SS PROTESILAUS: January 1940 by Kate Jones

A Bitterly Cold Winter

For a few days in January this year, 2021, it was seasonally wintry. The night skies were clear and in the morning cars in our cul-de-sac were covered with ice and the gardens decorated with hoar frost. The air outside was bitingly cold. The shore of Swansea Bay was fringed with ice and the sea was a hard, silvery grey.

In “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” I wrote about the first winter of the Second World War – the coldest winter for 45 years. The frosts began just after Christmas 1939 and continued until mid-February 1940, with frequent heavy snowfalls and an ice-storm that brought Britain to a standstill.  In the third week of January it was so cold that The Mumbles Lifeboat could not be brought back up her slipway after rescuing 22 men from a ship mined in the Bristol Channel.

The coxswain of The Mumbles Lifeboat in January 1940 was William Edwin Davies, a man of immense maritime experience. He had taken over the command of the lifeboat from his father, William Davies snr. in 1919. When war was declared in September 1939 he knew the younger crewmen would be called up; after all he had served in the RNR in the First World War, as had the present Second Coxswain, William John Gammon. Both men knew the empty places would be filled promptly by older men – there was never a shortage of lifeboat volunteers.

The Mumbles crew knew that whilst they were familiar with the peacetime perils of the sea, wartime would bring additional dangers. Night time launches would be during the blackout, with minimum navigation and shore lights to aid them; the huge increase in shipping coming in and out of Swansea Bay could well be hazardous to their small boat in the dark and they would negotiate minefields (German and British) risking attack from beneath the waves and in the skies above. The coxswain was issued with firearms and ammunition just in case they met the enemy at sea.

With the Admiralty controlling the coast, the lifeboat (like all other vessels) could not put to sea without permission from the commanding officer at Swansea Naval Base. He also instructed the coxswain what to do and what not to do when the lifeboat did launch. The crew knew they could be called upon to rescue men badly injured as a result of their ships being blown apart by mines or torpedoes. Above all, they knew they would be much busier than in peacetime.

The Mumbles lifeboat Edward, Prince of Wales had been at the station since May 1924. She had undergone a refit in September 1936 but plans to replace her, announced in June 1938, were indefinitely postponed by the outbreak of war.

Coxswain and crew understood that if anything happened to Edward, Prince of Wales there would be no chance of a replacement now. All boat-building yards and engineering shops had been requisitioned for war use and building new lifeboats would be impossible. Even so, if the country was invaded, Coxswain Davies had orders to destroy the lifeboat’s engine. (This order was amended in March 1943. The coxswain was instead to take the lifeboat to Swansea Docks and place it, along with himself and crew, under the Port Naval Officer’s order. That officer would, if necessary, immobilise, not destroy, the lifeboat’s engine.)

At 09.15 hours on Sunday 21 January 1940 Coxswain Davies received an urgent message from the Coastguard. A ship (presumably mined) was sinking in the Bristol Channel, six miles WSW of Mumbles Head, off Rotherslade Bay.

Firing maroons was forbidden during wartime, so the crew were alerted by messengers banging on front doors. (Messengers might be the police or boys eager to help). Thus summoned, men grabbed warm clothes, hurried out into the bitter cold, along the road to the pier and boathouse.

Just twenty minutes after the coastguard message had come through, at 09.35, the lifeboat Edward, Prince of Wales, launched down the slipway. On board were Coxswain William Edwin Davies, Mechanic Robert Williams, Second Coxswain William John Gammon and crew members William Thomas, Charlie Davies, Tom Davies, A. Gammon and William Noel. All were experienced crew, but uncertain as to what they would find when they reached the casualty – SS Protesilaus.

A moderate easterly breeze was blowing, but the sea was smooth with a cold mist drifting over it as the lifeboat rounded the lighthouse island and turned towards Rotherslade Bay. It took forty minutes to reach the stricken vessel, owned by Alfred Holt & Company’s Blue Funnel Line, one of Britain’s larger shipping companies.

When Edward, Prince of Wales arrived at the scene they found a patrol vessel alongside the Protesilaus. HMS Paramount was a Royal Navy minesweeper - a converted drifter trawler from Milford commanded by C. Ernest Blowers, RNR. His crew had already rescued 53 men. In the freezing weather conditions Coxswain Davies and The Mumbles lifeboat crew rescued the remaining 22, eight of them injured. The lifeboat returned to Mumbles where the survivors were taken care of by the Red Cross, St John’s Ambulance and the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society.

The lifeboat crew were unable to rehouse the lifeboat due to heavy frost. Instead of being safe in her boathouse, Edward, Prince of Wales remained afloat for several days until the weather improved.

What happened to her after that was described by Laurie Latchford in his diary:

 “Her decks were forced into waves, her stern lying in 20 feet of mud. The bows rose and fell with the tide. The badly shattered midships couldn’t stand the strain and she broke her back. Surprising how easily a ship will do this….. She will not be salved but sold as scrap. The bows will be floated further inshore, and the stern raised if the mud will let it go! 

The Protesilaus wasn’t even insured at Lloyds, but by a salvage company. By peace-time standards she cannot be much of a loss, but nowadays anything which will carry a cargo is valuable.” 

[Sunday 4 February 1940; The Swansea Wartime Diary of Laurie Latchford]

The stern section was intended for further use. After temporary repairs it was towed by two tugs Empire Henchman and Abeille 21 to the Royal Naval Base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands to be scuttled as a block ship. The previous autumn, during the night of 13/14 October 1939, Scapa Flow’s defences had been breached by U-47 which had crept in undetected at high tide through gaps in the old World War I block ships. Under the command of Korvettenkapitän Günther Prien U-47 fired 7 torpedoes at the anchored battleship Royal Oak which sank in minutes with the loss of 834 lives.

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill immediately ordered the construction of permanent barriers across Scapa Flow’s sounds. But the Protesilaus’s stern section never reached Scapa. It developed a serious leak and had to be sunk by gun fire 5 miles NW of Skerryvore – a remote island in the Inner Hebrides.

U-28’s end was undignified too. In November 1940 she had become a training vessel for new U-boat crews. On 17 March 1944 during a training exercise at the U-boat pier at Neustadt she passed too close beneath a dummy freighter used for target practice. Her conning tower was ripped off and she sank.

HMS Paramount, a drifter trawler built in 1911, requisitioned by the Admiralty in November 1939 and refitted as a minesweeper, was based at Swansea Naval Base. She was handed back to her owners the Drifter Trawler Company of Milford in January 1946. She was scrapped nine years later at Llanelli.

The ‘Captains’:                                                 

SS Protesilaus’s Master, Alfred Henry Denistoun Shand, RNR, served throughout the war. He died in 1969.

HMS Paramount’s skipper Clair Ernest Blowers, RNR, commanded minesweepers throughout the war. He died in 1974.

U-28’s Kapitänleutnant Günther Kuknke (Knight’s Cross) survived the war as well. He joined the Bundesmarine in 1955 and was appointed Konteradmiral in 1966. He retired in 1972 and died in 1990.

Edward, Prince of Wales: Coxswain William Edwin Davies retired in June 1940 and died less than two years later. His successor was William John Gammon. 

January 1940

For Britain’s lifeboats and their veteran crews January 1940 was a tough month made worse by the arctic weather. Spray froze as it fell encasing lifeboats and crew in ice so that the men’s oilskins had to be broken off. In the bitter cold crews searched in rough seas and gale-force winds for vessels missing in the pitch darkness of wartime blackout, forbidden to signal or call out. Darkened shores, treacherous enough at the best of times, were rendered even more dangerous by coastal defences. Crews navigated minefields and climbed aboard blazing ships to rescue men, many of them horribly injured.  In January 1940 lifeboats launched 143 times and rescued over 400 lives. Twenty-two of those were men saved from a casualty of war, SS Protesilaus, by the men of The Mumbles Lifeboat.

© Kate Jones, March 2021