Next of kin address 5 St Johns Terrace Road Reigate England Mother Elizabeth B Father Frank L More info Enlisted 15/02/1914. Impregnable Boy2c 19/10/1911. Woolwich (Onslow) AB 04/04/16 - 06/07/17; L/S 07/07/17 - 30/09/17. Discharged shore from Vernon on 07/06/1924. This is an account of my Dad’s service in the Royal Navy, during which he fought in the Battle of Jutland. It is an extract from a longer hand written letter he wrote in 1974 which he headed “The Woodhouse Family History”. I have copied the letter exactly as written, except for some very minor changes in punctuation where I felt my changes aided the flow of his words. As far as I know, Dad was fortunate enough to come through the battle without a scratch. He died in Brighton in 1975 at the age of 79 “with his boots on” as he had always hoped. On 18 October 1911 I was sent down to the Navy Training Ship at Devonport HMS Impregnable and there trained in sails seamanship and gunnery. The Petty Officers (Instructors) were very brutal at this time in the Navy and used short pieces of tarred rope with a Turks Head knot in it they used to chase the boys when going aloft, lashing out at those that were last or nervous. On completion of our training we were sent to sea for further training. I was retained as an “instructor boy” for a further year to help train the “new entries” after which I went to sea in the 16” gun dreadnought HMS Colossus on 8 June 1913. In 1914 to the sister ship HMS Hercules. While on this ship when we were going home and were dressed in our No. 1’s and awaiting the liberty boat, we were all sent below to change into coaling rig and get in 5000 tons of coal, working all night. Then we had to ammunition ship next day and get in lots of stores and provisions and on completion we put to sea with the whole fleet. This was 31 July 1914. That night we went through the Straights of Dover all guns maned and loaded and ready for instant “action”. It was then disclosed to us that the 1st world war was thought to be possible with Germany as the enemy. We went straight to Heligoland and steamed up and down the coast of Germany for a week and on 4 August war was declared. By this time coal was getting short so the fleet went to Scapa Flow in the Shetlands and took on 5000 tons of coal and off to sea again, working in two watches of 4 hours. The watch on deck manning the guns while the watch below had to clean ship, prepare meals and do any repairs necessary and get some sleep if possible. This went on for 6 months after which the big ships stayed in Scapa Flow behind nets and boom defences and the cruisers and torpedo boat destroyers did the scouting off the German coast, and laying minefields. After about a year of this I was sent to HMS Vernon at Portsmouth to qualify as a torpedo man and electrician. On passing as seaman torpedo man, was selected for advancement to Leading Torpedo Man and qualifying in this, was sent to the “Fairfields” shipbuilding firm at Govan, Glasgow, to see the torpedo tubes and electrical gear installed in the destroyer HMS Onslow being built there. I was 3 months there, living in digs just outside the yard gates. The crew came up from Portsmouth and commissioned the ship and we put to sea for the acceptance tests for the Admiralty.. This completed I had to sign for the electrical and torpedo installation on the ship together with the Admiralty officers sent up, which done we oiled ship and were sent at full speed to the North of Ireland to rescue if possible the crew of the Audacious which had been torpedoed by a submarine there. There was a terrific gale blowing and mountainous seas running it was one of the roughest trips I’ve ever made but we found no survivors. As we were making for harbour a wireless message ordered us to Kingston (Dublin) as a rebellion had broken out. We arrived there and landed fully armed and had to take on street patrols until the army could be sent. We were on this job for a week, but the Irish didn’t fire at us but as soon as the soldiers arrived all hell broke loose. The Sinn Feiners set fire to the wharf warehouses where we were tied up, which were full of hay for the army in France and I and my patrol were recalled post haste to find our ship on fire from bow to stern and the stokers getting up steam by hand to get the destroyer away from the wharf. I had to defuse the torpedoes each containing 650 lbs of explosive while the seamen sprayed us and them from hoses. This done our captain steamed up to the cross channel ferry from Holyhead to Dublin and got a towing hawser on to her and towed her out into the harbour where she anchored and we plied our hoses onto her sides, bridge and superstructure to help her crew to put out the flames. This done the street patrols were again landed and the fighting at the GPO Building and O’Connor St. started. The army took over the street patrols and we were sent up to Queenstown in the Firth of Forth to join the fighting 13th flotilla at Port Edgar near the Forth Bridge attached to Admiral Beatty’s cruiser squadron there. Then started a long monotonous time at sea, continuously at sea and we did not see a blade of grass or tree for the next six months, only the sky line of the hills as we entered a harbour at night to re-oil, take on stores, letters and ammunitions and depth charges, then off again in the blackout always at some isolated part of the Scottish coast, the only leave ashore we got was when the boilers needed cleaning or some mishap to the ship like we had when a cruiser ran into us off Zeebrugge and cut our bows off. We had to steam backwards across the North Sea into Chatham. There they put in new ribs of wood covered with canvas – sent us north like that to Leith, Edinburgh docks for repairs. Here each watch got 7 days leave and once again we were off to sea. Exercises were often carried out between the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow and the battle cruiser squadron under Beatty at Queenstown, and it was on one of these exercises that the Jutland battle commenced. Beatty’s battle cruiser squadron, with light cruisers and the 13th flotilla were to proceed south across the North Sea run up the German coast northwards until he met the Grand Fleet that had come out of Scapa over to the Norwegian coast and turned south to meet Beatty’s fleet. It was a beautiful summer day and I and my crew were sitting round our torpedo tubes sunning ourselves and getting some sleep, when the action alarms went and the men poured out of the mess deck and manned their guns and tubes and cleared ship for “Action”. Then from the bridge we were warned that one of our light cruisers had spotted the German fleet in the fog near the Jutland coast and that Beatty was steaming towards them to engage them and draw them up north, so the Grand Fleet could go into action against them. It was about 3pm we saw the flashes of gun fire in the coast fog and then their shells were falling all around us. We were on the engaged side of HMS Lion shielding her against destroyer attack when she opened fire, the blast from her guns was awful and as we got nearer to the German fleet our Captain decided to attack with his torpedoes, so turned towards them at full speed together with his chum on the “Onslaught” putting us between the two fleets. We got quite close before they spotted us, when they opened up with all guns 11” 6” pomp oms etc. The Onslaught was blown up in lumps and we got an 11” shell in our after boiler which blew up and parted our main steam pipe underneath my tubes, killing all in the boiler room and a huge hole in the side flooding it. A 6” shell entered the officer’s wardroom, skating round it and demolishing the officer’s cabins and exploding on going out the other side of the ship and taking 12 ft. x 10 ft. of the ships side and killing several men in its travels besides flooding all the stern part of the ship. Still having one torpedo left we fired and hit the Derfflinger amidships and another 6” shell smashed up the ships steering gear and left us hors-de-combat. Then as the battle faded away in the distance all hands were ordered to work, blocking up shell holes with our own blankets and hammocks and stokers to shore up the bulkheads, with our tables and mess stools to withstand the pressure of the flooded compartments and repair the steering gear. Some men were detailed to gather all the canvas covers of the guns and from the bridge rails and with these to make a new canvas pipe strengthened with wire rope to join up the main steam pipe blown away, to get enough steam to run the ships dynamo and steering engine, as we had switched over to hand steering (taking 3 men on the wheel) we could ill afford. A raging gale blew up during the night and next day, drifting us northward and as I did not drink I had about 6 bottles of neat rum in my locker (a crime of 90 days in prison) I decided to get rid of it. So got the mess kettle and mixed it with equal measure of water and the lads got busy on it. Then the destroyer “Defender” sighted us, she also badly damaged but could steam half speed and the lads managed to get a steel hawser aboard and take us in tow. This hawser broke several times, due to the large seas, but was re-fixed and she managed to tow us to Aberdeen where a tug took us into harbour. Here we found we had been listed as lost, presumably sunk, but as we were slowly sinking, they took a merchant ship out of the dry floating docks, and hauled us into it. They had only just got two timber baulks against the ships side, when with a gargle and sigh she sank in the dock onto the keel timbers the upper deck being 6” under water. We had had no food and very little drinking water for 3 days and 3 nights and with the severe and heavy hard work we had to do, was exhausted and starving. On the jetty were all the Scots fisher girls, gutting the herring catch, whom we asked for bread and they gave us their lunches and fetched buckets of water for us to drink which we did like savages, they also got us bread etc. from the shops. We all looked like pirates as our clothes were in rags and lots of us had bandages due to wounds rounds our heads, not a man had a hat. They all went overboard when the “Lion” blasted off her first salvo at the Huns, when the battle started. Those girls were angels, all of them. When the water was pumped out of the floating dock and we could go aboard, the Captain said we could all send a telegram home, but could only say “Safe and well” and one’s name. My mother and sister Maude were home when it arrived but were afraid to open it in case it was bad news, having read in the papers all about the battle of Jutland. When the dockyard had estimated the damage and time to repair same, we were allowed a week’s leave home. There I received a letter from the ship saying I had been mentioned in despatches and that the French Government had awarded me, the torpedo instructor, and the Captain the coveted medal, the French Croix de Guerre with Palms “first class”. I was in every action in the North Sea during the war except Zeebrugge and “Evans of the Broke” episode, including the destruction of a zeppelin off Chatham when returning from a bombing raid on London. In 1919 I commissioned HMS Colombo as Petty Officer that had to take out four sloops and 6 river boats for the Yang Tse river and do a 2 ½ year commission based on Hong Kong, returning in the spring of 1922 to HMS Vernon at Portsmouth. There I asked for my discharge from the Navy when it was being reduced, after the war in three steps. First to buy ones discharge at £70. Second a free discharge. Third the Navy would pay you to go. I got £160 with mine and went ashore to find nearly 3 million unemployed and was unable to get a job.