: the dead were Irish as well as British, the sinking was caused by the war the Irish nationalist leadership had refused to fully endorse, and the ship's role as a British Post Office mail vessel connected the disaster to the broader question of Ireland's relationship with the British state.

The British Admiralty's immediate public response included a statement of condolence, a promise of support for the families, and a tightening of the Irish Sea destroyer escort protocols. The private Admiralty response included an internal review of the U-boat tolerance in the Irish Sea, which concluded that the relaxed escort rules of 1918 had been a miscalculation. UB-123 herself, returning from her patrol, struck a mine in the North Sea minefield off the Dutch coast on 19 October 1918 and was lost with all hands; Oberleutnant Ramm's grave is in the Kriegsmarinefriedhof at Wilhelmshaven.

The wreck of Leinster was located in 1996 by a private survey team under the Irish marine archaeologist Roy Stokes, working with the Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht of the Irish Republic. She lies at approximately 35 metres depth in the Irish Sea, off the Kish Lightship, intact on her starboard side with the damage from both torpedoes visible on her port side. The site is a protected Irish maritime archaeological site under the National Monuments (Amendment) Act 1994.

The Leinster Memorial in Dún Laoghaire, unveiled in 1998 on the 80th anniversary of the sinking by President Mary McAleese, is the principal Irish memorial to the disaster. It lists the names of 564 dead on a bronze plaque in a circular cloister; the design by the Irish sculptor Rowan Gillespie depicts a bronze anchor partly submerged in a polished stone pool. The Leinster remains the largest ship sunk in Irish waters, the largest single-day Irish civilian casualty event of the First World War, and the principal surviving Irish maritime war grave. The annual memorial service held on 10 October is attended by the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs and the British Ambassador to Ireland.