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Description: | Exercise book containing an ms account (29pp), transcribed in July 1916 from notes made in the previous month, recording his service as a midshipman in HMS SHANNON (2nd Cruiser Squadron, Grand Fleet) at the time of the Battle of Jutland, 29 May – 3 June 1916, and describing in particular their departure from Scapa Flow on the evening of 30 May, their surprise at the possibility of action the following afternoon, the alteration of course that kept them out of the main fleet actions during which they never opened fire and the submarine alarms before and during the battle; together with his ms notes and diagrams (23pp), drawn from other sources, about the battle and his conclusion that ‘whereas we had nothing to lose by an indecisive action the Germans had everything to win’, his near contemporary accounts (10pp) of the Grand Fleet’s aborted attack on Sylt in May 1916, a search for a German surface raider in July 1916 and the Grand Fleet’s attempt to intercept a sortie by the German High Seas Fleet on 19 August 1916 during which the light cruisers HMS NOTTINGHAM and HMS FALMOUTH were sunk after being torpedoed by U-boats, and a transcript of a humorous sketch (4pp, undated) from the ship’s magazine of the battleship HMS VANGUARD; an ms diary (ca 185pp) also kept during his service as a midshipman in HMS SHANNON, September 1916 – May 1917, covering the completion of her refit in Liverpool and her subsequent deployment, based on Swarbacks Minn in the Shetlands, with the Northern Patrol seeking to intercept German blockade runners and raiders, apart from a brief period of detachment in January 1917 to escort a convoy of troopships from Devonport to Madeira, and including interesting comments on the effectiveness of the Northern Patrol, coaling ship, occasional anxieties about the threat from mines, Admiral Jellicoe’s appointment as First Sea Lord, the remote and primitive life of the local people at Swarbacks Minn, the attributes of SHANNON’s Captain (V B Molteno RN), the sinking of the German raider LEOPARD by HMS ACHILLES and HMS DUNDEE on 16 March 1917 and his concern about the critical press coverage of the Royal Navy’s contribution to the war effort (10 April); and a Navigating Officer’s Note Book containing his contemporaneous ms account, as a Sub Lieutenant in HMS SARPEDON (11th Destroyer Flotilla, Grand Fleet), of the events surrounding the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet on 21 November 1918, beginning with a retrospective description of the fairly muted Armistice Day celebrations on board the units of the Grand Fleet based on Rosyth and then recording their preparations for escorting the German ships into the Firth of Forth, the ‘wonderful sight’ of their surrender, SARPEDON’s role in escorting some of the German destroyers to Scapa Flow and her passage back to Rosyth and commenting, in particular, on the inferiority and dirty state of the German warships and the discipline of their ship’s companies (‘far better than I expected’).
Cataloguer RWAS | Publisher: | http://www.iwm.org.uk | Source: | Imperial War Museum | Creator: | Clover, I R | Identifier: | http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/o... | Go to resource |
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