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Beddoe, William James

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Beddoe, William James Wellington Remembers 1914–1918 009 223044 Able Seaman William James Beddoe Royal Navy Born on 17 January 1887 in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire Lived Coalbrookdale; The Wharfage, Ironbridge; 22 Haygate Road, Wellington Drowned on 24 July 1918 aged 31 on HMS Pincher Remembered on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial His story William James Beddoe was born to William and Sarah Annie Beddoe (née Morris) who married in Madeley in 1883. His father was a labourer in an ironworks. By 1891, William was the only child living with his parents and maternal grandmother, Margaret, at 1 Main Road, Coalbrookdale. By 1901 the family had moved to the Wharfage in Ironbridge next to the Wheatsheaf Inn. William had a brother, Sidney Henry, born 1897. The young William was working as a labourer in one of the local encaustic tile works. The following year he decided a life in the industrial midlands was not for him and 15-year-old William travelled to Portsmouth where he enlisted on 17 October 1902 as a boy second class in the Royal Navy. It was noted on his service papers that he was just over 5’ 2” tall with brown eyes, dark brown hair and a fresh complexion, and a birthmark on the back of his left knee. He started his training on HMS Impregnable and this was completed in 1905. He signed on for a 12-year engagement on 17 January 1905 as an ordinary seaman. By this time he had grown a further 2” and had accumulated a number of tattoos: ‘Rings on the 2nd and 3rd fingers of his left hand, a heart and cross on his left forearm, a pierced heart, true love and clasped hands on his right forearm.’ After a number of short assignments on various ships and onshore training bases, he served on HMS Mars from 31 October 1906 to 4 March 1907. The following year on 22 December he was assigned to HMS Prince of Wales on which he served for the next seven and a half years until 2 June 1916. After a 1908 refit at Malta, in February 1909 HMS Prince of Wales transferred to the Atlantic Fleet as flagship of the fleet’s commander, but she was damaged by an explosion in one of her stokeholds on 2 July. In December 1910, Rear-Admiral John Jellicoe, later commander of the Grand Fleet and First Sea Lord, hoisted his flag in Prince of Wales. 24 Wellington Remembers 1914–1918 The ship underwent a refit at Gibraltar in February–May 1911 before being transferred to the Home Fleets on 13 May 1912. She later became the flagship of the second- in-command of the Second Fleet, at Portsmouth, and part of the 5th Battle Squadron. By 18 February 1913, she was serving as the flagship for the second-in-command of the 5th Battle Squadron. On 2 June 1913, she was accidentally rammed by the submarine HMS C32 while participating in exercises, but suffered no damage. In the summer of 1913, while on shore HMS Prince of Wales leave, William married Maud Ellen Fox in Wolverhampton. On 18 May 1914, Prince of Wales had relieved her sister ship, Queen, as flagship of the 5th Battle Squadron. When World War 1 broke out in August 1914, the squadron was assigned to the newly reconstituted Channel Fleet on 7 November and based at Portland, from which it patrolled the English Channel. Prince of Wales was now the flagship of Rear-Admiral Bernard Currey and the first task of the squadron was to protect the transfer of the British Expeditionary Force over the English Channel to France. They patrolled the eastern end of the Channel while the 7th and 8th Squadrons covered the cruiser squadron at the western entrance. The Germans made no significant effort to interfere with the traffic in the Channel and the 5th Battle Squadron was allowed to return to Portland after the bulk of the BEF was across on 23 August. Several days later, the squadron ferried the Portsmouth Marine Battalion to Ostend, Belgium. On 14 November, the squadron transferred to Sheerness to guard against a possible German invasion of the United Kingdom, but it transferred back to Portland on 30 December 1914. On 19 March 1915, Prince of Wales was ordered to the Dardanelles to participate in the Dardanelles campaign. She departed Portland on 20 March 1915 and was assigned to the British 5th Squadron of the Allied Fleet off the Dardanelles, where she arrived on 29 March. Two days later on 31 March, Maud gave birth to their daughter, Edna, in Wellington. Prince of Wales supported the landings of the 3rd Brigade, Australian Army, at Gaba Tepe and Anzac Cove on 25 April. Her time at the Dardanelles was destined to be short as the Anglo-French-Italian Naval Convention of 10 May required that the British furnish a squadron of four battleships to reinforce the Italian Navy against the Austro- Hungarian Navy after Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary. Admiral Revel, the Italian naval chief of staff, believed that the threat from Austro-Hungarian submarines and naval mines in the narrow waters of the Adriatic was too serious for him to use the fleet in an active way. He therefore kept his most modern battleships, plus the British ones, at Taranto to blockade the Austro-Hungarians in the Adriatic Sea. 25 Wellington Remembers 1914–1918 On 22 May, Prince of Wales, along with the battleships Implacable, London, and Queen, was transferred to the Adriatic to form the 2nd Detached Squadron and Prince of Wales arrived at her new base on 27 May. The ship became the flagship of the squadron in March 1916. She ended her flagship duties in June 1916, when she went to Gibraltar for a refit and William returned to England. After serving on HMS Hindustan from December 1916 until 25 October 1917, William joined the destroyer HMS Pincher on 18 February 1918. On 15 May 1918, HMS Pincher was reassigned to the 4th Destroyer Flotilla at Devonport. In July 1918, Pincher had been, along with her sister ship HMS Scorpion, assigned to escort the standard oil tanker War Hostage from Plymouth to Scotland. The ships steamed out of Devonport on the evening of 23 July. The evening was foggy and Lieutenant Weir had ordered a course that brought Pincher dangerously close to Seven Stones Reef. Mistakes in navigation due to the fog compounded the error and in the early hours of the next morning, Wednesday 24 July 1918, Pincher struck the reef at high speed. The impact tore open her hull and she sank at 3.33am. After the accident, William was listed as one of 13 men who drowned. An inquiry was held and the commander was subjected to a court martial. Lieutenant Weir was found guilty of steering an unsafe course and sentenced to be reprimanded. For his service to his country William earned the 1914–15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. His body has never been recovered, and he is remembered with honour on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial. At the time of William’s death his wife Maud and daughter Edna were living at 22 Haygate Road, Wellington but by 1922 they had moved to Portsmouth, Hampshire where Maud remarried. Her new husband was William Ephraim Gamble, serving in the Royal Marines. They lived at 13 Marlborough Row, Portsea, Portsmouth. William’s brother Sidney, who trained as a joiner, enlisted into the Royal Navy on 4 September 1912. He survived the war and in 1939 was a funeral director, carpenter and joiner in Wednesfield. In 1939, Maud and Edna, who had married, were living in Portsmouth. Notes: Encaustic tiles are ceramic tiles which get their colour from different colours of clay. See biography 042 for more information about HMS Impregnable. Acknowledgements: Image of HMS Prince of Wales courtesy of Imperial War Museums under their non-commercial licence © IWM (Q 21648). 26.
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