The HMS Prince George, stranded off the North Holland coast in 1921, reappears on the beach of Camperduin

The sea takes and the sea sometimes gives back. The British battleship HMS Prince George, which beached near Camperduin in North Holland in 1921 and has since disappeared under the sand, is now emerging again.

“Something has washed up on the beach of Camperduin, and if we could just drive there and clean it up,” Marco Snijders, assistant beach explorer in Egmond, was told. he told news site NH Nieuws. But the enormous pieces of rusting iron that stuck out of the sand there had not washed up but had been there for more than a century.

It was her very last trip. Even a warship named after the man who would come to the British throne as George V in 1910 remains a ‘she’. After serving the Royal Navy for 25 years, in war and peace, and in more and less glorious roles, she was withdrawn from service in 1920 for scrapping.

The British wrecker sold her to a scrapyard in Germany in 1921. On the way there, towed by a tugboat, she ran aground near Camperduin in a storm on December 28, 1921. That was the southernmost point of the Hondsbossche Zeewering, which, despite the triple dike, was still one of the weakest links in the coastal defense. After the stranded ship had been stripped of everything valuable and movable, it was decided to leave her there to serve as a breakwater.

Coastal reinforcement

Until 2014, remains could still be seen, until they disappeared under the sand during the major coastal reinforcement operation by Rijkswaterstaat and the construction of a new dune area. The only sign that the Prince George was there was a dotted circle on the nautical chart near the beach, and the letters ‘Wk’, the international symbol for ‘wreck’.

Recently, a lot of sand has been washed away along the coast by storms. According to assistant beach explorer Snijders, the pieces of iron now pose a danger. For tourists, but also for the military police who sometimes drive there at night to see if drugs have washed up, but who do not know the beach well. According to Snijders, it is better to salvage the wreck in its entirety now.

The Prince George, with a length of 128 meterswas launched in 1895. The ship was powered by two steam engines, fueled by coal, and had two batteries of double-barreled cannons as main armament – ​​never call naval guns ‘cannon’nen‘ – with a caliber of 12 inches (over 30 centimeters). Before and during the First World War, the ship was part of various British fleets for escort duties in the Channel, the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean.

During an interim modernization in 1909, the ship was equipped with radio. Even during the war, ships like the Prince George proved to be outdated and then her days were numbered. In her old age she functioned in various places as a ‘depot ship’, a floating warehouse.

She was lucky a few times. In May 1916, during a bombardment of Turkish forts, she was hit by a Turkish shell below the waterline and had to be repaired in Malta. She was then hit by a torpedo, which did not explode. But in 1921 her luck ran out.

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