1 July 1922

HMS Insolent was one of those small, perhaps insignificant footnotes in the annals of the Royal Navy, but she was still a part of the vast panoply of vessels both large and small that made the Senior Service the most powerful fighting force in the world during the reign of Queen Victoria. Insolent could easily be overlooked in the grand scheme of things. She was one of two Bouncer-class gun boats launched at Pembroke Royal Dockyard in 1881, a 265-ton ‘flatiron’ vessel, so-called because of her supposed likeness to the clothes irons of the day. She and her sister, Bouncer, were small, without masts and having a low freeboard. Built of steel, she mounted a 10in muzzle-loading fixed gun, which was aimed by pointing the whole vessel at the target. The class, as with many of the flatiron and similar gun boats, was nominally for coastal defence, but also with an eye to coastal bombardment – acting as small monitors that could either steam into position – slowly – or be towed to a certain location, from where she could hit shore defences. Her career was distinctly patchy; one of her Commanding Officers, Boatswain Ernest Griffin, was removed from command after a court martial in 1909, though he was temporarily back in command for two months in 1914. In 1917 she appeared to be operating in the western English Channel, as she was reported to have picked up survivors from the American destroyer USS Jacob Jones, sunk by U-53 on 6 December 1917 near the Isles of Scilly. Before the war ended she was reduced to harbour service at Portsmouth as a gate vessel, and by 1919 she was one of 33 Royal Navy vessels deemed obsolete and awaiting disposal. Many of her type of ship were particularly sturdy and saw continued service in civilian life, but Insolent was not so lucky, as she foundered in Portsmouth Harbour on 1 July 1922.

2 July 1803

HMS Minerve has a rather unusual history, having been built by the French, captured by the British, recaptured by the French and finally taken again by the Royal Navy, meaning she had four distinct identities during her 20 year career. She was built as a 40-gun frigate at Toulon and launched in September 1794 as Minerve. She saw some action in the Mediterranean, capturing the British collier Hannibal off Ibiza in December that year, and the following year she took part in the Action of 24 June, when she and the 36-gun frigate Artemise tangled with frigates HMS Lowestoffe (32 gun) and Dido (28 guns). Despite their apparent advantage in firepower, the French did not play their hand well – Artemise fled the scene and Minerve was forced to surrender. She was commissioned as HMS Minerve and enjoyed several successes, including the capture of the Spanish frigate Santa Sabina I December 1796 in a bloody action (the Spanish had 164 men killed or wounded, while Minerve had eight men killed, four missing and 38 wounded). In early September 1802 she ran the 46-gun French frigate Bravoure ashore off Elba. On 2 July 1803 Minerve ran aground in fog off Cherbourg while chasing French merchant vessels. Attempts to refloat her failed, and under fire from a shore battery as well as gunboats, she surrendered early the following morning. The ship was put straight back into service by the French as the Canonniere, and in 1806 sailed to Mauritius (at that time known as Isle de France), patrolling the Indian Ocean and tangling with two powerful Royal Navy ships on 21 April that year. She continued to range far in her duties, sailing from the Philippines to Mexico in early 1807 before returning to Mauritius, where she challenged the blockading 30-gun frigate HMS Laurel, defeating her in a single-ship action on 11 September 1808. In late 1809 she began a transit back to France for major repairs under the name Confiance with a small crew and reduced armament, having been sold before she set off. While on passage she managed to evade British warships more than a dozen times, but her luck ran out off the coast of Brittany when she encountered 74-gun third rate HMS Valiant and captured after a six-hour chase. She was once more placed on the Royal Navy’s books, but she never saw active service and was deleted from the records in 1814.

3 July 1942

Armed trawler HMS Le Tiger was loaned to the Americans in March 1942 for a period of just seven months, but that gave the 516-ton ship plenty of time to prove her worth. She was built in 1937 by Cochrane and Sons at Selby on the River Ouse and commissioned into the Royal Navy in the first weeks of the war as an anti submarine vessel. Having gained experience in anti submarine warfare tactics at Tobermory in Scotland and Lough Foyle in Northern Ireland over several months, in March 1942 she and her crew were sent to the East Coast of the United States to patrol under US Navy control. On 3 July that year she was tasked with picking up survivors of the 7,000-ton American merchantman SS Alexander Macomb, which had been attacked by submarine U-215. The cargo ship, carrying 9,000 tons of military kit including aircraft, tanks and explosives, was on her maiden voyage and in thick fog had fallen astern of Convoy BX 27, which was heading to Halifax in Nova Scotia in preparation to cross the North Atlantic. At just after midday around 170 miles off Cape Cod a torpedo from the U-boat caught the merchant ship amidships and detonated explosives in her hold, causing her. To sink in under 30 minutes. Ten of her crew of 66 died, and 35 of the survivors were picked up by HMT Le Tiger within 15 minutes of the ship going down. The British trawler dropped her passengers ashore at Woods Hole the following day, by which time U-215 had met a similar fate to her only victim. Having picked up the American survivors, HMT Le Tiger began to hunt for the attacker, a 1,280-ton Type VIID submarine which was also on her maiden war patrol, and she quickly detected her prey. A brief and accurate attack with depth charges destroyed the submarine, which went down with all 48 hands. Le Tiger returned to British service in the autumn of 1942 and served out the war without mishap. She was sold to the Hull Ice Co in October 1945, renamed Regal in the summer of 1947 and Othello a year later. She was finally scrapped at Ghent in Belgium in 1963.

4 July 1915

Frederick Parslow won the Victoria Cross for his actions in the face of an attack by a U-boat off the coast of Ireland on in the summer of 1915, though it could not be awarded until four years after later, after some administrative loose ends were tied up. On the morning of 4 July 1915 Frederick Parslow was the Master of His Majesty’s Horse Transport Anglo-Californian, a 7,330 ton requisitioned steamer carrying almost 1,000 military horses, when she came under attack from U-39. Parslow, a civilian mariner aged 59, ordered the ship keep changing course to avoid the U-boat, but by 1030 he was preparing to follow the Kptlt Walter Forstmann’s order to “abandon your vessel as quickly as possible” when the British wireless operator received a message from a Royal Navy destroyer telling them to hold out as long as possible. Parslow got his ship under way again, at which the submarine – a prolific ship-killer, with more than 150 victims – redoubled its attack, firing at the transport’s bridge. Parslow remained on the bridge throughout, despite the damage caused by the gunfire, and he died where he stood. Parslow’s son, also Frederick, was the Chief Officer on board and took over from his father, managing to steer clear of major damage until two Royal Navy destroyers arrived and drove off the U-boat. The steamer suffered 20 casualties, but most of the horses were saved. Frederick Parslow the younger was subsequently commissioned into the RNR as a Sub Lieutenant and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions. His father was not eligible for the VC as a Merchant Navy officer at the time of his death; however, the Royal Navy posthumously commissioned him as a Lieutenant in the RNR, and in May 1919 he was posthumously awarded the highest gallantry medal, making him the first member of the Merchant Navy to receive the VC, as well as the oldest recipient in World War 1.

5 July 1873

Two of the most dispensable ships of the Victorian Navy went head-to-head on 5 July 1873, and after the smoke had cleared no one was any the wiser as to how they could effectively deploy these two white elephants. HMS Hotspur was launched in March 1870 at the Robert Napier and Sons yard in Govan. The 4,330-ton ship was designated an ironclad steam ram, a design which grew from the idea that a steamship could itself be a weapon by the addition of a ram to its bows, in this case a 3-metre armoured projection. In reality there were hardly any examples of a ram working properly in combat – the chances were that the attacking ship would do at least as much damage to itself as to its foe. In the case of Hotspur, there was even less chance of her doing damage, as she was considerable slower than her prospective targets, and the prominence of the ram in her design meant that the effectiveness of her main 12in gun was compromised. She was rebuilt in 1871, when she received a revolving turret mounting two 12in guns, as well as new boilers and improved armour, and in July 1873 her effectiveness was tested against the breastwork monitor HMS Glatton. This 5,000 ton ship, completed at Chatham Dockyard in 1872, is something of a mystery – her design was determined by the Board of Admiralty but her purpose was never made entirely clear, and even her designer was not let into the reasoning behind her existence. There was vague talk of her being used to defend British harbours and anchorages, while attacking those of the enemy, but her very limited freeboard (less than a metre amidships) meant she would have been less than comfortable in open waters in anything more than a gentle breeze. She went straight into reserve on commissioning, acting as tender to the gunnery school at HMS Excellent in Portsmouth, and on 5 July 1873 she was the target of live firing trials by HMS Hotspur, which sent 600lb shots into Glatton’s turret to see how it coped with the shock. She clearly survived this ordeal, as she was fitted to fire torpedoes in 1881 and additional guns were added to her armoury. Her only ‘sea time’ came in 1887 when she was made responsible for the defence of the Thames Estuary, after which she drifted into reserve and was sold in 1903. Hotspur saw service in the Sea of Marmara during the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 but was also limited in terms of active service at sea, and she ended up as guardship at Holyhead, until 1893, then at the Royal Dockyard in Bermuda, where she was sold for scrap at the start of the 20th Century.

6 July 1916

With a slight shift in timing it could well have been the case that the submarine HMS E26 lined up against Royal Navy warships instead of with them. The 820-ton vessel was one of a pair ordered by the Ottoman Navy in April 1914, but that order was taken over by the Admiralty instead and the submarine was laid down at the William Beardmore yard in Dalmuir in November that same year. She was launched almost exactly a year later, but her career was relatively brief. She sailed from Harwich on 29 June to take up a patrol off Terschelling on the coast of the northern Netherlands, but on 2 July the Germans reported seeing evidence of an oil leak apparently coming from a submarine. The following day, HMS E55, which was in the same vicinity, heard the muffled sounds of distant explosions, which with hindsight could well have been the death throes of her sister boat. No more was heard from E26m, and she was listed as having been lost with all 31 hands on 6 July 1916 in the North Sea, somewhere off the mouth of the Ems River, where German forces had indeed attacked an unknown submarine with gunfire and bombs on 3 July. Her wreck was found by Dutch divers some 20 years ago.

7 July 1917 Submarine HMS J2 is thought to have sunk U-boat U-99 in the North Sea on 7 July 1917, though there are doubts over the exact fate of the 1,100-ton German submarine. J2 was something of a monster – built just 14 years after the Holland class, the J-class boats displaced 18 times that of Holland 1 and they could motor along at almost 20 knots on the surface, making them the fastest submarines in the world at that time. Reports at the time record that the British boat encountered U-99, which was on her maiden war patrol, between the Orkneys and the Norwegian coast on 7 July 1917, putting an 18in torpedo into the German vessel, which sank with all 40 hands. Subsequent research suggests that J2’s attack as carried out at extreme range, and there are doubts whether such an attack could have resulted in the loss of U-99. After the war J2 was one of the six surviving J-boats offered to the Royal Australian Navy as gifts to help police the Pacific region, and she sailed for the Antipodes on 9 April 1919, along with cruisers HMAS Sydney and HMAS Brisbane and submarine depot ship HMAS Platypus. The flotilla reached Sydney three months later in somewhat weary condition, requiring immediate refits, but despite being brought back to readiness they had little to do, and by the middle of 1922 they were being withdrawn from service as their maintenance was proving too costly. J2 was scuttled off Port Phillip Heads in 1924 and she is now a popular destination for experienced divers, amongst whom she is known as the ’39-metre Sub’ or ‘Deep Sub’ (because of the depth of water in which she lies).