Holland No. 5

The Admiralty ordered five boats based on the American inventor John Philip Holland's design so it could test a weapon already being adopted abroad. Vickers built them in secrecy at Barrow-in-Furness with help from Holland's company. No. 5 was launched in 1902 and completed in 1903. About 19.5 metres long, she used a petrol engine on the surface and an electric motor underwater, carried one bow torpedo tube and normally had seven or eight men. Experiments with these small boats included an early practical submarine periscope, allowing a commander to look out while remaining submerged. Holland No. 5 served with the 1st Flotilla at Fort Blockhouse, Gosport, before being removed from the Navy list in August 1912. Her final journey was not a patrol but an unmanned tow from Portsmouth towards disposal at Sheerness.

On 8 August 1912 Holland No. 5 was being towed east through the Channel when the towing cable parted near Beachy Head. She foundered at the south-east end of Royal Sovereign Bank, off Bexhill. The sources do not give enough detail to say whether water was already entering, whether rough water caused the cable failure, or whether another towing arrangement failed after the line parted. A large metal object found close to the wreck in 2005 may have belonged to the towing gear, but that interpretation is not proved. The important difference from a service accident is that the submarine had been decommissioned and was on her way to be broken up. The sinking accidentally preserved the boat that official disposal was about to destroy.

No one died in the sinking. Holland No. 5 was not carrying her normal submarine crew while under tow to the breakers. The men of the towing vessel survived, and the lost craft itself was the only casualty. During service these very small boats normally put seven or eight people into a cramped steel hull with a petrol engine, batteries and torpedoes, at a time when safe submarine practice was still being discovered. The wider Holland class is reported never to have lost a man, an unusual record for such experimental machines. That should not be confused with later early submarines such as A1, which suffered a fatal collision. Holland No. 5's human story is therefore about the crews and engineers who learned from risk, rather than deaths at this wreck.

The submarine lies upright and nearly complete at about 30 metres depth. Survey images show the closed pressure hull, bow and stern, with only lighter external fittings and much of the thin outer casing lost. A periscope support or ventilator was still standing when first recorded, and the sealed interior may retain machinery and fittings. The wreck was found by local diver Gerry Dowd in the 1990s and reported for official study around 2000. Later dives recorded corrosion, fishing net caught on the hull and danger from a marker-buoy chain. The bow cap disappeared in 2010 and was reported as stolen or broken away; either way, it is no longer in place. The protected area was created in 2004 and came into force in 2005. Diving or interference is controlled so that a remarkably whole submarine does not become a collection of loose souvenirs.

Holland No. 5 marks the moment when the Royal Navy moved from doubt to practical submarine service. Trials with the five Hollands taught officers what a submarine could do and fed improvements into the larger A class that followed before the fifth boat had even been launched. The type was outdated within a decade, but that rapid change is exactly why the wreck matters: it preserves a short experimental stage normally erased by scrapping. Holland No. 1 was raised and is displayed at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum; No. 5 is the only example of the type surviving on the seabed. Together they allow the design to be studied in a museum and in the setting created by an actual sinking. For East Sussex it is also a direct link to the birth of a naval service that changed sea warfare.