Relatives mark centenary of Vanguard disaster
RELATIVES of those killed in the Royal Navy’s worst wartime accident have marked its centenary at commemorative events.
HMS Vanguard sank following an accidental explosion in Scapa Flow off Orkney on July 9, 1917, with the loss of 843 lives. Only two of the 845 men on board survived.
Forty descendants took part in a wreath-laying service over the wreck site yesterday.
Divers from the Royal Navy’s Northern Diving Unit took a single wreath to the seabed to place on the wreck. They had earlier recovered a White Ensign, laid on the wreckage of the Vanguard in 2009, and replaced it with a new flag.
Relatives said it meant a lot to attend the ceremony.
Among the victims was Lieutenant Evelyn Dunbar-Dunbar-Rivers, known to his family as Evie, who joined the Vanguard in November 1913. He was 26 on the night the ship went down and his portrait hangs in the hallway of the family home.
His great-nephew Duncan Dunbar-Nasmith, of Glen of Rothes, Moray, was at the ceremony.
He said: “I’ve grown up with the painting. You come in through the front door and there’s great-uncle Evie on the wall, his naval cap at a jaunty angle and his face full of character.
“To be in Scapa Flow, on the waters above the ship, our links with him feel so much more substantial.”
As a child, Paula Smith, from Ipswich, remembers her grandmother talking with sorrow and affection of her younger brother Henry Metcalf, a 19-year-old Royal Marine who had served aboard Vanguard for just two months when he died.
She said: “She had a photograph of Henry on the wall of her home. They never found him and she never made it to Scapa Flow. I’m doing this in her memory as well as his.”
The accepted explanation of the explosion is that a fire started in a fuel compartment next to one of Vanguard’s armaments magazines.