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Grave
10 George
William Baker 1888-1921
Opposite
the surf boat memorial is the Baker family plot. On the
headstone
you will see the name of Engineer Lieutenant George
William Baker RH.M. Submarine K5. He was 33 years old at
the time of his death but sadly his
body
does not lie in this grave. The circumstances leading to
his death date to the 20 January 1921 when HM Submarine
K5 sailed from
Torbay
as part of the fleet
bound
for
Spain
, which included the cruiser H.M.S. INCONSTANT and
submarines K8, K9, K15 and K22. It was decided to
conduct a mock battle in the
Bay of Biscay
and the vessels split up to take their positions. A
signal was received from K5 that she was diving but she
failed to reappear at the end of the exercise. An hour
before dusk a
battery
cover from a ‘K Class’ boat was recovered and the
next morning a sailor’s ditty box was found – the
last trace of K5.
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K5
was one of the notorious K Class steam submarines. She
was launched on
the
16th December 1916 and completed in 1917 at Portsmouth
Dockyard. She
carried
a crew of 57 (6 officers and 51 ratings). The K Class
had a very
unfortunate
record in service, with many of the boats being lost to
accidents.
Their
two oil-fired boilers required not only funnels but air
intakes. In the
words
of a contemporary submariner they had, “too many
damned holes” and
it
took nothing much in the way of debris to foul the
watertight covers as they
closed
over these as the boat dived, letting in the ocean – a
fatal flaw in
submarine
design for which scores of submariners paid with their
lives. The
boats
were large at 2,650 tons and 338 feet long and extremely
unwieldy and
had
it not been for the stubbornness of their champion
Admiral Fisher would
have
been withdrawn and scrapped.
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