Exceptional Naval and Polar Awards from the Collection of RC Witte

The Great War D.S.M. awarded to Able Seaman H. M. Richardson, Royal Navy, who was decorated for his gallant deeds as a 17 year old Boy 1st Class in the famous North Sea duel between the Alcantara and the German raider Greif in February 1916, ‘an action which savoured of the days of Nelson, the two ships being engaged at point blank range’ - and both sunk

Distinguished Service Medal, G.V.R. (J. 34229 H. M. Richardson, Boy 1 Cl., H.M.S. Alcantara, 29 Feb. 1916), edge bruising and polished, thus fine, or better £1400-1600

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, Exceptional Naval and Polar Awards from the Collection of RC Witte.

View
Collection

D.S.M. London Gazette 22 June 1916.

Horace Matthew Richardson was born in Chatham, Kent in April 1899 and entered the Royal Navy as a Boy 2nd Class in the training establishment Powerful in January 1915. Quickly rated Boy 1st Class, he joined the Alcantara, commanded by Captain Thomas Erskine Wardle, just three months later, and would have been employed on patrol work between Scapa Flow and the coast of Norway prior to her famous North Sea duel with the German raider Greif on 29 February 1916.

At about midday on that date, in a position of 60 miles E. of the North of the Shetlands, the Alcantara was due to rendezvous with her relief ship, the Andes, when a wireless message instructed her to remain thereabouts and keep a sharp lookout for a suspicious steamship coming out of the Skagerrak. But it was not until about 8.45 a.m. on the following morning that Captain Wardle spotted smoke on the horizon on his port beam. During the course of making passage to this unidentified steamship, he received a wireless warning from the Andes that this was in all probability the vessel he was seeking, so Wardle signalled to the latter to stop, and fired two rounds of blank ammunition. By this stage the two ships had approached to within 1,000 yards of each other, the Alcantara coming up astern and lowering a boarding boat. At that moment, however, the “stranger” - which had Norwegian colours painted on her side and the name Rena-Tonsberg - dropped her bulwarks and ran out her guns. She was, infact, the enemy raider Greif, and the point blank nature of the ensuing 20 minute duel is best summarised in Deeds That Thrill The Empire:

‘From the very first the British gunners got home on the enemy. His bridge was carried away at the first broadside, and then, systematically, our guns searched yard by yard along the upper works of the enemy, seeking out the wireless room from which were emanating the meaningless jargons that “jammed” the Alcantara’s wireless. This had been set to work at once to call up assistance - a proper fighting precaution in any event, but doubly so in this case, seeing that it was quickly apparent the Greif carried considerably heavier ordnance than her own. Before long the enemy’s wireless was smashed, and our guns promptly turned themselves upon the hull and water-line of their opponent. In a few minutes the Greif had a great fire blazing aft; a few more, and she began to settle down by the stern; and as the Alcantara’s guns methodically and relentlessly searched her from stem to stern her return fire grew more and more feeble until, after about fifteen minutes’ fighting, it died away almost entirely. On paper, judging by the difference between the armaments, the Alcantara ought to have been blown out of the water by this time; but, although she was hit frequently, the actual damage she sustained was almost negligible. The Greif was already a beaten and doomed craft when other vessels came up in answer to Alcantara’s wireless. The first to arrive was the Andes, Captain George B.W. Young (another converted unit of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Line), and a few rounds from her apparently completed the enemy’s discomfort. Not long after, a “pukka” cruiser appeared on the scene; but it is reported that, seeing the Alcantara had already made a hopeless mess of her opponent, this cruiser clicked out the signal “Your Bird” and went about her other business!

But the fight was not yet over. The Greif had again begun to blaze away with the one or two guns that remained intact when there happened one of those misfortunes that are apt to occur to the most efficiently handled ships. An unlucky shot carried away the Alcantara’s steering-gear, and her captain was immediately robbed of the weapon upon which he had chiefly depended for the destruction of his enemy - his seamanship. The Alcantara, though nearly all her guns were intact, became unmanageable, and for the first time in the action she was swung round by the seas into such a position that her full broadside was exposed to the enemy. There had, too, been no half-measures in fitting out the Greif for her work. She carried not only a powerful equipment of guns, but also torpedo tubes, and, although she was fast settling down in the water, she was able to bring them to bear now on a most favourable target - a big ship lying broadside on with disabled steering-gear. The first two torpedoes that were fired missed - in spite of the short range. The third caught the Alcantara squarely. Whereby it happened that after some twenty minutes of the most fierce and closely contested fighting the naval campaign had seen, the two principal combatants found themselves making headway towards the bottom in company. The Greif was the first to go. It is believed that, like the Moewe, she carried a big cargo of mines to be strewed where they would be most likely to entrap our warships. However that may be, she blew up with a tremendous explosion and went to the bottom, just a few minutes before the mortally injured Alcantara turned over on her side to find a resting place within a few hundred yards of her ... ’

And it was in the ensuing chaos in the water that Richardson was particularly noted for his gallantry:

‘Some fifteen of Alcantara’s boats or Engleheart rafts, and two rafts made on board, floated clear of the ship. Swimmers immediately began making for them. Some port side boats, their falls cut or shot away, floated clear when the ship went down but they were badly damaged and most of them sank. Men helped each other to survive. Both John Howell-Price and young Horace Richardson, Boy 1st Class, jumped out of their boats and gave other men their places ... ’

Lieutenant Howell-Price received a D.S.C., to which he added a D.S.O. for services in the submarine C. 3 in the Zeebrugge raid in April 1918, and ‘young Richardson’ his D.S.M.

The Alcantara’s loss amounted to five officers and 69 men, of whom nearly all were killed by the final torpedo, and of the 321 officers and men with which the Greif entered the fight, five officers and 115 men were rescued from the sea and made prisoners by the British destroyers that came upon the scene. The remaining 201 went to the bottom with their ship.

Richardson next served in the battleship Royal Sovereign, from May 1916 until January 1918, and in the old gunboat Britomart, February 1918 to April 1919, but was invalided as an Able Seaman in October of the latter year, his service record noting the cause as an ‘old injury - left thigh’. The same source also notes that his particulars were requested by the O.C., 102nd Light Troop A.A., Royal Artillery (T.A.R.), at Crayford in 1939.