1 September 1917

Pangbourne Nautical College in Berkshire was formally opened under the command of 52-year-old retired Royal Navy officer Capt Superintendent William Montanaro on 1 September 1917. The establishment, on the site of the former Clayesmore School, was designed to prepare boys for careers as Merchant Navy officers, although the founder – shipowner Sir Thomas Lane Devitt, a partner in Devitt and Moore – also ensured that the students had a well-rounded education in case a life at sea was not their ultimate career choice. but as the war at sea was raging at the time the Admiralty was very interested, and cadets from Pangbourne emerged with RNR uniforms and ranks. The ‘Nautical’ element of its name was dropped in 1969 when the focus shifted to academic rather than maritime subjects, and that shift was reflected in the institution taking on its first civilian headmaster. That is not to say that the nautical element was forgotten – despite its shift to a more civilian curriculum, and the fact that Pangbourne is not a military school, Naval traditions are still strong; pupils wear Naval uniform, sleep in cabins rather than dorms, eat from galleys rather than kitchens and relax in gunrooms rather than common rooms. Pangbourne College campus is the site of the Falkland Islands Memorial Chapel, opened in 2000 by the Queen, which commemorates the courage and sacrifice of those who served in the South Atlantic in 1982 – the college was chosen for its Naval history, and for the fact that 47 Old Pangbournians served in the Conflict.

2 September 1917

SS Olive Branch was torpedoed by U-28 on 2 September 1917 off Hammsfort, destroying both vessels. The 4,650 ton steamer had already come in for some punishment under her original name – she was built on the Clyde as the Bellorado – when she was damaged by gunfire from submarine UC-22 on 27 February 1917, killing three of her crew. In September that year the newly renamed SS Olive Branch was part of an Allied convoy en route from Liverpool to Arkhangelsk in Russia when she was torpedoed 85 miles to the north of North Cape in Norway by U-28 in the late morning of 2 September. The 860-ton pre-war submarine, which had conducted f ive war patrols and sunk 40 ships for a total of 90,000 tons, was two weeks into what turned out to be her final patrol out of Emden. As the German submarine closed in to finish the steamer with gunfire, all but one of the British ship’s crew scrambled into lifeboats and hurriedly pulled away from the area, as they knew (and the German commander didn’t know) that Olive Branch was carrying a full cargo of ammunition. One shell detonated the cargo in hold number 4, sending Olive Branch sky high, and the explosion fatally damaged the U-boat – one version of events reports that a truck carried on the steamer’s deck fell from a great height onto the submarine, inflicting the major damage. Uncertain as to the presence of other enemy ships or submarines, the convoy steamed on, leaving the 39 German submariners to perish in the Arctic Ocean.

3 September 1988

Type 42 destroyer HMS Southampton collided with container ship MV Tor Bay on 3 September 1988 while on escort duties in the Straits of Hormuz, ripping a ten-metre hole in her hull and injuring 11 of her ship’s company. The destroyer, built by Vosper Thornycroft in her namesake city, was on Armilla Patrol at the time, and with the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) at a ceasefire stage warships were still escorting merchant vessels through the narrow entrance to the Gulf. Tor Bay, a 33,200-tonne Overseas Containers Ltd (OCL) ship, was en route from Nagoya in Japan to Bahrain and had made contact to rendezvous with Southampton, at 4,800 tonnes much the smaller of the two ships. There was some initial confusion in the twilight as there was a second merchant ship close to Tor Bay, but the merchantman and warship teamed up – only for Southampton to cross the path of Tor Bay and take the full force of the container ship, steaming at 13 knots, on her port flank. Tor Bay sustained some damage, but was able to steam on to Dubai, where she underwent two weeks of repairs. Southampton also manage to continue under her own power to Fujairah, in the United Arab Emirates, but the damage was sufficient to take her out of the Armilla Patrol, and it was eventually decided to transport the warship back to the UK on board the heavy-lift semi-submersible MV Mighty Servant, with repairs being carried out by Swan Hunter on the Tyne some time later as part of a scheduled refit. Type 22 frigate HMS Boxer took Southampton’s place on the Armilla Patrol. A Batch 2 Type 42 destroyer, Southampton had been in service for seven years at the time of the collision, and she went on to serve another 20 years and more under the White Ensign before she was decommissioned on 12 February 2009. She was towed from Portsmouth in October 2011 for Turkey, where she was scrapped.

4 September 1995

The Royal Navy Detention Quarters in Portsmouth closed on 4 September 1995, with all personnel moving to the Military Corrective Training Centre (MCTC) at Colchester. The DQs, as they were known, opened in Portsmouth on 1 January 1911, and in 1931 this facility took on responsibility for dealing with those sailors who had previously been incarcerated in the DQs of Chatham and Devonport. The introduction of DQs, generally hated though they were, was a major step in the direction of a more humane regime which had been developing since the mid-Victorian period, when the huge Royal Navy found itself transitioning from the brawn and muscle of the age of sail to the more technologically challenging era of steam and rifled, long-range guns. Instead of summary justice, with a range of often cruel punishments being meted out on board ships, those who transgressed were more commonly transferred to civilian prisons (particularly Winchester for Portsmouth, Maidstone for Chatham and Exeter for Plymouth) with the military element often taking up quite a sizable amount of the available space. It did, however, mean that the errant sailors were beyond the reach of the Admiralty, and the obvious solution was Royal Navy run prisons. The first such establishment, was at Lewes in Sussex, acquired by the Admiralty in 1853 and which immediately housed large numbers of Finnish prisoners of war from the Crimean War The second RNP was at the already well-established prison at Bodmin, and in World War 1 this facility was used to contain German naval prisoners; the prison became a fully civilian establishment in the early 1920s. Hard labour and cruel regimes gradually gave way to a more enlightened approach The opening of the RNDQs brought the system back fully within the Admiralty’s grasp, and thus it remained until the responsibility was farmed out to Colchester and a tri-Service approach was undertaken, giving sailors the unique chance to train in infantry skills and learn new crafts to either help resume their Naval career or take up a new path once outside the military.

5 September 1914

HMS Pathfinder was sunk by U-21 in the Firth of Forth on 5 September 1914. This was the first successful self-propelled torpedo attack by a U-boat against a warship, and the first Royal Navy warship to be sunk by a submarine. Pathfinder was a 2,950-ton scout cruiser built at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead, launched in 1904 and commissioned in 1905. She was an experimental class of ship, designed to bridge the gap between destroyers and large cruisers; lightly-armed and relatively fast, she was intended to lead destroyer flotillas and provide reconnaissance for the capital ships and heavy cruisers of the main fleet. However, rapidly-evolving technology and design rendered scout cruisers obsolete in short order. She spent the pre-war period with the Atlantic, Channel and Home Fleets, and at the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 was with the 8th Destroyer Flotilla at Rosyth. On 5 September 1914 Pathfinder was patrolling off the Firth of Forth, to the north of St Abbs Head, when smoke from her funnels was spotted by a lookout in the German submarine, which was recharging its batteries on the surface. Pathfinder steamed past the 830-ton U-21 out of range, and the German continued to recharge, but Pathfinder then doubled back, allowing U-21 to submerge and fire a single torpedo which caused one of the cruiser’s magazine to explode. The ship broke in two and sank rapidly, killing some 260 men. U-21 proved a thorn in the side of the Royal Navy, switching to the Mediterranean theatre in 1915 where she sank battleships HMS Triumph and Majestic at Gallipoli, as well as French cruiser Amiral Charner. U-21 (also known as U-36 while on service with the Austro-Hungarian Navy) survived the war and sank under tow in 1919.

6 September 1914

HMS Dwarf rendezvoused with cruiser HMS Cumberland on the evening of 6 September 1914 to begin operations in Cameroon. The following day she helped to cut out four lighters in the estuary of the Cameroon River, which were added to the British flotilla in the area. Dwarf was a 700-ton Bramble-class First Class gunboat, built on the Clyde by London and Glasgow Shipbuilding in 1898 and commissioned the following year. She spent her entire active service around the coast of the African continent, from the Strait of Gibraltar to South Africa. She saw action during the Boer War between 1899 and 1902, and went on to play a leading role in the campaign against the Germans in West Africa in World War 1, winning the Battle Honour Cameroons 1914. In the month of September 1914 Dwarf was attacked three times by German ‘infernal machines’ – improvised torpedoes/ attack craft, including the 150-ton auxiliary armed steam vessel SMS Nachtigal, which rammed Dwarf amidships, causing the British ship some superficial damage. In all three cases Dwarf survived – two craft were sunk before they got close to her, while Nachtigal was set on fire and sank shortly after the two vessels collided. Dwarf spent her later years in reserve in Gibraltar, was paid off in 1925 and sold for scrap the following year.

7 September 1943

Submarine HMS Shakespeare sank Italian ocean going submarine Velella in the Gulf of Salerno on 7 September 1943. The 1,010-ton S-boat, built at Barrow by Vickers Armstrong and launched in December 1941, spent the first part of her career in the Mediterranean before moving on to the Far East in late 1944, although her first war patrols, from 15-26 August 1942 and 7-23 September, took her from Lerwick into the Norwegian Sea – an uneventful debut. She reached Gibraltar on 21c October, and took part in the North Africa (Operation Torch) landings, protecting convoys, carrying out reconnaissance missions and providing covering patrols. In December 1942 she was forced to return to the UK for repairs to her main motors, arriving at Chatham just before Christmas. Her return passage to the Med turned unto her further war patrol as she was ordered to intercept an enemy blockade runner, though the vessel never showed up. On 13 April 1943, during her f ifth war patrol, she was struck by an enemy bomb, which hit her hull as she dived through 40ft, making a loud cracking noise, but fortunately the device failed to explode. On her next patrol she sank a couple of small Italian sailing craft and bombarded Italian aircraft hangars on Corsica. On her next patrol Shakespeare was lining up an attack on a U-boat, possibly U-73, when an Allied aircraft attacked the British submarine with rockets, forcing her to break off her own attack run and allowing the U-boat to escape. Again, Shakespeare was undamaged. July and August 1943 saw her carrying out reconnaissance and acting as a beacon for the landings in Sicily, but she was unsuccessful in an attack on two Italian light cruisers. On 7 September the Italian Navy sent two submarines to attack the Salerno landings, but only one survived – and the other turned out to have been an unnecessary sacrifice. Shakespeare picked up Velella and Benedetto Brin on ASDIC almost 20 miles off Licosa Island, south of Salerno, as light faded in the evening, and fired six torpedoes at them. At least four struck Velella, which disintegrated and sank with all 52 hands. Benedetto Brin, which had been partially masked by the background shoreline, escaped. The sad aspect of this kill was that the Italian armistice came into effect just a few hours later. Once transferred to the Eastern Fleet, Shakespeare was damaged by gunfire and an air attack of the Andaman Islands on 3 January 1945 while itself attacking the Japanese minesweeper Wa 1. Both vessels sustained serious damage, and although the British submarine was able to make it to a safe port, she was written off as a constructive total loss. She was sold in July1946 and broken up soon afterwards.