Durham Pals survive submarines and seasickness en route to Suez

After their baptism of fire during the Hartlepool bombardment, the 18th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry spent most of 1915 in training, first at Ripon and then on Salisbury Plain.

Senior officers had been to France on a scouting mission and the battalion expected the long-awaited order to travel to the Western Front at any moment.

Durham Pals' soldiers on submarine watch as they cross the Mediterranean. Copyright Durham County Record Office D/DLI 2/18/24(203). Reproduced by permission of Durham County Record Office and the Trustees of the former DLI

Instead, the sun helmets arrived, and in the first week of December they found themselves forming up in a torrential downpour and boarding trains for Liverpool, to be transferred to the liner Empress of Britain.

In peacetime, the Clyde-built ship carried 1,500 passengers on the Liverpool-Quebec crossing. For now, 5,000 troops of 18DLI and the 12th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry plus the ship’s crew found themselves packed into her overloaded decks.

It was a thoroughly miserable journey for the teachers, shop assistants and farmhands of the Durham Pals, few of whom had been to sea before and had no idea where they were bound for. Many suffered terrible seasickness as the liner headed out into the Atlantic in heavy seas.

In his war history of the battalion, Lieutenant Colonel William Douglas Lowe wrote: “The men’s quarters were very much overcrowded and they suffered a great deal of discomfort. The food also was totally inadequate and badly prepared.

“To add to the general discomfort, early in the voyage everyone was inoculated against cholera. Physical drill and life-belt drill could only be carried out by companies at a time owing to the crowded condition of the decks.

“Danger from submarines caused us to follow a very circuitous route and in addition the ship took a zig-zag course throughout the voyage. This, combined with heavy weather in the Bay of Biscay, made us take six days to reach Gibraltar, which we passed at night in brilliant moonlight and saw faintly outlined against the sky.”

Lance Corporal EC Bell put it more simply in his own diary: “Many white faces being the object of despair, wondering what they had done to deserve such a fate.”

Just before midnight on December 13, as they approached Malta, the ship suddenly jolted. Lt Col Lowe recorded: “There was a shock through the ship and the engines stopped. The troops stood to in their quarters and remained perfectly calm and quiet and it turned out that we had collided with an empty French troopship, the Djuradjura, returning from Salonika and almost cut her in two by the engine room. She signalled the SOS slowly to us and accordingly the Empress of Britain stood by in dead calm and threw out flares and showed searchlights until the crew of 62 from the French ship, together with the wife of the French ambassador at Athens were taken on board. Two of the French stokers were killed in the engine room by the collision.”

During the rescue, the Empress of Britain crammed with 5,000 men was a sitting duck for any of the German U-boats which hunted in the Mediterranean and the tension felt on board comes across in a letter from an anonymous soldier printed in the Durham Chronicle. He wrote: “We had crashed into another boat amidships, many of us were on deck but there were many below. Everybody remained steady though it was a nerve wracking ordeal and stood there on the deck or below in the inky darkness and in steady rain wondering what would happen to our boat.

"In the next moment, we slipped on our lifebelts and stood ready while our ship reversed engines and pulled away from the doomed ship. A distress flare from the sinking ship lit up the sea with a lurid glare for miles and it was seen that boats were leaving her. These gradually approached us and about 60 survivors were taken on board before we steamed away in the darkness.”

Sgt William Brown, of Hartlepool, wrote: “What a row the crew members made as they embarked on our boat and how our officers swore and told them to be quiet. I needn’t say that the sighs of relief were numerous when once the light was extinguished and we were moving again.”

TWO days later, the Empress of Britain limped into Valetta harbour in Malta for repairs on her damaged bow plates.

The Governor of Malta refused a request to let the Durham Pals go ashore, after their nine days at sea. With understatement, the battalion war diary records: “Naturally, the men were disappointed.

“They were all, however, much interested in their first view of the East and the bum-boats brought plenty of things for sale, including fruit at a very high price, while the Maltese boys flocked in numbers to dive for pennies.”

After a regimental dinner on board to mark the first anniversary of the Hartlepool bombardment, the Empress of Britain left harbour at 6am on December 17 and within hours again came within a whisker of disaster. A German submarine was shadowing the packed liner and in the late afternoon, the Empress opened fire with three rounds aimed at the U-boat.

Private Robert Webster, from Hartlepool, was below deck when the shooting started. He wrote: “Below deck it was beer time when the 6-inch gun fired, panic broke out below, rushing men blocked the stairs to the deck. Another explosion, greater panic and shouting then another explosion. Panic gradually cooled and died when we were made aware of what was happening. Bert Young had just got his head through a porthole trying to see anything when the second explosion occurred and he got the full blast from the gun and a big bump on his knapper. The panic was an awful scene to witness and showed what little chance there was if we were hit when down below.”

Unbeknown to the men, they had come within yards of being sunk – the submarine had loosed two torpedoes which passed either side of the ship, one missing the stern very narrowly, before the liner was able to outrun its pursuer.

ON the evening of December 19, almost two weeks after leaving Liverpool, the Durham Pals arrived at the Egyptian port of Alexandria. The battalion was ordered to guard the Suez Canal against raids from Turkish forces in the Sinai. The men were first sent to a tented camp near Port Said, where they spent an exotic, if Spartan, Christmas.

Lieut-Col Lowe wrote: “While there, we had some battalion and company close order drill, plenty of bathing parades including a voluntary one on Christmas Day as the sea was very warm; and the men had a number of opportunities to go into Port Said, where some remarkable shows could be seen, though Arab Town itself was out of bounds. Unfortunately, none of our Christmas supplies had arrived and, practically speaking, a Christmas dinner was out of the question as all troops were on hard rations owing to the shortage of transport ships.”

Three days after Christmas, the Durham men were loaded up into open train trucks alongside Sikhs, Gurkhas and Bengal Lancers and taken to el Kantara, a fortified town on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal.

At first, their work consisted of shoring up the town’s fortifications, building a light railway and unloading supply barges, interspersed with football matches, camel races and bathing in the canal, with exhibitions of the horse-riding skills of the Mylore Lancers.

Lieut Col Lowe wrote: “To ensure that natives should not approach the Suez Canal bank undetected, the entire eastern bank was swept with logs drawn by a series of camels each evening; this smooth trail would then show clearly any footprints in the sand. Wandering coolies from time to time caused considerable alarm until the footprints were traced to them.”

He added: “During our early days in Egypt, Arab refugees, homeless and generally starving, who were being squeezed between the British and Turkish fronts, used to attempt to enter our lines. At first this was forbidden, as it was perfectly easy for Turkish spies to enter with them and arrangements were made to send out grain to their camps in the extensive No Man’s Land. Later when they were allowed to come through our lines, they would sweep up any grain even from the horse lines or any scrap of food lying about.”

In late January, orders came through to widen the perimeter screen protecting the canal to give more protection against Turkish attack. The Battalion was marched eight miles into the desert: C and D Companies, the Durham and Hartlepool men, to set up a defences at Hill 70, the rest to do the same at Hill 108.

It was hard going. Former Sacriston schoolteacher Private John Davison wrote home: “We find it pretty difficult to cross the desert as sand is by no means the easiest matter to walk on. Practically all our transport is carried by means of a camel corps and the animals carry tremendous loads."

Private William Wilkinson, from Willington, wrote: “We have moved eight miles further into the desert. In places we were over the boot tops in sand, not to mention anything about the blazing sun. Eight miles may seem a short distance, but I tell you every man of the company was done up. About three o’clock in the morning it started to rain and a sandstorm swept over the desert. I was about frozen to death. Some of our lads take an interest in catching chameleons or lizards. These animals are perfectly harmless but we don’t fancy these things creeping over us at night.”

On Hill 108, sandstorms would fill the newly-dug trenches almost as soon as they were completed and life wasn’t much better on Hill 70. Lance Corporal Charles Moss, from Pelaw, wrote home: “You need not send any more soap. We only get two pints of water per day now for a tent of 10 men to wash in and so you may judge what it is like when it comes to the turn of the last man.”

The men saw the occasional Turkish patrol or aeroplane buzzing overhead, but did not see any action and, after a month of hard labour in the desert outpost, were relieved and marched back to the canal where they worked on enlarging the wharf at Spit Post.

Rumours circulated that they were to be posted elsewhere, most likely to Mesopotamia where they would join the attack to relieve the siege of British forces in Kut, rumours which gathered strength when they were sent back to Port Said.

On March 5, 1916, 18th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry boarded the liner Ivernia and set sail again, only this time they were bound for France – and the Battle of the Somme.