Ben Wade and Greg Booth were to be the first to dive – their job was to make sure the shotline was on the seabed near the wreck and to secure it. They would be followed by Brian Burnett and Paul, who would take down the trapeze transfer line and connect it to the downline and add some spare cylinders of bailout gas. Then Gary Petrie and I would dive, our job being to add some more fixed bailout cylinders.
Dressed into my CCR and full rig, with my CCR safety pre-breathe done, I finally stood up heavily from the kitting-up bench and clumped gingerly to the dive gate in the gunwale. I could hardly believe that this moment had finally arrived.
Standing there waiting for the skipper to position the boat beside the downline, the familiar feeling of apprehension and excitement that I get before a big dive like this washed over me. I had been so consumed by the planning of the expedition over the last 18 months, securing the licence, writing to the Kirkwall police to advise of what we were doing, writing to advise the Coastguard and Orkney harbours of the licensed activity, the sheer logistics of getting everyone and all their kit to Orkney, the shakedown dives, the preparation …. And here, now, it was finally a reality – I was rigged in my CCR, bailout cylinders clipped under my arms, ready to jump. An unforgettable moment.
By the time I strode off the boat, Ben and Greg were already down on the wreck. The trapeze had been lowered into the water, and it self-deployed as Paul and Brian took the transfer line down and clipped it off to the downline. As I hit the water and the white froth of bubbles dissipated, I looked across to the downline which I could see dropping vertically down into the depths. The underwater visibility out here in the Atlantic was just as I remembered from my last expeditions 20 years earlier – astonishing for Scotland, at least 50 metres. I could see Paul and Brian below me; Ben and Greg were already out of sight below.
Gary and I moved over to the downline and started our descent. The water was absolutely slack; with no current at all, we could just freefall beside the downline.
As I reached 30 metres, where the transfer line from the trapeze had already been safely clipped in by Paul and Brian, Gary unclipped the spare cylinder of deep bailout he was porting and we clipped it off on the transfer line. It was set up so that when we recovered the trapeze and transfer line onto the boat after the dive, all the spare bailout gas would come out with it. Although the bow and stern downlines would be left for the duration of the exped, we wouldn’t be leaving cylinders on them. Deep bailout gas clipped off, it was time for Gary and me to continue our descent.
Although it was very dark beneath us, the underwater visibility was still crystal clear. Looking down the downline, as my eyes traced its path down and slightly up-current, I was astonished to see the dim silhouette of the wreck far below us. The dim pinpoints of the four divers’ torches, clustered in two pairs ahead of us, were visible at different points of the wreck. I could make out the upturned hull of the stern, and even see the long free section of the port prop shaft leading out from its tube to its circular bearing bracket, supported on struts connected to the main hull. This was the last memory I had from my dives on the wreck 20 years earlier – I’d never thought that I would be back here to see it again.
In the slack water, I was able to move away from the downline and make for the fantail of the wreck, which was lying upside down on the seabed. The seabed around the wreck was hard shale with scattered large Norwegian glacier melt boulders some several metres high. There is no silt and the wreck is clean, uncovered by sand.
Unlike the much larger capital ships of the day, Hampshire did not have a large elevated armoured superstructure, so when she capsized and hit the bottom, the lighter sections of her superstructure and her four smokestacks were crushed by her weight and momentum. The vessel came to rest almost completely upside down, but with a slight list to starboard, propped up by her 7.5-inch turrets and her conning tower.
The wreck of HMS Hampshire today lies in 68 metres of water.
Left: The ship’s name still rings around the fantail – now missing the HA. (Author’s collection)
The port 43-ton propeller of HMS Hampshire. © Ewan Rowell
I arrived at the stern at a depth of about 65 metres and Gary arrived soon beside me. With a quick exchange of OK hand signals, and a muffled ‘Are you OK?’ shouted through the mouthpiece of my rebreather in a squeaky helium Donald Duck voice, we turned to move forward along the port side of the wreck at seabed level on our first recce. I immediately started filming.
At the very stern, we could see how the two unarmoured upper deck levels had collapsed down and how the upside-down bulwark of the fantail was sitting a few feet aft of the more intact keel section of the stern. We could make out the large embossed letters of her name, MPSHIRE. The section of metal that would have held the HA was missing, having sprung somewhere as this section of the ship collapsed. The rudder lay fallen to the seabed nearby.
I moved forward, a few feet above a seabed that was littered with plating, spars and bits of ship. As I did so, the smooth intact steel of a large section of her keel began to rise up from the fantail and a gap began to appear between the seabed and this intact section of keel and hull. The keel swept upwards towards the vertical sternpost which would have held the rudder – and there just forward to port, and still supported on its bearing and struts, was the massive 43-ton manganese bronze, three-bladed prop – about 16 feet across according to the ship’s drawings. Sections of the underside of the quarter deck lay flat on the seabed to port, and it appeared that the ship had sagged to starboard as the higher levels collapsed aeons ago.
The gap between the seabed and the intact section of the ship continued to increase – and then the reason for this became apparent. The large gunhouse of the 7.5-inch gun Y turret, situated on the centreline of the quarter deck, was resting upside down on the hard shale seabed. Rising up from its underside, the cylindrical armoured trunking that held the ammunition hoists extended all the way up to the underside of the keel bar. The ammunition hoists transported shells and cordite propellant charges up from the magazines and shell rooms, far below the surface in the bowels of the ship, to the gunhouse. Inside the ship, adjacent to the hoist trunking, masses of 6-inch shells for her secondary armament and QF 3-pounder shells had tumbled down from above to litter the underside of her main deck, now at seabed level. High up on the wreck, the keel plating had split open to expose the port 7.5- inch shell room, the large shells still neatly stacked in rows.
The port side of the wreck aft has separated from the keel, allowing a glimpse of the 7.5- inch shell room. (Author’s collection)
In the astonishing visibility, I continued to fin forward at a depth of just over 60 metres. Just forward of the aftmost Y turret, the two-storey port 6-inch gun casemate came into view, its curved armoured side projecting from the hull. With the ship upside down, the 6.8-metre- long barrel of the uppermost casemate now lay flat on the seabed, pointing aft. The lower (now uppermost) of the two 6-inch casemate guns had been demounted from the casemate in 1916 and moved to the upper deck in place of one of the original 3-pounder guns. The resulting vacant gun port had been plated over to keep the sea out – and the plate was still very evident on the wreck, its centre now corroded through.
As I looked at the 6.8-metre-long barrel on the seabed, I noticed the end of the barrel of a 3-pounder sticking up through the sand at its end. Tracing back towards the hull, this led me to the