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The wreck of HMS Audacious now lies upside down in 67 metres of water. The secondary explosion (forward) has destroyed her bow section. B turret lies upside down with what is believed to be the base of the conning tower abaft. The armoured barbette for B turret lies on the seabed nearby. A long section of her starboard side runs outwards from the wreck to the bow, which still has two anchors held in their hawses. Her four props remain on the wreck.
As we made our way towards the bow, the upturned flat bottom of the battleship, lined with docking keels and with a bilge keel running down either side suddenly petered out – the whole bow section is missing, from the conning tower area forward.
The hull just stops abruptly in the vicinity of the conning tower and descends into a scattered debris field on the seabed. Parts of ship, winches, secondary casemate guns, cordite propellant charges and 13.5-inch shells for the main guns lie scattered around amidst sheared plates and sections of ship.
Some 100 feet of the bow section is missing – blown off in the magazine explosion that sank her as she hung upside down on the surface. The hull has been blown open, and the massively strong 12-inch thick vertical armour belt on either beam, is peeled back like a banana skin. The stem, the very tip of the bow, still with its two starboard anchors held snug in their hawses, now lies almost halfway down the wreck on the starboard side. It is staggering to think how seemingly effortlessly the 12-inch thick plates of her Krupp cemented armour have been blown apart.
I spotted what appeared to be the upside-down cylindrical base of the conning tower. On top lay a 4-inch barrel of one of her secondary guns, the barrel itself smoothly and apparently easily bent over the armoured base of the conning tower.
Further out forward of the conning tower, lying upside down and almost alone on the seabed, is a 13.5-inch gun turret with its massive twin barrels flat on the seabed. It is believed that this is B turret – and perhaps 30 feet away out to starboard and almost separate from the wreck itself, lies an upturned barbette for one of the main twin 13.5-inch gun turrets, most probably B turret barbette.
Barbettes are huge armoured cylinders that were integral to the structure of the ship, and ran down from the gun turret on the deck to the internal horizontal armour deck above the magazines and shell rooms. On Audacious, the cylindrical walls of the barbette were fashioned of 10-inch-thick Krupp cemented armour at their maximum, tapering to 5 inches or less where armoured decks gave some protection. The barbettes housed the ammunition hoists that lifted shells and propellant from the magazines below to the transfer room, directly beneath the turret itself. Whereas the barbette was fixed in position inside the structure of the ship, the ammunition hoists inside the barbette turned as the gun turret above turned.
If this was B turret and B turret barbette, there was no obvious sign of A turret and barbette in this area. It is believed that A turret fell downwards as the magazine explosion took place on the surface and that the ship has possibly come to rest upon it.
From B turret forward, the ship itself is largely missing. The massive explosion has split the ship open and the bow section has been blown back on itself. Scattered all around the seabed are dozens of her 13.5-inch shells, fallen from the forward shell rooms.
After exploring around the bow area for some time, we turned our scooters and headed aft. Past the upturned conning tower, the hull reformed to its full shape. The hull amidships is sagging – I suspect that it is being held up by the amidships Q turret barbette and turret. The 12-inch thick vertical armour belt of the citadel and the internal horizontal armour deck are immensely strong and, allied to Q turret barbette, seem to be holding the wreck together here, as with the German World War I battleships at Scapa Flow.
The stern of Audacious still has both rudders upright and displays the aft submerged torpedo tube. © Barry McGill
The bottom of a battleship is unarmoured – just simple 1-inch-thick steel plating. It was so deep in the water that it was safe from any enemy shell or torpedo, the only danger seemingly being from running aground. Battleships were constructed with strong double bottom frames, the double bottom spaces holding oil and water.
As we sped aft down the upturned hull we soon arrived at perhaps the most visually stunning area of this wreck – the stern. Audacious has a small, almost delicate, stern with the upturned quarterdeck sitting flat on the sand. Both large rudders still stand upright, rising from the underside of the stern – and at the very stern itself is the aperture for her submerged stern torpedo tube.
The very aftmost section of the stern is broken off from the rest of the ship, leaving a small gap, and just forward of the gap here, on either side of the keel bar, are set her four high-speed propellers. The long sections of free propeller shaft run forward from their support bearings and disappear into the shaft tubes before running forward inside the wreck to the turbine rooms.
For a battleship weighing in at some 25,000 tons you’d think the props would be massive – the props on the far smaller 10,850-ton armoured cruiser Hampshire at Scapa Flow are large 43-ton affairs, which dwarf a diver. But the props on Audacious aren’t of that scale – these were small high-speed propellers, designed for high revs.
All too soon, our 35-minute bottom time was up – and it was time to head back to the downline to ascend, rising up as we moved forward, the blink of our strobes easily visible far ahead in the beautiful visibility.
Postscript
The beautiful visibility off Malin Head can seduce divers into staying too long on the wreck. I know it did to me on an open-circuit trip back in 2003 before I had moved to rebreather diving. We were diving 60–75 metres every day for about 10 days, and on one occasion doing two 75-metre dives in one day. Even although every dive was carried out flawlessly using the prevailing decompression software of the day in our computers, I still got badly bent with decompression sickness after the very last dive of the trip. You can read about the whole episode in more depth in the chapter entitled ‘Bent in the North Channel’ in my prequel to this book, The Darkness Below.
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Sunk by German mine off north-west Orkney on 5 June 1916 with the loss of the UK Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener
The wreck of the 10,850-ton armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire lies 1.5 miles off the 200-foot sheer cliffs of Marwick Head at the north-west tip of the main island of Orkney. It is a very special and sensitive wreck for the people of Orkney – its memory deeply entwined in the fabric of Orkney itself. A total of 737 souls, including the UK Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, and his staff, perished on the fateful night of 5 June 1916 as Hampshire sank quickly after striking a mine laid by a German submarine eight days earlier – part of German preparations for what would develop into the Battle of Jutland. There were only 12 survivors.
The 10,850-ton Devonshire-class armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire. (IWM)
Hampshire was laid down on 1 September 1902 by Armstrong Whitworth at its Elswick shipyard at Newcastle upon Tyne and launched on 24 September 1903. Fitting out afloat was completed on 15 July 1905. She was one of six such vessels in her class and displaced 10,850 long tons with
