Memories of finding the wreck of HMS Exmouth

I am honoured that Kevin Heath asked me to write a few words for the new HMS Exmouth website. It was Kevin and I who first discovered the wreck of HMS Exmouth in 2001. He and I were both keen wreck divers and researchers. Our common interest brought us together, and we both vividly remember our wide-ranging conversation about shipwrecks in Scottish waters when we first met in the drydock at Leith in 1999. At that time, I was thoroughly consumed with research for my book Shipwrecks of the North of Scotland, which, of course, includes the area in which HMS Exmouth was lost. A great many wrecks were the result of activities during WW1 and WW2, and we were both fascinated to compare the sometimes-conflicting accounts of contemporary German U-boat records with the British records. Each set of documents helped to fill in gaps in the knowledge of the other, and to either confirm, or correct suppositions and guesses made at the time.

One of the many wrecks we were keen to find was HMS Exmouth, which had been recorded as having been sunk ‘probably by U-boat torpedo’ somewhere in the Moray Firth, on 21 January 1940. There were no survivors. The entire crew of 189 were lost. We subsequently learned that some of the families who had lost their loved ones were led to believe the ship had sunk after striking a mine, and had never been told where the ship had sunk. Several different positions had been recorded over the years, but the true position of the wreck remained uncertain.

Early in 2001 we became aware that others were also actively searching for the wreck. This knowledge provided some impetus to our own search. I had already carried out a considerable amount of research in the Admiralty Hydrographic Department records in Taunton and in the National Archives at Kew, but Kevin’s finding of the German U-boat records in Washington DC, USA provided the final vital information for us to be confident of finding the wreck. Kevin divulged our position for the wreck to the European Technical Diving Centre at Burray, in Orkney, and asked them to go and dive the wreck on our behalf. I joined their ex-Royal Navy vessel Loyal Mediator at Wick to sail the 22 miles out to the location. The position we had deduced was so accurate that the wreck was pinpointed within a few minutes of arriving at the scene. I had hoped that the ship’s bell could be recovered, to confirm the identity of the wreck, but it was not found.

A 4.7” gun shell was recovered, and I was relieved to see that it had been manufactured in 1937 – thereby confirming that this was not a WW1 wreck. (At that time, we were not entirely sure of the exact position of the destroyer HMS Lynx, which had been mined and sunk in the Moray Firth in 1915. I knew it was highly improbable that we may have accidentally stumbled upon that wreck, but nevertheless the nagging possibility played in the back of my mind until entirely removed by the evidence provided by the gun shell). The shell casing had been crushed by the water pressure at 60 metres depth, and the warhead had been squeezed off. Video footage enabled many features of the wreck to be compared with plans and photographs of HMS Exmouth, confirming that this was indeed the wreck we had found.

About 160 relatives attended a memorial service for those lost on HMS Exmouth at Wick Cemetery and in Wick Old Parish Church during a highly emotional weekend in September 2001. Many had come from Lewis, in the Western Isles, while others had come from as far away as Florida and New Zealand! Kevin and I felt very privileged to be there with them all. One of the most incredible coincidences of that weekend was that Karen Lewis, who had travelled to Wick from Berkshire, chanced to meet Wick resident Donald Sutherland. Sixty-one years previously, as a ten-year-old truant schoolboy, it was he who found the bodies that washed ashore and were buried at Wick. Karen’s grandfather Able Seaman Alfred G Woodham was one of them.