Part 1:
I imagine it was the same for Howard Carter when he opened the long-sealed tomb of Tutankhamun. He knew something awaited the beam of his torch, but until it broke the millennia of darkness, he knew not what.
Whilst it is not quite as dramatic in the hushed reading room of the National Archives at Kew, laying the heavy brown cardboard box on your allocated table does have an air of reverence about it. Although ‘ADM/2889 Trade Division Records, Routes for Merchant Shipping, East Coast’ is unlikely to include a golden death mask, or indeed curses from across the ages, there is still a pang of excitement as I untied the box and removed the lid.
The smell of musty long unread papers makes its escape. You cannot but wonder who was the last person to read the documents. The words retelling stories of long-past dramas and lives, the humdrum and the heroic, here they are patiently awaiting their rediscovery. You stir the old ghosts with the turn of every page. There is the occasional startling revelation, but the vast majority of pages are passed over rapidly, sent back to their long sleep, awaiting their historian.
Researching history is as far removed from the fast-paced digital online world as it is possible to get. This is a profession, perhaps a better description might be obsession, that rewards the patient, studious shuffling of obscure papers.
On day one of my research trip to London, St Pancras station bustled with travellers, commuters heading for their offices, darting expertly between heavily laded tourists. The contrast between the hot summer streets and the air conditioned calm of the British Library’s Asian and African Studies reading room could barely be greater. There is a studious silence. I join the rows of academics, historians and the outright curious at the rows of desks. The bulky file entitled ‘Compensation to Dependents of Lascars of S.S. Tangistan’ is placed at my allocated workspace. And so the work begins.
On Tuesday 9 March 1915 the Tangistan was conveying iron ore from North Africa to Middlesbrough when she struck a mine off Cayton Bay. The heavily laden ship sank within minutes, killing all but one of her crew. The engine room was manned largely by, what was then termed, Lascar seamen. They had signed on at Aden on the shores of the Red Sea. Prior to my visit to London, I knew all of their names and approximate ages. But their exact origins remained a mystery, they may have been classed as being in the Indian Merchant Marine, but this covered an area from East Africa to Burma, so wide-ranging as to be a hindrance to research.
There were seventeen Lascar sailors working in the ship’s engine room. Every single one of them were lost to the cold waters of the North Sea. A single body was found by a fishing coble, floating off Flamborough Head, the body was landed at Bridlington, where, despite detailed enquires, it proved impossible to identify him. Thus he was buried in an unmarked grave in Bridlington Cemetery.
The file on the Tangistan does give previously unpublished information on the Lascar sailors. Whilst it will probably prove to be impossible to positively identify the man buried at Bridlington, the field will certainly be narrowed to two or three names. What the file does allow is a window into the world from which they came. The men were all from the ‘interior of Arabia, beyond Aden’. This is probably today’s Yemen, but there is the possibility that they also came from Saudi Arabia. What has come apparent is that three of the men deserted the ship before it sailed towards its fate off Cayton Bay, thus the number of those lost will have to be adjusted accordingly.
Over the coming weeks I hope to gain a far greater understanding of the men, their origins and working conditions. As ever, the act of reading and researching, leads to perhaps unexpected conclusions and destinations.
In the next blog I will describe my second day in London and visits to the Imperial War Museum and the National Maritime Museum.
Part 2:
A pair of fifteen inch naval guns stand guard at the entrance to London’s Imperial War Museum; one each from the battleships HMS Ramillies and HMS Resolution. They are trained northward and I couldn’t help but wonder what they might hit if they suddenly opened fire. Apparently, I am not the first to ponder the question, naval historiographer and YouTuber ‘Drachinifel’ estimated their elevation at 8°, consulted gunnery tables for period and estimated that Devonshire Road, Enfield in north London would be in the firing line; fully nine miles from the Imperial War Museum.
Inside the visual drama continues with an RAF Spitfire hanging from the roof, seemingly in mid-flight, and a V2 rocket awaits its launch; goodness knows where that might land! As I made my way towards the Imperial War Museum archive room, I passed the remains of a Japanese Zero fighter aircraft, retrieved from a tropical jungle on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. It was discovered fifty years after the end of the Second World War, a British made bullet lodged in the fuselage tells of its demise, a dried lotus flower found in the cockpit, carried by pilots for luck, only adds to the pathos of the wrecked machine.
However, I was at the Imperial War Museum to continue my research into the German minefield laid off Scarborough during the infamous bombardment of 1914. The diary of Vice Admiral A. C. Scott apparently mentioned the Scarborough raid. Scott’s cruiser was attached to the mighty 4th Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet. In 1914 the squadron comprised of the dreadnought battleships Agincourt, Bellerophon, Dreadnought and Temeraire. With the rest of the Grand Fleet, these powerful units were at sea in the wake of the bombardment of Scarborough, scouring the North Sea for the German High Seas Fleet. It was to no avail, as the Germans used the poor weather to shield their return to the safety of their home ports. Admiral Scott’s diary merely contained a passing reference to the bombardment of Scarborough; incidentally, Scott was the cousin of the famous Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Scott.
The memoir of Lieutenant Hubert Boothby RNR, proved to be far more fruitful. Boothby was twice sunk on minesweepers in Cayton Bay. As far as I’m aware his is the only published first-hand account of the battle to clear the German minefield in the winter of 1914-15. His description of how minesweeping was undertaken and the dramatic descriptions of the sinkings was gripping reading. It is often the small details that drive home the fact that these were ordinary men undertaking extraordinary tasks. Boothby complained that he had lost his prized gramophone and his record collection, when his minesweeper Orianda was sunk. The records lay on the bottom of the North Sea to this day, perhaps waiting to be rediscovered by the divers from the Scarborough Sub Aqua Club.
In the afternoon I travelled across south London to Greenwich, where the masts of the Cutty Sark loom over the surrounding streets, a reminder of the centrality of Greenwich in the nautical history of these islands. The National Maritime Museum’s Caird Library is the largest maritime reference library in the world. On the groaning shelves is Julian Corbett’s multi-volume official history of the Royal Navy in World War One. His work confirms that the East Coast War Channel, the swept and marked safe channel for shipping, was only in place as far as Flamborough Head when the bombardment took place. Indeed, it was the laying of the German minefield off Scarborough that triggered an expansion of the channel to cover all of the north east coast, which would eventually run all the way to the Northern Isles and the fleet base at Scapa Flow.
The Returns of Deaths for Sailors 1914-19 is a sobering remainder of the human cost of conflict. Among the blue files was one for a sailor killed on board the collier Torquay when she struck a mine off Gristhorpe Bay in February 1915. The crippled ship was towed stern-first into Scarborough and beached. Once the water had been drained from the stoke hold, the body of fireman Karl Pearson was discovered. He was subsequently buried in Scarborough’s Manor Road Cemetery. He lies in an unmarked grave, but the Friends of Manor Road are attempting to get a Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone in place in time for the 110th anniversary of his death in 2025.
In part three of the blog I will take readers to the reading rooms of the National Archives at Kew in south west London. This would be, I hoped, the main event. I had ordered ten boxes of files and was expecting to discover invaluable information on the fate of the ships and men of the Scarborough minefield of 1914-15.
Part 3:
As you plunge through the dense green foliage and struggle in the humid air, you could be forgiven for believing that you are in the midst of a tropical rain forest, perhaps on a remote Pacific island. But, in truth you are not at all far from the madding crowds, indeed, you are part of the madding crowds, as this is Kew Gardens famous palm house.
Kew in south west London is rightly famous for its astonishing gardens. The vast majority of visitors arriving at Kew Gardens tube station immediately head across the pleasant leafy square towards the world-famous gardens. However, a small, but not insignificant number, will head in the opposite direction, down the quiet residential streets, often clutching notepads and sharpened pencils. They are heading for Kew’s hidden secret, the National Archives. To call it hidden might appear ludicrous, the National Archives are after all housed in an enormous concrete modernist building. But, they are tucked away down the backstreets of Kew. Ask the majority of those heading towards Kew Gardens and it is unlikely that they will be aware of the existence of the National Archives. Yet, there it is, a handful of streets away, home to one thousand years of history and over fifteen million documents.
I had ten large cardboard boxes awaiting me at my allocated workstation inside the National Archives reading room. Although I had allocated myself two days to work through them, it still appeared to be daunting task. The very first document I leafed through was the report into the loss of the minesweeper trawler Garmo. The battered telegram from the Scarborough wireless station to the Admiralty in London, announced that the skipper was dead and five were missing. Its clipped language announcing yet another victim of the minefield laid by the Germans off Scarborough during the bombardment of 1914. It was followed a few pages later by the official press release for the morning papers. On a single page it listed those who had died when the minesweepers Orianda and Garmo had struck mines in Cayton Bay.
The scene was set for an often melancholy day, reading the litany of losses in 'ADM 137/2959 British Merchant Vessels sunk and captured by the enemy, August 1914 to December 1915’. There was little new evidence in that bulky document, but there listed at first hand were the names of the ships I have become familiar with during the course of my research. The first victim, the collier Elterwater, her twelve crew rescued by another collier, but the second mate died on the deck of the S.S. City of Newcastle.
A few pages later, the Torquay again, the collier described in the last post, one of whose firemen is buried at Dean Road Cemetery in Scarborough. The document did add that she was towed into Scarborough by the trawler Game Cock, so another small piece is added to the jigsaw.
I patiently worked my way through the ‘History of British Minesweeping during the War’, the ‘Records of the Director of Minesweeping’ and finally an intriguing bundle of files that purported to contain ‘Wreck. Notification of a boat found off Flamborough Head’. I read through each file four times and there was nothing. It had either been misfiled, or I was going cross-eyed by this point. The final box was entitled ‘ADM 137/1887 Secret Packs of C-in-C Grand Fleet Vol. VII … Pack 005 Minesweeping’. There stamped in red on the buff cover of the first document was the word ‘Secret’. Even 110 years on, there was still an air of excitement as I opened the file. I have to admit that I am an admirer of Admiral Jellicoe and his leadership of the Grand Fleet during the Great War. There I was reading the same file that he opened on board the fleet flagship HMS Iron Duke. There was the great man’s signature. Unfortunately, there was little of much significance in regard to the minefield at Scarborough, Jellicoe was commenting on the general effectiveness of the German mines and the failed operation to intercept the German ships in the wake of the bombardment.
On my final night in London I attended the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, as a promenader paying a mere £6 to witness Sir Simon Rattle conduct the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. The chosen work was the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 4. Although it is a romantic work, it now has an historic resonance, as the symphony was the final piece of music performed and broadcast by the Berliner Philharmoniker on 12 April 1945. Apparently, Albert Speer chose the symphony as a signal that the Nazis were about to lose the war. Hitler Youth members were reported to have distributed cyanide pills to the audience for those who wished, by death, to escape the imminent arrival of the Red Army. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) was also performed.
This research trip was kindly facilitated by the Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre and will lead to an exhibition at the centre, entitled ‘After the Bombardment, the Battle of Cayton Bay 1914-15’ between December 2024 and March 2025.
