HMS Amphion, an Active class scout cruiser built at Pembroke Dockyard (and commissioned in 1913) was the first vessel lost in the First World War by the Royal navy in a tragic turn of events.
Even before the commencement of hostilities between Britain and Germany the Kaiserliche-Marine were working on efforts to strike at British Maritime power in ways that wouldn’t affect the High Seas Fleet. Two hours after the declaration, auxiliaries left the Ems estuary one of which was the Konigin Luise destined for the Thames estuary with her orders being:
Make for sea in Thames direction at top speed. Lay mines near as possible English coasts, not near neutral coasts, and not farther north than Lat 53
So what sort of ship was Konigin Luise?
The ship was originally built at the AG Vulcan ship yards at Stettin in 1913 and commissioned into the Hamburg Amerika Line as a ferry from Germany to Holland.but a year into her career she was requisitioned by the Imperial Navy on 3rd August 1914.
After a day’s worth of conversion and stripping out she was loaded with two hundred mines, two revolver cannons and a plan for two 3.5 inch guns but the War started too quickly and action was needed straight away. The Navy painted her black with buff and yellow upper workings to disguise her as a Great Eastern Railway steamer operating between Harwich and Holland.
Her Commander, Bierman, knew that this was a mission that would be difficult to return from but he took his ship out to the estuary and over night began laying mines in the estuary. It wasn’t that an easy prospect to carry out such a mission in the busy sea lane of the Thames estuary and they were spotted acting suspiciously by British vessels, so they headed for the Dutch coast.
The Royal Navy had begun sending out patrols looking for evidence of German ships, spies and minelayers off their coast and in the Channel and on the 5th August HMS Amphion under Captain Cecil H. Fox was leading the 3rd Destroyer flotilla on a sweep behind the 1st Destroyer Flotilla. A trawler reported to Fox that they had seen a suspicious looking vessel “Throwing things overboard twenty miles north east of the Outer Gabbard”
Fox spread his destroyers out with the Lance and Landrail pushing ahead and at 11:00 the German vessel was spotted. The Lance fired a shot across the bows of Konigin Luise and signalled her to come to a stop and this shoot is reportedly the first shot fired by the Royal Navy in the conflict. The German ensigns unfurled and she returned fire with the revolver cannons.
Thomas Wallace, who was on the Llewellyn said that at that moment:
Everything went mad. Every destroyer… each one of them started bang bang bang. They just broke loose
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