‘The Trade’ is a classless vocation, compared to the rest of the navy, a combination of loyal camaraderie and moments of shared terror and continual exhaustion. As many as 60 submarines out of 215 during the First World War are about to be lost, which is nearly a third – by far the biggest attrition rate in the navy – and most of those losses will be for unknown reasons.
Sleep is broken into four-hour periods so that the crew will still be alert if they have to wake in an emergency, which means that exhaustion is endemic on patrol, with the crew craving sleep and even more wretched thanks to the lack of oxygen. Headaches usually follow a long period submerged, because breathing foul air for an extended time period leaves the crew with symptoms like hangovers – but, for some reason, does not affect those who have real hangovers from the night before. There are air purification systems but they are far less effective than their German counterparts – like the periscope design and much else on board. There is no effective air conditioning which leaves those near the engines seriously overheated while the officers of the watch are drenched and frozen on the conning tower, kept sane by endless supplies of cocoa. That means that the smells from the toilet buckets, rotting food and diesel fumes can be overwhelming on long dives.
All that affects the whole crew, as it does on most British submarines. But by far the greatest pressure falls on the commanders – it will be recognised after the war that submarines need an extra officer to share the watches. That is why they succumb to mental and physical exhaustion faster than the other officers. On them lies the responsibility for the lives of everyone aboard and on them rests the greatest strain of all – to stay awake the longest and to suffer the extremes of fear and not show anything at all except calm composure. That is why submarine officers are hit so often by the common complaint of a mixture of fever headaches and “awful lassitude”. It is why so many of them suffer for years afterwards from alcoholism and nervous stomach complaints.
This is the submarine which went down the slipway at Barrow on 7 July 1914. Two days before, the German Kaiser had received a special envoy from the Austrian Emperor – one week after the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir – and promised him full support if they attacked Serbia in retaliation. The Kaiser then left for a cruise off the northern coast. By the time E14 was launched, two days later, the inevitable series of circumstances and mistakes were conspiring to bring about a universal war.
Boyle had set up home with Marjorie in Southsea (16 Helena Road, a large-red-brick Edwardian semi-detached, with an arch over the front door) but had been sent to Harwich at the outbreak of war and was called to sea on war patrol for the first time in D3 in 5 August. The early weeks of the war had been expected to see the fantastic clash between the two biggest battle fleets the world had ever known. In fact, the two fleets were only destined to meet once in the whole war – this was to be a small ship war and Keyes was making the most of the work of his top submariners, venturing ever closer to the German coast and beyond into the Baltic. He knew that the public needed a dramatic description of the submarines if anyone was going to recognise what his commanders were achieving. The result was what the Morning Post called an “astonishing document”, written within weeks of the outbreak of war, describing a submarine in a heavy storm:
“Ten fathoms down the great steel fish, with twenty or thirty men in her belly, was swung about like a bottle by the vast and incessant movement of the water. No one could stand or lie, to open the hatch and to breathe the wind again was to risk the sea water pouring into the hull. Sea-water mixed with petrol gas… form chlorine gas, which is fatal to life.”
It was within weeks of this despatch that Boyle had taken D3 further and more perilously into the shoal water of Sylt, off the German coast, and earned the temporary admiration of his commander – enough to be awarded command of one of the new E class.
It was an elite job. Horton would make his reputation in E9 in the Baltic, just as Lier would in E4 and Nasmith would in E11 and Cochrane in E7. Boyle took command of E14 in Liverpool and sailed her round the coast to Harwich, only to be attacked on one of his first patrols by the British cruiser Aurora and four destroyers. He tackled the destroyer captains about it in dock that evening. They said that they had noticed that his submarine had a long straight upper deck, in the British style, but they still thought she ‘might’ be German.
It was a peculiar life, in peril at sea but back home in the midst of civilian life a few days later. It was a strange modern kind of war, familiar to RAF bombers a generation later but unknown before then – and deeply stressful for families and friends. There were no battered warships returning to dock after action, no wounded soldiers travelling back from the front; if a submarine ran into the enemy and lost, they were just never seen again. The only sign that they had gone would be the brave and determined figures of their wives and partners staring hopelessly out to sea. It was a strange combination to be so near danger and yet be able to take weekends or days off relaxing in civilian clothes. Cecil Talbot, in command of E16, was even accused of being a shirker by two ladies in a railway carriage.
We know a little of the atmosphere among the submarine pioneers, especially those in the 8th Submarine Flotilla based at Harwich, because of the satirical magazine they published during the war called the Maidstone Muckrag, and started by Lieutenant Commander Stopford Douglas, on the flotilla staff. ‘Maidstone’ referred to the submarine depot ship where they lived in the harbour, and where Douglas was an officer, and the larger-than-life personalities come back to life in its pages – the antics of Horton, Feilmann, Nasmith, Cochrane and the others – using the kind of black, ironic humour that communities fall back on when some of their number go out and never come back.
“Yet another beard in the mess,” said the first edition, aiming at Herbert Shove, commanding C2, who used to keep a white rat called Cyril in his breast pocket when they dived. “Haven’t we enough hardships to undergo without having these insanitary soup-traps thrust upon us?”
There is then a long description of the kind of satire that exhausted, perhaps even traumatised, submarine officers might find amusing, about their shared struggle with the conning tower hatch in the North Sea in winter. Choose someone and designate them ‘IT’, says the Muckrag:
“He is then given a pair of oilskin trousers to distinguish him from the others and driven up the conning tower. The boat then rises and IT opens the lid. The object of the game is for IT to wash down the players in the boat without wetting himself and for the players in the boat to thoroughly drown IT without getting wet in their turn.”
For ‘washing down’ the captain, IT can score 25 points. If IT gets his boots full of sea water, the other players score 5. “On the homeward trip, the scores are added up and the winner gets the spare egg or extra sausage.”
The Muckrag evokes a forgotten atmosphere of gin in the wardroom, the damp mist of the Harwich quay, and the strain, cold and loneliness of the North Sea and Heligoland Bight – and, of course, the boyish, enthusiastic and demanding presence of the submarine commodore, Roger Keyes: