The Naval Revolution: Triumph and Disaster

A deafening impact, a shattered destroyer, and a legacy that completely revolutionised warfare at sea. When HMS Tiger sank beneath the waves one dark night in 1908, over half of her crew were lost to the depths, and the nation went into mourning. But this was more than a tragic, peacetime accident. It was a warning that the age of steam, steel and speed had transformed warfare faster than navies could adapt. And the sinking of HMS Tiger revealed the hidden dangers and profound upheavals of this naval revolution. Today we're joined by expert divers and wreck specialists Dan, Dave and Leo, who have just discovered the wreck of HMS Tiger, 118 years after her sinking. They tell us all about this remarkable find, and the advent of a revolutionary new class of warship - the destroyer. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore. We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6 Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  The night is almost completely black. Somewhere off the southern coast of the Isle of Wight, the ships of the Royal Navy's home fleet are moving silently through the darkness. Every navigation light has been extinguished. The hulking battleships and cruisers are little more than shadows on the water. Their presence betrayed perhaps by the faint glow, the churn of their propellers, leaving behind a speck of foamy water, and the sound of the deep rhythmic beat of the steam engines propelling those thousands of tons of steel through the night. This isn't a war, but it's meant to feel as close to one as possible.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Hidden somewhere ahead are the attackers, a handful of fast agile torpedo boat destroyers. Their task is to launch one of the newest and most terrifying weapons of war at sea. They're going to slip through the fleet screen, evade detection, and launch a simulated torpedo attack, and then try and escape before the heavy ships can respond. It's a dangerous game of cat and mouse, played at speed, in darkness, with almost no margin for error. It matters because the future of naval warfare, perhaps the fate of Britain, is at stake. Among those torpedo boat destroyers that night is the little HMS Tiger. She darts through the blackness. She's one of the Royal Navy's latest weapons.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  She's small, she's extraordinarily fast, and she's built for exactly this kind of work. Around her, towering warships loom in and out of the darkness like cliffs. Their outlines briefly discernible before they disappear into the night. Officers strain to make out those silhouettes. Lookouts peer into the gloom, searching for movement. No one dares utter a sound. Every decision has to be made in seconds. Every course alteration carries a risk. But for the Tiger, at the moment, everything appears to be going according to plan. Tiger has penetrated deep into the British fleet. She's slipped past ships many times her size. The destroyer ahead of her has launched, well, simulated, a launch of its torpedoes. The exercise is almost over, but then something changes.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Tiger veers off course. Why she turns, no one will ever know. Because suddenly, emerging from the darkness, just a few meters away, is the bow of the armoured cruiser HMS Beryll. She is enormous compared to Tiger, weighing thousands of tonnes more, driving relentlessly forward. By the time one ship sees the other, there is no time to react. On HMS Beryll, the engine was thrown astern, but her momentum was unforgiving. The inevitable collision is devastating.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Beryll's steel bow tears into Tiger amidships with incredible force. The destroyer is cut in half. Her hull's split pretty much clean in two. Steam erupts into the night with a deafening roar. Steel buckles and screams. Men are hurled from their feet as the deck beneath them simply disappears. The forward half of Tiger vanishes beneath the surface almost immediately. For a few desperate moments, the stern remains afloat. Survivors scramble across the twisted wreckage, some throwing themselves into freezing water, others clinging to anything that will float. Around them, the darkness that concealed the fleet only moments before now swallows up the men calling for help. Within minutes, it's over.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  The sea closes over the wreck of HMS Tiger. Nearly half her crew are gone.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  There have been no enemy, no shells fired, no torpedoes launched, just one unexplained turn in the darkness, and a tragedy that would haunt the Royal Navy for generations.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  But the story of HMS Tiger is about more than just this one single tragic accident. It is the story of a revolution in war at sea. She was a new type of warship that would transform naval warfare forever. Built to hunt tiny torpedo boats that it was thought threatened the world's battleships, she was a torpedo boat destroyer. It was one of the most important innovations of modern naval warfare. Over time, the name was shortened simply to destroyer, and these ships would go on to become a backbone of 20th century fleets. It'd escort convoys, it'd hunt submarines, it'd defend aircraft carriers, and they would evolve into sophisticated guided missile destroyers that still serve in navies around the world today.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  So the story of HMS Tiger is really the story of how modern naval warfare came to be. It's the story of technological revolution, of changing tactics, mounting international tensions, and extraordinary risks that sailors were expected to accept long before the First World War ever began. And I got to learn all about those risks recently on a very special mission. I got to head out into the, really, the middle of the English Channel, into those waters off the Isle of Wight, with wonderful maritime historians and wreck specialists, Dan McCullen, Dave Wenz, and Leo Fielding. They are the trio that lead the merry band that try and find lost shipwrecks, and they set out to find the wreck of HMS Tiger.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  More than a century after she disappeared beneath the waves, they believe that they have identified the site of Tiger, and I went to join them as they went to try and take a dive on that wreck. As you know, folks, I love the sea, I love naval history, I love finding shipwrecks. This was a dream opportunity for me and Team History at. There will be a documentary on the History at Channel coming soon. And this wreck in particular offers a remarkable connection to one of the Royal Navy's most haunting peacetime disasters. So today, we're going to retrace Tiger's final hours. We're going to explore why the destroyer changed naval history. I'm going to hear from Dan and Leo, part of Project Explore. Go and check them out, they're trying to look for shipwrecks all over the place, fantastic stuff, and Dave, about what it's like to descend into the depths and visit a shipwreck

• 7:30Speaker 00

  that has lain forgotten on the seabed for over 100 years. Enjoy.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  Leo, Dan, and Dave, good to have you on the podcast.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Good evening.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Hello, how are you? Well, guys, I'm very excited. It's great to be talking about, well, this topic, and then, of course, we're going to come to this remarkable wreck, so lots going on in this episode. First of all, just give me a sense of this period, 1885 to the start of the First World War. A lot is changing in naval history. Just give me a sense of the new platforms, the new weapon systems, new technology that's coming into play in this period.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure. So the main event of this period was the development of the torpedo, of course, which posed a serious threat to the British Navy. What the British Navy was worried about was that you'd have these very small surface craft that would be able to take on and put at risk even the largest capital ships, a bit like the kind of drone technology that we're seeing today. And so what the Navy needed was ships that could go very fast, and they could track down and catch these torpedo boats before they could put at risk capital ships.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Talk about asymmetric warfare. You mentioned drones, interesting, isn't it? Because they're about 1% the price of a battleship, but they can sink a battleship, right? Whereas previously, to sink a battleship, you needed another battleship with big guns and thick armour, and they just exchanged broadsides and that's that. Now you've got these weapon systems, and they can be delivered. They don't need a big battleship to fire a torpedo. Presumably, you can do it from a very small platform, can you?

• 9:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Small platforms, fast ships, ships that can attack in numbers. They can catch up to battleships, cruisers, fire their torpedoes, and be away before they can be caught. So yeah, it was a major, seen as a major threat to the fleet at the time.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  And I guess, if you're the world's biggest navy of all the world's biggest battleships, everyone else therefore thinks, hang on, maybe we'd have to build those. Maybe we could build a whole fleet of much smaller, cheaper vessels carrying these torpedoes, and we sort of avoid the expense of trying to compete with Britain on a like-for-like basis. You can see how the rest of the world would have thought this was quite exciting.

• 9:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. It's very appealing as a shipbuilding strategy, and it's really what triggered what you could see as an arms race essentially in the 1880s, 1890s, to develop both the torpedo boats themselves and the technology and the boats that could catch those torpedo boats and disable them before they did any damage.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  The Admiralty were very much aware of the emerging threat of these fast agile torpedo boats, because they could just zip in and out of the enemy torpedo, a capital ship, and zoom away again. So the development of a torpedo boat destroyer was to destroy the torpedo boats. So these new torpedo boat destroyers, particularly the thirty knotters, had to be as agile and faster and more heavily armed in order to counter and deter the threat. And that's what we've seen now with the Tiger and our sister ships came about.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  It's so interesting, isn't it? So if you're in France, you think, hang on a minute, let's not build massively expensive battleships to fight the Brits. Let's fill up the English Channel with these fast boats that attack at night, they go extremely quickly, they're taking advantage of this new technology, and we can build loads of them, we can have absolutely loads of them, we can swarm the whole Channel with them. I mean, it must have been causing nightmares for British planners.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, just following on from what Dave and Leo said as well, there was a really famous quote by Admiral Mountbatten at the time, and it was a large hole in a ship below the waterline is obviously far more likely to be able to sink that ship, rather than a hole above the waterline. So it sort of explains why these torpedoes at this sort of era in warfare were so dangerous.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  So this fear of these torpedo boats spawns an entirely new class of warship, one that's still with us today, fascinatingly. And what is that called?

• 11:47Speaker 03

  The destroyer.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  So that begins life as a torpedo boat destroyer, doesn't it?

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, but now they're referred to merely as destroyers, but they were torpedo boat destroyers. And I think the Admiralty around about the turn of the century, around about the 1890s, decided that they needed fast thirty knot destroyers. And the tender went out to other shipbuilders. If you want to build any of our destroyers, they've got to achieve a speed of thirty knots. And that's where the Tiger comes into it.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  Dave, take me through. You're a professional mariner. Thirty knots is pretty quick today, isn't it? I mean, how fast was that back in, you know, 1900?

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Well, phenomenally fast. This was powered by steam engines, steam engines producing just over thirty knots of speed. It's incredible for the period. And the beauty of steam was that they're very quiet. You could stand next to a steam engine going at full speed and have a conversation. Apart from the vibration of the machinery, the actual noise of the engine was quiet, contrasting with the diesel and oral engines of today, where you couldn't possibly stand next to them and have a conversation. But that was a side issue, really. The main event was speed. They had to have the speed, and they had to have enough speed to outrun the torpedo boats that they were designed to attack.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  So just for people at home, people who have heard, people might have heard of HMS Warrior, which I've made several podcasts on, and the top speed of HMS Warrior in 1860 odd was about fourteen knots. Forty years later, this is twice as fast as that. So it just shows how quickly technology is moving. So we've got an engine, the whole thing's built around the engine presumably. What are they carrying aboard? What are the tools they've got to do their job to destroy?

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so she was heavily armed to intercept these torpedo boats and chasers. Her primary armament was one twelve pounder, quick firing, twelve hundred weight gun, which was mounted just forward of the bridge on the turtle deck. Her second armament was, she had five Hotchkiss six pounders. They were staggered across the ship. So you had two directly behind the bow, next to the bridge section, and then you had one on the port and one on the starboard side, near the center section of the ship. And then you also had one in the center line, right at the stern of the ship. And then obviously, along with the main shell firing armament, she had two eighteen inch torpedo tubes, which fired white head

• 14:14Speaker 04

  torpedoes. And this was all just jam packed into the ship. As we mentioned before, the ship was incredibly fast. She was powered by four Norman boilers, she had three funnels, she had an incredible shaft horsepower of like 6,400, and she carried a weight of coal of 86 tonnes. So the ship was literally jam packed, full of armaments or fuel or machinery.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  So it can fire torpedoes as well, but it's got these pretty punchy guns on its deck as well. So it can sink any ships that it's able to overhaul. And so it sounds to me like a pretty, a pretty versatile boat as well. And it will end up doing all sorts of jobs, not just chasing down torpedo boats, but it'll end up doing all sorts of jobs for the rest of the 20th century, won't it?

• 15:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, so absolutely, Dan. They were used not just for, for chasing down torpedo boats, but also on coastal patrols, bearing in mind this is a pre-radio era. So figuring out where the enemy fleet actually is, was quite an analog process. And having a boat that could deploy rapidly along the coast was very much part of the intel gathering process for the British fleet.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  They weren't very large boats, were they? How many crew might be on a destroyer?

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Well, the Tiger had a complement of about fifty seven or fifty eight men, which was pretty well standard throughout that period, which is remarkable, really. When you look at the size of the ship and the size of the machinery, the room they had to operate in was very restricted. There wasn't much room for them to move within the confines of the ship. They were obviously a well oiled crew. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were skilled at their jobs. And many of them died doing it.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Again, so very, very small compared to the big people have heard of Dreadnoughts, the super Dreadnought battleships that were built a few years later. Over a thousand people on board those. So these are very, very different. They're going super fast, they're armed in different ways. Would there have been an informality aboard? Would it feel like a bit of a different navy to serving on some of those larger, very hierarchical ships?

• 16:19Speaker 05

  I think that's absolutely right, Dan. I think the crews on these destroyers had a reputation for being rough and tough, as we've heard. You know, the living space was really tiny by modern standards. And it must have been absolute hell to be crew on one of these boats. They were reputed to be extremely wet boats. They had to deal with intense heat. They had to deal with vibration. They had to deal with just the fact that these boats were not good handling in rough weather. They had very poor sea keeping. And so this is really, I think, an example of the navy pushing shipbuilding, both the equipment and the crew to the absolute limits of what was possible.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Do we know if it's desirable to remember? Was this an exciting place to be? And they feel like the cutting edge?

• 17:07Speaker 05

  I think so. I think if you, just reading the memoirs, a lot of the senior admirals at the time, particularly during the First World War, a lot of these guys cut their teeth on destroyers. And so it was seen as being a good place to learn the trades.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Just a bit more freedom. People lower down the pecking, a bit more responsibility, probably, a bit more exciting than being on a battleship.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  I don't know, really, when anyone enlisted in the navy, whether they had much choice in where they served. I guess they could volunteer for certain parts of the service. But certainly, if you were allocated to be a stoker, and Leo alluded to them being a bit rough and ready, these were men that were in the stokehold, attending to the boilers, shoveling coal into the boilers in order to keep the furnaces burning, to provide steam for the engines. And this was a hot sweaty job. And so of course, they were rough and ready, because they were strong, they were used to using their muscles to keep the coal flowing into the boilers. It's a tough job.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  I mean, no question. And I imagine it's even tougher on a tiny little vessel like a destroyer, where you're going to feel every wave as well. They used to get battered around in the rough seas.

• 18:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. I think the, the speed was known informally, it was sort of a, an in joke among engineers in the navy at the time, that the faster these ships ran on their speed trials, the more likely they were to break down, or the worse their track record later on, because running them at full speed actually, for any period of time, would cause damage, structural damage to the hull. So these things were literally sort of falling apart the moment they were running at full pace.

• 18:42Speaker 00

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• 21:23Speaker 00

  Now, let's come on to the Tiger itself because this is such an important story and it is such an important vessel because it's a snapshot of this whole period of time, really. Where was she built?

• 21:35Speaker 05

  So she was built in Scotland at, it was the Clydebank Yard of J and G Thompson. So she was built over the course of about a year under an order. It was 1898, 1899 that she was ordered and then completed in June 1901.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  And so she enters the navy, presumably they're serving in the Channel, they're not being sent out to the far-flung corners of Britain's empire. This is a destroyer prepared to take on, well, perhaps the French, perhaps the Germans in waters around Britain.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, she did. She also operated out of Portland and Devonport, but latterly her home port was Portsmouth.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  And what kind of service would she have been seeing in those first few years?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  A lot of training for sure, a lot of exercises. I don't think there were any wars that they got involved in as such during that period, but they were there to defend the nation and to prepare in the event of war, which as we know, came soon after in 1914.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Tell me about the exercises that she took part in in 1908. What was the point of these exercises?

• 22:35Speaker 05

  So the idea was that you'd have a dozen destroyers that left Portsmouth to practise night attacks against battleships and cruisers that were heading to Portland. So it was designed as a training exercise at night, everyone screening their lights, there's total darkness, no moon, and so the destroyers were practising torpedo attacks on these big ships.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  And presumably it's a dangerous business not using lights. I mean, there's no GPS, there's no identify friend or foe, there's no AIS systems. I mean, but you've got to make them as realistic as possible.

• 23:13Speaker 05

  That's right. And interestingly, only a few years before Tiger had been involved in a near miss collision, also during a simulated night attack, also with light screens to preserve stealth. So this was a dangerous exercise with lots of ships, big ships manoeuvring in large numbers in total darkness.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  I think it's worth remembering as well that these guys were operating from an open bridge. They were exposed to the weather. There would have been a canvas screen around the, around some stanchions to keep the spray off them, but otherwise they were completely in the open and relied totally on their eyesight and their wits and their skills. As you said, Dan, the no radar, no GPS, no radio, they just had to navigate with compass sextant, although sextant wasn't a great deal of use at night, and dead reckoning. And so it's hardly surprising that there were accidents.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Amazing, isn't it? Just yet worth repeating that. People will be familiar with movies of the bridge with the screens lit up and windows, waves breaking over them. This is a bridge that is open to the elements.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Not like our boats today with a wheelhouse where you can be out of the wind and waves. They were completely in the open.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  And toughness, I suppose, was the point. They believed that a war was imminent. By 1908, that war's most likely going to be imminent to the Germans. The Germans have got a very capable navy indeed. There was presumably the desire to train up the men and prepare them for that eventuality.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah, training was absolutely essential because when the real thing comes along, they are prepared and ready. Absolutely right.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Right, let's come back to that night, that fateful night of April 1908. So we've got a division of the Royal Navy steaming west down the English Channel, south of the Isle of Wight, about 20 miles south the Isle of Wight, heading towards Portland, hugely important harbour at Portland. And then you've got these destroyers that are imitating really what torpedo boats, so just this attacking force of destroyers hoping to get amongst them and cause havoc.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the torpedo boat destroyers were basically there to simulate their night attack exercise on the larger fleet, the home fleet. And they did so by using flares. So when they simulated a torpedo to be fired, they would use a flare to fire that up.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Wow. So, okay. So the idea is you try and come up undetected and then fire flares, meaning torpedoes away. Look at this, look how close we are, we've got you.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So it was a stealth exercise, you know, they didn't want to give it away and make it easy for everybody involved. They wanted to try and simulate this as realistic as possible.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  So that night, you've got HMS Recruit and HMS Tiger, and they actually, they're trying to sneak in up on these bigger ships, the Royal Navy, and they succeed, they do pretty well.

• 25:54Speaker 05

  Yes, that's right. So HMS Recruit that Tiger was following got in amongst the big ships and fired their veris lights. Tiger was supposed to be following the Recruit, following her leader, but for reasons that nobody has ever explained, she didn't.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  So Tiger seemingly veered to port, so veered to left for everyone who's not familiar with the maritime expressions, and ended up cutting straight across the track of this line of bigger Royal Navy vessels. Is that right, Dave?

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's under orders to follow HMS Recruit, the leader, and they couldn't see Recruit, but they could see her wake. And they tried to follow that. My own personal view is they just didn't see the barrack coming. They couldn't have seen the bow wave, which would have shown up as white foam. They just didn't see it. That's my own personal opinion. Otherwise, they wouldn't have turned directly across such a massive ship which was bearing down upon them. It was a fatal error. And as Liam says, we will never know what the real reason was. Maybe they were dazzled, maybe they just made a miscalculation, but it's purely as guesswork. We won't know the truth.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Dan, we hear Dave talking about the massive ship HMS Barrack. Give us a sense of how big that was compared to the Tiger.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think the barrack was 10,000 tonnes, is that correct?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  The Tiger itself, it was 380 tonnes light and 425 tonnes fully loaded, you know, so you've got like over 20 to 25 times the size in mass. And with that such armoured bow and ram on the front of the barrack, it just literally sliced through the ship like a hot knife through butter.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you mentioned the armour. We forget now, but that was also thought to have been potentially a futuristic weapon of war, was actually crashing into other ships, wasn't it, at close range and slicing them open. So this bow of barrack and this ram at the front, that was actually, it was a job that it was prepared to do.

• 27:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. I think it's one of the ironies, a sort of poignant ironies about this story, that barrack had been specifically equipped with a ram bow. So we're talking here about, you know, a heavily reinforced underwater forward extension on her bow that had been designed as a weapon to sink enemy ships. And in this case, you know, it's proved lethal to a friendly ship during an accident.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  How long would the crew have had, do you think, Dave, as a man who's spent a lot of time in these waters on boats, and how long do you think the crew of the Tiger would have had to respond to the barrack's bow just coming out of the darkness?

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Well, virtually no time. I think when the barrack first sighted the Tiger, they were about 100 yards off. So seconds to react, and then you've got to try and alert all your mates below deck. It's just not enough time. They were doomed the moment they made the manoeuvre to cross the bows of the barrack, even though it wasn't their intention. The disaster was just inevitable.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  What do we know about that moment of collision? What do the sources tell us?

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Well, the sources say that one of the men was below decks and just became aware of a wall of steel passing in front of his face as the barrack sliced through. He watched the floor plates buckle up. He instantly tried to escape but found his escape hatch above his head had been distorted, but he was nevertheless able to get through. But for everybody else down below, very difficult to try and escape. And in particular, the men in the bow section, because the vessel parted, started to sink straight away. So the men in the forward part of the ship that were down below just didn't stand a chance.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Dan, tell us how many men did manage to survive and how do you survive a crash like that? It's extraordinary.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  From the initial point of collision at quarter past eight in the evening, it only took three minutes for the stern to disappear below the waves. As you can imagine, the sense of total fear would have been amongst them sailors, unfortunately, below decks. And then after the stern disappeared, there was only another one to two minutes before the bow disappeared below the waves. And yeah, it was gone forever for 118 years. There was in total 35 men lost below decks, and that included Lieutenant William Middleton as well.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  No one from the bridge survived, right? So none of the command team, if you like. So actually, no one was ever really able to unpack exactly what happened in those last few seconds of the life of Tiger.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a great unanswered question. What really happened? The court martial couldn't explain it. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Middleton, didn't make it. So he couldn't testify. None of the surviving crew members knew why the order was given. So that's why it remains a mystery to this day.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  This is Dan Snow's History. HMS Tiger has been found, well, after this. Don't go away.

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• 31:58Speaker 00

  This was obviously a peacetime tragedy. How big a deal was this at the time?

• 32:02Speaker 05

  So this was major national news at the time. You had King Edward VII personally telegraphed his sympathies. Questions were asked in Parliament. There was a lot of scrutiny about why this had happened. Again, pre First World War, you know, national maritime tragedies on this scale, the public not accustomed to. And it was headline news for weeks. And it shows in the fact that there was this massive search and salvage operation run by the Navy over several days. They sent multiple cruisers, multiple tug salvage vessels to see if they could find any sign of the wreckage. But they never found the wreck and eventually gave up and called it practically impossible.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Did those men die in vain? Or were there useful, I mean, it sounds callous, but were there lessons learned that you think may have helped prevent future tragedies like this?

• 32:53Speaker 05

  Well, one of the developments that we've talked about is the fact that Admiral Fanshawe, in the aftermath of the sinking, immediately banned the use of signal flares from night exercises. So he speculated that they were too brilliant and they had dazzled the destroyer crews. And he recommended alternatives that would be visible to the target ships, but wouldn't be binding to the attackers. So there were practical reforms that we saw that were born from this tragedy.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  But I guess it also just highlights that these kind of destroyer operations at night, they are dangerous. And funnily enough, in the Battle of Jutland, less than 10 years later during the First World War, when it was a very, very real shooting war at sea, there were collisions at night in much the same way. I mean, it's fascinating how this does presage the type of warfare that's going to come.

• 33:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think also just picking up the theme about seakeeping abilities of these boats, you know, Tiger herself had quite a chequered history in terms of engine failures, collisions with other ships, crashing into the breakwater at Portland. And she was repaired and returned to service each time. But you get this sense that she was always living on borrowed time taking part in these exercises.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  These new platforms, they can be difficult for navies to absorb, I suppose. Dan, why did you want to find the wreck of Tiger?

• 34:14Speaker 04

  So as a project, we really wanted to find the wreck of the Tiger, not only because it was the last 30 knot torpedo boat destroyer missing in the Channel, but we also felt like it was a really important target to find as well. Because as a project, we run by three pillars, remembrance, conservation and documentation. And we felt like if we found the wreck, we would be able to do it justice by extensive documentation and also to remember the sailors that unfortunately lost their lives.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  Dave, you've found more wrecks than I've had hot dinners and you've dived on them in the Channel, one of the biggest graveyards of ships in the world. What was it about this one in particular? Because this has been a lifelong mission for you.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've done a lot of research on wrecks. When I'm not diving on them, I'm researching them through the winter. And I'd always known about the Tiger, but didn't know exactly where it was. I knew it was offshore. And to try and go offshore to find a wreck, it takes a lot of time, money and effort and grim determination, particularly if the weather's not favourable. And I always thought this was an important wreck to find, simply because the story is so dramatic. Loss of life was, peacetime loss of life was absolutely appalling. And now, as we know, we found it.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Well, we have, Leo. We were out on Dave's boat the other day and it was a very, very special day indeed. You've spent a huge amount of time in the archive. What was it like going down that shot line, that rope down to the seabed and seeing Tiger for the first time?

• 35:49Speaker 05

  I mean, for me, the adrenaline was incredible. So she's 62 metres deep, which is deep enough that you're on specialist rebreather equipment. You've got a limited time available to you on the bottom. And the first thing that I saw was the fourth Norman boiler on the stern just looming out of the darkness. And at that point, I knew immediately we were on a 30 knot, we were on Tiger and the adrenaline was just incredible.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  What have you learned, Dan and Leo? What did you learn from diving? Obviously diving is a great adventure and you've got amazing pictures and scans. What were you able to learn that adds to our knowledge of that accident that night back in 1908?

• 36:34Speaker 04

  So during the dive, we managed to uncover several artefacts which give us historical insight into actually what happened during the snapshot of time when the barrack sliced into the Tiger. And one of them things was that she didn't alter speed nor course. So on the stern telegraph, the pointer was still around to full speed ahead. So she didn't try to slow down. Also, the rudder indicator as well, which we managed to document on the bow section, that was also still pretty much straight ahead. It was a slight indication that she was going five degrees, maybe five to seven degrees to starboard at the time.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  However, you know, we could never be sure if that was 100% accurate at the time.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  So isn't that amazing? So the engine telegraph, that's the way that they communicated from the bridge to the engine room. People will be familiar with the famous one in the Titanic movie, you know, you ring it and it rings a bell and you can say full of stern and everything. So that was going full ahead. So they did not have any time to adjust the speed and potentially not even adjust the steering. It was that sudden, I mean, that's just terrifying, isn't it?

• 37:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when they did see the barrack off the starboard side, it was literally 100 to 150 yards away. So they literally had seconds to react. And I don't think they had time to react in that instance.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  All the chains and the cables which went from the controls on the bridge to the stern would have been severed. So even if the signal had been made, it wouldn't have gone anywhere, it wouldn't have reached anyone. I think one of the engineers reported that after the ship had been cut in two, he did go back down and shut the steam off. But in the event, it made no difference to the outcome whatsoever.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Give me some of the highlights, guys. You both came up so excited from that dive, but give me some of the other highlights, the things you saw down there.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  I think one of the highlights for me was seeing these incredibly ornate fluid compasses. So Denton Co London fluid compasses used for navigation. And they had these highly decorated 128 point cards, graduated cards showing direction with a flerza lee that was pointing north and with the name Dent visible through the glass. And seeing those, we found four of those so well preserved was really impressive.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  For me, it was some of the smaller details. For example, the rudder indicator on the helm that was inside the conundrum tower. And some of the room label tags as well. So we found a really nice brass label to the 12 pound shell room. And that was just amazing to see that in situ. It was frozen in time.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Well, no one's been anywhere near that wreck ever. And I mean, talk about time capsule, totally untouched, steering wheel in place, never been looted. What an incredibly special find that is, guys.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  I haven't dived it myself, but the guys come up and told me there were, there were six telegraphs on the bridge section, two or three compasses, oil lamps, portholes, steering pedestals, you know, staggering. And not to mention, of course, the prized find, the ship's bell was discovered.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  So guys, you know you found the right wreck. It's got the name Tiger on it, has it?

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the bell itself, we were able to see the inscription HMS on the bell. And later, a review of the photos that we were able to gather, we believe that we can see the letters I G E as well, just below the HMS.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  I think we can credit you with the HMS Tiger here, guys. I feel there's enough evidence. Dave, what's it mean to you that you've been chasing down this wreck for decades?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Well, it's the culmination really of years and years and years of research and diving. And to find this particular wreck in such a fantastic condition with absolutely everything still in place, it really is quite an exceptional find.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  What a moment, guys. Do you take a minute to celebrate and congratulate yourselves or are you thinking about the next adventure?

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Not yet. We're going to live off this one for a while, I think.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. We did, when we got back on board Dave's boat, there was a lot of excitement, you know, that all the hard work, the time in the archive, the time at sea scanning, it all paid off. And we just hoped that we'd done enough because at that time, we didn't have time to review the pictures or anything like that, the video footage. So yeah, it was super exciting. But as all projects that look for wrecks, there is always the next one. And the following week after that, we were off up to Scotland to try and find our next target.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  It was lovely when you got back on the boat and put your dive kit away and we were able to have a few whiskies and celebrate your great achievement. Leo, Dan, Dave, thank you for coming on the podcast. Another huge congratulations for this, finding this complete and stunning wreck, but one that really gives us a snapshot into this absolutely essential period of British naval history.

• 41:42Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 42:34Speaker 00

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