Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A fine Great War patrol service D.S.M. group of six awarded to Stoker Petty Officer W. Browns, Royal Navy: his ship, the sloop Cyclamen, won the dubious distinction of being the only 1914-18 warship to sink both an enemy submarine and an Allied one - the former by ‘explosive paravanes’ and the latter by ramming

Distinguished Service Medal, G.V.R. (290220 W. Browns, Sto. P.O., H.M.S. Cyclamen, Patrol Service, 1915/6); China 1900, no clasp (Sto., H.M.S. Arethusa); 1914-15 Star (290220 S.P.O., R.N.); British War and Victory Medals (290220 S.P.O., R.N.); Royal Navy L.S. & G.C., G.V.R., 2nd issue, fixed suspension (290220 Sto. P.O., H.M.S. Pembroke), generally extremely fine (6) £1000-1200

D.S.M. London Gazette 22 May 1917:

‘In recognition of services in the Destroyer Patrol Flotillas, Armed Boarding Steamers, &c., during the period which ended on 30 September 1916.’

William Browns was born at Trench, Shropshire in May 1874 and entered the Royal Navy as a Stoker 2nd Class in October 1898. Advanced to Stoker during his time aboard H.M.S. Arethusa, when he served off China in the Boxer Rebellion, Browns had attained the rate of Stoker Petty Officer by the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. From that date until November 1915 he served aboard the destroyer Mallard and, after a period in Pembroke II, he joined, in April 1916, the sloop Cyclamen, aboard which ship he served for the remainder of the War.

Browns was therefore present when Cyclamen rammed and sunk the Italian submarine Gugliemotti east off Corsica on the night of 10 March 1917, an incident that prompted her red-faced captain, Lieutenant-Commander G. F. L. L. Page, R.N., to send one of the war’s classic signals: ‘Have rammed and sunk enemy submarine. Survivors appear to speak Italian’. In fairness to Page, because of a breakdown in Allied communications, he was never alerted to the Italian submarine’s presence, but rather to that of German submarines, and, in his capacity as a convoy escort officer, he took no chances. Certainly Their Lordships appear to have agreed with his snap decision to “ask questions later’” and by the war’s end he held the D.S.O. and Bar.

Fortuitously, Cyclamen’s next victim was indeed an enemy submarine, the UB-69, which she sunk off Cape Bon on 8 January 1918, by means of deploying her ‘explosive paravanes’ (see below). Such was the force of the explosion that Cyclamen’s crew thought they had detonated armaments aboard the enemy submarine - 30 seconds later the UB-69’s bow rose above the surface at a perpendicular angle and then sank. There were no survivors.

N.B. Explosive paravanes were one of the final developments of towed explosive sweeps the British used in the Great War but, as it transpired, the Cyclamen was the only ship to deploy them with success. A hydrodynamic device that was fully controllable from the surface, the paravane was towed behind the attacking ship and detonated on contact. Destroyers and the like normally used two such devices, one off to each quarter, as was the case when Cyclamen sunk the UB-69.