Chatham played a very important part in the nation's Great War
effort. It was one of the British Royal Navy's three 'Manning
Ports', with more than a third of the town's ships manned by men
allocated to the Chatham Division. The war was only 6 weeks old
when Chatham felt the affects of war for the first time. On 22
September 1914, three Royal Naval vessels from the Chatham
Division, HMS Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue, were sunk in quick
succession by a German submarine, U-9. A total of 1,459 men lost
their lives that day, 1,260 of whom were from the Chatham Division.
Two months later, on 26 November, the battleship HMS Bulwark
exploded and sunk whilst at anchor off of Sheerness on the Kent
coast. There was a loss of 736 men, many of whom were from the
Chatham area. On 18 August 1914, Private 6737 Walter Henry Smith,
who was nineteen and serving with the 6th Battalion, Middlesex
Regiment, became the first person to be killed during wartime
Chatham. He was on sentry duty with a colleague, who accidentally
dropped his loaded rifle, discharging a bullet that strook Private
Smith and killed him. It wasn't all doom and gloom, however.Winston
Churchill, as the First Lord of the Admiralty, visited Chatham
early on in the war, on 30 August 1914. On 18 September 1915, two
German prisoners of war, Lieutenant Otto Thelen and Lieutenant Hans
Keilback, escaped from Donnington Hall in Leicestershire. At first,
it was believed they had escaped the country and were on their way
back to Germany, but they were re-captured in Chatham four days
later. By the end of the war, Chatham and the men who were
stationed there had truly played their part in ensuring a historic
Allied victory.
General
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