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Chapter Four
BC's Naval Legacy: Improvising to Protect the West Coast
British Columbians had a swagger about them as they entered the war. But they felt vulnerable about their virtually undefended coastline. For decades, the Royal Navy at Esquimalt had been a comforting presence. After Britain began vacating Esquimalt Naval Base in the early 1900s, there was widespread anxiety about attack or invasion.
At first the Canadian Department of Marine and Fisheries took up the slack, and then the Naval Service of Canada, which became the Royal Canadian Navy in 1911. But in an era when mighty dreadnoughts represented the ne plus ultra of naval technology, the fledgling Royal Canadian Navy was royal in name only.
In January 1912, the BC legislature took up the fight, urging the federal government to address naval concerns on the West Coast. Prime Minister Robert Borden’s naval policy was floundering. He couldn’t get the money to build a robust Canadian Navy and he couldn’t convince his political opponents to back a timely contribution to the British Navy’s dreadnought program. As a Vancouver Province account of the debate in the legislature explained, a lot was at stake:
There were movements of great importance in the world...which made it imperative that something should be done to defend a coastline stretching from Puget Sound to Alaska and indented in many sounds and inlets which some future enemy might easily utilize for strategic purposes.
The major fear in British Columbia in 1912 was not the German Navy but the rise of China and Japan, two countries that actually ended up sending men to fight alongside us. One newspaper account picked up on the legislative debate, sounding alarms about Japan and China:
One of the first things an Oriental nation did in adopting western methods was to establish an army and navy, and these two nations were already looking for some place where they could transfer the people from their overcrowded lands, and no place was so convenient as Canada.
As mentioned in the opening chapter, Premier McBride travelled to London in the spring of 1912, and while naval matters were clearly not within his jurisdiction, he met with Winston Churchill and told the press that British Columbia had been left defenceless by the withdrawal of the Royal Navy. Canada, he insisted, must co-operate in maintaining British naval supremacy. On his return to Canada, McBride met with Prime Minister Borden and delivered Churchill’s views. There was no time to lose.
Two years later, when war broke out—not with Japan but with Germany—British Columbia was no better off and the Royal Navy was needed in European waters where it concentrated most of its efforts. As it turned out, Japan was one of Britain’s naval allies and ended up with the responsibility for defending Canada’s West Coast. This was a shock to McBride, who had done little to foster good relations with the Japanese. Soon Victoria would be entertaining visiting Japanese naval delegations!
The aging cruiser HMCS Rainbow was the Royal Canadian Navy’s only serious weapon against at least one and maybe two modern German cruisers operating on the west coast of North America. Our strategically important Vancouver Island coal fields, the Vancouver and Victoria harbours, and the fishing fleet looked like sitting ducks for a German attack. McBride thought something needed to be done to bolster the navy’s strength. And he set in motion one of the most audacious schemes in the history of provincial politics
Contents
McBride and the Submarines: An interview with historian Patricia E. Roy
Top Secret: We Built Submarines in Burnaby
Canada's First Submarines Were British Columbians
A Legacy of Heroism at Sea
Eager to Serve: Commander Rowland Bourke, VC, DSO
Commander Norman McCrae Lewis: Q-Boat Captain, German POW, Peacemaker
A Small Navy That Did Its Part
HMCS Galiano: Canada’s Lone Great War Loss
Article: The Gift of Salmon
Sidebar: From Our Listeners
McBride and the Submarines
An interview with historian Patricia E. Roy
Patricia E. Roy: There were rumours days before the war broke out that part of the German fleet was sailing for the North Pacific. Victoria in particular was almost totally lacking in defences. The Royal Canadian Navy had been created in 1911 but for political reasons had not amounted to very much. So when war seemed imminent, the base at Esquimalt had one cruiser, the Rainbow. Two small British sloops that had been stationed off Mexico were heading toward Esquimalt—and they were tiny. That was about it.
Premier McBride happened to hear—he was having lunch at the Union Club, the story goes, and a fellow who ran a shipyard in Seattle was also having lunch—and word got around that this shipyard had two submarines, ready to go. It had built them for the Chilean navy. There are conflicting stories about Chile rejecting them because they weren’t up to specifications, or Chile simply not having the wherewithal to pay for them.
In any case, the Seattle shipyard had them for sale. So McBride went ahead and bought them. I hasten to add, he did notify the federal government. He sent a telegram off to Prime Minister Borden and Martin Burrell, a federal cabinet minister who happened to be in Victoria at the time, and he consulted with him. Ottawa approved, but 1914 is before the days of instant tellers and wiring money by mail, and the Seattle shipyard said it was strictly a cash-and-carry deal. McBride wrote a cheque for just over a million dollars for the two submarines.
One of the nice things about Victoria is you can always find retired experts on almost anything, and McBride did find a retired Royal Navy submarine expert and sent him and a couple of other people with some naval knowledge down to Seattle along with the cheque. Haste was essential because once Britain was at war, Canada was at war. And once war was declared the Americans would be neutral. With their neutrality legislation in effect, they would not be allowed to sell war materials to a belligerent.
McBride’s team rushed out to near international waters. A quick inspection was made. The submarines passed muster. The cheque was handed over and they sailed back toward Esquimalt. By this time the army had gun emplacements at Fort Rodd Hill. They were ready to fire when someone realized that, yes, those were submarines, but if they were enemy submarines they would be coming in from the ocean rather than heading in the other direction. So they phoned Esquimalt, and Esquimalt said, yes, they’re our friendly submarines. So don’t fire. And they arrived safely in Esquimalt.
Mark Forsythe: Is it true that the torpedoes were in Halifax—that they didn’t have torpedoes?
Patricia: They had torpedoes here, but they weren’t of the right size. What we really depended on for our defence at the time was the Imperial Japanese Navy, because under the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japan and Britain had an agreement whereby they would help each other out in time of warfare. There were two Japanese naval officers based at Esquimalt.
Mark: The threat did pass in the Pacific. What happened to the subs?
Patricia: They were here for a year or so and then they were transferred to Halifax and apparently it was a rather harrowing journey and one of them had a lot of engine trouble. They never had to use them.
Patricia Roy is professor emerita of history at the University of Victoria and author of many books on BC history, including Boundless Optimism: Richard McBride’s British Columbia (UBC Press).
Top Secret—We Built Submarines in Burnaby
It is one of the better-kept secrets of BC history. Not only did BC purchase two Seattle-built submarines in 1914, but we went on to build submarines for export to the Russians at a hidden factory at Barnet in Burnaby. Nothing remains of the factory now other than a creek named in its honour, but in its heyday, safely concealed beside the CP rail line on Burrard Inlet, the British Pacific Construction and Engineering Company was a going concern. The man behind the company was James Venn Paterson, the same man who headed the Seattle shipyard and smuggled submarines across the international border for Premier McBride in 1914.
Burnaby seems an odd place to build submarines for the Russian Navy. And the story is a strange one. Our allies, including the Russians, were anxious to buy submarines wherever they could find them. The Americans could build them but couldn’t sell them directly without contravening their own neutrality laws. So Paterson’s Seattle shipyard started looking for ways to build subs to their own patented specifications in Canada. To keep the business, they set up the British Pacific Construction and Engineering Company at Vancouver. The company then found a quiet stretch of shoreline in Burnaby where they could build subs without attracting attention.
The site was closely guarded and the crews sworn to secrecy. And the work started. The design was good and the subs were built to be dismantled and shipped by rail or sea to customers who could then reassemble them closer to the theatre of war where they were needed.
“The works are surrounded by a high barbed wire fence,” a secret report stated, “...and search lights are being erected on the machine shops. There is a military guard of nine men there loaned by the Military, and already five submarines are laid down and well underway.” Over two hundred men were soon at work and that grew to over 450 working day and night shifts.
Russia needed subs to defend itself against the German Navy and its Turkish allies in the Baltic and Black Seas. It was a long way from BC, but European shipyards couldn’t help, and British Columbia was glad to assist. The subs were to be shipped to Vladivostok, and then to travel by Trans-Siberian rail to Petrograd where they would be assembled for service in the Baltic. Three subs were shipped in December 1916. Eventually five would reach Russia.
As if getting submarines across Russia wasn’t complicated enough, in 1917 Russia was shaken by revolution. The submarines were caught up in the chaos as the Russian Imperial Navy crumbled away.
“Their careers were brief,” wrote historian William Kaye Lamb in BC Studies (Autumn 1986). “The AG-14 was lost with all hands in 1917, and the other four were all scuttled early in April 1918 at their base in Finland to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Germans.”
If you want to find one of the Burnaby-built submarines, you might try travelling to the Baltic Sea. In June 2003 a diving company found the AG-14. The team was actually searching for a missing Swedish DC-3 that was shot down by the Russians in 1952 over the Baltic. They recovered the plane and also located the AG-14, missing since 1917.
It turns out that the captain of the AG-14 was none other than Antonius Essen, the only son of the Russian Admiral Nikolai Essen, head of the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet. Admiral Essen died suddenly of pneumonia in 1915. His family received another shock when son Antonius went down with his crew when the AG-14 hit a mine two years later.
The Essens were actually ethnic Germans who for two centuries served loyally with the Russian Imperial Navy. Seven family members had been awarded the Order of St. George, Russia’s highest military decoration.
Back in Burnaby our submarine industry dreams came to an end when the Americans entered the war in 1917. Freed from the constraints of neutrality, submarine manufacturers could move back across the border. The secret Barnet factory was dismantled, leaving little behind but bits of wood and rusty metal.
Canada’s First Submariners Were British Columbians
By Julie H. Ferguson
A middle-aged man with piercing blue eyes scrutinized Canada’s first submarines, CC1 and CC2, as they crept alongside in Esquimalt following their clandestine departure from Seattle. It was breakfast time on August 5, 1914, the day after World War I was declared. “Barney” Johnson was a master mariner of considerable repute from Vancouver whom the BC Pilotage Authority had “lent” to the Royal Canadian Navy.
No naval band played “Heart of Oak” to mark the historic birth of the Canadian submarine service, but British Columbia’s Premier McBride proudly greeted the two boats he’d purchased to defend his province from German cruisers threatening the Pacific coast.
The two submarines changed Johnson’s life irrevocably, as well as the life of another British Columbian. Willie Maitland-Dougall, from Vancouver Island, was posted to them a few days later. The men were in marked contrast—one was a reservist, too old for submarines, the other a career officer and nineteen; one was trained by experience, the other in the classroom.
In the turmoil of the outbreak of war, Lieutenant Johnson, RCNR, became the first lieutenant (executive officer) of CC2 and quickly mastered the art of navigating in three dimensions instead of two. Less than a year later, when the German threat evaporated, Johnson transferred to the Royal Navy’s H class submarines then being built in Montreal.
The RN appointed him as commanding officer of HMS H8 and he sailed her across the Atlantic, a feat only just accomplished by H1-5. Johnson was the first reserve officer to captain a submarine in the British Empire and he paved the way for other colonial reservists to command them in both world wars.
In March 1916, Johnson’s brilliant seamanship brought H8 home after a mine blew off most of her bow near Holland, earning him a DSO.
Soon Maitland-Dougall joined him in his new command, HMS D3, as his first lieutenant. They made a good team in the Western Approaches, claiming one U-boat sunk and another damaged.
As a fifteen-year-old, Maitland-Dougall had joined the first term of cadets at the Royal Navy College of Canada in Halifax. He was a good candidate—intelligent, energetic and resourceful. He became the midshipman on CC1 and cheerfully learned about submarines, standing watches on the surface and submerged.
Like Johnson, Maitland-Dougall also moved over to the RN—the two navies shared personnel between them. He soon volunteered for submarines, as they were the best option for a promising officer eager for rapid promotion and early command.
Maitland-Dougall sailed across the Atlantic in HMS H10, in convoy with H8, and aced the new basic submarine course in Portsmouth as the first Canadian. After a stint in the North Sea and now a sub-lieutenant, he rejoined Johnson. Together they ran HMS D3 without a third hand.
The RN had earmarked the youngster as a prospective submarine captain, and Maitland-Dougall soon bade Johnson goodbye to attend the first class of the newly established Periscope School in Portsmouth. Known as Perisher, the course taught the science and art of submerged attack for command. After passing, he returned to D3 as her captain.
He inherited a happy and efficient crew that he knew well and they began patrolling the English Channel.
These patrols were shorter but more hectic than in the Atlantic off Ireland. The heavy shipping in restricted waters complicated matters, and D3 was frequently attacked by her own side.
On March 7, 1918, Lieutenant Maitland-Dougall, RCN, took D3 to patrol off Le Havre, France. He was in high spirits—it would be a short patrol and he would be ashore in time to celebrate his twenty-third birthday. But D3 did not return.
The Royal Canadian Navy has never officially recognized Maitland-Dougall’s accomplishments, then or now. Indeed, few modern submariners have even heard his name. Maitland-Dougall was the first and only Canadian submarine commanding officer to be lost in action. He also remains the youngest to pass Perisher and earn command at twenty-two.
Johnson survived the Great War and served in World War II with distinction both at sea and ashore as a commander, but not in submarines. A ship’s bell given to Johnson by his shipmates still rests on the wardroom bar at HMCS Discovery in Stanley Park. It commemorated his fifty years as a naval reservist and he treasured it all his life.
Julie H. Ferguson is the author of Through a Canadian Periscope: The Story of the Canadian Submarine Service. The second edition celebrates the centenary of the service in 2014 and records in detail the adventures of Johnson and Maitland-Dougall, among those of many other submariners. Julie invites you to visit www.CanadianPeriscope.ca and www.facebook.com/CanadianPeriscope.
A Legacy of Heroism at Sea
Many British Columbians served with distinction in the Royal Canadian Navy, the British Navy and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. They found themselves in some tight spots a long way from home.
Here are some more stories of men who served with distinction at sea.
Eager to Serve: Commander Rowland Bourke, VC, DSO
By the CFB Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum
At the start of World War I, few people might have guessed that a quiet, introverted rancher from the interior of British Columbia would soon become one of only four Canadian naval Victoria Cross winners. Ironically, Commander Rowland Bourke almost didn’t make it to active duty.
Commander Bourke was born in London, England, in 1885. At seventeen, he came with his family to Nelson, BC. When World War I broke out, he left the family fruit farm and volunteered to enlist in the Canadian forces but was rejected in all three arms of service because of defective eyesight. Undaunted, he returned to England at his own expense and successfully joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve to serve on the motor launches.
In April 1918, raids were arranged to block the Belgian harbour of Zeebrugge-Ostend, most heavily defended of all the German U-boat bases. Bourke, a lieutenant at the time, immediately volunteered his vessel for the rescue of crews whose ships were sunk in the blockade effort. He was again rejected because of his poor eyesight. Despite being told most of the men would not make it back, Bourke persisted in offering his motor launch as a standby in case one of the chosen rescue motor launches was disabled.
As a result, on the night of April 23, Bourke’s launch picked up thirty-eight sailors from the sinking blockship HMS Brilliant and towed the crippled ML 532 out of the harbour. For this latter achievement Bourke was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
When the second operation against Zeebrugge-Ostend was called, Bourke’s motor launch was found to be too damaged for the work. But Bourke was so eager to take part that he offered to give up his command in order to participate in the operation on another vessel, ML254. Finally, however, his own ML was accepted as a standby. Bourke had just twenty-four hours to completely refit his vessel and find a new volunteer crew.
He succeeded, and on May 9 and 10, Bourke’s ML followed the blockship HMS Vindictive into the Belgian harbour. While backing out after the raid, he heard cries from the water. Bourke made a prolonged search of the area amid very heavy gunfire at close range. He found a lieutenant and two ratings from the RN ship badly wounded in the water. Bourke’s own launch was hit fifty-five times and two of the crew were killed. Nevertheless, he managed to bring out his vessel in one piece.
For this action, King George V decorated Bourke with the Victoria Cross. He was also presented with the French Legion of Honour. With characteristic modesty, Bourke asked his family not to inform the press of his achievements.
After the war the reluctant hero returned to Nelson and married. In 1932 he and his wife moved to Victoria and Bourke started work at HMC Dockyard in Esquimalt as a civilian clerk.
He was instrumental in organizing the Fishermen’s Reserve, a West Coast patrolling operation, just before World War II. He also served as a recruiting officer for a time, but in 1941 he again became an active serviceman, this time with the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve. He served as commander at HMCS Givenchy, Esquimalt, and Burrard, Vancouver.
In 1950 Bourke ended his long and dedicated career with the navy, retiring as supervisor of civilian guards. He died in August 1958 and was buried with full military honours. Bourke willed his VC and other medals to the National Archives in Ottawa.
Commander Norman McCrae Lewis: Q-Boat Captain, German POW, Peacemaker
Commander Lewis was one of a group of retired British Army and Navy officers who surfaced in the Boundary country around Rock Creek before the war. They were involved in the Kettle Valley Fruit Lands, a scheme to attract English gentry to settle newly developed irrigated lands. The Glossops (mentioned in Chapter 11) were also prominent in this scheme. Fruit farming had a strange allure for British gentry and retired military families. But like many other investment schemes, the Kettle Valley Fruit Lands did not succeed. At the outbreak of war, Commander Lewis, now almost forty, returned to England to re-enlist in the Royal Navy.
Lewis ended up in command of a British Q-ship, innocuously named HMS Tulip. Q-ships were built for a special purpose: to deceive the enemy. They were “flower class” vessels, hence the botanical name. Crews dubbed them “cabbage class” and sometimes “herbaceous borders.” But they could be deadly and were the bane of the German U-boat fleet.
Q-ships were essentially wolves in sheep’s clothing, dressed up to appear like normal merchant vessels. But behind an array of screens, they were actually heavily armed with artillery and machine guns intended to blow German U-boats out of the water. It was said that First Sea Lord Winston Churchill had devised the scheme to even some scores on the high seas.
Germany was behind a strangling naval blockade, but U-boats penetrated the blockade and attacked merchant ships ferrying supplies to England. They would occasionally surface to order a merchant crew to abandon ship before they sank the ship. At that stage, according to the plan, the Q-ship would reveal its true identity and open fire.
On April 30, 1917, HMS Tulip encountered U-62, a notoriously successful U-boat that had been sinking an average of one merchant ship each day it was at sea. The suspicious German commander set upon the Tulip. The first torpedo almost split the Tulip in half, killing all twenty men in the engine room. The rest of the crew took to the lifeboats.
Lewis’s account of what happened next appears in Robert Jackson’s book, Behind the Wire: Prisoners of War 1914–18.
My crew in their disguises as merchant seamen looked a sorry enough collection, in dirty clothes, rakish caps and unshaven chins, but none presented such a disreputable appearance as myself, the “skipper”—collarless, tieless, coatless and hatless, wearing only a grimy jersey, a pair of old blue trousers and slippers—and it was with shamefaced reluctance that I admitted to being the captain of the ill-fated vessel. However, I was taken aboard after bidding farewell to my men in the boats and led down through the conning-tower into the presence of the captain—Captain Ernst Hashagen. I began to wonder what my fate would be as I faced this tall, clean-shaven, pleasant looking officer with the Iron Cross. One was well aware in those days that the operations of “Q” ships were proving a very painful thorn in the flesh of the Germans, and that little mercy had been shown to the personnel of “Q” ships on those few occasions recently when they had fallen into the hands of the enemy.
Mercifully, the crew who were left behind in lifeboats were picked up later by a British destroyer. And while Lewis feared the worst for his fate, to his surprise, once aboard the U-62, he was offered a friendly drink. He spent the next three weeks aboard the U-boat as she tracked other merchant vessels, continuing her deadly spree. Lewis continued to be treated well, dining with the officers, drinking their wine and liqueurs, and smoking their cigarettes. When the U-62 arrived back at her German base, Lewis was sent to a prisoner of war camp at Karlsruhe and later Freiburg where he spent the rest of the war.
Upon his return to England after the Armistice, he was greeted by his wife, Margaret. They returned to Canada and Rock Creek in early 1919 where he tried to resume his life as a gentleman fruit farmer. But there was no comfortable fortune to be made and Lewis eventually headed home to England.
Lewis became an advocate for the League of Nations and efforts to make a lasting peace with Germany. He befriended his old nemesis, Captain Hashagen, and their families became friends, exchanging Christmas cards. Lewis went on tour with his story, speaking to schools and meetings. In 1931, in a talk at Solihull School in the West Midlands, he told students, “The Great War broke out because no one minded its coming, and the majority welcomed it as something romantic and glorious.
“There is absolutely no justification for so-called civilised countries killing, burning, and starving each other in millions,” said Lewis. “There is no romance or glory in war.
“Peace cannot become a reality if people are content merely to do nothing,” Lewis went on. “Everyone has his or her task to fulfil. The League of Nations Union takes upon itself the task of educating public opinion, and it is the duty of everyone who wants the League to succeed to join the Union.”
Sadly, Lewis’s wish that another world war could be averted was dashed. He died in Kent in 1965.
A Small Navy That Did Its Part
The Q-ship strategy was a mixed success. HMS Tulip went to the bottom along with hundreds of merchant vessels. The ships of the Canadian Navy fared much better. All except HMCS Galiano. This is her story.
HMCS Galiano: Canada’s Lone Great War Loss
By David W. Griffiths
Jutland, Coronel, Falklands and Dogger Bank are a few of the great sea battles of World War I, fought between the Imperial German Navy’s High Seas Fleet and the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet across the far-flung oceans of the world.
In a number of these actions, ships of the fledgling Royal Canadian Navy distinguished themselves, but none were ever lost.
Indeed, the only Canadian naval casualty to occur during the Great War happened right here off the coast of British Columbia, less than two weeks before the signing of the Armistice.
She was the former Dominion Government Patrol Vessel Galiano, pressed into service with the RCN in late 1917.
Built in 1913 at Dublin, Ireland, the Galiano and her sister ship Malaspina arrived at Esquimalt via Cape Horn in February 1914, just six months before the outbreak of hostilities, to take up their duties in fishery patrol and protection.
At 162 feet in length and a top speed of eleven knots, both vessels were armed with a single six-pound, bow-mounted cannon.
Once requisitioned by the navy for war service, both the Galiano and the Malaspina patrolled a virtually undefended Pacific coast, continuing with her civil duties while undertaking minesweeping training as well as servicing and supplying strategic lighthouses and radio stations.
It was just before departing on one of these resupply runs that the Malaspina damaged her bow in a hard landing at a dockyard jetty.
The Galiano was quickly readied for sea, despite having only recently returned from the Queen Charlottes, being in need of repairs to both her boiler and main bearing, and being shorthanded because of the Spanish flu.
On October 27, 1918, under the command of Lieutenant Robert Pope, and with a crew of thirty-eight, the Galiano steamed out of Esquimalt Harbour, bound for the radio and light stations on Triangle Island, off Cape Scott, and the Ikeda Cove wireless station, at the south end of the Charlottes.
Just two days before the Galiano’s departure the CPR steamer Princess Sophia had been lost with almost 350 passengers and crew, in a blinding snowstorm, after grounding in Lynn Canal, Alaska.
Northern waters were still churning in the throes of that southeast gale on the afternoon of October 29 as the Galiano finished unloading fuel and stores at Triangle Island, embarked the station’s housekeeper, Emma Brunton, for passage back to Victoria and headed out for the crossing of Queen Charlotte Sound, bound for the Ikeda Station.
At three the following morning, the wireless operators at both Triangle Island and Bamfield picked up a message from the Galiano: “Hold’s full of water. For God’s sake, send help.” This was the last that was ever heard from her.
The rescue and later the recovery effort lasted for more than a week. Only three bodies of the forty souls aboard were ever found, along with two skylights and the portside lifeboat.
Speculation about the cause and location of the loss continues to this day. Most theories agree that the Galiano was most probably in sight of the light at Cape St. James when she foundered, but whether she shipped a rogue wave, experienced mechanical failure or struck offshore rocks remains a mystery.
In World War I, a total of 422 men of the Canadian Navy and Reserve died while on active service.
The Galiano was the only Canadian vessel lost and her sacrifice is commemorated with a memorial in Victoria’s Ross Bay Cemetery.
David Griffiths is a Vancouver Island maritime historian.
[Click here for The Gift of Salmon]
From Our Listeners
Acts of Memory: My earliest memories to do with the Great War were of my mother yelling at my grandfather to stop him from beating me on the head. It was 1955, forty years after the events that left my grandfather with what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. [Read more]
Two Families, One War: It was not uncommon for men from the same family to serve on opposite sides. Sometimes, marriage after the war brought together families with roots in different camps... [Read more]