HMHS Britannic

Britannic was the last of the three Olympic-class liners conceived in 1907 by White Star's J. Bruce Ismay and Lord Pirrie of Harland & Wolff — a trio meant to answer Cunard's Lusitania and Mauretania not with speed but with size, luxury and safety. Her keel was laid at Belfast on 30 November 1911, on the same gantry slip that had held Olympic, a reuse that saved the yard the cost of clearing a third berth. She was to be the most sumptuous of the three: individual bathrooms in almost every first-class cabin would have been a first on an ocean liner, and a German-built Welte philharmonic organ was to stand by the Grand Staircase.

Then Titanic went down, and Britannic was redesigned on the stocks. Her beam was widened to 94 feet to allow a double hull along the engine and boiler rooms; six of the fifteen watertight bulkheads were carried up to B Deck; and the central compartments were strengthened so she could float with six flooded, where Titanic could survive only four. The wider hull demanded more power, so an 18,000-horsepower turbine replaced the 16,000-horsepower unit of her sisters, driving the central four-bladed propeller from steam exhausted by two reciprocating engines.

The most visible change was the lifeboats. Huge crane-like gantry davits, each electrically powered and able to launch six boats, were designed to reach across the ship so that a heavy list could not strand the boats on the high side. Only five of the eight planned sets were fitted before she went to war, the balance made up with manual Welin davits, but she carried 48 boats — capacity for at least 3,600 people against a maximum complement of 3,309. Delayed by all these changes, she was not launched until 26 February 1914.

War came in August 1914 before Britannic could enter the Southampton–New York service. Admiralty contracts took priority for raw materials, civilian work slowed, and she lay at Belfast while the Gallipoli campaign turned the Eastern Mediterranean into a casualty-clearing problem. Requisitioned on 13 November 1915, she was repainted white with a horizontal green stripe and large red crosses and commissioned as HMHS Britannic under Captain Charles Alfred Bartlett. Inside, 3,309 beds went in; the first-class dining and reception rooms on D Deck became operating theatres, and B Deck cabins housed the doctors.

Declared fit for service at Liverpool on 12 December 1915 with a medical team of 101 nurses, 336 non-commissioned officers and 52 commissioned officers, plus a crew of 675, she sailed on 23 December for Mudros on Lemnos, coaling at Naples on the way. She worked the run alongside Mauretania, Aquitania and her own sister Olympic, and spent four weeks as a floating hospital off the Isle of Wight. Released from military service on 6 June 1916, she went back to Belfast to be converted for transatlantic work — the government paying White Star £75,000 — only to be recalled to the Mediterranean on 26 August.

Britannic left Southampton on 12 November 1916 on her sixth Mediterranean voyage, passed Gibraltar at midnight on the 15th, and was held at Naples by a storm before rounding Cape Matapan in the small hours of 21 November. There were 1,066 people aboard: 673 crew, 315 Royal Army Medical Corps, 77 nurses, and the captain. At 08:12, steaming at full speed into the Kea Channel, she struck a mine laid a month earlier by SM U-73 under Gustav Sieß. The explosion tore her starboard side between holds two and three and wrecked the boiler-man's tunnel forward.

Her post-Titanic subdivision should have saved her. The first six compartments could flood and leave her afloat; the crucial bulkhead between boiler rooms four and five was undamaged. But nurses had opened portholes along the front lower decks to ventilate the wards, against standing orders, and as the list grew those portholes went under. Water passed aft of the bulkhead, and with more than six compartments open to the sea she was lost. The blast had also snapped the aerial wires between her masts: she could transmit her SOS but could not hear HMS Scourge and HMS Heroic answering.

Bartlett turned towards Kea to beach her, steering with the engines after the explosion knocked out the steering gear. He had the boats prepared but not lowered; two launched without permission on the port side by Third Officer Francis Laws were drawn into the still-turning propellers and destroyed, killing 30 people — the entire death toll of the sinking. By 08:50 most of those aboard were away in 35 boats. At 09:00, told the flooding had reached D Deck, Bartlett stopped the engines and sounded two long blasts. Britannic capsized to starboard and went down at 09:07, her bow striking the seabed before her stern was clear of the water.

Rescue was swift where Titanic's had not been: the sea was 20 degrees Celsius, help arrived in under two hours, and Kea fishermen in their caïque reached the survivors first. Scourge took off 339 and Heroic 494, while some 150 reached Korissia, where Britannic's own doctors and nurses worked on a bare quayside, tearing aprons and lifebelts for dressings. Of 1,066 aboard, 1,036 lived. Among the survivors was stewardess Violet Jessop, who had been aboard Olympic when she was rammed and had come through the Titanic sinking too.

Britannic was the largest ship lost in the First World War and, at the time of her sinking, the largest hospital ship in the world and the largest vessel built in Britain. White Star was compensated under the Treaty of Versailles with the German liner Bismarck, which entered service as RMS Majestic. The organ she never received survived too: identified in 2007 by the signature 'Britanik' on its main parts, it stands playable in the Museum für Musikautomaten at Seewen in Switzerland.

The wreck lies in about 400 feet of water off Kea, found on 13 November 1975 by Jacques Cousteau, who dived her the following year and interviewed survivors on camera. She rests on her starboard side, relatively intact — the largest intact passenger ship on the seabed anywhere — with the mine damage hidden beneath her and the bow held to the hull by only a few pieces of C Deck. Robert Ballard surveyed her in 1995; a 2003 expedition located mine anchors off the wreck, confirming German records that a single mine sank her, the damage compounded by open portholes and watertight doors.

Simon Mills, the maritime historian who has written three books on the ship, bought the wreck in 1996 and has organised work there since, including the 2025 recovery of the lookout bell announced by the Greek culture ministry. The 30 dead are remembered on the Mikra Memorial at Thessaloniki and in London; research by Michail Michailakis and Mills identified one unmarked grave on Syros as Sergeant William Sharpe of the RAMC, and a new headstone was raised for him. The last survivor, George Perman — a 15-year-old Scout and the youngest person aboard — died in 2000.