L 26 And The Air Ambulance

L-26 and The Air Ambulance On Saturday, October 7, 1933, five vessels of the Second Submarine Flotilla left Campbeltown for Invergordon, proceeding towards the Mull of Kintyre in dense fog. First, “L 19” grounded off Paterson’s Rock but freed herself almost immediately, “L 21” steered to port, narrowly missing harm and then, next in line, “L 26” turned to starboard and grounded at 4.58 p.m.. Eight hours later, just after midnight, slightly holed, she managed to refloat herself and began making her own way back to Campbeltown, putting a charge into her batteries as dawn rose. On Sunday morning, many of the inhabitants at church, the town was rocked by a huge explosion at 12.10 p.m., the explosion caused by a leakage of acid from ‘No 1’ battery and a failure to check that important ventilators were clear prior to charging the submarine’s batteries as she had returned to Campbeltown. Many of the crew had been assembled for lunch in the mess room, directly above the battery room and they took the full force of the explosion which threw them upwards against the deckhead. Their had been, as stoker John Fairclough was to recall, “A terrific explosion with an orange flash of flame as parts of the deck gave way when the batteries came up through it and we were imprisoned there in the mess room till we could be rescued.” Two Able Seamen, Leonard Rhodes and Fred Whiting, died from their injuries and were later buried in Kilkerran Cemetery’s ‘Stranger’s Neuk’. All four of Campbeltown’s doctors attended to the injured and the serious nature of nine of the injured gave rise for such concern that The Admiralty requested the help of Archibald Young, Professor of Surgery at Glasgow University, who arrived at 3 a.m. on the following morning after a night-drive from Glasgow. Two of the injured stokers, 29-year old Henry Taylor with a badly crushed left ankle and 32-year old John Fairclough, suffering from a fractured thigh, gave him special concern. Now, John Sword’s ‘Midland and Scottish Airways’ was asked to provide its ninth and first ‘multiple’ evacuation air ambulance flight in Scotland. On the Monday morning, the de Havilland Dragon G-ACDL, with Jimmy Orrell as pilot, made the one hour fifteen minute round trip from Renfrew to Campbeltown and back, to take the two stokers to hospital in Glasgow. The men were accompanied by Nurse Isobel Watson of the Voluntary Aid Detachment in Campbeltown, the hire of the plane costing £12.10/- and Nurse Watson’s fare to return her to Campbeltown being a further £1.10/-, both men recovered. The submarine’s commander, Lieutenant-Commander John Lewes was found guilty of two charges connected with the navigation of his ship and on a third charge of negligence, failing to examine the batteries before their charging began and this resulted in his dismissal from the ship. Lewes, who had displayed great coolness and resource following the explosion, was later reinstated to “L 26” after a later examination of the technical evidence surrounding the incident. The submarine, built as part of the emergency war programme in 1918, having a surface speed of 17-knots and able to carry ten torpedoes, had suffered a previous mishap in The Mediterranean in 1924, the repairs being carried out at Gibraltar. Following the Campbeltown incident, she sailed under escort for repairs at Devonport and later spent some time at Dunoon as a training vessel. She suffered a further battery explosion while being used as a target at the AntiSubmarine Training School in Nova Scotia in 1944, this time there was one fatality. The following year, 1945, still in Canada, she was taken out of service and sunk off the Canadian coast.

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