RN:
The wreck of HMS Montagu. In late May 1906,
Montagu tested new
wireless telegraphy equipment in the
Bristol Channel, sending and receiving test messages with wireless stations ashore. Late on 29 May, she was anchored off
Lundy Island, but could not pick up the messages from the test station, so the ship weighed anchor to steam to the
Isles of Scilly. Heavy fog forced her to reverse course and steam back to Lundy Island after four hours, but her navigator miscalculated the course, placing her some two miles off her original track.
Montagu encountered a
pilot cutter cruising in the vicinity of Lundy Island, slowed to a stop, and came alongside the cutter to request a distance and bearing for
Hartland Point on the mainland. Though the cutter supplied these accurately, the voice from the battleship's bridge replied that they must be wrong and that the pilot cutter must have lost her bearings. As
Montagu restarted her engines and began to move ahead, the cutter shouted back that on her present course
Montagu would be on Shutter Rock within ten minutes, and a short time later the sound of the battleship running aground carried through the fog.
At 02:00 on 30 May,
Montagu ran aground on Shutter Rock, suffering a 91-foot (28 m) gash on her starboard side. Unable to free herself from the rocks, she slowly filled with water; twenty-four hours later, her starboard
engine room and all of her
boiler rooms were flooded, among others. Her crew counter-flooded the port engine room to prevent her from listing further to starboard. Divers inspected the hull to determine the extent of the damage, which proved to be more serious than initially expected. The bottom of the ship also received extensive damage, including several other holes and the port propeller shaft having been torn from the hull. The starboard
bilge keel was also ripped from the hull, as was the
rudder. The wreck rested on a fairly even bottom, so there was hope that the ship could be refloated.
Since the Royal Navy had no dedicated salvage unit, it turned to Frederick Young, a former Royal Navy captain who now worked as the chief salvage officer of the Liverpool Salvage Association. Young was at that time the foremost expert on marine salvage in Britain, so he was hired to advise
Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, the commander of the Channel Fleet, who had no experience in salvage operations. The navy initially hoped to lighten the ship by removing the medium and small-calibre guns and other equipment that could be easily taken off and then to pump out the water so that the holes in the hull could be patched. By the end of June, some twenty pumps had been assembled on the scene, with a total pumping capacity of 8,600 tonnes (8,500 long tons; 9,500 short tons) of water per hour. Difficulties with pumping, owing in part to the subdivision of the internal compartments and the need to reflood the ship during
high tide to keep her from suffering more damage before the hull could be patched, led the salvors to give up the operation.
Wilson next sought to remove armour plate from the sides of the ship and to erect a series of
caissons, at which point a powerful air pump would be used to blow the water out of the hull. The caissons repeatedly broke free even in mild seas, and the air pump failed to have the desired effect. Her sister ship
Duncan herself ran aground whilst trying to help the salvage effort, though she was successfully freed. At the end of the summer of 1906, salvage efforts were suspended for the year, with plans to resume them in 1907. However, an inspection of the ship conducted from 1 to 10 October 1906 found that the action of the sea was driving her further ashore and bending and warping her hull so that her seams were beginning to open, her deck planking was coming apart, and her boat davits had collapsed. Having failed to refloat
Montagu, the navy decided to abandon the project. Further material was removed from the wreck, including her main battery guns, which were later re-used in other vessels.
The Western Marine Salvage Company of
Penzance completed salvage of the wreck for scrap metal over the next 15 years. The
court martial convened for the affair blamed the thick fog and faulty navigation for the wreck. The trial was held aboard
HMS Victory. The ship's captain, Thomas Adair. and the navigation officer, Lieutenant James Dathan, were severely reprimanded, with both men being dismissed from HMS
Montagu; Dathan lost two years of seniority in rank as well. The wreck site, which now amounts to little more than some armour plate on the sea floor, is a popular diving location. Divers have also located parts of her gun turrets and shells that were not recovered during the salvage operation. In September 2019 the British Government granted the wreck site—including the steps which had been chiseled out of the cliff during the salvage effort—
protected status.
