A Deal boatman regrets …
By David Chamberlain
At 11.30am on Wednesday the 11th November, 1914,
the small motor boat Elsie left Deal beach on a sunny autumn day. Onboard were
the owner, Harry Pearson and his crewmate Thomas Heard. Pearson’s boat was one
of the few on the beach that was motorised and was in demand for ship
attendance work throughout the busy anchorage of the Downs .
With the First World War in its early stage the Downs was being used as a
Contraband Control area, forcing all ships to anchor and undergo searches for
war materials that could be used by the enemy … and also spies. To enforce any
reluctant vessels captains’ to comply with this order was the gunboat H.M.S.
Niger.
The Niger
was a torpedo gunboat of 810 tons and carried a complement of 85 men. Although
she was old, being built in 1892, she had enough fire power, with her two 4.7
inch guns and four three pounders – plus three 18 inch torpedo tubes, to make
any contraband runner think twice. Her presence could be seen by all as she was
anchored in the fairway opposite Deal Pier.
Harry Pearson and Tom Heard were old friends and part of the
lifeboat crew, with Harry as second coxswain of the North Deal lifeboat and
Thomas the ex-skipper of the then defunct Walmer lifeboat. They both worked the Elsie in all the
occupations that the Deal boatmen did in those days. Netting for herring and
sprats in the winter, mackerel in the summer and accompanying the new trend of
channel swimmers. Harry Pearson was famous for piloting the second person to ever
swim the Channel, Thomas Burgess on his record swim. This particular day they
were doing ship attendance work and had aboard Captain Jorgensen, the master of
the sailing vessel Majorka.
The Majorka had been in collision with another ship and Jorgensen
had been ashore to telegraph the owners to make arrangements for his damaged
vessel. As the Elsie motored back out towards the sailing ship, Jorgensen
exclaimed he had sighted a mine. Harry Pearson viewed where the Norwegian
captain was pointing and stated that it was probably the mast from the
steamship Adjutant, that had been sunk a week earlier in another collision.
Little did Pearson realise that what he saw was the
periscope of a German u-boat that was stalking H.M.S Niger. At 10 minutes past
midday, in a freshening southerly breeze, the U12 released a single torpedo
which struck the Niger
a fatal blow on her starboard side. Within 30 minutes the old torpedo gunboat
slid beneath the sea in eight fathoms (48 feet) of water.
Later that day, Harry Pearson related what he had seen. The
four feet grey like spar, which had been the U 12’s periscope, was only yards
from his boat. He had motored over the stern of the submerged u-boat; and if
the periscope had been raised at that time, Pearson speculated, it would have
gone through the planks of the Elsie. He reminisced, in hindsight, that he
could, if he had known it was a u-boat, smashed the glass of the periscope with
his boathook and saved the Admiralty a loss of one of their ships. This was
possibly a regret he harboured for the rest of his life.