Dover in the First World War: history and guide to the Dover Patrol

Dover in the First World War: a naval base on the front line

When war broke out in August 1914 Dover had only just finished the largest building project in its history. The Admiralty Harbour, planned in 1897 and built by S. Pearson & Son, had been completed in 1909: the Admiralty Pier was extended, a new Eastern Arm was built across the bay and a detached Southern Breakwater closed the gap between them. Five years later that enclosed harbour became the base of one of the most important naval commands of the war.

A military control point on a road leading into Dover during the First World War.Civilian cross-Channel services were withdrawn as soon as war was declared, and the town filled with soldiers and sailors. The new Marine Station on the Admiralty Pier had just been completed in 1914, so its first passengers were troops on their way to Flanders and the sick and wounded coming back from the front. For many soldiers the quayside at Dover was the last piece of British soil they ever stood on.

War also reached the civilian population directly, for the first time in modern memory. Dover had the dubious honour of receiving the first bomb dropped on British soil, just before Christmas 1914, and by 1918 the town had been bombed from the air and shelled from the sea. Dover WW1 history is therefore two stories at once: a naval base keeping the Straits open, and a small town learning to live under attack.

This guide to Dover in the First World War sets out both, with links to the fuller pages on each subject.

The Dover Patrol and the war in the Straits

In late July 1914, with war looming, twelve "Tribal" class destroyers arrived at Dover to join the near obsolete destroyers already at anchor in the harbour, most of them built in the late 1800s. These ships formed the nucleus of the Dover Patrol. From modest and poorly equipped beginnings it grew into one of the most important Royal Navy commands of the First World War.

The Dover Patrol in the harbour from the Western Heights.The Dover Patrol assembled cruisers, monitors, destroyers, armed trawlers and drifters, paddle minesweepers, armed yachts, motor launches and coastal motor boats, submarines, seaplanes, aeroplanes and airships. With them it carried out several duties at once in the southern North Sea and the Dover Straits. It ran anti-submarine patrols, escorted merchantmen, hospital ships and troop ships, laid mines and even built mine barrages, swept up German mines, bombarded German positions on the Belgian coast and hunted the U-boats that were always somewhere in the Channel.

The work was dangerous. On 24 October 1914 the destroyer Falcon was hit by a German eight-inch shell that killed her captain and 24 of her 60-man crew; she was brought back to Dover and repaired. Later in the war the Falcon was commanded by Lieutenant C.H. Lightoller, who had been Second Officer of the Titanic. Lightoller moved his family to Dover, renting a house on East Cliff, and in July 1918 his next ship, the destroyer Garry, rammed and sank the German submarine U-110.

One of the best remembered officers was Captain E.R.G.R. Evans, who kept a penguin mascot on the mast of his destroyer as a relic of Captain Scott's Antarctic expedition. On 20 April 1917, in command of the flotilla leader Broke and with the destroyer Swift in company, he intercepted a force of German destroyers and sank G42 and G45. The action made Evans famous as "Evans of the Broke".

A younger officer who served in the same waters went on to greater things in the next war. Bertram Ramsay received his first command, the small monitor M25, in August 1915, and spent most of the next two years off the Belgian coast before taking over the Broke in October 1917.

Admiral R.H. Bacon commanded the Dover Patrol until 31 December 1917, when Vice-Admiral Roger Keyes replaced him. The new commander was given the special duty of blockading the German-held Belgian ports and the U-boats based there.

The Zeebrugge Raid and the Dover Patrol's finest hour

The threat came from the German naval base at Bruges, an inland town linked to the sea by two canals, one to Ostend and one, usable by the largest vessels, to Zeebrugge. Keyes planned to close both canal entrances by sinking blockships in them. At Zeebrugge there would also be a landing on the fortified mole to put its guns out of action.

The old cruiser Vindictive was stripped and fitted with howitzers, flame throwers, mortars and landing ramps. Two Mersey ferries, Iris and Daffodil, went with her, and the old cruisers Thetis, Intrepid and Iphigenia were filled with concrete to serve as blockships. More than 160 ships assembled at Dover and in the Thames Estuary. Twice the force sailed and had to turn back because of the weather; on 22 April 1918, the eve of St George's Day, it sailed for the last time, and Keyes signalled "St George for England" from the destroyer Warwick.

The fighting at the mole was savage. The Zeebrugge Raid cost 214 men killed and 383 wounded, and more than 200 decorations were awarded for the night, including eight Victoria Crosses. Two blockships were sunk in the canal entrance at Zeebrugge, but the attack on Ostend failed when its blockships ran aground short of the target. On 9 May a patched-up Vindictive went back and was sunk in the entrance at Ostend.

After the war the people of Zeebrugge presented Dover with the bell that had hung at the end of the mole, rung by the Germans to warn of a British attack. The Zeebrugge Bell hangs on the front of the Old Town Hall and is rung every year on St George's Day in honour of the Dover Patrol.

Admiral Sir Roger Keyes was knighted after the war and given the Freedom of Dover. When he was raised to the peerage in 1943 he took the title Baron Keyes of Zeebrugge and Dover. He died on 26 December 1945 and, after a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, was buried in St James' Cemetery in Dover among the men who had died in the raid.

Bombs and shells: the history of the raids on the town

Christmas Eve 1914 was bright and sunny. At around midday a German plane appeared over the town, and its pilot, Lieutenant von Prondzynski, saw Dover Castle and the naval harbour some 5,000 feet below. He lifted his bomb with both hands, steered with his knees and heaved it over the side. It fell about 400 yards short of the castle, which was no mean achievement at a time when bomb-aiming instruments did not exist.

The tiny bomb landed in the garden next to St James's Rectory and left a crater four or five feet deep. It broke some of the rectory windows and knocked the gardener, Mr James Banks, out of the tree he was pruning. Nobody was killed, but the first bomb on British soil had fallen on Dover.

Much worse followed, and for civilians the raids became the defining experience of Dover in the First World War. By the end of the war 184 bombs dropped from enemy aircraft and 23 shells fired by enemy ships had fallen on the town. There were 113 air raids in all, and 23 people were killed and 71 injured. Families took shelter where they could, including the vaults under the Phoenix Brewery. The map of where the bombs and shells fell shows how widely the damage was spread across the town.

The war changed everyday life in quieter ways too. Dover's trams ran short of materials and spare parts, evening services were cut back during the air raids so that every car was back in its depot by 10 p.m., and women were employed on the trams for the first time, as conductors and, by the end of the war, as drivers. The worst accident in the tramway's history happened in wartime as well. On 19 August 1917 a car bound for River ran away down Crabble Road and overturned, killing eleven people; the enquiry found the tram overcrowded and its driver inexperienced. It had nothing to do with the enemy, and yet it is hard to separate from the strain the war put on the town.

Remembering 1914 to 1918: a guide to Dover's memorials

The story of Dover in the First World War did not end with the Armistice. On 10 November 1920 the destroyer HMS Verdun brought the body of the Unknown Warrior from Boulogne, escorted by six destroyers. People lined the cliffs to watch, and at the Admiralty Pier the coffin was carried to a special train for London, where it was buried in Westminster Abbey the next day.

The Navy did not stay long after the war. The Admiralty had learnt that large warships at Dover were very vulnerable to air attack, and in 1919 it decided to give up Dover as a naval port, keeping only a few installations at the Camber. Ferry services to Ostend, Boulogne and Calais restarted between 1919 and 1920 as the minefields were cleared.

For anyone visiting the town with this period in mind, a short guide to the main sites:

• The Dover Patrol Memorial at Leathercote Point, St Margaret's, designed by Sir Aston Webb and unveiled by the Prince of Wales on 27 July 1921. Matching obelisks stand at Cap Blanc Nez in France and in New York Harbour. A Book of Remembrance with the names of nearly 2,000 men of the Dover Patrol is kept in St Margaret's church.
• The town war memorial by the Dover-born sculptor Reginald Goulden, a bronze figure of Youth reaching for a fiery cross, unveiled by Vice-Admiral Sir Roger Keyes on 5 November 1924 in front of Maison Dieu House.
• The Zeebrugge Bell on the Old Town Hall, rung each St George's Day.
• The war memorial of the South Eastern and Chatham Railway at the old Marine Station, placed there rather than at a London terminus because of the part the station played in wartime transport.
• St James' Cemetery, where Keyes lies among the Zeebrugge dead.

Most of these places can be seen in a single day on foot and by a short drive along the cliffs to St Margaret's. They make a useful companion to the written record of Dover WW1 life, which includes two first-hand accounts from the period itself: Stanley Coxon's Dover during the dark days, published in 1919, and Mabel Rudkin's Inside Dover 1914-1918: a woman's impressions, published in 1933.

A generation later the harbour, the cliffs and the castle were at war again, this time under German guns that could reach the town from France. That story is told in Dover in the Second World War.