PRISONER OF THE GERMANS
A JUTLAND SURVIVOR'S STORY
by Richard Taylor
TEN officers and 166 ratings of the Royal Navy were taken prisoner by the
Germans during the Battle of Jutland in 1916, most of them from two ships
of the 13th Destroyer Flotilla, both sunk by enemy shellfire.
One of them was the 1025-ton NESTOR, a new ship commanded by the Hon Barry
Bingham, who earned the VC for his gallantry during the battle. Among his
crew was 39-year-old Chief Engine Room Artificer Frederick William King,
later to receive the Distinguished Service Medal for his work on that
eventful day. Both he and his skipper survived the rigours of life first
as PoWs in Germany and subsequently as internees in Holland.
CERA King was awarded Hurt Certificates for Jutland and for an earlier
occasion when he was serving in the old A-class destroyer LIGHTNING when
she was sunk while on mine clearance work near the Kentish Knock light
vessel off the mouth of the Thames on 30 June 1915. Both documents are
among a large number that came into my hands just over eight years ago,
together with photographs of King and paperwork offering some details of
his later life in Civvy Street. They provide a picture of his life from
his birth in Oxfordshire in 1876 up to 1945, although some of the later
information is sketchy.
The most significant documents are, of course, those relating to Jutland
and his capture by the Germans. The NESTOR and NOMAD were both hit and
disabled by Adm Hipper's battlecruisers. Wounded men were prepared, ready
to abandon ship with the able-bodied, while code books and papers were
destroyed. The NOMAD went down with her colours flying, while five miles
away the Germans raked the stricken NESTOR. Her end was inevitable but
four officers and 68 ratings were picked up the German 5th Torpedo Boat
Flotilla.
On 9 May 1918, in response to instructions from Cdr Bingham, King set out
a dispassionate account of what had happened in the NESTOR's engine room
during the fateful two hours before she sank. King kept a copy, so we know
what he reported. After a preamble, he wrote:
"The revs were about 600 at 4.30pm. At about 4.45pm full speed was ordered
and at the Engr Lieut Comdr's orders I relieved A H Hayes ERA at the main
regulating valve and he was sent in charge of No 1 Boiler Room. At about
5.53pm a shell penetrated No1 Boiler causing damage to the oil heating
arrangements, which was immediately shut off and speed was reduced
accordingly..."
One can visualise the mayhem as, nearly two years after the event, King
went on to write: "At about 5.59pm another shell entered No2 Boiler and
difficulty was experienced with the feed water. Speed was now reduced to
17 knots... Owing to the shortage of water No3 Boiler was shut off. At
about 6.9pm the Engr Lieut Comdr gave the order to stand by to leave the
department and at about 6.12pm gave the order to leave. At just about the
same time another shell entered the stbd for'd end of the E. Room,
carrying away the stbd main circulating engine."
After further technical details, he added: "The Engine Room staff on watch
carried out the orders given in a very satisfactory manner." Among them he
named ERA A J Richards, RNR, and Acting ERA D G B Cock, who had been with
King at the forward end of the engine room.
Alexander Richards, Douglas Cock and King were all pictured in 1917 in a
group of five NESTOR survivors at the PoW camp at Brandenburg. The others
were CPO Frederick Munting, later awarded the DSM, and Chief Stoker Alfred
Dinnage. Alfred Hayes, mentioned in King's report to his CO, also survived
to become a prisoner.
Cdr Bingham, awarded the VC in September 1916 when he was held by the
Germans, wrote at least twice about his engine room staff. Just a few days
before Jutland, the newly formed 13th Flotilla had returned from a North
Sea sweep: "The sensation of tearing along at well over 30 knots was no
less exhilarating than the inspiring sight of my followers doing the same.
But much more important was the value of this high-speed run to the
engine-room departments concerned, because it afforded them an occasion of
carrying out in practice what they were shortly to be called upon to do in
earnest."
After the trauma of Jutland itself, he paid tribute to his engine room
team, who "applied themselves with all the means in their power to the
work of setting the engines in motion, but it was all to no avail".
King's wife Emily, then living at the family home in King Edward Road,
Gillingham, was no doubt fearful of her husband's fate. Then she was told
on 6 June that the Admiralty assumed her husband had died when his ship
was sunk, but on the same day a chance visit to the Mainz PoW camp by
members of the American Embassy revealed that some of the NESTOR's men had
survived. Four days later an anxious Emily received a letter from the
Admiralty telling her that 75 men had been rescued by the Germans.
In October she was informed that King was being held at Gefangenenlager
Brandenburg, a camp consisting of an abandoned terracotta factory about 40
miles from Berlin. It was administered by the German 3rd Army Corps and
was used to hold naval and mercantile marine prisoners. While he was
there, King kept a notebook which bears the camp's official stamp. In it
he wrote out mechanical problems which may have been for his own benefit,
or perhaps for teaching other engine room staff held in the camp.
There were, however, more serious distractions. One of King's shipmates,
24-year-old AB John Player Genower, from the NESTOR, was killed by a
German guard on 9 March 1917. A Times report claimed that the seaman was
escaping from a burning building when he was murdered. A later account
alleged he was bayoneted and then pushed back into the building, which was
in flames. A photograph of Genower can be found in Volume XI of H W
Wilson's The Great War, together with a picture of fellow prisoners at his
funeral.
In the post-war years King pressed for an improved naval pension and he
told an appeal tribunal in 1923 that he still suffered from an injury to
his right hip and from rheumatism caused by being immersed in water twice
when his ships were sunk. He further claimed that his gastritis and
nervous debility had been caused by the "privations and awful conditions"
he suffered as a PoW, as well as the wounds he had received in action. He
had, he said, had enteric fever very badly while at the Brandenburg camp.
The tribunal obviously accepted his evidence but it was two years before
he was awarded a pension for life on the basis of a permanent 25 per cent
disablement.
On 30 April 1918, with other prisoners, King was moved to Holland as an
internee, one of his notebooks showing he made an effort to learn Dutch.
He was repatriated on 3 October 1918, two days before his award of the DSM
was announced in the London Gazette. He was invalided from the service on
27 November and was awarded Service Rendered badge No 33419. Despite the
injuries which affected his right hip and leg, he was appointed on 3 May
1919 to a civilian post of instructor at the Mechanical Training
Establishment at Chatham. Just over two years later, however, a reduction
in staff meant he had to leave. Eng Cdr H Radford wrote: "He is of sober
habits, hardworking and trustworthy, has carried out his duties with zeal
and ability and is thoroughly recommended to take charge of machinery."
His conduct and character were described as "exceptional" and it appears
he was in fact kept on as a pensioner trade instructor for mechanician
candidates, although his papers show that in November 1926 he eventually
left because there was no further billet for pensioners.
His extensive surviving papers are rather more vague about the rest of his
life, but a notebook he kept in 1928 logs the hours he worked on the
torpedo tubes of the ODIN and PARTHIAN. These were submarines launched at
Chatham in 1928 and 1929 respectively. Both were armed with eight 21in
torpedo tubes.
Frederick King's documents, notebooks and photographs were found in an old
suitcase in the loft of his son's former home in Holcombe Close,
Bathampton, near Bath, in the 1970s. Almost 30 years later they were
passed to me by the recently widowed owner of the house in which they were
discovered. The case contained medal ribbons, but sadly no medals. Does
anyone know of their whereabouts?
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