magazine temperatures should be standardised throughout the fleet. The monitoring procedure should be conducted at more frequent intervals and should be carried out under the direction of the gunnery officer by the gunner of the ship, who should physically enter the magazines two or three times a day and inspect them.
The phenomenon of ‘hot pockets’ in magazines was already known about, and it was further recommended that the readings of fixed-temperature tubes should not simply be accepted as the temperature of the whole magazine. It was noted that when cooling apparatus was in use, the difference between temperatures registered by the thermometers in different parts of the magazine became accentuated. It was suggested that the circulation of cold air in their immediate vicinity unduly affected temperature tubes in certain positions in the magazines.
Amongst a whole raft of findings and recommendations it was noted that when turned to the storage position in the magazines, the lids of the smaller calibre brass flashproof cordite cases were often found to be loose – and in some cases to have fallen off altogether.
It was further noted that in Vanguard, coal sacks were stowed in fuel spaces adjoining the P and Q turret handling rooms. These fuel spaces had no ventilation when the access hatch was closed – as was normally the case. One of the 3-inch thick bulkheads to these fuel spaces actually formed the bulkhead between it and a 4-inch cordite propellant magazine (which was being used as a 12-inch magazine at the time) and a 12-inch shell room. Here, favourable conditions for a spontaneous combustion were produced if the 3-inch thick bulkhead became heated to a dangerous degree unnoticed. The court recommended that in all ships arrangements should be made such that a considerable rise in temperature in any compartment adjoining a magazine or shell room must be discovered within two hours.
Captain R. F. Nichols, (who was in command of Royal Oak at the time she was torpedoed in the Flow in 1939), was a young midshipman on Vanguard that night. He lived to command the Royal Oak in World War II, because on the night Vanguard exploded he had been attending a concert party presented by Royal Oak sailors on the theatre ship Gourko. The show had lasted longer than intended, and he had missed his boat back to the doomed Vanguard.
Commercial salvage work was carried out on the Vanguard in the late 1950s and subsequently in the 1970s. When hard-hat salvage divers initially went to examine the wreck in the 1950s they found that the main battery turret tops had been blown off and all the 12-inch gun barrels were blown out of their trunnion mounts. One main battery 12-inch barrel, weighing 67 tons, was found standing upright some 150 feet away from the wreck, its barrel buried 15 feet down into the seabed in much the same way that the 6-inch guns from Hampshire had impaled themselves into the seabed by their barrels.
They then found A turret, complete with its barbette, standing some way away from the bow, with sections of the tripod foremast and spotting top beside it.
At the stern, the propeller shafts were bent, and one of the ship’s propellers was found lying free of the ship and was lifted. The three other propellers were subsequently blown off and lifted to the surface.
The 10-inch-thick vertical main armour belt plates were very valuable and had been blown apart. This made them easy for the salvors to lift, in comparison to the German High Seas Fleet battleships nearby where the vertical armour belts were still firmly in place. On the German battleships, salvors had to blast their way into the ship through the unarmoured sections of hull bottom and get into the coal bunkers, which were directly behind the armour belt. Here, explosive charges were placed to blow the 25-ton plates off one by one, for stropping and lifting to the surface.
The 25-foot-long 28-ton condensers were blasted out and removed from Vanguard’s turbine rooms. A number of valuable Weir pumps were also recovered. These large pumps stood vertically inside the ship and at the top of the pump was a cylinder that held a piston powered by steam from the boilers. Weir pumps were used for pumping many different fluids around the ship, such as oil, firemain (water for firefighting), condensate and bilge. Weir pumps also fed water into the boilers to make steam and power the turbines – the boilers had to be regularly topped up with water recycled from the turbines via the condensers.
The three submerged torpedo tubes were also recovered: two beam tubes and one through the stern. The three tubes are noted as still being in place with the sliding doors in the closed position by salvage diver Frank Lilleker in Salvaging HMS Vanguard, 1958–59. A hole was blown near the stern tube door to get access to the tube, but once that was done an inspection revealed a circular flange against which a roughly shaped piece of plate was bolted, as though the tube itself had been removed for maintenance. The tube was believed to still be inside the stern, but had not been located by the time he finished his salvage work there.
To enable the torpedo to be fired from the beam, when the ship was steaming ahead a ram was first run out to cut a path through the water and allow the torpedo to clear the ship’s side without water pressure from the forward movement of the ship jamming the torpedo in the tube. These rams produced about 7 tons of gunmetal for the salvors when lifted and scrapped.
One of the ship’s bells was also discovered still hanging in a tangled mess of wreckage. It was lifted to the surface and was subsequently returned to the shipbuilders.
Following on from the good relations developed with the MOD and Royal Navy in relation to the Hampshire expedition, Emily Turton applied to the UK Secretary of State for Defence for a diving licence to use the same techniques to survey the Vanguard on the approach of the 100th anniversary of the sinking on 9 July 2017.
The licence was granted on terms similar to the Hampshire licence, and over the course of a preliminary one week’s diving the wreck during November 2016 and two further weeks diving during January/February 2017, Emily led a specialist team as they thoroughly surveyed and recorded the wreck with stunning atmospheric stills photography, video and 3D photogrammetry. As with the Hampshire imagery, once the photogrammetry results are ready they will be made publicly available for the common good. I was privileged to participate as a survey diver and videographer in the preliminary week of diving in November 2016.
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The wreck of this famous battleship lies in 30–35 metres of water less than one mile north of the tanker pier at Flotta to the south – the Vanguard east cardinal marker buoy swings nearby to the east. Although licensed salvage work was carried out on the wreck in the 1950s and 1970s, no diving has been permitted since the 1980s by virtue of Orkney Harbour Bye Laws and latterly by the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986. Now that I was part of a licensed survey team, after 35 years of diving in Scapa Flow but being unable to visit this wreck, I was now about to see this World War I dreadnought, hidden from sight for so long under the dark waters of Scapa Flow.
Preliminary sonar scans of the area revealed that the wreck lies with her bows to the north-east and her stern to the south-west. The two extreme sections of the wreck, the bow and stern, appeared to have survived largely intact. The fo’c’sle appeared to be sitting upright, detached from the rest of the wreck. The mid-section of the ship kept its ship shape on the sonar whilst the stern of the wreck appeared to be lying on its port side.
On Day 1 of the November 2016 expedition, the shotline was dropped to the seabed near the bow. After being aware of the history of this ship for so long, but never having dived it, I found it particularly moving to finally descend through the water column and see the majestic bow of this great dreadnought materialise in the depths below.
The bow section, from the stem back for some 60 feet, was sitting upright, with a least depth of about 25 metres at the top of the stem. The intact stem rose up from the seabed for about 11 metres but as I began to swim aft on the fo’c’sle deck, it quickly angled downwards towards the seabed where the ship has seemingly been cleaved across – just forward of where the barrels of A turret would have ended. The two large fairleads immediately abaft the stem (seen in the archive
