Qualla: HMS Niger (1892)

HMS Niger (1892): Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It was just before noon on 11 November 1914. HMS Niger, a Royal Navy torpedo gunboat converted to minesweeping, lay at anchor two miles off Deal pier in heavy weather. Some of her sailors were eating lunch. The explosion came without warning. Walther Forstmann's U-boat had crept up the Kent coast from a freshly captured Belgian base and put a torpedo into her side. Within the hour the Niger had gone down. People watched the smoke from the seafront. Boats fought through gale and high seas to take her crew off. By dusk, a single submarine had announced a new kind of war.

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HMS Niger (1892): A Victorian Ship in a Modern War

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Niger was almost a museum piece by 1914. She had been laid down at Naval Construction & Armament in Barrow on 17 September 1891, launched on 17 December 1892, and commissioned on 25 April 1893 - the products of an age when the Royal Navy was still arming itself against the French...

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HMS Niger (1892): Forstmann's First

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walther Forstmann would become one of the deadliest submarine commanders of the First World War, eventually credited with sinking nearly 150 Allied ships. In November 1914 he was at the start of that career, operating from Belgian ports that had only just fallen to the German adv...

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HMS Niger (1892): Boats Through the Gale

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There was no time and no kindness in the weather. The wind was high and the sea was running heavily; some of Niger's men had been at the mess table when the torpedo struck and reached the deck in shirtsleeves. Watchers on the Deal seafront saw the explosion, saw the smoke, and sa...

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HMS Niger (1892): Eleven, Eleven, Nineteen Fourteen

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The date carries a weight now that it could not have carried then. On 11 November 1914 the war was three months old. The Western Front had locked into trench lines that would not move for four years. Britain had not yet learned what U-boats would do to her merchant shipping; the ...

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