Gone, but not forgotten

There was a huge death toll when HMS Royal Oak went down in October 1939. A German U-boat, which had penetrated the British Navy’s main anchorage at Scapa Flow in Orkney, sank the 180m-long, 29,000-tonne Dreadnought battleship with deadly efficiency. It was Friday the 13th and 833 men lost their lives.

The next day a local salvage diver, Sandy Robertson, had the unenviable task of finding out why the ship had sunk. The scenes that this young hard-hat diver saw haunt him to this day – hundreds of bodies lay around the ship. The first two dives that Robertson, now in his nineties, made quashed rumours that she might have been sunk by sabotage. On his first dive he found the holes where the torpedoes had pierced the ship and on the second he recovered the propellers of two electric-driven German torpedoes.

Last year, I was granted special permission to work with the Royal Navy diving team, documenting the wreck both on stills and video. HMS Royal Oak is an official war grave and is off limits to divers. However, I’ve been lucky enough to spend many hours filming this ship, which must be the largest and most intact naval wreck to be found in shallow water in the northern hemisphere.

The wreck now lies in 30m of water, almost upside down, with its upturned keel reaching to just 5m below the surface. A wreck buoy marks it as a hazard to shipping. The dives that I made were no-decompression with a maximum of 20 minutes bottom time. In order to capture the wreck on film, time was of the essence. Fortunately, I had produced an earlier video to mark the 50th anniversary of her sinking in 1989 and I was familiar with her layout and detail.

On every dive on the Royal Oak you feel a sense of awe as you swim over the growth-encrusted hull towards the main rails where the hull meets the deck. The rolling slope of the hull ends abruptly at the rails as the deck descends into the void, leaving you hanging over a steep drop into the cold, dark-green water. Visibility is rarely more than 10m, and you spend some time gliding through the gloom before the sea bed becomes visible. Throughout the descent you are conscious of a dark shape on one side and the lighter green of open water on the other.

At the bow the damage from the first torpedo attack is immediately evident. But the graceful line of the bow beckons you down to the huge links of the anchor chain which loop down from the ship to the sea bed at 30m. Swimming just above the sea bed towards amidships you come across the first of the twin 15in gun breaches. Royal Oak was fitted with eight of these guns – the largest guns ever fitted on a British naval vessel. They each weighed 102 tonnes and were capable of hurling 876kg shells on to targets up to 29km away. Supporting her main armament were 6in and 4in guns, together with anti-aircraft guns and even four submarine torpedo tubes, although these were later removed. Unfortunately, because of the way the ship rolled over, the guns added to the momentum of the sinking and the barrels hit the sea bed first. Consequently, the barrels are buried in sand under the wreck, though the breaches are still visible. The main control wheels are still intact and the overall scale is impressive. These breaches are more than 8ft in diameter and identical guns are on display outside the Imperial War Museum in London.

Finning towards the second turrets you pass crushed ‘carly’ floats or rafts. These aluminium dinghies, if there had been time to launch them, would have saved so many lives; but instead they sank with the ship and now lie on the sea bed, some of their airtight compartments crushed by the pressure of water. Fortunately, there were some survivors – a tiny tender, Daisy II, picked up hundreds of seamen who had scrambled into the cold water and ferried them to shore. Only 30m long and 4.5m wide, she nevertheless managed to rescue 386 men from the icy, oil-covered waters of Scapa Flow in total darkness.

Further aft is the Admiral’s barge, which would have been used to transfer officers to and from the ship. This timber-hulled vessel has deteriorated considerably over the years and the engine block has become exposed as the timbers have rotted away. From here the main superstructure looms out and stretches to your left. The metal of the main funnel and fighting top lie distorted and crushed. In her floating state, the roof of the fighting top would have been about 30m from the deck and would have hit the water at an alarming rate as the ship keeled over.

Further on, the breaches of the rear 15in guns lie on the sea bed, having ripped themselves away from the deck which runs towards the stern rails. These are now covered with a thick marine growth of plumose anemones and dead men’s fingers. They provide a riot of colour to this sombre grave.

Rising to a depth of 20m and finning back along the ship, you can see the single rudder silhouetted against the Scapa Flow daylight and a row of 6in side armament guns lie above the main companionway. There are several large doors still tightly bolted shut and one can only imagine the panic there must have been to try to open these in time to escape. Most portholes are open and several survivors have described how they managed to squeeze out of them to safety as the water rushed in. In pitch darkness they took the decision to swim out, in the hope of rising to the surface, where the cold night air must have smelled its sweetest despite the oil-covered freezing-cold water. Some swam as far as the nearest cliffs, nearly a mile away, but many perished in the attempt as the water sapped their energy.

Moving up and over the huge hull amidships, you can drop down on to the starboard side which, until the gaping torpedo holes appear, seems to be a vast expanse of smooth metal. The holes were made by the U-boat’s second salvo – the first one having scored a minor hit on the bow – and were so accurate that the three holes appear as one. They are so large that if you swim through the centre of them you can only just see the sides.

The Royal Oak listed heavily to starboard as explosions ripped her open, seawater rushed in and balls of ignited cordite raced through the ship incinerating most of the crew. Nothing is recognizable inside except mangled, distorted and flattened metal and there is an eerie lack of marine growth compared with the rich growth at the stern.

Small amounts of fuel oil have always seeped from the upturned hull. As it emerges from minute holes and cracks, the oil forms into black droplets which rise slowly from the wreck. The oil provides a poignant visual reminder to the Orcadians that Royal Oak was providing anti-aircraft cover for their capital Kirkwall. In recent years this seepage has increased as the hull deteriorates. The Ministry of Defence has placed a cage over the wreck to contain the escaping oil and this year plans to tap into the hull and pump the oil out. This is a complicated project, but the work will not disturb the inside of the wreck and the oil must be removed to avoid a major spillage.

The loss of Royal Oak brought a long-term benefit to Orkney as the decision was made by the Admiralty in 1940 to build permanent barriers across the eastern entrances to secure the naval base of Scapa Flow. These became known as the Churchill Barriers and took more than four years to build. Most of the hard work was done by Italian prisoners of war who completed the task with pride. As a memorial of their time on Orkney they converted a Nissen hut into a chapel using only discarded materials. The chapel is one of Orkney’s most popular tourist attractions and a mass is celebrated there each year on the nearest Sunday to the anniversary of the sinking of HMS Royal Oak.

The 61st anniversary of Royal Oak’s sinking saw a unique event in naval history when the Ministry of Defence granted special permission for the ashes of Dorothy Golding, wife of bandsman Arthur Golding who went down with the ship, to be taken down and placed in the wreck. Dorothy never remarried after the tragedy and mourned her husband for 61 years. She died at the age of 94 on Remembrance Day 1999, and her family requested permission to reunite her with her husband. After a service and a naval salute, Dorothy’s grandson Christopher Kilford, a qualified scuba diver, took his grandmother’s casket down to a part of the wreck at 20m.

I have produced a 50-minute video from my dives which includes previously unseen underwater images of the wreck and there are interviews with survivors and the first diver on the wreck, Sandy Robertson. Also included on the video is coverage of Dorothy Golding’s ashes being placed in the wreck. The finale is the unfurling of a battle ensign on the upturned hull by a Royal Navy diver on the anniversary of her sinking. The final credits include the names of all those who died.

The Royal Oak may be sunk and invisible to those on the surface, but for the time being the oil that floats on the surface provides a permanent reminder of all those brave men who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the name of peace.

Going down in history HMS Royal Oak was built in in the naval dockyards at Devonport, Plymouth during the First World War. During that war the ship served at Jutland and her 40,000hp engines could achieve speeds in excess of 20 knots. However, by 1939 she had difficulty keeping up with the more modern ships and was posted to the northeast of corner of Scapa Flow to provide anti-aircraft cover.

Shortly after midnight on 13 October 1939, Gunther Prien, commander of German U-boat U-47, had ordered his vessel to lie off the east coast of Orkney. Leading into the British Navy’s main anchorage at Scapa Flow were four narrow channels between islands which had been further restricted by the sinking of block ships. Prien chose Kirk Sound where, on a fast incoming tide, he was able to navigate through a gap and into the waters of Scapa Flow.

Once inside the Flow, Prien surveyed the scene and found only one capital ship (capital ships are the largest and most heavily armed ships in a naval fleet). Fortunately, all but the Royal Oak had left just a few days before, fearing, possible air attacks. Had they not, Gunther Prien could have drastically altered the course of the Second World War.

Just before 1am Prien fired his first salvo of torpedoes, which scored a minor hit on the bow of Royal Oak. Those on board thought there must have been a small internal explosion and no alarms were raised. Twenty minutes later Prien had reloaded and fired his second salvo, which scored three perfect hits amidships, resulting in the sinking of the ship.

As skilfully as he had entered, Gunther Prien left Scapa Flow through Kirk Sound and returned to Germany to a hero’s welcome.

Many of the Royal Oak’s crew escaped only to die of their wounds, and they are buried in the naval cemetery at Lyness on the nearby island of Hoy. A remembrance plaque was placed on the wall of St Magnus Cathedral in Orkney’s capital. The Royal Oak’s bell was later added to this display when it was found by Navy divers in the 1970s.

Each year on 13 October Navy divers, survivors and members of the British Legion go out to the buoy that marks the wreck’s position and conduct a ceremony over the water. Wreaths are laid and Navy divers descend to the wreck to remove the old flag and raise a new one in remembrance of those who lost their lives.