The War at Sea

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16 T H E WA R AT S E A T H E WA R AT S E A 17
THE MUSICAL EAR IN WARTIME
A hydrophone attempts to listen to sound is a receiving microphone in a
waterproof casing.When a noise occurs underwater – a sound wave – the vibration is
turned into an audible electrical sound.
The hydrophone research and training base was called HMS Tarlair (after the drifter in
which the first trials had been conducted,from Granton harbour) and was established at
Hawkcraig Point,Aberdour,in June all,1,090 officers and 2,731 ratings were
trained at Hawkcraig,by parties visiting the naval bases,and by another school along
the Fife coast at Elie.
In charge of HMS Tarlair was Captain Cyril assembled an unlikely team that
included top scientists,Nobel Prize winners,and a soprano singer.
The hydrophones were used in pairs so that a trained ear could locate where the enemy
submarine might be – low for port and high for starboard.The Navy thought the best people
to develop this would be the top musicians of the day.They recruited Hamilton Harty,who
was in charge of the Hallé Orchestra,and his wifeAgnes Nichols who was a famous singer.
The musicians sat amongst all the hydrophones and had to get them into piles,low for
port and high for starboard,and they used a hammer to tap the diaphragms as they got
them into the middle of 1918,ten hydrophone listening stations had been set up
in Scotland,seven of them being in the Forth.They were mainly used to operate controlled
minefields,which could be activated electrically if a U-boat was detected.
NOTE OF INTEREST
Tearing the rules of war apart
InAugust 1914 Britain issued orders in council effectively closing off German overseas
trade.The blockade became progressively tighter over the next two years. On the 4th
of February 1915 Kaiser Wilhelm responded by signing an executive order that tore
the rules of war apart. It read “From the Eighteenth
of February onwards all enemy merchant ships in the
waters surrounding Great Britain and Ireland will be
destroyed,irrespective of the impossibility of avoiding
in all cases danger to passengers and crew.”
Three months later,on 7th May,a German U-boat
torpedoed the Lusitania, a passenger ship sailing
south of Ireland. It was heading for Liverpool with
almost 2,000 passengers on board,many fromCanada
and the USA. The Germans had posted notices in
American newspapers warning of the dangers facing
any ships entering British waters but with a death toll of
1,189 there was international outrage against Germany.
128 of the victims were from neutral America,
and American outrage forced the Kaiser to end his
campaign of unrestricted U-boat warfare. For a while at least. Most significantly, the
sinking of the Lusitania had been a drastic demonstration of the potential of Germany’s
tiny U-boat fleet.
PRIZE RULES
The laws of war, codified after
1856, set out to establish the rights
of neutrals and to protect private
property. Contraband was a legitimate
target, and was defined in two ways.
Munitions of war were absolute
contraband but other cargoes were
conditional contraband. Conditional
contraband was made up of goods
which could be intercepted if it was
destined for military use, but not
if it was not. It was the job of the
commander attacking a commercial
vessel to establish the nature of
the cargo before sinking the ship.
A submarine therefore had a duty
to surface, so exposing itself, in order
to put a boarding party on to the
merchant ship. If the cargo proved
to be contraband, the merchant ship
was given time to get civilians, crew
and any passengers off, so that when
it was sunk no lives would be lost. In
doing so the submarine exposed itself
to attack.
This was called prize rules, as
the ship’s cargo was a prize.
part 11 - below the waves part 11 - below the waves
Lifeboats and drowning passengers
from a ship after being torpedoed by a
German submarine March 1915
The British had to quickly develop new techniques of anti-submarine warfare.
Cruising on the surface U-boats could be shelled or rammed. Hitting them under
water was more difficult. In 1916, the Royal Navy introduced depth charges. But the
question remained of how to detect submerged submarines in the first place. In search
of an answer the Admiralty established a research station at Aberdour on the Forth
in the summer of 1915 to develop what became a precursor to modern day sonar:
the hydrophone.