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The Titanic connection
CONTINUING the series of articles by diver Bill Woolford on the shipwrecks off Bridlington's coast ...
HMS Falcon
Position: 54 01.000 N
000 19.888 E
Depth: 60 metres
Location: 30 miles east of Bridlington
HMS Falcon was sister ship to HMS Fairy, which we have previously featured in this column, a three-funnel destroyer of 375 tons.
It was also a C-Class that measured 67 metres long with a beam of 6.5 metres and was built by Fairfield shipbuilding Co in 1899.
Her armourment was fitted out the same as HMS Fairy with one 12lb gun, five six pounders and two 18" torpedo tubes.
She was also fitted with depth charges close to her stern.
HMS Falcon was under the command of Captain Charles Herbert "Lights" Lightoller, who has the distinction of being shipwrecked four times while being asleep.
The first ship was the windjammer Holt Hill, which he crashed into the island of St Paul in the Indian Ocean.
The second ship was the Titanic.
Lightoller was the most senior surviving officer and his character was played by Kenneth Moore in the film A Night To Remember.
The third ship was the Oceanic, sister ship to the Titanic, which was wrecked off Shaalds Reef, off Foula Shetlands, in 1914.
And, finally, the last ship was HMS Falcon.
Final voyage
In February 1918 Lightoller was ordered to take Falcon to join the North Sea Patrol, based at Immingham on the Humber.
His job was to escort incoming convoys carrying US and Canadian troops and equipment to join in the final offensive in the First World War against the Kaiser.
Escorting some 40 ships at a time against U-boat attacks, in mostly foul weather, did nothing for Falcon's slimline hull.
She was not a rough-weather boat, nor could she manoeuvre easily in giant seas. In the darkness it was even worse.
Lightoller's worst fears came true minutes into April 1, 1918.
He was asleep below when a huge lurch and a tremendous grinding sound woke him.
For a moment he thought he was back on Titanic.
He rushed up on deck and found, not an iceberg towering over him, but the crumpled bow of a trawler close by.
The John Fitzgerald, acting as a convoy escort, had hit the Falcon in one of her most vulnerable places, the narrow hull almost amidships.
The steel had been cut almost in two and the impact had pushed the two halves up out of the water. This had slowed the inrush of water but each swell pushed and pulled the two sections.
Lightoller had the boiler fires extinguished and steam blown off, then transferred all 31 engineers and stokers to the John Fitzgerald.
But the Falcon's stern was slowly sinking and it would not be long before it separated from the bow.
The rest of the crew were ordered to abandon ship in the Falcon's only two lifeboats and were picked up by another escort-destroyer, HMS Peterel.
Moments later the bow broke away with a huge cracking noise and within seconds had sunk.
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Left on board now were Lightoller, his first lieutenant and the gunner who had been on duty when the trawler struck.
The stern appeared to be staying afloat so HMS Peterel was ordered to catch up with the convoy.
The three men leapt into the sea and began to swim desperately away from the ship, afraid the armed depth-charges on Falcon’s decks would blow when they reached their set depths.
They didn’t but the men were clinging to wreckage for half an hour before a trawler picked them up.
At the court-martial all three were cleared of blame.
Lightoller was promoted to lieutenant-commander and given HMS Gary, a bigger and slightly younger destroyer than Falcon.
On July 19, 1918 Lightoller was in the command of HMS Gary when he attacked and sank the German submarine UB110 after ramming it twice.
The destroyer however was so badly damaged she only just managed to make the journey back to dry dock where she was written off.
Another outstanding achievement in his life was when Lightoller brought the destroyer HMS Gary back to Immingham, steaming astern all the way, as her bow was badly damaged.
It was not until he rounded Flamborough Head that he felt safe, should she start taking on water, that he could have beached her on the sands from Bridlington Bay down to Spurn Point.
Wreck site
The old destroyer lies 60 metres down, broken in two, in what trawlermen call the Sand Peaks. It is a 29-mile RIB ride from Bridlington.
Her stern is halfway down the side of one of the sand peaks.
The bow section with the 12-pounder gun is half a mile of dunes away, and well dug in.
Despite the depth and the fact we were in a sandy area of the North Sea, the visibility that day when we first dived the Falcon was an amazing 20 metres.
The half-wreck was on an even keel and ran from two boilers with two engines past a torpedo-tube ring mounting to the stern, with a six-pounder gun and two big propellers, one clear of the sand, the other with just a tip showing.
The starboard side stood three to four metres proud of the sandbank but the port side was heavily covered with sand to more than deck level, where the crest of the sand peak was starting to break up.
The first divers down, Graham Hirst and Neville Cocker-ham, landed almost on top of the wreck.
They surfaced after decompression stops with a 5” deck-light cover.
I knew at once this was a Navy ship because I had been responsible some years previously for finding and identifying HMS Fairy, a C-Class 30-knot destroyer, near Flamborough Head.
I had found an identical deck-light on Fairy. On my first dive on the stern half of the unknown ship, I confirmed my first impression that this was a similar, slim-bodied destroyer.
I could see that it was sliced off near the second boiler, which appeared to have been wrenched out of line by a trawl, and that it had two huge engines.
I quickly finned aft and there, sure enough, were the stern telegraphs.
That confirmed she was an old 30-knotter destroyer or torpedo boat but we still did not know which one.
We plunged into research.
The mystery wreck could have been one of several destroyers – Kale, Itchen, Lightning, Coquette and Falcon were all possibles.
We dived again, hoping each time that a small artefact would give us the vital clue.
Several months passed before we solved the problem while cleaning steam gauges from the wreck.
Scratched on the back of one we found the words “Auxiliary steam” and the letter ‘F’. On the next were scratchings which read: “Low pressure steam. Falcon.”
The third too was clearly marked “Falcon”. It all fitted into place.
We had found the fourth shipwreck from which “Lights” Lightoller had escaped with his life.
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Weather for Bridlington
Tuesday 07 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -3 C to 4 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: -4 C to 2 C
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