Manica prepares to launch her kite balloon off Gallipoli, 1915 | |
History | |
---|---|
Name |
|
Namesake | |
Owner |
|
Operator |
|
Port of registry |
|
Builder | Sir James Laing & Sons Ltd, Sunderland |
Yard number | 580 |
Launched | 25 September 1900 |
Completed | December 1900 |
Commissioned | into Royal Navy, March 1915 |
Decommissioned | out of Royal Navy, October 1919 |
Identification |
|
Fate | Scrapped 1931 |
General characteristics | |
Type |
|
Tonnage | |
Length | 360.5 ft (109.9 m) |
Beam | 47.0 ft (14.3 m) |
Depth | 28.3 ft (8.6 m) |
Decks | 2 |
Installed power | 530 NHP |
Propulsion | triple expansion engine |
Speed | 12 knots (22 km/h) |
Armament | by 1916: 1 × 4-inch gun |
Aircraft carried |
|
Notes | sister ships: Barotse, Bantu, Baralong |
HMS Manica was a merchant steamship that was built in England in 1901 and was scrapped in Japan in 1931. She was built as a dry cargo ship but spent the latter part of her career as an oil tanker.
She is most notable for her service in the First World War. In 1915 she was converted into the Royal Navy's first kite balloon ship. Later in the war the Navy had her converted into an oiler. The Admiralty sold her back into civilian service in 1920.
She was renamed Huntball in 1917 and Phorus in 1920. Her original owner was Bucknall Steamship Lines Ltd, which in 1914 became part of Ellerman Lines and was renamed Ellerman & Bucknall. [1] After the First World War she was owned by Anglo-Saxon Petroleum, which is part of Royal Dutch Shell.
In 1900 and 1901 Bucknall Steamship Lines Ltd took delivery of a set of four new sister ships from two shipbuilders in North East England. In 1900 Sir James Laing & Sons Ltd at Sunderland on the River Wear launched Manica on 25 September and Barotse on 22 December. [2] [3] In 1901 Armstrong, Whitworth & Co Ltd at Low Walker on the River Tyne launched Bantu on 16 July and Baralong on 12 September. [4] [5] All four ships were named after peoples or places in southern Africa, where Bucknall traded.
The four ships were built to almost identical dimensions. Manica's registered length was 360.5 ft (109.9 m), her beam was 47.0 ft (14.3 m) and her depth was 28.3 ft (8.6 m). Her tonnages were 4,120 GRT and 2,621 NRT. T Richardson & Sons of Hartlepool built her engine, which was a three-cylinder triple expansion steam engine rated at 530 NHP. [6]
Sir James Laing completed Manica on 21 December 1900. [2] Bucknall's registered her in London. Her UK official number was 112782 and her code letters were SDGP. [6]
In Bucknall's service, Manica was crewed by a mixture of white and Lascar seafarers. In October 1907 one of her Lascars was hospitalised in Suez and died of pneumonia. In May 1908 three of her Lascars died of beri-beri and were buried at sea. Later that month another she lost another Lascar at sea, believed drowned. In July 1908 she arrived in the River Tyne, where another four Lascars were taken ashore to hospital with beri-beri. [7]
At the end of August 1910 Manica docked in Port Adelaide, South Australia. Two members of her crew jumped ship there. One was from Ceylon and the other was African American, which made them "prohibited immigrants" under the White Australia policy. The South Australian authorities held her Master, Francis Potts, responsible. On 22 September he was convicted at Port Adelaide Police Court, fined £100 for each man and charged 20 shillings for court costs. [7]
Details of the two fugitives were published in South Australian newspapers, and £10 reward was offered for their capture. On 24 September they were arrested on a farm some miles from Adelaide. On 26 September Port Adelaide Police Court convicted them of desertion and sentenced them to seven days in prison. [7]
Manica lost two more Lascars listed as missing at sea: one in February 1914 and the other in January 1915. Each was believed to have drowned. [7]
On 12 February 1915 Manica arrived in the Port of London [7] with a cargo of manure. [8] On 11 March the Admiralty requisitioned her. [7] She was converted to carry a kite balloon for naval observation. She was fitted with long sloping deck from her forecastle to her waist, a hydrogen compressor to inflate her balloon, a dynamo to drive the compressor, and a winch to raise and lower the balloon. In civilian service she had lacked wireless telegraph, so a deckhouse for a W/T installation was added. She would need a larger complement as a kite balloon ship than as a cargo ship, so accommodation for more officers and men was added. [8]
On 22 March she was commissioned as HMS Manica, [7] with the pennant number Y4.17. [9] She was manned by Royal Naval Reserve officers and merchant marine reserve crew. [7] On 25 March Manica's chief steward died of natural causes. [7] He is buried at Flaybrick Hill Cemetery in Birkenhead. [10]
On 16 April Manica reached Lemnos in the Aegean Sea, which was an Allied base for the Gallipoli campaign. She spent the next few days making test flights of her balloon. [7] She was assigned to the Second Squadron to support the Landing at Anzac Cove. [11] On various dates Manica directed the fire of Royal Navy battleships including HMS Queen Elizabeth, Triumph and Lord Nelson. [7]
Manica's balloon observers first directed Royal Navy gunnery on 19 April, when they directed the bombardment of an Ottoman Army encampment. On 24 April this was followed by shelling the Ottoman barracks at Kabatepe. On 27 April an observer in Manica's balloon sighted an Ottoman transport ship on the far side of the Gallipoli peninsula, and successfully directed Queen Elizabeth's 15-inch guns to hit and sink her. [7] [12] [13]
Thereafter, Manica's balloon directed naval bombardments of two field batteries on 28 April, the town of Çanakkale on 30 April and 25 June, a battery of what were described as "8-inch (200 mm) guns" on 2 May, four Ottoman batteries on 8 May and a house believed to be an Ottoman military headquarters on 12 May. [7] [13]
On at least two occasions Ottoman aircraft including a Etrich Taube tried to bomb either Manica or her balloon. Neither attack succeeded. [7] Manica's defensive armament included anti-aircraft guns, which proved effective. [14]
In August 1915 Manica supported the Landing at Suvla Bay. On 12 August UB-8 fired a torpedo at her, but it passed under the ship and missed. On 14 August a U-boat fired two torpedoes at Manica, but this attack also failed. [7] [11]
By November 1915 Manica had been withdrawn from the Gallipoli campaign and was being refitted. [7] On 19 February 1916 she left Cammell Laird's number four dry dock in Birkenhead. On 9 March she left Birkenhead for German East Africa to support the Allied East African campaign, [9] now carrying a seaplane as well as her balloon. [7]
Manica bunkered at Gibraltar and Port Said, passed through the Suez Canal and called at Mombasa in British East Africa before reaching Zanzibar on 15 April. [9] From 22 April 1916 Manica operated from Zanzibar along the coast of German East Africa, where observations by her balloon and seaplane directed Royal Navy bombardments of German positions ashore.
On 13 June the battleship HMS Vengeance and protected cruisers Challenger and Pioneer bombarded the town of Tanga near the border with British East Africa, as Manica's seaplane directed their guns. On 7 July the protected cruiser HMS Talbot and monitor Severn, again supported by Manica's observers, entered Manza Bay [9] and put troops ashore who occupied Tanga. [15]
On 13 July Manica deployed her seaplane and balloon to direct the guns of HMS Severn, which bombarded the town of Pangani. The Germans surrendered the town to British land and naval forces on 23 July. Manica did the same for bombardments of the town of Sadani by the monitor Mersey on 26 July and battleship Vengeance on 3 August. [9] The Navy reached each town at the same time as British and Empire land forces that were advancing south from British East Africa. Each town quickly surrendered. [16]
In August British forces attacked the coastal town of Bagamoyo. Manica's seaplane and balloon provided artillery observations for bombardments of the town by HMS Talbot on 1 August and Vengeance on 4 August. [9] Between 0330 and 0400 [9] hrs on 15 August a flotilla that included Vengeance, Challenger, Severn, Mersey, the armed merchant cruiser Himalaya, Manica and the armed tug Helmuth anchored off Bagamoyo. An hour later troops including Royal Marines and Zanzibar Rifles went ashore. [17] During the morning Manica's seaplane suffered an engine fault and had to return to the ship. [7] But her balloon provided aerial observations [9] to direct naval artillery against German positions ashore, whose defences included one of the 105 mm naval guns that the German forces had salvaged from the cruiser SMS Königsberg. [18] On the morning 16 August, German artillery defending Bagamoyo fired at Manica, but no damage was recorded. On 18 August she deployed her seaplane to observe for Severn to bombard the shore. [9]
On 21 July Manica had deployed her seaplane and balloon to direct Mersey's guns in a bombardment of Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa. The Navy resumed the attack on 21 August, when Manica's balloon and seaplane observed for Vengeance to bombard the city. On 3 September, British and Empire land forces reached the northern outskirts of the city, the Navy briefly bombarded German positions on the same front, and the German authorities surrendered. [19]
After Dar es Salaam fell, British and Empire forces took the remaining coast of German East Africa with little or no resistance. The last German coastal resistance was in the swampy Rufiji delta, [20] where Manica and the Condor-class sloop Rinaldo bombarded a German encampment on 8 September. [9]
Manica remained in East Africa until March 1917. She left two crewmen buried in the war cemetery in Dar es Salaam. One was a fireman who was drowned on 6 August 1916 [21] when he was returning to the ship in her liberty boat when he fell between the boat and the ship. The other was an RNAS air mechanic who died on 21 March 1917. [22] On 25 March Manica left Zanzibar. In May 1917 two of her complement died of heat stroke and one died of typhoid fever. All three were buried at sea. [7] [23]
In August 1917 the Admiralty had Manica converted into an oil tanker at Bombay. For her new rôle she was renamed Huntball. on 15 April 1918 the Admiralty bought Huntball from Ellerman and Bucknall. [7]
In 1919 Anglo-Saxon Petroleum bought Huntball. In 1920, in accordance with standard practice, Anglo-Saxon renamed the ship after a genus of mollusc. Phorus is a synonym of the gastropod genus Xenophora . She was given the new civilian code letters TVRP. [24] Throughout the 1920s she traded in the Far East, and also to Australia and occasionally New Zealand. [7]
In February 1931 Phorus arrived in Nagasaki in Japan. On 3 July that year she arrived in Osaka to be scrapped. [2] [7] [25]
HMS Irresistible—the fourth British Royal Navy ship of the name—was a Formidable-class pre-dreadnought battleship. The Formidable-class ships were developments of earlier British battleships, featuring the same battery of four 12-inch (305 mm) guns—albeit more powerful 40-calibre versions—and top speed of 19 knots of the preceding Canopus class, while adopting heavier armour protection. The ship was laid down in April 1898, was launched in December that year, and was completed in October 1901. Commissioned in 1902, she initially served with the Mediterranean Fleet until April 1908, when she was transferred to the Channel Fleet. Now outclassed with the emergence of the dreadnought class of ships, she entered service with the Home Fleet in 1911 following a refit. In 1912, she was assigned to the 5th Battle Squadron.
This is a list of aviation-related events from 1915:
The naval operations in the Dardanelles campaign took place against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Ships of the Royal Navy, French Marine nationale, Imperial Russian Navy and the Royal Australian Navy, attempted to force a passage through the Dardanelles Straits, a narrow, 41-mile-long (66 km) waterway connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea further north.
HMS Albion was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the British Royal Navy and a member of the Canopus class. Intended for service in Asia, Albion and her sister ships were smaller and faster than the preceding Majestic-class battleships, but retained the same battery of four 12-inch (305 mm) guns. She also carried thinner armour, but incorporated new Krupp steel, which was more effective than the Harvey armour used in the Majestics. Albion was laid down in December 1896, launched in June 1898, and commissioned into the fleet in June 1901.
Bagamoyo, is a historic coastal town founded at the end of the 18th century, though it is an extension of a much older Swahili settlement, Kaole. It was chosen as the capital of German East Africa by the German colonial administration and it became one of the most important trading ports for the Germans along the East African coast along the west of the Indian Ocean in the late 19th and early 20th century. Today, it is the capital of the Bagamoyo District in Pwani Region. In 2011, the town had 82,578 inhabitants.
HMS Implacable was a Formidable-class battleship of the British Royal Navy, the second ship of the name. The Formidable-class ships were developments of earlier British battleships, featuring the same battery of four 12-inch (305 mm) guns—albeit more powerful 40-calibre versions—and top speed of 19 knots of the preceding Canopus class, while adopting heavier armour protection. The ship was laid down in July 1898, was launched in March 1899, and was completed in July 1901. Commissioned in September 1901, she was assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet and served with the fleet until 1908. After a refit, she transferred to the Channel Fleet, then onto the Atlantic Fleet in May 1909. By now rendered obsolete by the emergence of the dreadnought class ships, she was assigned to the 5th Battle Squadron and attached to the Home Fleet in 1912.
HMS Ark Royal was the first ship designed and built as a seaplane carrier. She was purchased by the Royal Navy in 1914 shortly after her keel had been laid and the ship was only in frames; this allowed the ship's design to be modified almost totally to accommodate seaplanes. In the First World War, Ark Royal participated in the Gallipoli Campaign in early 1915, with her aircraft conducting aerial reconnaissance and observation missions. Her aircraft later supported British troops on the Macedonian Front in 1916, before she returned to the Dardanelles to act as a depot ship for all the seaplanes operating in the area. In January 1918, several of her aircraft unsuccessfully attacked the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben when she sortied from the Dardanelles to attack Allied ships in the area. The ship left the area later in the year to support seaplanes conducting anti-submarine patrols over the southern Aegean Sea.
HMS Lord Nelson was a Lord Nelson-class pre-dreadnought battleship launched in 1906 and completed in 1908. She was the Royal Navy's last pre-dreadnought. The ship was flagship of the Channel Fleet when the First World War began in 1914. Lord Nelson was transferred to the Mediterranean Sea in early 1915 to participate in the Dardanelles Campaign. She remained there, becoming flagship of the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, which was later redesignated the Aegean Squadron. After the Ottoman surrender in 1918 the ship moved to the Black Sea where she remained as flagship before returning to the United Kingdom in May 1919. Lord Nelson was placed into reserve upon her arrival and sold for scrap in June 1920.
HMS Cornwallis was a Duncan-class pre-dreadnought battleship of the Royal Navy. Built to counter a group of fast Russian battleships, Cornwallis and her sister ships were capable of steaming at 19 knots, making them the fastest battleships in the world. The Duncan-class battleships were armed with a main battery of four 12-inch (305 mm) guns and they were broadly similar to the London-class battleships, though of a slightly reduced displacement and thinner armour layout. As such, they reflected a development of the lighter second-class ships of the Canopus-class battleship. Cornwallis was built between her keel laying in July 1899 and her completion in February 1904.
HMS Revenge was one of seven Royal Sovereign-class pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Royal Navy during the 1890s. She spent much of her early career as a flagship for the Flying Squadron and in the Mediterranean, Home and Channel Fleets. Revenge was assigned to the International Squadron blockading Crete during the 1897–1898 revolt there against the Ottoman Empire. She was placed in reserve upon her return home in 1900, and was then briefly assigned as a coast guard ship before she joined the Home Fleet in 1902. The ship became a gunnery training ship in 1906 until she was paid off in 1913.
HMS Vengeance was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the British Royal Navy and a member of the Canopus class. Intended for service in Asia, Vengeance and her sister ships were smaller and faster than the preceding Majestic-class battleships, but retained the same battery of four 12-inch (305 mm) guns. She also carried thinner armour, but incorporated new Krupp steel, which was more effective than the Harvey armour used in the Majestics. Vengeance was laid down in August 1898, launched in July 1899, and commissioned into the fleet in April 1902.
HMS Anne was a seaplane carrier of the Royal Navy used during the First World War. Converted from the captured German freighter Aenne Rickmers, the ship's two aircraft conducted aerial reconnaissance, observation and bombing missions in the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea during 1915–17 even though the ship was not commissioned into the Royal Navy until mid-1915. She was decommissioned in late 1917 and became a Merchant Navy collier for the last year of the war. Anne was sold off in 1922 and had a succession of owners and names until she was scrapped in 1958.
Pangani Town is a historic Swahili settlement located on the south eastern shore of Tanga Region, Tanzania. The town lies 45 km (28 mi) south of the city of Tanga, at the mouth of the Pangani River. It is the headquarters of the Pangani District. Administrately the town Pangani is situated within two wards, Pangani Mashariki and Pangani Magharibi. The town is currently the largest settlement in Pangani district and is a major tourist attraction in Tanga region and is a Tanzanian National Histotic Site.
Sadani is one of two places in Tanzania with this name. This is the one in Tanga Region, near the coast.
The Battle of Imbros was a naval action that took place during the First World War. The battle occurred on 20 January 1918 when an Ottoman squadron engaged a flotilla of the British Royal Navy off the island of Imbros in the Aegean Sea. A lack of heavy Allied warships in the area allowed the Ottoman battlecruiser Yavûz Sultân Selîm and light cruiser Midilli to sortie into the Mediterranean and attack the Royal Navy monitors and destroyers at Imbros before assaulting the naval base at Mudros.
HMS Baralong was a cargo steamship that was built in England in 1901, served in the Royal Navy as a Q-ship in the First World War, was sold into Japanese civilian service in 1922 and scrapped in 1933. She was renamed HMS Wyandra in 1915, Manica in 1916, Kyokuto Maru in 1922 and Shinsei Maru No. 1 in 1925.
HMS Helmuth was a German tug that the Royal Navy captured at the beginning of World War I and armed as a picket boat. She served in the East African campaign including the battles of Zanzibar and Tanga, she survived a German attack at Dar es Salaam, and took part in blockading SMS Königsberg in the Rujifi Delta. In 1916 she took part in an amphibious assault on the coastal town of Bagamoyo.
SMS Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand was an Austro-Hungarian Radetzky-class pre-dreadnought battleship commissioned into the Austro-Hungarian Navy on 5 June 1910. She was named after Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The first ship of her class to be built, she preceded Radetzky by more than six months. Her armament included four 30.5 cm (12 in) guns in two twin turrets, and eight 24 cm (9.4 in) guns in four twin turrets.
The International Squadron was a naval squadron formed by a number of Great Powers in early 1897, just before the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, to intervene in a native Greek rebellion on Crete against rule by the Ottoman Empire. Warships from Austria-Hungary, France, the German Empire, Italy, the Russian Empire, and the United Kingdom made up the squadron, which operated in Cretan waters from February 1897 to December 1898.
SS Himalaya was a P&O steam ocean liner that was built in Scotland in 1892 and scrapped in Germany in 1922. She operated scheduled services between England and Australia until 1908, and then to and from Japan until 1914.