She was a pretty dismal ship that fought a pretty dismal campaign. But now, a century after she was commissioned by Winston Churchill, HMS M33 is set to play a central role in commemorating one of the most shambolic episodes of the First World War.
The gunboat, which bombarded the Turkish coast during the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915 and 1916, is to undergo a $4.3 million restoration in time for the operation’s centenary next year. Restoration work is underway in a dry dock at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.
She is one of the few remaining warships from the First World War, and the only one to have served at Gallipoli, where 50,000 Allied servicemen died without gaining an inch of soil.
Researchers have unearthed crew members’ diaries, as well as original logs and captain’s reports. Financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund and other donors, the National Museum of the Royal Navy at Portsmouth will restore some of the interiors before opening the 570-ton ship on August 6 next year, exactly a century since she first saw action. She is expected to take part in official events to commemorate the campaign, due to be outlined by the Government next week.
Historians hope that the permanent exhibition will raise awareness of Gallipoli. “We can’t just remember the war’s successes – we have to remember the failures,” said Duncan Redford, one of the museum’s historians. “We want to lift people’s views from the mud of the trenches to the whole world. The Great War was far more than the Western Front.”
In fact, the campaign was designed to end the trenches stalemate, by destroying Turkey as a fighting force and opening a line of communication with Russia, uniting the Allies. British, Commonwealth and Empire forces, with the French, would seize the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli before advancing on the Ottoman capital, Constantinople.
Gallipoli became the largest amphibious operation of the war, and its least effective. Historians have blamed its failure on poor planning, insufficient artillery and inaccurate maps and intelligence.
The M33 was one of five monitors, or gunboats, commissioned by Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, and John Fisher, the first sea lord, in March 1915. Rather than risking state-of-the-art battleships in what they knew would be a risky campaign, they ordered monitors, specifically designed to be expendable.
Equipped with 6-inch guns but with a very shallow hull, they were able to maneuver close to the shore and bombard the coastline. A battleship carried up to 1,000 men, but monitors only had room for 67, meaning that each assault would put fewer men in danger.
The campaign had begun by the time the Admiralty placed the order, so Harland and Wolff in Belfast had to build M33 in just seven weeks. She had many flaws. She was made so quickly that the workmen who built her called her a “whippet,” but not for her speed: she could barely reach 10 knots. She was also unstable: a crewman complained that even “some of our modern sons of Neptune [were] wonderfully seasick.” She struggled in strong currents and had to be towed to Malta, which she reached on July 14, 1915.
She spent the next three years in the Aegean, targeting Turkish forts with around 50 rounds of gunfire a day. “She was not designed to be maneuverable or to be a ship that fights other ships,” said Matthew Sheldon, who is spearheading the restoration at the museum. “She was about attacking forts, and was designed around her guns.”
Even though the crew did not return home until Armistice Day, November 1918, there were no casualties, despite a few “hairy moments”. The other monitors were not so lucky: one sank in 1916 and another two years later.
But the crew of the M33 endured other hardships. Unlike soldiers, they had no leave for more than three years. Conditions were cramped, with 44 men sleeping in hammocks in a small room where temperatures could top 38C. There was no refrigeration, so the men often survived on ship’s biscuits.
Even so, diary entries state that the crew organized fancy dress competitions and adopted a small cat they named Miss Muggins, who grew fat on tinned fish and was forever getting lost.
Henry Mulligan, the ship’s leading signalman, wrote his diary throughout the campaign. On August 7, 1915, he wrote: “Fired 59 rounds today. Don’t think Mr Turk likes the look of us.”
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After the war, the ship was sent to Russia as part of the White Sea Squadron, to support counter-revolutionary forces fighting the Bolsheviks. She was hit twice, and her hull still shows the repair after a Bolshevik shell struck in 1919. Miss Muggins suffered a burnt tail.
M33 was saved from the scrapyard when she was converted into a floating workshop during the Second World War. She was bought by Hampshire County Council in 1990, which carried out emergency repair work – but a plan to open her to the public could never be realized. Until now.
Today, she stands in a dry dock propped up by sodden timber. Workmen are on site to see she is ready by next August. Ironically, this old workhorse sits in the shadow of HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship. Yet, she has her own appeal, says Sheldon: the speed she was built, and the good humour with which her crew endured life aboard. “She shows what British industry could do in just seven weeks,” he said. “It was incredible.”