"Protected" sub wreck plundered

(Holland Class sub)

Daily Mail Online: Wreck of 'protected' Royal Navy sub plundered by thieves who dived down 90ft to reach it

The wreck of an historic Royal Navy submarine has been plundered by thieves who dived 90ft to the sea bed to remove part of it.

HMS Holland, which sank in bad weather off the Sussex coast while being towed to a scrapyard in 1912, is protected by law because of its historical importance.
Now police are investigating after divers from the Nautical Archaeology Society discovered during a routine check that its torpedo tube hatch is missing.

Thieves are thought to have floated the 66lb piece of ironwork to the surface in 90ft of water by attaching buoyancy balloons.

Experts say it was an audacious raid which may have been carried out at the request of a collector with an interest in naval history. Both Sussex Police and English Heritage, which is responsible for the wreck's care, have appealed for the return of the artefact and hope that someone in the diving community may provide them with a lead.

Police say that whoever took the hatch, which is about 30in in diameter, is liable for prosecution under the Protection of Wrecks Act.

The Holland 5, as the wreck is known, lay undiscovered until the mid-Nineties. It is the only surviving example of five Holland class vessels commissioned by the Admiralty to test the fighting capability of submarines, which were at the time a relatively new type of technology. They were top secret and only a few senior officers and crew knew of their existence.

The submarines were built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness between 1901 and 1903. The 64ft-long vessels were fitted with one of the first periscope designs, had a top speed of 9.2mph and a crew of eight.

But they were unreliable – an attempt in 1903 to sail round the Isle of Wight on the surface ended in four of them breaking down before they had covered much more than four miles.

Britain was one of the last major maritime powers to form a submarine fleet because senior Admiralty staff considered it to be unacceptably devious to attack the enemy from beneath the waves.

Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, Controller of the Royal Navy, said in 1901 that submarine warfare was 'underhand, unfair and damned un-English'.