H.M.H.S.

BRITANNIC

BY: ENRICO MIGUEL N.

SALVADOR

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
PAGE 3
CHAPTER 1
PAGE 4
CHAPTER 2
PAGE 5
CHAPTER 3
PAGE 7
CHAPTER 4
PAGE 9
CHAPTER 5
PAGE 14

GLOSSARY
PAGE 17
ABBRIEVIATIONS
PAGE 18
GALLERY
PAGE 19

INTRODUCTION

H.M.H.S. Britannic is a White Star liner

that is a sister ship of the well-known
R.M.S. Titanic. It sunk on November
21,1916, resulting in 30 deaths. November
21,2016 is the ships 100th sinking
anniversary. Have fun reading.

THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER 1

IMPROVEMENTS ON THE SHIP

Following the loss of Titanic in 1912,
some improvements were made on
Britannic, the last of White Stars
Olympic-class vessels. These included
the increase of the ships beam to allow a
double hull along the engine and boiler
rooms. It also included the fitting of large
crane-like davits, each capable of holding
6 lifeboats. Through this, the ship carried
48 lifeboats, carrying 75 people each.

CHAPTER 2

CONSTRUCTION
The keel of Britannic was laid on
November 30,1911 in the Harland and
Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland. Due to
the improvements introduced after the
Titanic disaster, Britannic was not
launched until February 26,1914. She was
constructed in the same gantry slip used
to build Olympic. Reusing Olympics space
saved the shipyard time and money by not
clearing out a third slip similar in size to
those used for Olympic and Titanic. In
August 1914, before Britannic could
commence transatlantic service between
New York and Southampton, World War 1
began.
Immediately, all shipyards with
Admiralty contracts were given top
priority to use available raw materials. All
civil contracts (including the Britannic)
were slowed down. The naval authorities
requisitioned a large

number of ships as armed merchant

cruisers or for troop transport. The
Admiralty was paying the companies for
the use of their ships but the risk of losing
a ship in naval operations was high.
However, the big ocean liners were not
taken for naval use, because the smaller
ships were much easier to operate. R.M.S.
Olympic returned to Belfast on November
3,1914, while work on Britannic
continued slowly. All of this would change
on 1915.

CHAPTER 3

MAIDEN AND LAST VOYAGE

Britannic was completed on December

12,1915. Britannic departed
Southampton, England for Lemnos, Greece
at 2:23 p.m. on November 12,1916.
Britannic passed on Gibraltar, England
around midnight of November 15 and
arrived at Naples, Italy on the morning of
November 17 for her usual coaling and
water refueling stop, completing the first
stage of her mission.
At 8:12 a.m. on November 21,1916, a loud
explosion shook the ship. Whether it is an
enemy torpedo or a mine, the cause is not
apparent. The reaction in the dining room
was immediate, but not everyone acted
this way, and Captain Bartlett is on the
bridge at the time. The explosion is on the
starboard side and its force damaged the
watertight bulkhead between hold one
and the forepeak. The first four watertight

compartments were filling rapidly with

water, the boiler-mans tunnel connecting
the firemens quarters with boiler room
six was damaged, and water was flowing
into that boiler room. Captain Bartlett
ordered the watertight doors closed, sent
a distress signal, and prepare the lifeboats.
Along with the damaged watertight door
of the firemens tunnel, the watertight
door between boiler rooms 5 and 6 failed
to close properly for an unknown reason.

 CHAPTER 4

FINAL MOMENTS
On the bridge, Captain Bartlett was
already considering efforts to save the
ship, despite its increasingly dire
condition. In about 10 minutes, Britannic
was roughly in the same condition Titanic
had been in 1 hour after the collision with
the iceberg. Fifteen minutes after the ship
was struck, the open portholes on E-deck
were underwater. With the shores of the
Greek island Kea to the right, Capt.
Bartlett gave the order to navigate the
ship towards the island in attempt to
beach the vessel. The effect of the ships
starboard list and the weight of the rudder
made attempts to navigate the ship under
its own power difficult, and the steering
gear was knocked out by the explosion,
which eliminated steering by the rudder.
However, the captain ordered the port
shaft driven at a higher speed than the
starboard side, which helped the ship
moved towards the island.

 Simultaneously, on the boat deck the

crew members were preparing the
lifeboats. Some of the boats were
immediately rushed by a group of
stewards and some sailors, who had
started to panic. An unknown officer kept
his nerve and persuaded his sailors to get
out and stand by their positions near the
boat stations. He decided to leave the
stewards on the lifeboats because they
were responsible for starting the panic,
and he did not want them in his way in the
evacuation. However, he left one of the
crew with the sailors to take charge of the
lifeboat after leaving the ship.
At 8:30 a.m., two lifeboats from the
boat station assigned to Third Officer
David Laws were lowered without his
knowledge, through the use of the
automatic release gear. Those lifeboats
dropped some 2 meters and hit the water
violently. The lifeboats soon drifted back
into the still-turning propellers, which
were beginning to rise out of the water
due to the water flooding into the front of
the ship. As they reached the turning

blades, both lifeboats, together with their

occupants, were torn to pieces. Words of
the carnage arrived on the bridge, and
Capt. Bartlett, seeing that water was
entering more rapidly as Britannic was
moving and that there is a risk of more
victims, gave the order to stop the engines.
The propellers stopped turning the
moment a third lifeboat was about to be
reduced to splinters. Royal Army Medical
Corps (RAMC) occupants of this boat
pushed against the blades and got away
from them safely.
The Captain officially ordered the
crew to lower the boats, and at 8:35 a.m.,
he gave the order to abandon ship. The
forward set of portside davits soon
became useless. The unknown officer had
already launched his 2 lifeboats and
managed to launch rapidly one more boat
from the aft set of portside davits. He then
started to prepare the motor launch when
First Officer George Ernest Kemp Oliver
came with orders from the Captain. Capt.
Bartlett ordered Oliver to get in the motor
launch and use its speed to pick up

survivors from the smashed lifeboats.

Then he was to take charge of the small
fleet of lifeboats formed around the
sinking Britannic. After launching the
motor launch with Oliver, the unknown
officer filled another lifeboat with 75 men
and launch it with great difficulty, because
the portside was now very high from the
surface because of the starboard list. By
8:45 a.m., the list to starboard was so
great that the davits were inoperable. The
unknown officer with 6 sailors decided to
move to mid-ship on the boat deck to
throw overboard collapsible rafts and
deck chairs from the starboard side. About
30 RAMC personnel who were still left on
the ship followed them. As he was about to
order them to jump, then give his final
report to the Captain, he spotted Sixth
Officer Herbert Welsh and a few sailors
near one of the smaller lifeboats on the
starboard side. They are trying to lift the
boat, but they had not enough men.
Quickly, the unknown officer ordered his
group of 40 men to assist the Sixth Officer.

Together they managed to lift it, load it

with men, then launch it safely.
At 9:00 a.m., Capt. Bartlett
sounded one last blast on the whistle then
was washed overboard, as water had
already reached the bridge. He swam into
a collapsible boat and began to coordinate
the rescue operations. The whistle blow
was the last signal for the ships engineers
who, like their colleagues in Titanic had
remained at their posts until the last
possible moment. They escaped via the
staircase into funnel #4, which ventilated
the engine room.
In 9:07 a.m., only 55 minutes after
the explosion, H.M.H.S.Britannic was the
largest ship lost in the First World War.

 CHAPTER 5

RESCUE
Compared to Titanic, the rescue of
Britannic was facilitated by three factors:
the temperature is 21 degrees Celsius,
compared to -2 degrees for Titanic, 35
lifeboats were launched and stayed afloat,
compared to Titanics 20 lifeboats, and
help arrived in less than 2 hours after the
first distress call, compared to three and a
half hours for Titanic.
The first to arrive on the scene
were the Greek fishermen from Kea on
their caque, who picked up many men
from the water. At 10:00 a.m., HMS
Scourge sighted the first lifeboats and 10
minutes later stopped and picked up 339
survivors. HMS Heroic had arrived some
minutes earlier and picked up 494
survivors. Some 150 survivors had made it
to Korissia (a community on Kea), where
surviving doctors and nurses from
Britannic were trying to save the injured
men, using aprons and pieces of lifebelts
to make dressings. A little barren quayside

served as their operating room. Although

the motor launches were quick to
transport the wounded to Korissia, the
first lifeboat arrived there some 2 hours
later because of the strong current and
their heavy load. It was the lifeboat of
Sixth Officer Welsh and the unknown
officer. The latter was able to speak some
French and managed to talk to one of the
local villagers, obtaining some bottles of
brandy and some bread for the injured.
Scourge and Heroic had no deck
space for more survivors, and they left for
Piraeus signaling the presence of those
left at Korissia. HMS Foxhound arrived at
11:45 a.m. and after sweeping the area,
anchored at Korissia at 1:00 p.m. to offer
medical assistance and take on board the
remaining survivors. At 2:00 p.m. the light
cruiser HMS Foresight arrived. Foxhound
departed for Piraeus at 2:15 p.m. while
Foresight remained to arrange on Kea the
burial of RAMC Sergeant William Sharpe,
who had died of his injuries. Another two
men died on the Heroic and one on the
French tug Goliath. The three were buried

with military honors in the British

cemetery at Piraeus. The last fatality was
G. Honeycott, who died at the Russian
Hospital at Piraeus shortly after the
funerals.
In total, 1035 people survive the
sinking. Thirty men lost their lives in the
disaster, but only 5 were buried. The
others were left on the water, and their
memory is honored in memorials in
Thessaloniki, Greece and London,
England. Another 38 men were injured
(18 crew and 20 RAMC). The ship carried
no patients. Survivors were hosted in the
warships that were anchored at the port
of Piraeus. However, the nurses and the
officers were hosted in separated hotels at
Phaleron, Greece. Many Greek citizens and
officials attended the funerals.
In May 24, 2000, George Perman, the
last survivor of the disaster, died at age 99.
THE END

 GLOSSARY
1.Aft- the rear (also called stern) part of
the ship
2.Boiler Room- a space where water was
boiled to power the vessel
3.Davits- a small crane for suspending or
lowering a lifeboat
4.Double Hull- a ship hull design and
construction method where the bottom
and sides of the ship have two complete
layers of watertight hull surface.
5.Hull- the watertight body of a ship
6.Portside- the left side of a ship
7.Rudder- a flat piece, usually of wood,
metal, or plastic used for steering
8.Starboard Side- the right side of a ship
9.Watertight- closely sealed, fastened, or
fitted so that no water enters of passes
through

 ABBRIEVIATIONS
1.H.M.H.S. stands for His/ Her Majestys
Hospital Ship.
2.R.M.S. stands for Royal Mail Ship.

H.M.H.S GALEKA


R.M.S.
OLYMPIC
AND
TITANIC

 GALLERY
BRITANNIC AT
HER
CONSTRUCTION

BRITANNICS
DECK PLANS

KEA
CHANNEL,WHERE
BRITANNIC SANK

H.M.S. FORESIGHT
(1904)