E. Keble Chatterton

In history it is frequently the case that what seems to contemporaries merely ordinary and commonplace is to posterity of the utmost value and interest. How little, for example, do we know of the life and routine in the various stages and development of the sailing ship! In a volume entitled ‘Ships and Ways of Other Days,’ published before the war, I endeavoured to collect and present the everyday existence at sea in bygone years. Some day, in the centuries to come, it may be that the historical student will require to know something of the organization and mode of life on board one of the Q-steamships, and because it is just one of those matters, which at the time seemed so obvious, I have now thought it advisable here to set down a rough outline. As time goes on the persons of the drama die, logs and diaries and correspondence fall into unsympathetic hands and become destroyed; therefore, whilst it is yet not too late, let us provide for posterity some facts on which they can base their imagination of Q-ship life.

Elsewhere in the pages of this book the reader will find it possible to gather some idea of the types, sizes, and appearances of the ships employed. The following details are chiefly those of one of the most distinguished Q-ships, the famous Penshurst, and as such they have especial interest as showing the organization of a tiny little tramp into a valiant and successful man-of-war that sank several powerful enemy submarines; and it is through the courtesy of her gallant late commanding officer, Captain F. H. Grenfell, D.S.O., R.N., that I am able to present these facts.

Q-ship “Dunraven”
Showing the damage done to her poop after the action with submarine. The after-deck is already well awash and presently she foundered.

To face p. 214

Penshurst was a three-masted, single-funnelled, single-screw steamer, owned by a London firm. She had been fitted out as a decoy at the end of 1915 by Admiral Colville at Longhope. Her length between perpendiculars was 225 feet, length over all 232 feet, beam 35 feet 2 inches, draught 14 feet 6 inches, depth of hold 13 feet 7 inches. Her tonnage was 1,191 gross, 740 registered, displacement 2,035 tons. Fitted with four bulkheads, the ship had the maximum amount of hold, the engines being placed right aft. The crew were berthed in the forecastle, the engineers’ mess and cabins being aft, whilst the captain’s and officers’ mess and cabins were adjacent to the bridge just forward of midships. The engine-room pressure was 180 pounds, and the maximum speed, with everything working well and a clean bottom, was 10 knots. Her armament consisted of five guns. A 12-pounder (18 cwt.) was placed on the after hatch, but disguised in the most ingenious manner by a ship’s boat, which had been purposely sawn through so that the detached sections could immediately be removed, allowing the gun to come into action. Originally there were mounted a 3-pounder and 6-pounder on each side of the lower bridge deck. These were hidden behind wooden screens such as are often found built round the rails in this kind of ship. These screens were specially hinged so that on going into action they immediately fell down and revealed the guns. Thus it was possible always to offer a broadside of three guns. In the spring of 1916 Penshurst was transferred from Longhope to Milford and Queenstown, and Admiral Bayly had the arrangement of guns altered so that the 3-pounders were now concealed in a gunhouse made out of the engineers’ mess and cabins, the intention being to enable both these guns to fire right aft. The 6-pounders were then shifted forward into the positions previously occupied by the 3-pounders on the lower bridge deck. How successful this arrangement was in action the reader is able to see for himself in the accounts of Penshurst’s engagements with submarines. The ship was also supplied with depth charges, rockets, and Verey’s lights.

The crew consisted of Captain Grenfell and three temporary R.N.R. officers, an R.N.R. assistant-paymaster, thirteen Royal Navy gunnery ratings, eight R.N.R. seamen, a couple of stewards, two cooks, a shipwright, carpenter’s crew, an R.N.R. chief engine-room artificer, an engine-room artificer, and R.N.R. stokers, bringing the company up to forty-five.

In arranging action stations in a Q-ship the difficulty was that internally the vessel had to be organized as a warship, while externally she must necessarily keep up the character of a merchantman. In Penshurst Captain Grenfell had arranged for the following signals to be rung from the bridge on the alarm gong. One long ring meant that a submarine was in sight and that the crew were to stand by at their respective stations; if followed by a short ring it denoted the enemy was on the starboard side; if two short rings the submarine was on the port side. Two long rings indicated that the crew were to go to panic stations; three long rings meant that they were to go to action stations without ‘panic.’ ‘Open fire’ was ordered by a succession of short rings and whistles.

With regard to the above, in the case of action stations the look-out men on the bridge proceeded to their gun at the stand-by signal, keeping out of sight, while the crews who were below, off watch, went also to their guns, moving by the opposite side of the ship. In order to simulate the real mercantile crew, the men under the foc’s’le now came out and showed themselves on the fore well deck. If ‘panic’ was to be feigned, all the crew of the gun concealed by the collapsible boat were to hide, the signalman stood by to hoist the White Ensign at the signal to open fire, and the boat party ran aft, turned out the boats, lowered them, and ‘abandoned’ ship, pulling away on the opposite bow. The signal for standing-by to release the depth charge was when the captain dropped a red flag, and all guns’ crews were to look out to fire on the enemy if the depth charge brought the U-boat to the surface.

[Photo. Heath and Stoneman

The Gallant Officers and Crew of the Q-ship “Dunraven.”
Captain Gordon Campbell is in the second row with Lieutenant C. G. Bonner on his right.

To face p. 216

Larger image (161 kB)

Special arrangements had been made in the event of casualties. Thus, if the captain were laid out a certain officer was to carry on and take over command. Similar arrangements were made in the event of all officers on the bridge becoming casualties, an eventuality that was far from improbable. In fact, Captain Grenfell gave orders that if a shell burst on or near the bridge a certain officer was to be informed in any case; and if the latter did not receive word of this explosion he was to assume that everyone on the bridge was a casualty and he was to be ready to open fire at the right time. One of the possibilities in the preliminary stages of these attacks was always that owing to the hitting by the enemy’s shells, or, more likely still, by the explosion of his torpedo against the side of the ship, some portion of the screens or dummy deckhouses might have been damaged, and thus the guns be revealed to the enemy. So, while Penshurst’s captain was busily engaged watching the movements of the submarine, the information as to this unfortunate fact might have been made known. It was therefore a standing rule that the bridge was to be informed by voice-pipe of such occurrences. Damage received in the engine-room was reported up the pipe to the bridge. Conversely there were placed three men at the voice-pipes—one on the bridge, one in the gunhouse aft, and one at the 12-pounder—whose duty it was to pass along the messages, the first-mentioned passing down the varying bearing and range of the submarine and the state of affairs on the bridge, and when no orders were necessary he was to keep passing along the comforting remark ‘All right.’ By this means the hidden officers and guns’ crews were kept informed of the position of affairs and able to have the guns instantly ready to fire at the very moment the screens were let down. Obviously victory and the very lives of every man in the ship could be secured only if the vessel came into action smartly and effectively without accident or bungling.

Sometimes victory was conditional only on being torpedoed, so that the enemy might believe he had got the steamer in a sinking condition and the vessel was apparently genuinely abandoned. Inasmuch as the submarine on returning home had to afford some sort of evidence, the U-boat captain would approach the ship and endeavour to read her name. It was then that the Q-ship’s opportunity presented itself, and the guns poured shells into the German. Special drills were therefore made in case Penshurst should be hit by torpedo, and in this eventuality the boat ‘panic party’ was to lower away and at once start rowing off from the ship, whilst the remainder hid themselves at their respective stations. As for the engineers, their duty was to stop the engines at once, but to try to keep the dynamo running as long as possible so that wireless signals could still be sent out. The engine-room staff were to remain below as long as conditions would allow, but if the water rose so that these were compelled to come up, their orders were to crawl out on to the deck on the disengaged side and there lie down lest the enemy should see them. As these Q-ships usually carried depth charges and the latter exploded under certain conditions of pressure from the sea, it was one of the first duties on being torpedoed that these should be secured.

Now, supposing the Q-ship were actually sunk and the whole crew were compelled really to abandon ship, what then? The submarine would certainly come alongside the boats and make inquiries. She would want to know, for instance, the name of the ship, owners, captain, cargo, where from, where bound. That was certain. She would also, most probably, insist on taking the captain prisoner, if the incident occurred in the last eighteen months of the war. All these officers and men would, of course, be wearing not smart naval uniform, but be attired in the manner fitting the personnel of an old tramp. The captain would be wearing a peaked cap, with the house-flag of his Company suitably intertwined in the cap badge, while the men would be attired in guernseys, old suits, and mufflers, with a dirty old cloth cap. Now, if the U-boat skipper was a live man and really knew his work he would, of course, become suspicious on seeing so many hands from one sunken tramp. ‘This,’ he would remark, ‘is no merchant ship, but a proper trap,’ and would proceed to cross-examine the boats’ crews. It was therefore the daily duty of Q-ship men to learn a suitable lie which would adequately deceive the German. Here is the information which Penshurst was, at a certain period of her Q-ship career, ready to hand out to any inquisitive Hun if the latter had sunk the ship.

In answer to questions the crew would reply: ‘This is the S.S. Penshurst, owned by the Power Steam Ship Company of London. Her master was Evan Davies, but he has gone down with the ship, poor man. Cargo? She was carrying coal, but she was not an Admiralty collier.’ Then the enemy would ask where from and to. If it happened that Penshurst was in a likely locality the reply would be: ‘From Cardiff’; otherwise the name of a well distant coal port, such as Newcastle or Liverpool, was decided upon. For instance, if Penshurst were sunk in the neighbourhood of Portland Bill whilst heading west it would be no good to pretend you were from the Mersey or Bristol Channel. When the German commented on the singularly large number of the crew, he would get the reply: ‘Yes, these aren’t all our own chaps. We picked up some blokes two days ago from a torpedoed ship.’ Then in answer to further questions one of the survivors from the latter would back up the lie with the statement that they were the starboard watch of the S.S. Carron, owned by the Carron Company, 2,350 tons, bound with a cargo of coal from Barry (or Sunderland) to a French port. In this case Captain Grenfell would pretend to be the master of the Carron, and of Penshurst’s four officers one would pretend he was the first mate of the Carron, another the first mate of the collier Penshurst, another the Penshurst’s second mate, whilst the assistant-paymaster, not being a navigator, passed as chief steward. Thus, every little detail was thought out for every possible contretemps. To surprise the enemy and yet not to let him surprise you was the aim.

If, by a piece of bad luck, your identity as a Q-ship had been revealed—and this did occur—so that the enemy got away before you had time to sink him, there was nothing for it but to get the other side of the horizon and alter the appearance of the ship. To the landsman this may seem rather an impossible proposition. I admit at once that in the case of the Q-sailing-ships this was rather a tall order, for the plain reason that topsail schooners and brigantines in these modern days of maritime enterprise are comparatively few in number. But the greatest part of our sea-borne trade is carried on in small steamers of more or less standardized type or types. Vessels of the type such as Penshurst and Suffolk Coast are to be seen almost everywhere in our narrow seas: except for the markings on their funnels they are as much like each other as possible. In a fleet of such craft it would be about as easy for a German to tell one from another as in a Tokio crowd it would be for an Englishman to tell one Japanese from another. The points which distinguish these craft the one from the other are of minor consideration, such as the colour of the hull, the colour of the funnel, the device on the funnel, the number of masts, the topmast, derricks, cross-trees, and so on. Thus, in the case of Penshurst there were any amount of disguises which in a few hours would render her a different ship. For instance, by painting her funnel black, with red flag and white letters thereon, she might easily be taken for one of the Carron Company’s steamers, such as the Forth. By giving her a black funnel with a white V she might be the Gloucester Coast of the Powell, Bacon, and Hough Lines, Ltd.; by altering the funnel to black, white, red, white, and black bands she might have been the Streatham, owned by Messrs. John Harrison, Ltd. Other similar craft, such as the Blackburn and Bargang, had no funnel marks; so here again were more disguises. Penshurst further altered her appearance at times by taking down her mizzen-mast altogether, by filling in the well deck forward, by adding a false steam-pipe to the funnel, by shortening and levelling the derricks, by removing the main cross-trees, by painting or varnishing the wood bridge-screen, by giving the deckhouses a totally different colour, by showing red lead patches on the hull, and varying the colour of the sides with such hues as black to-day, next time green or grey or black, and adding a sail on the forestay.

If you will examine the photos of Commander Douglas’s Q-ship Barranca, you will see how cleverly, by means of a little faking, even a much bigger ship could be disguised. In one picture you see her alley-ways covered up by a screen, funnel markings altered, and so on; whilst in another the conspicuous white upper-works, the white band on the funnel, and the dark hull make her a different ship, so that, he tells me, on one occasion after passing a suspicious neutral steamer and not being quite satisfied, he was able to steam out of sight, change his ship’s appearance, and then overtake her, get quite close and make a careful examination without revealing his identity. To the landsman all this may seem impossible, but inasmuch as the sea is traversed nowadays by steamers differing merely in minute details, distinguished only to the practised eye of the sailor, such deception is possible. I remember on one occasion during the war a surprising instance of this. Being in command of a steam drifter off the south-west Irish coast, I obtained Admiral Bayly’s permission at my next refit to have the ship painted green, the foremast stepped, the funnel and markings painted differently, and a Dublin fishing letter and number painted on the bows, a suitable name being found in the Fisherman’s Almanack. The 6-pounder gun forward was covered with fishing gear, which could be thrown overboard as soon as the ship came into action. Discarding naval uniform and wearing old cloth caps and clothes, we left Queenstown, steamed into Berehaven, and tied up alongside a patrol trawler with whom we had been working in company for nearly a year. The latter’s crew never recognized us until they saw our faces, and even then insisted that we had got a new ship! In fact, one of them asserted that he knew this Dublin drifter very well, at which my Scotch crew from the Moray Firth were vastly amused.

Routine at sea of course differed in various Q-ships, but it may be interesting to set down the following, which prevailed in that well-organized ship Penshurst:

SEA ROUTINE.

A few weeks after the war, Lord Jellicoe remarked publicly that in the ‘mystery ship’ there had been displayed a spirit of endurance, discipline, and courage, the like of which the world had never seen before. He added that he did not think the English people realized the wonderful work which these ships had done in the war. No one who reads the facts here presented can fail to agree with this statement, which, indeed, is beyond argument. Discipline, of course, there was, even in the apparently and externally most slovenly tramp Q-ship; and it must not be thought that among so many crews of ‘hard cases’ all the hands were as harmless as china shepherdesses. When ashore, the average sailor is not always at his best: his qualities are manifest on sea and in the worst perils pertaining to the sea. The landsman, therefore, has the opportunity of observing him when the sailor wants to forget about ships and seas. If some of the Q-ships’ crews occasionally kicked over the traces in the early days the fault was partly their own, but partly it was as the result of circumstances. Even Q-ship crews were human, and after weeks of cruising and pent-up keenness, after being battered about by seas, shelled by submarines while lying in dreadful suspense, and then doing all that human nature could be expected to perform, much may be forgiven them if the attractions of the shore temporarily overpowered them. In the early stages of the Q-ship the mistake was made of sending to them the ‘bad hats’ and impossible men of the depots; but the foolishness of this was soon discovered. Only the best men were good enough for this special service, and as the men were well paid and well decorated in return for success, there was no difficulty in choosing from the forthcoming volunteers an ideal crew. Any Q-ship captain will bear testimony to the wonderful effect wrought on a crew by the first encounter with an enemy submarine. The average seaman has much in him of the simple child, and has to be taught by plain experience to see the use and necessity of monotonous routine, of drills and discipline; but having once observed in hard battle the value of obedience, of organization and the like, he is a different man—he looks at sea-life, in spite of its boredom, from a totally different angle. Perfect discipline usually spelled victory over the enemy. Presently that, in turn, indicated a medal ribbon and ‘a drop of leaf’ at home, so as to tell his family all about it. Never again would he overstay his leave: back to the ship for him to give further evidence of his prowess.

This was the kind of fellow who could be relied upon to maintain at sea the gallant traditions of British seamanhood, and in their time of greatest peril the true big-souled character manifested itself, as real human truth always emerges in periods of crisis. I am thinking of one man who served loyally and faithfully in a certain Q-ship. In one engagement this gallant British sailor while in the execution of his duty was blown literally to pieces except for an arm, a leg in a sea-boot, and the rest a mere shattered, indescribable mass, his blood and flesh being scattered everywhere by the enemy’s attack. And yet the last words of this good fellow, spoken just before it was too late, did much to help the Q-ship in her success. In a previous engagement this man’s gun had the misfortune to start with seven missfires. This was owing to ammunition rendered faulty by having been kept on the deck too long as ‘ready-use.’ Consequently his gun did not come into action as quickly as the others. This piece of bad luck greatly upset such a keen warrior, and he was determined that no such accident should occur again. Therefore, in the next fight, just as he was crouching with his gun’s crew behind the bridge-screen, he was heard to say to his mates: ‘Now, mind. We’re to be the first gun in action this time.’ Immediately afterwards a shell came and killed him instantaneously.

Or, again, consider the little human touch in the case of the Q-ship commanded by Lieut.-Commander McLeod, which had been ‘done in’ and was sinking, so that she had really to be abandoned. When all were getting away in the boats, Lieut.-Commander McLeod’s servant was found to be missing. At the last moment he suddenly reappeared, carrying with him a bag which he had gone back to fetch. In it was Lieut.-Commander McLeod’s best monkey-jacket. ‘I thought as you might want this, sir, seeing you’ll have to go and see the Admiral when we get back to Queenstown,’ was his cool explanation. Nothing could crush this kind of spirit, which prevailed in the trenches, the air, and on sea until the Armistice was won. It is the spirit of our forefathers, the inheritance of our island race, which, notwithstanding political and domestic tribulations, lies silent, dormant, undemonstrative, until the great hour comes for the best that is in us to show itself. Germany, of course, had her disguised armed ships, such as the Moewe, the Wolf, and so on, and with them our late enemies performed unquestionably brilliant work all over the world. It is true, also, that a similar achievement was attained in one disguised sailing ship; nor can we fail to admire the pluck and enterprise which enabled them to get through the British blockade. To belittle such first-class work would be to turn one’s back on plain truth.

But the Q-ship service was not a short series of three or four spasms, but took its part in the persistent prosecution of the anti-submarine campaign. It remained a perpetual thorn in the enemy’s side, and it was a most dangerous thorn. Unlike the U-boat service in its later stages, it continued to be composed of volunteers, and it was certainly the means of bringing to light extraordinary talent and courage. Like other children, the seaman loves dressing up and acting. In the Q-ship he found this among the other attractions, of which not the least was the conscious joy of taking a big share in the greatest of all wars. In one Q-ship alone were earned no fewer than four D.S.O.’s and three bars, five D.S.C.’s and seven bars, one Croix de Guerre, and six ‘mentions’ among the officers. Among the men this ship earned twenty-one D.S.M.’s and four bars, as well as three ‘mentions.’ To-day as you pass some tired old tramp at sea, or watch a begrimed steamer taking in a cargo of coals, you may be gazing at a ship as famous as Grenville’s Revenge or Drake’s Golden Hind. At the end of the war the Admiralty decided to place a memorial tablet on board each merchant vessel that had acted as a decoy during the war, the tablet being suitably inscribed with details of the gallant ship’s service, together with the names of the commanding officer and members of the crew who received decorations. The first of these ships so to be commemorated was the Lodorer, better known to us as Captain Campbell’s Q-ship Farnborough. After hostilities, in the presence of representatives of the owners and the Ministry of Shipping, Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Duff unveiled Lodorer’s tablet, and those who read it may well think and reflect.