Current Information:

Age-27

10, Lee Street, Plumstead

Royal Naval monitor vessels were relatively small warships but equipped with very large ,14-15 inch, guns and used primarily for coastal bombardment. One area in particular where they were put to use was the eastern Mediterranean both during the Gallipoli campaign and then in support of the fighting in Palestine.

HMS Raglan was one of these monitor ships and had been in the Mediterranean since 1915, part of the Aegean Squadron, based at Imbros. On 20th January, 1918, while the battleships of the squadron were elsewhere, a Turkish battle fleet  entered the harbour and in the ensuing Battle of Imbros, HMS Raglan was sunk with the loss of 127 lives, one of whom was Sidney Kingsland. Two of the Turkish ships involved in this action were the battlecruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim and the light cruiser Midilli which, at the beginning of the war had been the German ships Goeben and Breslau and had made the headlines in 1914 in their dash across the Mediterranean to join the then neutral Turkish fleet. Neither of these two vessels survived the Battle of Imbros. They ran into a minefield when withdrawing and the Midilli sank while the Yavuz Sultan Selim was badly damaged and could not be used again.