1906 – The end of the Submarine Mining Service

In 1906, the Submarine Mining Service was disbanded.

The mines and equipment were handed over to the Navy. Diving was abolished as an Army service and the diving gear transferred to the Navy.

The Army took over the buildings at Port Laing, as part of Carlingnose Barracks.

The various submarine mining corps were converted to Electrical Engineers, and managed the searchlight facilities.

1906 A New Life for the Forth Volunteers

The Forth Volunteer Division (Submarine Miners) became the Forth Division (Electrical Engineers) (Volunteers), in 1906. In 1907 the Haldane Reforms led to a major reorganization of the British Army, with all volunteer units being combined into the Territorial Force (TF). The Forth Division was retitled as the City of Edinburgh (Fortress) Royal Engineers.

By World War I, the unit’s organisation was as follows:
City of Edinburgh (Fortress) Royal Engineers
• HQ at 28 York Place, Edinburgh
• No 1 Works Company
• No 2 Electric Lights Company

The Territorial Force was demobilised at the end of WWI, then reinstated in 1926, as the Territorial Army.

Other work performed by the Submarine Mining Service.

As well as managing minefields, and their associated electric lights, the Submarine Mining Division of the Royal Engineers also engaged in three other activities.

Clearing wrecks

A fairly obvious use of their expertise in underwater explosives was to clear any wrecks which were a danger or nuisance to shipping and could not be raised. Wrecks were cleared in the Thames, Spithead, Calcutta, Karachi and Rangoon.

Diving

Demolition work required divers to place the charges, and divers were also used at some minefields as an alternative to raising mines and junction boxes for inspection.

In the early 1880s there was a great demand for divers for various civil works in progress, including the Tay and Forth Bridges; the attractions of higher pay proved too much for the Royal Engineer divers. It was therefore found necessary to withhold the diving course completion certificate until the men had completed their time of service.

The Brennan Torpedo

The third activity was to sponsor the development of the wire-guided Brennan Torpedo. As explained earlier, torpedoes were initial explosive charges on long spars projecting from the bow of a torpedo boat. The torpedo was rammed against enemy ships. A later development was the self-propelled torpedo which could be launched from a ship, or later a submarine.

During the 19th century, an anonymous officer of the Austrian Marine Artillery conceived the idea of using a small boat laden with explosives, propelled by a steam or an air engine and steered by cables to be used against enemy ships. On his death, his papers came into the possession of Captain Giovanni Luppis, who commissioned a model of the device. It was powered by a spring-driven clockwork mechanism and steered remotely by cables from land. Dissatisfied with the device, which he called the “coast-saver”, in about 1850, Luppis asked Robert Whitehead to develop this design into a self-propelled underwater torpedo.

Whitehead was born in Bolton, England, and trained as an engineer and draughtsman, at the Mechanics Institute in Manchester. His was employed at shipyards in Toulon, Milan and Trieste, before moving to Fiume in present-day Croatia. There he became the manager of a company making marine steam boilers and engines, with the Austrian Navy as one of their customers.

Whitehead developed a torpedo propelled by compressed air and carrying an explosive warhead, with a speed of 7 knots (13 km/h) and the ability to hit a target up to 700 yards (640 m) away. By 1870 Whitehead’s torpedoes were running at 17 knots (31.5 km/h). In 1896, Whitehead bought the rights to a patented gyroscope gear which kept the torpedo on track regardless of wind or wave action.

In 1890 Whitehead opened a UK manufacturing and test site in Portland Harbour, Dorset. When Whitehead retired, the Whitehead family sold the company to two large British armaments companies, Vickers and Armstrong-Whitworth. Thus the company remained under British control until the First World War.

In 1877, Louis Brennan, an Irish-born Australian inventor resurrected the idea of a torpedo which was steerable from the launch station. The Brennan torpedo was propelled by two contra-rotating propellers that were spun by rapidly pulling out wires from drums wound inside the torpedo. Each drum carried several thousand yards of high-tensile steel wire. The wires were pulled by a steam-powered winch on the launch station, and the torpedo could be steered by varying the winding speed on each wire.

The torpedo attained a speed 27 knots (31 mph), could hit a target at a range of 200 yards, and could be turned 180 degrees to hit a target from the off side.

By 1879, Brennan had established the Brennan Torpedo Company assigning half of the rights from his patent to his partner John Ridley Temperley, in exchange for much-needed funds. Brennan and Temperley travelled to Britain, where the Admiralty examined the torpedo and found it unsuitable for shipboard use. However, the Royal Engineers could see its potential for shore defences.

In 1884 Brennan received a letter from the War Office stating that they had decided to adopt his torpedo for harbour defence. The Brennan torpedo became a standard harbour defence throughout the British Empire and was in use for more than fifteen years.

In 1891 a report to the Director of Artillery stated: We have now completed or in progress 7 installations viz. Thames, Medway, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Cork, Malta (2 sites). Further sites are proposed as funds become available at Plymouth, Milford Haven, Clyde, Forth, Falmouth, Hong Kong, Singapore and St Lucia.

The first seven and the one at Hong Kong were completed, but in 1905 the Committee on Armaments of Home Ports issued a report in which they recommended the removal of all Brennan torpedoes from fixed defences due to their comparatively short range and the difficulty of launching them at night.

Manufacture of the Brennan torpedo finished in 1906.