Solway Firth

[Terry_Reeves]

Was there any significant naval activity in this area in WW1, perhaps a guard ship for instance?
 

TR
 

 

[horatio2]

The Solway Firth marked the northern boundary of Auxiliary Patrol Area XXII (Holyhead). It was patrolled by about thirty yachts, trawlers and drifters but their patrols were probably focussed further south then Solway, around the isle of Man and in the busy approaches to Liverpool.

I am not aware of any significant naval actions in the Solway Firth but an ineffective  U-boat bombardment of Harrington Coke Oven Co., on the Cumberland coast of the Solway Firth, in early August 1915 is mentioned in the Official History of the War at Sea -  https://www.naval-history.net/WW1Book-RN3a.htm 

[Terry_Reeves]

9 minutes ago, horatio2 said:

The Solway Firth marked the northern boundary of Auxiliary Patrol Area XXII (Holyhead). It was patrolled by about thirty yachts, trawlers and drifters but their patrols were probably focussed further south then Solway, around the isle of Man and in the busy approaches to Liverpool.

I am not aware of any significant naval actions in the Solway Firth but an ineffective  U-boat bombardment of Harrington Coke Oven Co., on the Cumberland coast of the Solway Firth, in early August 1915 is mentioned in the Official History of the War at Sea -  https://www.naval-history.net/WW1Book-RN3a.htm 

Thanks Horatio, much appreciated.

TR

 

 

[A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy]

The heading to this thread caught my eye as I live on the Solway Firth. I was not previously aware of the attack on the Harrington Coke Oven Company on 16 August 1915, but followed the link in @horatio2’s post with interest, and found an interesting article in the Whitehaven News for 3 May 2012   https://www.whitehavennews.co.uk/news/17127338.the-mps-wife-a-flashing-light-and-a-german-u-boat/ as well as a contemporaneous artist’s impression of the attack by James Durden, now in the Beacon Museum at Whitehaven https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-german-submarine-attack-coke-ovens-on-fire-at-harrington-143213 .

In Sir Julian Corbett’s Official History it is said that “There were no coast defences and she [the U24] was quite uninterrupted” in her attack on the naptha and benzol works at Lowca near Harrington, while the article in the Whitehaven News quotes a report in a Munich paper as saying “The extreme importance of this bombardment lies in the fact that it proves that the British fleet is not able even to protect the coasts of the Irish Sea from attack by German warships”.

The German press reported complete destruction of the works, whereas both the Official History account and the Whitehaven News say that the impression of complete destruction was given by a smokescreen, which convinced U24 that it had achieved its objective, whereas in fact only £800 worth of damage had been caused. In the Official History the smokescreen is said to have been the result of a drum of benzol exploding, while the Whitehaven News reports, more colourfully, that “a valve operator on duty, Oscar Ohlson, released flaming gas into the atmosphere”, thus causing the smokescreen by a deliberate defensive act.

The Official History records that U24 was aided by the fact that German companies had constructed the plant and retained the plans, while the Whitehaven News, though also noting that the plant had been designed and built by the German company Koppers, records that the local people blamed the German wife of the local MP, Hildegard Burnyeat, nee Retzlaff, associating her with tales of lights flashing on the Cumberland Coast before the attack. Though she was sympathetic to the Germans and had brothers in the German forces, there doesn’t seem to have been any real evidence of her involvement in the U24’s attack, though she was arrested shortly afterwards and interned for a while, before being released in late 1916 or 1917 and allowed to stay with an English family in Harrogate (some 60 miles inland, so presumably no opportunity to be involved in the U-boat attacks on Scarborough!).

Edited 3 October , 2022 by A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy

[horatio2]

Thanks for the extra local context.