'Forty three
years ago, on June 5th 1916, at 7.45p.m G.M.T., a telegraph message was sent
from Birsay Post Office to Kirkwall and Stromness. It read: "Battle
cruiser seems in distress between Marwick Head and the brough of Birsay ”.
Twenty minutes later a telegram with the words "vessel down"
followed.
At that
moment some 200 men who had escaped from the cruiser Hampshire, before she
plunged to the bottom with Kitchener of Khartoum on her quarter-deck, were
clinging desperately to Carley rafts and pieces of wreckage on a cold and
raging sea in the wildest summer gale Orkney had experienced for years. Some
died within, the first hour or two; for others it was a bitter hell, lasting
until darkness fell. Twelve men survived of the ship's company.
Few people
witnessed the tragedy, one or two in Marwick, and Mr Joe Angus, now a
‘grocer’ in Stromness, but then a gunner in the Orkney Territorial
Forces, who saw a "cloud of smoke and flame burst up behind the bridge
of the, Hampshire" and instantly gave the alarm to the man in charge of
the watching post, Corporal Drever,
who in his
turn raced to the post office. The. Cruiser was about a mile and a half or
two miles from the shore. In fifteen minutes she had disappeared.
MUDDLE AND PANIC
Then began
a long and pathetic tale of muddle and panic. The service authorities in
Kirkwall and Stromness were caught unaware: they vacillated, made slow and
ineffectual decisions, discouraged violently civilians who wanted to help,
and failed to make urgent costal search which might have meant life to a
few, who survived the waves only to be killed by the rocks. In Stromness the
news of the cruiser’s loss quickly reached Mr. G. L. Thomson, honorary
secretary of the R.N.L.I. branch. He rushed to Stromness Naval HQ with an
offer to launch the lifeboat. His offer being declined, he pressed to see a
senior officer, by whom he was told: “you have no right to interfere in
Naval matters. It is none of your bloody business. And, what’s more, if
you attempt to launch a lifeboat it’s mutiny. Mutiny do you hear? Any more
nonsense or argument and I’ll have the whole lot of you locked up”.
In Birsay,
the few who knew of the disaster, who wanted to help, were in some cases
“forcibly prevented under dire threats”. One man was told by a soldier
“that all civilians were to remain in their houses and not to venture near
the shore or we should be fired on”. A Birsay man was certain that if
people in the neighbourhood had been allowed to take a hand in the rescue
operations “another fifty lives could have been saved”.
DESTROYERS AT LAST
It was not until 9.45pm that
a tug and two trawlers left Stromness for Birsay. A little after 10pm four
destroyers followed, then other boats. Observers in Birsay were positive
that none reached the scene of the sinking before midnight. Cars from
Kirkwall arrived by way of Evie; several times they lost their way and had
to be re-directed. A party under Captain Mackay from Stromness made a more
effective search, but were hampered by lack of information.
By a
miracle, one or two men had sufficient strength to reach a farmhouse, after
their ordeal by sea. The others were found on the rocks more dead than
alive. The dead strewed the shore, or were picked up by ships. Not a single
man was rescued from the sea itself. Someone remembers two lorry loads of
bodies coming to Stromness Pier, little attempt being made to cover them
from public view: Some were almost naked. They were sent down a chute into
the hold of a Naval tug to be taken for burial at Lyness.
Courtesy
of The Orcadian.
