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 struck 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.
