HMS Stephen Furness was steaming through the northern Irish Sea on the afternoon of December 13 1917, en route to Liverpool for repairs. The crew maintained a cautious course, altering direction every ten minutes and travelling at a steady 13 knots – fully aware of the lurking threat from German U-boats.
At 4.15pm, disaster struck. A torpedo launched by the German UB-64 hit the starboard side of the vessel, causing an explosion that sank the ship in just three minutes. Of the more than 100 sailors on board the Stephen Furness, only 12 survived. Clinging to a makeshift raft, the survivors, including Lieutenant P.S. Simmonds, were rescued two hours later by a trawler and brought to safety in Holyhead, north Wales.
For more than a century, the final resting place of HMS Stephen Furness remained a mystery. Simmonds provided an approximate location in his report the following day, but the precise site was never confirmed. Now my colleagues and I believe we’ve found the wreck site about ten miles off the east coast of Northern Ireland.
