January 10, 2015
The Royal Navy, amid all the holiday celebrations, sneaked into San Juan for a port call. The HMS Severn was here on Christmas Eve day and overnight. The Severn is a river class patrol ship, usually assigned, with her two sisters, to fishing patrols. This last October, the Severn was assigned to the Atlantic Patrol Tasking (North), taking the place of the destroyer or frigate usually designated for this duty. In fact, the Severn replaced the Type 23 frigate HMS Argyll which headed home after her deployment. You may recall, in a previous letter, that the Argyll was often delegated to fleet ceremonial duties. That continued after she left here with a trip to Havana, widely covered on the local television news.
Two views of the HMS Severn, taken 12/24/14.
The Severn carries a crew of 48, including a medical detachment, and displaces about 1,700 tons. She is smaller than the mega-yacht A, owned by Russian multi-billionaire Andrey Milinchenko, which is as of this writing (1/10/15) still in port. I bet the food on the Severn is not as good as that served on A – tinned bully beef and the occasional shot of Nelson’s Blood versus Beluga caviar and ice cold Stoli. And the Severn does not, so far as I can tell, have even one pool, let alone three.
The current HMS Severn is the ninth Royal Navy ship to bear that name, with the various ships illustrating the evolution of naval warfare. The first six Severns were men-o-war, sail-powered ships of the line. The seventh, launched in 1856, a sail-powered frigate, was converted to screw propulsion in 1860. She was stricken in 1876. The next, launched in 1875, was a Mersey-class protected cruiser. Naval architects were grappling with how to add armored protection to ships intended to be fleet and nimble. A protected cruiser had some armor plating on its deck, while an armored cruiser added armor plating to its sides. The armor added substantial weight and thus detracted from speed and range.
The next Severn, built in England in 1914 and originally destined for Brazil, was a specialized shore bombardment vessel, specifically a monitor. Her shallow draft allowed her to go close to shore, which she did in the Battle of the Yser, in 1914, during which she bombarded German troops and artillery positions. The shallow draft caused a torpedo from the German submarine U-8 to pass harmlessly under her, but also made her unseaworthy. She was towed to the Rufiji River delta, in Tanzania, then German East Africa, in July 1915, where she, along with her sister ship HMS Mersey, were able to move upstream and fired upon and sank the German light cruiser SMS Konigsberg. The German cruiser had been a thorn in the Admiralty’s side while acting a commerce raider in the Red Sea. She would have been a bigger threat but the Germans kept running out of coal.
The monitor HMS Severn, 1914. From the Wikipedia page under her name.
The SMS Konigsberg, circa 1910. From the Wikipedia page under her name.
This was about the same time as the Canadian roust-about and African Queen captain Charlie Allnut conspired with the British Methodist missionary Rose Sayer to run rapids, avoid German fortresses, and eventually sink the German gunboat Queen Louisa, deployed downriver on a large lake, probably Lake Victoria. The Queen Louisa sank just after Charlie and Rose were married by the Louisa’s captain, and immediately before they were to be executed as British spies.
The efforts of the monitors Severn and Mersey, and Charlie Allnut and the African Queen, pretty much ended the German naval efforts in East Africa. The Germans managed to salvage a few of the guns from the Konigsberg and used them in continuing land operations, but to little strategic effect.
The fleet submarine HMS Severn was launched in 1934. She served in pretty much all of the Royal Navy’s World War II areas of operations: the Mediterranean (she started the war in Malta), the North Atlantic (she helped track the Bismarck), and the Indian Ocean, at Trincomolee. She was stationed at Ceylon as the war ended, and sold for scrap soon thereafter. The current HMS Severn was launched in 2002 and commissioned in 2003. She and her crew are probably making a port call somewhere, perhaps Bermuda, even as I write this.
The River Severn, at 220 miles, is the second longest river in the UK. It rises in mid-Wales and flows generally west. It has a drainage area of about 4,400 square miles. By way of comparison, the Mohawk River is about 150 miles long and drains about 3,400 square miles. The Severn’s tributaries include the River Avon, as in Stratford-on-Avon, and it flows through Powys, Newton, Welshpool, Shrewsbury, Ironbridge, Bridgnorth, Bewdley, and Upton on its way to the Celtic Sea.
Back in 1979, we visited friends in England and I made a one day pilgrimage to Ironbridge. I left London from Paddington Station, changed at Birmingham, changed again at Wolverhampton and ended at Telford Station. That was auspicious – Thomas Telford (1754-1834) was a Scottish civil engineer. Telford specialized in roads, canals, and other infrastructure, so much so that he was known as the Colossus of Roads during his lifetime. Telford, among his many contributions, used lead and boiling sugar to make water tight connections between cast iron plates – these connections were needed in the construction of iron viaducts to carry canals across valleys.
But I was not there to honor Telford – I was there to see the first iron bridge ever made. The Iron Bridge was built in the late 1770s to span the River Severn in Shropshire and opened for traffic on January 1, 1781. It was crafted from local cast iron and came in over budget. It was, however, a commercial success, and soon the tolls were sufficient to pay investors a dividend of 8% per year. The town of Ironbridge came into existence at its northern end. When I was there, the area was being transformed into an English Heritage site to commemorate the industrial revolution.
Two images of the Iron Bridge, taken during my trip there, Summer 1979.
While we’re at it, here’s another image from the trip – me and my very young son. My wife has always said this image captures my best side.
The trip to Ironbridge, while fascinating, was not the most memorable event of that trip. One evening, while having a cup of tea in their small kitchen, our host and hostess got into an argument over some matter long since forgotten. At one point, our hostess threw a tea cup at her husband. He must have been used to this – he ducked, and I got hit in the head with the missile. I’ve always felt, but for that concussive blow to the head, I might have amounted to something.
Perhaps the long term effects of that concussive impact make it difficult for me to tell fiction from reality. Perhaps – I’ll have to think about that. In the meantime, I’m writing these last few words in Ricks Café, on the first floor of the Hotel Casablanca, on Calle Fortaleza in Old San Juan. Ricks Café is one of those wonderful places where every hour is happy hour. Sam’s playing the piano, again, and it seems that most of the usual suspects are here.
For more information, see Wikipedia entries for HMS Severn, River Severn, SMS Konigsberg, African Queen, and Casablanca.