Today is Lancashire Day when the people of Lancashire celebrate the anniversary of sending its first members to the Model Parliament of Edward I in 1295. On this day, we toast HM The Queen, the Duke of Lancaster. On such a day it is worth remembering an old hero of Lancashire, Charles Rumney Samson. Samson was one of the first four Royal Navy pilots and a pioneer of naval aviation. He was born in 1883, in a suburb of Manchester, so in his day, he was Lancashire born and br

The hero of my submarine novel, The Custom of the Trade, is partially based on the exploits of Lieutenant Commander Martin Nasmith during the Dardanelles campaign. By coincidence, Nasmith was later to command the 7th submarine Flotilla in the Baltic and to become the senior naval officer at Revel (now Tallinn) in Estonia during the campaign by the Baltic States for independence from the Bolsheviks. The story of the Baltic submarine flotilla is the subject of the novel I am

A continuing theme of my novels is the often unsung heroes and largely unknown activities of the Royal Navy in WW1. My aim is to bring to the fore once again the courageous deeds of great men and highlight that the Royal Navy wasn’t just involved in the Battle of Jutland. In my first novel, The Custom of the Trade, I have focused on the early days of submarine operations. Submarines in those days were in their infancy and extremely dangerous and unreliable. As will often b

One of the first acts by the Royal Navy during WW1was to have the German underwater telegraphic cables cut in the North Sea, thus denying them telegram communications with most of the world. It meant that they had to rely on high frequency radio transmissions to communicate with their embassies and overseas ships. Knowing this, the Admiralty engaged the help of Marconi and the Post Office to set up listening stations on the east coast of England to intercept the German sign

I am now about two thirds of the way through the first draft of my latest and fourth WW1 naval thriller, Where the Baltic Ice is Thin. I have decided to include in my tale an embellished version of the true account of German perfidy in the sinking of the submarine HMS E13 in the neutral waters of Denmark. E13, under the command or Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Layton, was despatched to the Baltic in August 1915 to assist the Russians intercept German shipments of iron ore fr

Several readers of my WW1 submarine thriller, The Custom of the Trade, have expressed surprise at how difficult it was to detect and sink submarines during the first half of the war. We have been brought up with images from WW2 submarine films of destroyers locking on to the dived submarine and attacking it with depth charges. It comes as a surprise that neither sonar nor depth charges had been invented before 1916. Prior to 1916, the only means of detecting submarines was

The forgotten, but outstandingly successful submarine campaign in the Dardanelles and Sea of Marmara, deprived the Turks of vital supplies at Gallipoli, such that when the Allies withdrew from the beaches, the Turks were within a week of running out of ammunition. Four Commanding Officers of Royal Navy submarines were awarded the VC in the campaign. The hero of my first novel, The Custom of the Trade, is loosely based on Lieutenant Commander Martin Nasmith’s exploits. He wa

In June 1913, Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, persuaded the House of Commons that the Treasury should spend £2.2 million on a 51% stake in Persian oil fields in order to guarantee the supply of fuel oil to the Royal Navy. The House approved the bill within a day, the investment was duly made and a twenty-year contract negotiated. I suspect today’s Sea Lords are jealous of the influence their predecessors once held. In my second novel, Now the Darkness Gath

Today, on 31st May in 1916, 250 British and German ships met in what became known in the Battle of Jutland. The battle was to last until the following day and both sides suffered nearly 10,000 casualties. Fourteen Royal Navy ships and eleven German ships were sunk. Most of the casualties were on the British side. Over 6,000 Royal Navy sailors died. The German ships were not only better armoured, but built with more watertight compartments. Whereas the RN ships were desi

We have recently commemorated ANZAC Day. In 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers participated in an expedition to capture the Gallipoli Peninsular so that the Dardanelles Strait would be open to allied navies to open a southern front and knock Turkey out of the First World War. It might have been avoided had a mere naval captain succeeded in his plan to bribe Turkey to sever its alliance with Germany. Captain Reginald 'Blinker' Hall was the newly appointed Director of

Who would have thought that a torpedo test ship would have such an impact on the conduct of the First World War? On 2 August 1914, the SMS Magdeburg, a German light cruiser, opened fire on the port of Libau in Latvia (now Liepaja), the first shots of the war against Russia. However, it was not until later in the month that her place in history would become more significant. On 26 August, whilst steaming off Estonia, she ran aground and could not be freed. Two Russian cruis

My third book, The Wings of the Wind, is with my publisher for scrutiny. Whilst I await my fate, I have begun work on my fourth novel, about the Royal Navy's submarine flotilla in the Baltic. There, a squadron of nine submarines worked with the Russian Navy to disrupt the supply of Swedish iron ore to the Germans. The presence of such a potent force denied the Baltic to the German Navy as a sea training area. The work of the submarine flotilla was severely hampered by the Rus

The current and all past heads of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) are and have been known as 'C', for "Chief", but the first head of SIS was known as 'C' for a different reason. Commander Mansfield Cumming used to sign documents in green ink with the letter C. Cumming had been retired from the Royal Navy on medical grounds due to his chronic sea sickness. As a retired officer, he went on to work on the design and operations of boom defences, based on the River

Today (4th February) in 1915, the German government announced that it would impose a submarine blockade of Great Britain with effect 18th February 1915. It meant that any shipping, including that of neutrals, could be sunk without warning. Until this change in policy, German submarines, as with those of the Allies, had surfaced in the vicinity of merchant ships and given the crews time to take to their boats in safety before sinking the ships. The introduction by Britain o

I have just finished a section of my latest book that is set during the siege of Antwerp in 1914. In conducting my research, I came across this photograph in the Imperial War Museum archives of a Belgian machine gun battery being pulled by dogs. Wing Commander Charles Samson of the Royal Naval Air Service noted in his autobiography, Fights and Flights, that whilst the soldiers might have been dead on their feet, the dogs still had the energy to fight amongst themselves. The

I am very excited to have received in today’s post, a first-edition copy of Charles Rumney Samson’s autobiography, Fights and Flights, published in 1930, just a year before his sudden death. Samson was one of the first four Royal Navy pilots and a pioneer of naval aviation. He will feature frequently as a character in my current novel about the Royal Naval Air Service, much as Roger Keyes dipped in and out of my first novel (and will come back in a later novel). Samson was

With just five weeks to go before the publication of my pre-WW1 espionage thriller, Now the Darkness Gathers, here is a taster of what to expect. I will add another chapter nearer the time. I hope you enjoy reading this and will feed tempted to buy the book on publication from Amazon as an e-book or paperback. PROLOGUE September 1898 Sir Herbert Kitchener, Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, seemed pleased to receive the two scruffy Dervishes and had even offered them hospitality

It is being reported by the Media that the Russians have a ship, the Yantar, capable of severing Britain’s underwater communications cables. There are also concerns that the Russians could use underwater drones to attack the network of cables that carry internet and telephone communications around the world. This all sounds very familiar to students of WW1 naval history. Within hours of the declaration of war on 4 August 1914, British cable ships, including the CS Alert, op

Today, in 1916, Admiral Jellicoe was appointed First Sea Lord. It was not to be a successful office for him. Jellicoe is best known for his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet during the Battle of Jutland. He was a cautious man and has been criticised for failing to achieve a decisive victory at Jutland. However, with limited intelligence of the German Fleet’s movements, he probably handled the Grand Fleet as well as anybody could have expected. As Church

One hundred years ago today, the First Battle of Cambrai commenced, the first British Army combined arms attack of WW1 and one in which huge numbers of tanks were deployed to crush the Germans’ barbed-wire defences. Quite naturally, the Royal Tank Regiment claims credit for this battle, but few people recognise that the Royal Navy can claim credit for coming up with the concept for the tank and armoured car. In the first month after the start of WW1, the Royal Naval Air Serv