The sinking of Vice-Admiral Tryon

Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon died on 22^nd June 1893, at sea in the eastern Mediterranean. As he acknowledged shortly before going under, it was entirely his own fault.

Born in January 1832 into a wealthy Northamptonshire family who owned a country estate, George Tryon was educated at Eton and entered the Navy at the age of 16. His promotion through the ranks was rapid, although much of his experience was away from the sea. He became a Vice-Admiral (following a failed bid to enter Parliament and a post that gave him responsibility for coastguard buildings) in 1889.

As a Vice-Admiral during peacetime, his main responsibility was to direct “naval manoeuvres”, which in layman’s terms means “war games”. It was during one such operation in 1893 that disaster struck.

Tryon had a reputation for keeping his captains on their toes by issuing orders at the last minute and seeing how responsive they were. His aim, as he saw it, was to encourage initiative and quick thinking. It was unfortunate that these were qualities that he did not always demonstrate himself.

On the day in question, Vice-Admiral Tryon was aboard his flagship HMS Victoria at the head of a double column of eight battleships and three light cruisers. They were steaming in two rows about 1,200 yards apart.

Tryon gave orders that the two rows were to turn inwards towards each other in a complete 180 degree manoeuvre, after which they would steam in the opposite direction before turning at 90 degrees and coming to anchor.

There was one huge problem with this idea, which was that the turning circle of a battleship was at least 800 yards. This was pointed out to the Vice-Admiral by some of his officers, and he agreed to increase the distance between the columns to 1,600 yards, which would just be sufficient if the ships continued at their current speed.

However, not long after the new formation had been adopted, Sir George went back to Plan A. Just for good measure, he ordered the ships to increase their speed. It would now be impossible for the manoeuvre to be made safely. All the senior officers knew this, with the sole exception of Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon.

He then raised a signal flag to order the ships to make the 180 degree turns. Rear-Admiral Albert Hastings Markham, who was in charge of HMS Camperdown at the head of the opposite column, had serious doubts about the order – which he knew to be unsafe – and he hesitated to obey it. Sir George sent a tetchy signal that was visible to all the other captains, to the effect of “what are you waiting for?”

So the turn was made. Knowing Vice-Admiral Tryon’s reputation for pulling rabbits out of hats, it might have been the case that everyone was expecting another order to come that would have saved the situation. But that was not the case.

HMS Camperdown hit HMS Victoria and tore a large hole below the waterline, causing Sir George’s flagship to sink in 13 minutes. Fortunately, none of the other ships in the column had followed the order as quickly as the two at the front and there were no other collisions.

Vice-Admiral Tryon went to the bottom along with 358 members of his crew. One of the 357 survivors was John Jellicoe, an officer who would later become Admiral of the Fleet and take charge at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

So why did the disaster happen? There was an enquiry, at which various explanations were put forward. One was that Sir George made a simple arithmetical mistake. Another was that the intention had been for the columns to cross each other as they turned, with one ship passing behind its opposite number. 

However, what was going on in Vice-Admiral Tryon’s head will never be known.

© John Welford

The wreck of the Torrey Canyon, 1967

The wreck of the Torrey Canyon on 18^th March 1967, off the coast of Cornwall, brought home to the British public the risks that are involved in the transport of huge quantities of oil by sea in giant supertankers.

The Torrey Canyon

Although the Torrey Canyon, at 120,000 tonnes capacity, was one of the largest crude oil carriers afloat at the time, it would be dwarfed by some of the monsters around today. Nonetheless, in 1967 it was the largest ship ever to be wrecked, and the loss of its cargo led to a serious environmental disaster that stretched the resources of the UK authorities and gave rise to lessons that have proved beneficial in later similar incidents.

Fully laden, the Torrey Canyon had set sail from Kuwait on 19^th February, her destination being the massive oil refinery at Milford Haven, South Wales. However, a navigational error (not helped by the ship’s cook being the man on watch at the time) led to her running aground on the Seven Stones Reef, ten miles to the north-east of the Scilly Isles. Attempts to refloat the ship failed, and a member of the Dutch salvage team that made the attempt was killed.

Dealing with the cargo

With the oil tanks ruptured, huge amounts of oil began to pour into the sea and a major pollution threat was unleashed. Not only was wildlife at risk, so were the valuable fisheries of the area and the tourist beaches of Cornwall (and, as it turned out, Brittany in France and Guernsey in the Channel Islands).

Great Britain was unprepared for such an event and plans to counter such a threat were rudimentary. The first idea was to use huge quantities of detergent to break up the oil. Some 10,000 tons were sprayed from Royal Navy vessels and more were used on the coast when the oil slick reached land. They were clearly ineffective in containing the spillage and their toxic effects proved to be just as harmful to marine life as the oil.

As more tanks ruptured and the spill increased in volume, the decision was taken to use the Royal Air Force to bomb the ship with a view to setting fire to the oil before it could leak out. In all, 62,000 pounds of bombs were dropped, plus thousands of gallons of petrol that it was hoped would be ignited by the bombs. Napalm was also used. However, when fires were started they were soon put out as the sea washed over the wreck. Many of the bombs missed their target and those that did hit the ship had the effect of sinking it, thus taking the remaining oil below the surface where it was out of reach but still liable to leak as the ship broke up.

The effect on Cornwall

Nothing could stop much of the oil reaching the coast of Cornwall a few days later, and that of Guernsey (the most westerly of the Channel Islands) 19 days after the wreck. In Cornwall, the cliffs and beaches affected by the oil turned black and up to 25,000 seabirds perished. The smell of the oil drifted inland until it was noticeable far inland throughout the county.

As mentioned above, the use of chemical detergents to clean the beaches was widespread but unwise. The Cornish coast is subject to storms and high seas that constantly batter the rocks and beaches, and six months after the spill many of the places that had not been treated were clear of oil. However, the treated beaches had become a disaster area of their own, with all signs of life wiped out.

The effect on Guernsey

On Guernsey, where tourism is the major industry, efforts to clean the beaches were given the highest priority. Teams of people scraped up the oil which was then dumped in a disused quarry. This saved the beaches but created another pollution hazard in the quarry, which could not be dredged clear because of the presence of unexploded World War II bombs. Much of the oil is still there, although modern methods that use oil-eating bacteria are currently proving effective.

The lessons learned

Divers to the wreck of the Torrey Canyon 44 years later reported that there was no sign of the oil and that marine life in the vicinity had returned to normal.

Many lessons were learned from the Torrey Canyon incident, not least concerning the proper course to follow in such events. Panic measures are clearly not the answer, neither is the use of toxic industrial-strength detergents that do more harm than good. Appreciating the risks posed by supertankers, which must approach British shores in order to discharge their cargoes and therefore be subject to the forces of nature, the government now has proper plans in place to deal with any future emergency of this kind.

Likewise, progress has been made on devising methods that avoid the worst environmental consequences when major oil spills occur. Of these, the most hopeful involve the use of biological remedies, as mentioned above in the Guernsey context, and the ability of natural forces to provide their own clean-up operations.

Although the Torrey Canyon wreck was indeed a pollution disaster, it did have some positive outcomes that have proved helpful down to the present day.

© John Welford

The Hindenberg disaster, 1937

During the years preceding World War II there were two choices on offer to those who wished to travel by air. There were fixed-wing, propeller-driven aircraft, and there were airships. Given that the former were primitive by modern standards, being noisy, cramped and uncomfortable, not to mention dangerous, it is understandable that people who could afford to travel long distances by air were attracted to the much greater comfort offered by airships, although safety was still an issue.

Airships and zeppelins

The rigid-framed airship was the invention of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, an aristocratic German general who, in 1895, patented a design for a cigar-shaped balloon, filled with hydrogen gas, to which engines and a cabin could be attached, thus making it far more manoeuvrable than standard balloons that could only go where the wind blew them. Not surprisingly, the rigid airship became known as the zeppelin.

During World War I, Germany used zeppelins as weapons of war, mainly for reconnaissance but also for carrying out bombing raids on London, but after the war the zeppelin was developed as a means of luxury travel. It was American interest that was mainly responsible for this, with orders being placed for bigger and better airships to fly across the Atlantic and beyond.

Passenger services between the United States and Europe began in 1930, with the vast “Graf Zeppelin” airship taking pride of place. This was 776 feet long and was capable of flying anywhere. However, in 1931 an order was placed for an airship that would be even bigger and more luxurious. This was the “LZ 129 Hindenburg”, which entered service in 1936.

This was the age of the great ocean liners that transported the rich and famous in considerable luxury from one side of the “Pond” to the other, but even the fastest liners took the best part of a week, or even longer, to do so.  There was therefore a market for a means of transportation that was just as luxurious but faster, even though a modern traveller would not consider four days for a journey from Germany to New Jersey to be particularly rapid.

The Hindenburg

The Hindenburg was massive, being more than 800 feet long and 130 feet in diameter. In size it was nearly as big as that other ill-fated transatlantic voyager, RMS Titanic. The cabin that was slung beneath the gas balloon (which consisted of 16 separate cells) could carry up to 72 passengers and had a crew of around 50. There was a lounge in which entertainment was provided at a grand piano, a promenade deck, a dining room, a smoking room, and sleeping accommodation in two-bunk berths that resembled sleeping compartments on long-distance rail trains. The whole thing was powered by four huge diesel engines.

The one great drawback for the Hindenburg was that the gas used to fill the balloon was hydrogen and not helium, either of which would have given the required lighter-than-air lift. The United States was the only country in the world that could supply helium gas in sufficient quantities, and, since the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933, such supplies were off-limits to the Hindenburg’s German owners. Instead of travelling thousands of miles slung beneath an enormous bag of inert helium gas, the passengers had no choice but to trust their safety to a similar quantity of highly inflammable hydrogen.

The end of the Hindenburg and travel by airship

The flight that arrived on May 6^th, 1937, at Lakehurst airfield, New Jersey, was the victim of this arrangement. As the airship reached the mast to which it was to be moored before the passengers disembarked, something caused the hydrogen gas to ignite. The fire ripped through the gas envelope from rear to front in just over half a minute, causing the passenger cabin to fall to the ground.

Although the disaster killed 35 of the 97 people on board (there was also a casualty among the ground crew), it is noticeable that the majority survived. This was largely because the blaze was very rapid and the flames soared skywards, so that the passenger accommodation was not touched. As the aircraft broke free from its mooring, the as yet unburned gas still provided enough lift during that short time for the fall to the ground to be relatively gentle, thus making the impact survivable for most of those on board.

The cause of the fire has never been conclusively determined, but the arrival of the Hindenburg coincided with an electrical storm, and it possible that the highly charged atmosphere at the time caused a spark within the metal framework of the airship which would have been enough to ignite the vast quantity of hydrogen gas.

This was a very public disaster because this particular landing was filmed and a radio commentator gave a live broadcast of the event. The dramatic scene therefore became the subject of newsreels that were seen all across America and Europe, as were the still photographs that were splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the world.

There had been other airship disasters in the past. The loss of the British R101 in 1930, which crashed in France with the loss of 48 lives, had put an end to British interest in airships as a mode of international travel. The United States now followed suit given that the inherent dangers of massive airships had become apparent to everyone.

The world would soon be at war, during which time civilian air transport ceased to be a priority for most nations. When the war ended, the development of fixed-wing passenger aircraft made massive strides, especially when jet engines became generally available, so the era of airships such as the Hindenburg could be allowed to slip into history without many regrets.

© John Welford