why the poor girl shouldn’t sigh rhythmically I don’t know.
Thus, at Hawkcraig, “an organized system of training of officers and ratings was instituted, an instructional staff appointed, and lecture-halls, workshops, ad hoc genus mone [and that sort of thing], put up.”6 Ryan’s students had access to the Firth of Forth shore stations where vessels from the British 6th Battle Squadron (Admiral Beatty) at Rosyth provided opportunities to hear large and small surface vessels, essential for distinguishing them from a submarine. But … that required the student listeners to have heard what a submarine sounded like.
One of the British B-class submarines commissioned during the first decade of the twentieth century. Considered obsolete by the beginning of the war, they still performed important missions, including support of Captain Ryan’s experimental work in the Firth of Forth. (Library of Congress (LOC) LC-F81-2000)
Among the vessels provided for the ever-resourceful Ryan was the aging HM Submarine B-3, which, in 1916, had been outfitted at Leith, on the southern coast of the Firth of Forth, with one of Ryan’s experimental hydrophone systems. Throughout the remaining years of the war, B-3 was stationed at Rosyth for use by the training staff at Hawkcraig. Lieutenant Wilson, however, lamented the use of an inappropriate submarine for their listener training: “Why an obsolescent submarine of our own, and that, too, only occasionally? Why not a U-boat captured from the enemy, and run daily for our benefit?”7 These were questions for which Wilson had no answer. He was, however, certainly justified to ask them. During the summer of 1916, a captured German submarine in the hands of the French Ministry of Invention was being thoroughly investigated, and was found to have its own acoustic system.8
Because B-3 was not always available, “the actual movements of a submarine under water at varying distances from a hydrophone were recorded by a phonograph, and records made so that the sounds might be reproduced at will for the education of the ear.”9 Recordings of submarines and other underwater sounds became a common practice, both in Britain and eventually the United States, where the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey, provided the phonograph recording technology.10
Listener training soon expanded beyond the Firth of Forth. Instructor teams were assembled and dispatched from Hawkcraig to listening stations and hydrophone schools that were being established in 1917 and operated throughout the war. “At Malta an experimental station, with a hydrophone training school, was started in the autumn of 1917, and good work was done both there and at a hydrophone station established southward of Otranto at about the same time, as well as a hydrophone training school started at Gallipoli at the end of the war.”11
The success of Ryan’s training program can be measured by the recognition of this effort by Britain’s Admiral John R. Jellicoe: “The greater part of this training took place at the establishment at Hawkcraig, near Rosyth, at which Captain Ryan, R.N., carried out so much exceedingly valuable work during the war…. I am not able to give exact figures of the number of officers and men who were instructed in hydrophone work either at Hawkcraig or at other stations by instructors sent from Hawkcraig, but the total was certainly upwards of 1,000 officers and 2,000 men.”12
Jellicoe was close. According to Lieutenant Wilson, based on his service under Captain Ryan at Hawkcraig, “1090 officers, including Base hydrophone officers, submarine officers, and Royal Marine submarine mining officers, and 2731 ratings had either attended Hawkcraig for courses, or had received instruction from Tarlair travelling parties.”13
While the successes of Commander Ryan and his Hawkcraig staff brought praise from the Admiralty, as far back as 1915 there had been growing interest in the need to incorporate science into the development of listening devices. Ryan had his first encounter with a scientist that summer when a retired professor, Alexander Crichton Mitchell, arrived at Granton Pier with an idea to detect submarines with a non-acoustic technology. Ryan, who was skeptical of the civilian scientist at first, soon found Mitchell’s ideas worthy of further investigation and supported the experimental work in the Firth of Forth (chapter 4). Mitchell’s ideas were independent of the Admiralty, and there continued to be a cooperative effort between the officer and the civilian.
The Board of Invention and Research was created by Lord Balfour, First Lord of the Admiralty, in July as a way to insert scientific insights into the development of antisubmarine technologies by integrating teams of scientists and engineers into the various experimental stations under Admiralty control. Because the submarine had became a problem of national significance as more and more ships were sent to the bottom, victims of U-boat torpedoes, the BIR was given submarine detection as a high priority. The next step was to assign BIR staff members to the Admiralty Experimental Station at Hawkcraig. They arrived in November, while Commander Ryan was still in the midst of moving from Granton Pier at Edinburgh to this (his) new experimental station. It soon became evident that Ryan was less than enthusiastic about the influx of civilians and what he likely perceived as a disruption in his own approach to solving the submarine detection problem.
A CRITICAL LACK OF COOPERATION
[A]t the time of our arrival at Hawkcraig the state of our knowledge of underwater sound propagation in the sea was very primitive…. It became immediately apparent, however, that this early work was essentially empirical, and that the serving officers at the station were not greatly interested in the physical properties involved.14
These comments by Albert B. Wood, a research assistant from Liverpool University, now on the BIR staff at Hawkcraig, summarized the different approach that would be taken by the BIR over that of Commander Ryan and his naval staff. By the time Wood and his colleagues arrived, Ryan had been demonstrating successful submarine detection with his hydrophones to his Admiralty bosses, who were already authorizing shore-based listening stations using Ryan’s designs.15
There was never a true spirit of cooperation between Ryan’s staff and the BIR, and by the spring of 1916, complaints began to arrive on the desk of BIR chairman, Admiral Fisher. Professor William H. Bragg, from the University College in London and in charge of the BIR efforts at Hawkcraig, wrote to Fisher complaining about the lack of ability to build the various apparatus his team needed for their experimental work. “What holds us back is the lack of instrument fitters and workshops…. It is quite exasperating that so much should turn on getting hold of the instrument makers.”16
Not only was it difficult to have equipment built, the scientists also experienced frustrations having access to test vessels, one of the most important being the British submarine, B-3. In March, Albert Wood wrote to Sir Ernest Rutherford, a principal civilian scientist serving on the BIR in London:
The usual difficulties in obtaining a second ship or submarine still exist. Commander Ryan informs that we have no right to demand two ships and we are only allowed to have them when he considers it convenient … With regard to submarine B-3 … he said that it was to be used by both of us (Navy and BIR). He could not tell us, however, when we could have it for our own use; indicating that it would be possible for us to have it only on those occasions when he did not require it himself—which occasions from our previous experience will probably be rare.17
Rutherford continued to receive negative reports from Hawkcraig, revealing the lack of cooperation between his scientists and naval interests; he also sensed similar attitudes from members of the Admiralty. Rutherford reportedly “attacked the view taken by ‘certain parties’ in the Admiralty which appeared to suggest that research and development of listening apparatus was useless and irrelevant.”18 With pressure being put on the Admiralty, some improvements were made in the operations at Hawkcraig after April, but
