Q-Ships and Their Story

by E. Keble Chatterton

Such a figure is morally and physically alone. He is the great brain of the ship; at his word she is transformed from a tramp to a warship. It is he who has to take the fateful, and perhaps fatal, decision; and to none other can he depute this responsibility as long as life lasts. Only a big character, strong and independent, can tackle such a proposition. Alone, too, he is physically. Most of his men have left the ship and are over there in the boats, sometimes visible on the top of the wave, sometimes obliterated in the trough. The rest of his crew are somewhere below the bridge, under the bulwarks, at their guns, crouching out of sight. His officers are at their respective stations, forward, aft, and amidships, connected to him by speaking-tubes, but otherwise apart. He himself, arbiter of his own fate, his men, and his ship, has to fight against a dozen contending impulses, and refuse to be panic-stricken, hasty, or impetuous. This much is expected of him; his crew are relying on him blindly, absolutely. However, by long years of experience and moulding of character he has learnt the power of concentration and of omitting from his imagination the awful possibilities of failure. Before putting to sea, and whilst on patrol, he has envisaged every conceivable circumstance and condition likely to occur. He has mentally allowed for every move of the submarine, for the wounding of his own ship: and he has had the ship’s action stations thus worked out. Accidents will, of course, occur to spoil any routine, though some of these, such as the breakdown of the wireless and the bursting of a gun, or the jamming of a screen, may be foreseen and allowed for.

But after all that could be prepared for has been done, there always remains some awkward possibility which the wit of man can never foresee. Take the incident of the Q-ship Ravenstone, which was commissioned as a Q-ship on June 26, 1917, under the name of Donlevon. A month later she was torpedoed one afternoon in the Atlantic, 40 miles south of the Fastnet. Fortunately there were no casualties, and fortunately, too, the ship did not straight away founder. There was a heavy sea running, and she was soon down by the head; but she was also prevented from using her engines, for the torpedo had struck her in No. 2 hold, and the force of the explosion had lifted and thrown overboard from the fore well-deck a 7-inch hemp hawser. This had fallen into the sea, floated aft, and there fouled the propeller so effectually that the ship could go neither ahead nor astern. It was a most annoying predicament, but who could have foreseen it? The submarine apparently ‘hopped it,’ for she made no further attack, and one of Admiral Bayly’s sloops, H.M.S. Camelia, stood by Donlevon, and from Berehaven arrived the tug Flying Spray, who got her in tow. Another sloop, the Myosotis, had her in tow for thirty-one hours, handling her so well in the heavy sea that, in spite of Donlevon being down by the head and steering like a mad thing, she safely arrived in Queenstown, and was afterwards paid out of the Service. Ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage had been done.

In the early summer of 1917, at a time when the United States Navy had just begun to help us with their destroyers and the enemy was hoping very shortly to bring us ‘to our knees,’ we had thirteen different Q-ships based on Queenstown. There was the converted sloop Aubrietia, commanded by Admiral Marx, M.V.O., D.S.O., who, in spite of his years, had come back to the Service and accepted a commission as captain R.N.R. For a time he was in command of H.M. armed yacht Beryl, owned by Lord Inverclyde. From this command he transferred to the more exciting work of decoying submarines, and it is amusing when one thinks of an admiral pretending to be the skipper of a little tramp. Of this thirteen there was Captain Grenfell’s Penshurst, about which the reader has already been informed. Captain Gordon Campbell was in Pargust, and Commander Leopold A. Bernays, C.M.G., was in Vala. The latter was one of the most unusual personalities in a unique service. Before the war he had left the Navy and gone to Canada, where he had some pretty tough adventures. On the outbreak of war he joined up, and crossed to England as a soldier, but managed to get transferred quite early to a mine-sweeping trawler, where he did magnificent work month after month; first in sweeping up the mine-field laid off Scarborough at the time of the German raid, December, 1914, and afterwards in clearing up the difficult Tory Island minefield, which had been laid by Berlin in October, 1914, but was not rendered safe for many months afterwards. When in the summer of 1915 a British minesweeping force was required for Northern Russia, Bernays was sent out with his trawlers. Here, with his usual thoroughness and enthusiasm, he set to work, and again performed most valuable service, and buoyed a safe channel for the ships carrying munitions from England to voyage in safety.

But Bernays was no respecter of persons, especially of those who were not keen on their job. With Russian dilatoriness and inefficiency, and in particular with the Russian admiral, he soon found himself exasperated beyond measure. His own trawlers were working in the most strenuous fashion, whereas the Russians seemed only to be thwarting instead of helping, and at any rate were not putting their full weight into the contest. I do not know whether the yarn about Bernays in exasperation pulling the beard of the overbearing Russian admiral is true, but there was a big row, and Bernays came back to England, though for his good work he received the coveted British order C.M.G. After further minesweeping off the Scotch coast, where once more he distinguished himself, he came to Queenstown to serve in his Q-ship. Here he went about his job in his usual fearless manner, and on one occasion had played a submarine as he used to play a fish. He had slowed down, and the U-boat was coming nicely within range, when just as everything was ready for the bait to be swallowed, up came a United States destroyer at high speed to ‘rescue’ this ‘tramp.’ The submarine was frightened away, and Vala lost her fish. Then one day Bernays took Vala on another cruise. What happened exactly we do not know, but evidently a submarine got her, and sank her without a trace, for neither ship nor crew was ever heard of again.

Bernays was just the man for Q-ship work. He was one whom you would describe as a ‘rough customer,’ who might have stepped out of a Wild West cinema. A hard swearer in an acquired American accent, in port also a hard drinker; but on going to sea he kept everything locked up, and not even his officers were allowed to touch a drop till they got back to harbour. The first time I met him was at 3 o’clock one bitterly cold winter’s morning in Grimsby. It was blowing a gale of wind and it was snowing. Some of his minesweepers had broken adrift and come down on to the top of my craft, and were doing her no good. There was nothing for it but to rouse Bernays. His way of handling men, and these rough North Sea fishermen, was a revelation. It was a mixture of hard Navy, Prussianism, and Canadian ‘get-to-hell-out-of-this-darned-hole.’ There was no coaxing in his voice; every syllable was a challenge to a fight. On the forebridge of his trawler he used to keep a bucket containing lumps of coal, and in giving an order would at times accentuate his forcible and coloured words by heaving a lump at any of his slow-thinking crew.

Having said all this, you may wonder there was never a mutiny; but such a state of affairs was the last thing that could ever happen in any of Bernays’ ships. From a weak man the crew would not have stood this treatment a day, but they understood him, they respected him, they loved him, and in his command of the English tongue they realized that he was like unto themselves, but more adept. Follow him? They followed him everywhere—through the North Sea, through Russian and Irish minefields, and relied on him implicitly. And this regard was mutual, for in spite of his rugged manner Bernays had a heart, and he thought the world of his crew. I remember how pleased he was the day he was ordered to go to the dangerous Tory Island minefield. ‘But I’m not going without my old crew; they’re the very best in the world.’ Bernays, as an American officer once remarked, ‘certainly was some tough proposition,’ but he knew no cowardice; he did his brave duty, and he rests in a sailor’s grave.

Another of these thirteen was the converted sloop Begonia, commanded by Lieut.-Commander Basil S. Noake, R.N., an officer of altogether different temperament. Keen and able, yet courteous and gentle of manner, tall, thin, and suffering somewhat from deafness, this gallant officer, too, paid the great penalty. For Begonia was destined to have no ordinary career. Built as a minesweeping sloop, she carried out escort and patrol work until one day she was holed, but managed to get into Queenstown. Here she was repaired and transformed into a decoy, with a counter added instead of her cruiser stern, and with the addition of derricks and so on she was a very clever deception. During one cruise she was evidently a victim to the enemy, for she disappeared, too.

The remaining ships of this thirteen were the Acton (Lieut.-Commander C. N. Rolfe, R.N.), Zylpha (Lieut.-Commander John K. McLeod, R.N.), Cullist (Lieut.-Commander S. H. Simpson, D.S.O., R.N.), Tamarisk (Lieut.-Commander John W. Williams, D.S.O., R.N.R.), Viola (Lieut.-Commander F. A. Frank, D.S.O., R.N.R.), Salvia (Lieut.-Commander W. Olphert, D.S.O., D.S.C., R.N.R.), Laggan (Lieutenant C. J. Alexander, R.N.R.), and Heather (Lieutenant Harold Auten, R.N.R.). In this list there is scarcely a name that did not receive before the end of the war at least one D.S.O., while two of them received the Victoria Cross.

Acton had an indecisive duel with a submarine on August 20, 1917. It was a fine day with a calm sea when the enemy was sighted, and on being attacked Acton abandoned ship. In order to make this doubly real, fire-boxes were started in the well-deck, and steam leakage turned on, which made the ship look as if she were on fire. The enemy inspected the ship closely, so closely in fact that he actually collided with Acton, shaking the latter fore and aft. But after he had come to the surface and Acton opened fire, hitting, loud shouts came from the conning-tower, and he submerged, thus escaping. Acton went on with her work until the end of hostilities.

Zylpha and Cullist both had tragic ends to their careers. Zylpha was a 2,917-ton steamer, built at Sunderland in 1894, and had been commissioned as a Q-ship as far back as October, 1915. Early in June, 1917, she steamed along the south Irish coast and then out into the Atlantic, as if bound for New York. On June 11, at 9.45 a.m., when about 200 miles from the Irish coast, she was torpedoed by a submarine that was never seen again, and totally disabled. Her engines had stopped for the last time, and the sea had poured in, though her closely-packed cargo of wood was at present keeping her afloat. Having ‘bleated’ with her wireless, one of the United States destroyers, based on Queenstown, proceeded to her assistance. This was the Warrington, and she stood by the ship for a whole twenty-four hours—from 2 p.m. of the eleventh until 2.30 p.m. of the twelfth. By the time Warrington had arrived Zylpha’s engine-room and boiler-rooms were already awash, Nos. 2 and 3 holds flooded, the wireless out of action, and one man killed. The Warrington kept patrolling round her, requested a tug by wireless, and went on zigzagging through the long hours. By the evening Zylpha was in a bad way, and the Atlantic swell was seriously shaking the bulkheads, but she was still afloat next morning. By this time the Warrington, who had been some time on patrol, was running short of oil, so, at 2.30 p.m., regretfully had to return to harbour for fuel.