Grimsby Fishermen at War
The Loss of the Minesweeper Night Hawk
25 December 1914
Against the background of the loss of the Norwegian steamer Boston, the minesweepers continued their dangerous work. Christmas Day meant nothing to the mines, they lay in wait beneath the waves, patiently awaiting their next victim.
Since the bombardment of Scarborough the former Grimsby trawler Night Hawk had been sweeping the sea every single day. Working between Whitby and Flamborough Head, they began three miles off the land, and had gone four, five to five and a half-miles eastward. Backwards and forwards, relentlessly searching for the mines. The men on board the Night Hawk hailed from a tight group of streets in Cleethorpes. They were friends, neighbours and shipmates.
At noon on Christmas Day the Night Hawk was three and a half miles off Scarborough when she hit a mine. The entire bottom of the ship was blown out. For those below deck, death must have been instantaneous. The Night Hawk’s skipper, Harry Evans, was blown clear of the ship by the force of the explosion, other survivors found themselves being pulled down by the rapidly sinking trawler. The Night Hawk sank inside ten seconds.
Evans described the detonation as being akin to hitting a rubber ball, because the concussion was so sudden and deadening. He said that the ‘whole bottom of the ship fell out with her engines and all hands that happened to be below’. Five crewmen died instantly, the survivors found themselves in a fight for their lives in the cold waters of the North Sea.
One of the Night Hawk’s officers, Lt. William Senior, found a life raft and sculled it through the icy waters, rescuing his shipmates as he went. Fortunately, they were picked up within half an hour by adjacent mine sweepers. Tragically, one of the men, Alfred Chapple of Cleethorpes, died whilst being brought ashore.
A few days after the sinking an inquest was held into the loss of the Night Hawk and the death of Alfred Chapple. The appearance of the heavily bandaged Night Hawk’s skipper, Harry Evans, brought home the grim reality of the sinking of the minesweeper.
In the wake of the bombardment emotions were running high in Scarborough. Perhaps it felt unjustified that, even after the German battle cruisers had fled the scene, death and destruction was still being wrought. The words of the Scarborough Coroner drip with fury. He said that the mines made ‘the bombardment all the more terrible and ruthless, and all the more disgraceful … More grievous and more brutal. It could not be said that the deceased was a combatant, because he was engaged on a work purely and simply to protect those using our harbour or who might be passing along the coast’.
The Night Hawk’s skipper Harry Evans told the inquest: ‘We left Whitby at 7 a.m. on Christmas Day working southward. We were three and a half to four miles from Scarborough when we struck this mine, which exploded at once. If was like a deafening concussion as if we had struck a rubber ball. I think the whole of the bottom must have been knocked out. Everything was blown to pieces. From the stern to amidships was almost completely blown up.
‘There were two stokers, the second engineer, the steward, and the deck hand below. We knew nothing about them. In seven or ten seconds after the explosion she went down. Those below must have fallen through the bottom with the machinery, and it would be instant death. Those of us on deck were either knocked into the water or taken under by suction. With the exception of myself no one was injured of those on deck, and my injury is only superficial. When we got into the water we would be from fifty to sixty yards apart. There were several other ships sweeping behind us. I think it would be twenty-five minutes to half an hour before assistance arrived. We were struggling in the water that time.’
The coroner asked why they were in the water for half an hour when there were other minesweepers in the vicinity? Evans stated: ‘You cannot run other vessels into danger where one has come to grief. The only thing you can do is to send small boats out, and that is how we were picked up. I remember nothing till we returned to the harbour. They tell me I was walking about on the ship whose boat rescued me, but I don’t remember anything about it. It was bitterly cold. We each had on a life-belt, a life-jacket, and a life-collar.’
Moving onto the death of Alfred Chapple, his fellow shipmate Felix Bee of New Cleethorpes, Grimsby, stated they were in the water twenty minutes to half an hour as near as he could tell. The deceased did not appear to be injured when picked up and apparently died from exhaustion. He was married and had a wife and four children (his wife Louisa was expecting a fifth child). A verdict was returned of death from the effects of shock and exhaustion following the explosion of a mine.
The body of Alfred Chapple was returned to his home town of Cleethorpes by rail, he was buried at Cleethorpes Cemetery in the presence of his family, friends and ship mates. He was given a military funeral, which, according to one of his shipmates, Alfred would have found amusing, as he was a committed socialist! In an obituary in the Labour Leader newspaper, it was said that his children would find solace in the fact that their father ‘died in saving life, not blasting it’.
Alfred’s youngest daughter, Olive, was born on 6th March 1915, three months after her father’s death.
The grave of Alfred Chapple in Cleethorpes Cemetery
The Night Hawk was built in 1911 for the Pioneer Steam Fishing, the Grimsby-registered, GY643, trawler was hired in August 1914 as minesweeper and given the Admiralty No.57.
In 1973 an inshore trawler working out of Scarborough caught in her nets part of a bow section of a steam trawler. It was discerned that the wreckage was from the Night Hawk, the section of bow was placed on display in a small museum at Scalby Mills. Chris Baker of Filey SAA rediscovered the wreck of the Night Hawk and described it thus: ‘A well decayed wreck, but with a bit of a fairly intact bow section, with some sort of brass scuppers. There is one, average sized, single boiler. The rest of wreck is more of less flat to the seabed’.
Crewmen killed on HMT No.57, Night Hawk
Alfred Chapple (29), chief engineer, Cleethorpes
Joseph Church (36), trimmer, Grimsby
Arthur H Hearne (25), trimmer, Cleethorpes
George H Hubbard (21), deck hand, Grimsby
William H Rowbotham (28), engineman, Cleethorpes
Thomas H Shearsmith (26), cook, Grimsby
Acknowledgements
‘Taffrail’, Captain Taprell Dorling, Swept Channels, being an account of the work of the minesweepers in the Great War, (Hodder & Stoughton, 1938)
Arthur Godfrey, Yorkshire Fishing Fleets, the story of Yorkshire’s oldest and most dangerous industry, (Clapham: Dalesman, 1974)
Arthur Godfrey & Peter J Lassey, Shipwrecks of the Yorkshire Coast, (Clapham: Dalesman Books, 1974)
Robb Robinson, Fishermen, the Fishing Industry and the Great War at Sea, a forgotten history? (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, (2019)
Robb Robinson, Trawling, the rise and fall of the British trawl fishery, (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1996)
Harold Felix Baker Wheeler, Daring Deeds of Merchant Seamen in the Great War, (G.C. Harrap & Company, Limited, 1918).
Ron Young, The Comprehensive Guide to Shipwrecks of the East Coast, Vol.One (1766-1917), (Stroud: Tempus, 2003)
Michael Pendleton
Scarborough Pictorial