the possible sinking of the Audacious got into the public domain. In an effort to hide the disaster that had befallen a new dreadnought from a single mine, the Admiralty went as far as modifying the SS Mountclan to resemble the lost battleship and published her ‘movements’. They also kept Audacious on the Grand Fleet’s order of battle.
The British media kept largely quiet about the sinking to begin with – refraining from aiding the enemy. But the large number of witnesses to the sinking and the inevitable loose tongues made the task of keeping the secret all but impossible. It proved difficult enough to persuade the neutral passengers who had been aboard the Olympic during the attempts to save the battleship to keep silent – but some of the crew themselves also let the cat out of the bag.
The Daily Mail published a letter proclaiming that a masseur from the Olympic had openly boasted to his barber that he had seen Audacious sink – and that the authorities had ordered everyone to say nothing. The publication of this letter led to the Admiralty being deluged with enquiries from anxious relatives of the Audacious’ crew. If the deception were to be maintained then the fears of the families would have to be assuaged.
None of the crew of Audacious had been lost during the sinking – so when an enquiry was received the Admiralty could reply with a reasonable degree of truth: According to the latest information, 85 is well and serving with the Fleet.’
All enquiries about Audacious herself were ignored.
As images of the stricken battleship taken by the Olympic’s passengers were published beyond the Empire and free from constraints placed on the British press, Germany knew by mid-November that Audacious had been sunk.
The only casualty during the entire momentous incident had been the unfortunate Petty Officer William Burgess on the cruiser HMS Liverpool. He was killed whilst standing on her crowded deck some 800 yards away, when he was hit by a 2ft × 3ft fragment of armour plate as Audacious blew up.
Audacious was the only British dreadnought battleship lost to enemy action during World War I. HMS Vanguard blew up at anchor in Scapa Flow from a magazine explosion in 1917, and the Royal Navy’s other capital ship losses were either battlecruisers or pre-dreadnoughts.
Three days after the Armistice was called in November 1918, the Admiralty officially admitted the loss of Audacious in what it called ‘a delayed announcement’.
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Location chart for the wreck of HMS Audacious. Nearby are the famous wrecks of SS Empire Heritage and RMS Justicia.
Today, Audacious lies far out from Malin Head into the Atlantic, and a dive on her requires careful planning because of her depth and because it is a very exposed site, where the weather can turn quickly.
The wreck lies in an area of water which has become renowned for its consistently crystal- clear underwater visibility. She lies in 67 metres of water, a lovely depth for today’s technical divers that allows long bottom times – more than 30 minutes or so – down on the wreck for relatively modest decompression times.
Malin Head on the Donegal coast has become known as one of the world’s hot spots for technical diving because, in addition to the crystal-clear Atlantic water, there are a number of classic tek dives that are on every tek diver’s bucket list. Not far away from Audacious lies the large 512-foot long, 15,702grt SS Empire Heritage, which was torpedoed and sunk by U-482 on 8 September 1944. She is famous in diving circles for her deck cargo of tens of Sherman tanks that are spilled out onto the seabed.
A little further out to the north lies the wreck of the massive 32,234-ton White Star liner RMS Justicia, sunk by two German submarines on 19 July 1918 on a voyage from Belfast to New York. You may be aware that all White Star liners ended their name with ‘ic’, as in Titanic, Britannic, Laurentic etc. Justicia was to have been a Cunard liner; their ships’ names largely ending with ‘ia’, as in Campania, Carpathia, Aquitania, Mauretania etc.
However, as Cunard didn’t have a crew available, the British government handed the Justicia to the White Star Line to manage, as their crew of the newly sunk White Star liner Britannic were now available.
To add to these fine ships there are also the wrecks of the 14,892grt Laurentic, which sunk on 25 January 1917 after hitting two mines, along with the 13,580grt liner Athenia, sunk by a U-boat during World War II on a passage from Liverpool to Montreal.
In addition to these and countless other wrecks, at the end of World War II there were 156 German submarines surrendered to the Allies, of which 116 were scuttled during Operation Deadlight after the war. The U-boats were to be towed out, ostensibly to three defined areas about 100 miles north-west of Ireland where they would be scuttled. Many of the U-boats however were found to be in poor condition from a prolonged period waiting in exposed harbours for their fate to be determined – and this, allied to poor weather, meant that some 56 of them sank under tow before they reached the designated scuttling areas. Many of these have been relocated over the last 20 years or so, lying in perfect technical diving depths: pristine, virtually intact examples of several types of World War II U-boats. You can see why Malin Head is so popular with technical divers.
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About 20 miles offshore, above the grave of Audacious, I was about to dive another famous warship that was high on my wish list. Clad in my black drysuit, rebreather on my back, cylinders of deep and shallow bailout gases under either arm and with my underwater scooter clipped to my crotch D-ring and propped up on its nose, I stood at the dive gate through the gunwale, straining to support the 85kg of kit whilst I waited for the skipper to position his boat in the right place, directly beside and slightly up current of the shotline buoy. I was ready and eager to splash.
At the skipper’s signal, I strode off the dive boat and dropped down into languid blue water. The sea was calm and the sun, already high in the sky, beat directly down. A lot of light would be pouring down onto the wreck far below.
Once in the water, I looked around me and, as ever at Malin Head, I was impressed by being able to see for at least 100 feet in any one direction. The visibility was fantastic, a stunning opposite to the dark, cloudy waters of my usual east coast dive sites. This wreck was going to be a joy to dive today.
My dive buddy and I dropped down slowly beside the shotline, peering below as we slowly descended. Finally, when we were some 35 metres down, the uniform deep blue beneath us started to acquire a form – blurred, indistinct, ragged lines began to materialise out of the darkness below. Something manmade lay beneath us.
We pressed on down, feeling the squeeze of the water pressure on our ears, on our body – our drysuits compressing and nipping at our skin until we bled some air into them to relieve the squeeze.
We eventually passed through a visibility horizon – one minute we were seeing blurry lines beneath us – the next, an upturned World War I dreadnought battleship lay beneath us. It looked magnificent: a massive manmade island set on an underwater desert of clean white sand and shale.
Our shotline had landed just off the wreck amidships – the wreck was so big I couldn’t tell initially which way was forward and which way astern. So, picking one direction at random we gunned the motors of our underwater scooters and headed off. Soon, up ahead I could see the wreck beginning to lose its shape, and it became clear that we were heading towards the bow. I checked my depth gauge; it read 63 metres. In old money, that meant there was more than 200 feet of water above us – it was a long, long way back up to the surface.
