The north Norfolk coast is not somewhere you would normally expect to find good diving, but having had some excellent diving on the Dogger Bank a year before I was looking forward to this.The north Norfolk coast is not somewhere you would normally expect to find good diving, but having had some excellent diving on the Dogger Bank a year before I was looking forward to this.
I was in Norfolk as a guest of James Holt, skipper of the dive boat “Mayflower”. Mayflower was busy doing some survey work at Lowestoft, so James had teamed up with the other local dive boat “Desert Moon”, skippered by John Martin and Dave King, to show me some of the wrecks.
HMS Umpire was a U-class submarine, rammed in error by the trawler Peter Henriks on 19 July 1941, just 9 days after it was commissioned and on its first night at sea.
U-class submarines were originally intended as training boats and to play the enemy in anti submarine exercises. Nevertheless, with a dual role in mind they were armed and at the outbreak of war entered operational use in home waters and in the Mediterranean. More boats were built through the war with minor variations in design, with a total of 34 U-class submarines entering service.
The wreck lies on its starboard side and is partly broken up. I immediately find the remains of the conning tower, broken from the hull with the main gun mount just forward of it. Further forward the torpedo room is partly open, with two sloped torpedo loading hatches in the deck.
The bow is well broken with no sign of the torpedo tubes, but I can see a re-load torpedo inside. The Umpire was part of the second group of U-class submarines constructed and was armed with a 3 inch gun and 4 x 21 inch torpedo tubes. The gun is well aft of where the gun mount lies and several metres out from the wreck.
14 of the crew of 31 were lost when the Umpire was rammed, with most of the survivors escaping through the engine room escape hatch using submarine escape apparatus, so this area must have been intact when it went down.
Now the engine room is the most broken part of the wreck, with the aft section of the wreck completely separated from the keel. Looking forward I can see two diesel engines, but there are no signs of electric motors. It looks as if the hull was broken open for commercial salvage of the copper in the motors, and maybe the torpedo tubes were salvaged from the bow at the same time.
To me this illustrates the dichotomy of the war graves issue. Here I am sketching the wreck, taking photographs and being careful not to disturb anything; whilst years ago, probably soon after the war, the integrity of the wreck was badly damaged by commercial salvage.
The Fane was a 1119-ton Norwegian steamship which struck a mine on 6 August 1917, sinking in 29 metres.
The shot is just aft of the bows, the most broken area of the wreck as that is where it struck the mine.The port side of the holds has collapsed inwards, nevertheless the starboard side is intact and provides a line to amidships and the stern.
At the stern, the propeller is still in place, but the rudder has fallen to the seabed. Just aft of the last hold a spare propeller is flat on the deck.
Once again exposed parts of the wreck are covered in bright plumose anemones. By the end of this report you may will be tired of me remarking on the dense coverings of orange and white plumose anemones. It would be easy to get blasé about the pretty and colourful marine life on these wrecks.
The Kylemore was a paddle steamer originally launched in 1897. The Kylemore survived service as a minesweeper in the First World War, eventually being bombed and sunk by German aircraft on 21 August 1940.
The wooden upper decks have eroded and collapse to the point where the waterline of the flat bottomed wreck is now just above the seabed in 23 metres. Even so, the wreckage retains the original outline of the paddle steamer.
Amidships a single boiler is forward of a transverse steam engine, the shaft extending to both sides of the ship and the paddle wheels. The starboard wheel has partly collapsed outwards, but the entire port wheel and the framework for its cover are beautifully intact. I play hide and seek with a shoal of pouting that have set up home about the wheel.
In service the Kylemore was fitted with two gun platforms. The guns have obviously been salvaged, but the mount for the 3 inch gun can be found collapsed to port near the bows and a smaller machine gun mount can be found on the seabed just aft of the port paddle wheel.
On areas of deck forward and aft of the paddle wheels, tiled floors and the remains of toilet bowls indicate there was once a whole row of toilets overhanging the water. A vision goes through my mind of marine plumbing 100 years ago, the toilet flushing immediately in front of the paddle wheel for the discharge to be macerated.
One of the toilets must have been in use as an ad-hoc magazine, a crate of machine gun ammunition rests on the tiles with a lobster defending his home beneath.
The Amberley rests slightly upside down on its starboard side in just 18 metres, the wreck rising as shallow as 11 metres. A sand bank holds it from capsizing further.
It is an unusual design of ship. A collier with engine room aft and wheelhouse amidships. The last wreck I had dived of this layout was the Trane in Brittany. The Amberley foundered after its cargo shifted in a gale in 1973. The crew were evacuated by helicopter and the Amberley eventually went down on the outside edge of the Blakeney Overfalls.
With steel superstructures the Amberley is incredibly intact and covered in the densest mass of anemones yet. The visibility is only about 7 metres, but sunlight makes it a very bright and colourful dive.
I stick outside sketching and photographing for most of my dive, venturing inside just a few cabins near the stern. There is lots of potential for some serious inside exploration with good lights and a line.
James' father Stephen Holt is compiling a guide book to Norfolk's wrecks. There are over 150 wrecks within 25 miles of harbour, all within easy diving depth. He kindly sent me proofs from which I drew much of the background information.