A pig's tale: the porker that jumped ship in the first world war | Henry Nicholls

Off By Sharon Black

Name: Tirpitz
Species: Pig (Sus scrofa domestica)
Dates: 1915-1919
Claim to fame: Survived the sinking of a German cruiser and defected to the British Navy
Go visit: The Imperial War Museum, London

When the British guns began to fire, the Germans knew the game was up. As SMS Dresden took on water, its crew jumped ship. One of the last to abandon the vessel was a colossal pig, launching herself into the water from the gunwale.

Three months earlier, the Dresden had been the only German cruiser to escape the Battle of the Falklands. Fleeing south, round Cape Horn and into the Pacific, the Dresden made it to Robinson Crusoe Island in the San Fernandez archipelago off Chile. But it was here that the British vessels HMS Glasgow and HMS Kent caught up with her on 14 March 1915. Forced into unconditional surrender, the Germans scuttled their own ship to avoid its capture by the allies.

While some British seamen went ashore to round up the shipwrecked survivors, others clambered into tenders to recover what booty they could from the water. A medical officer on board HMS Kent recalled the exercise with glee: “We thoroughly enjoyed our tub-hunting expedition,” he wrote. Among other things, they salvaged a dinghy, oars, a boathook, buoys, six chairs, hammocks, brooms, fenders and even “a cask of red wine undamaged by its immersion in the sea”.

Ratings on HMS Glasgow recovered the pig which, once winched on deck, would become prized as the ship’s living, live-in mascot. In spite of its gender, the men of HMS Glasgow took delight in naming her after the head of the German navy Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and facetiously awarded her the German military decoration, the Iron Cross, for staying with her ship to the last.

For a time, Tirpitz lived a charmed life on board before taking up residence at the Royal Navy’s training facility on Whale Island in Portsmouth Harbour in 1916. She was in good company: there were chickens, ducks, geese, even a “wallaby paddock”. Unfortunately Tirpitz became a nuisance. When she broke down the chicken runs to raid their food, radical action was required. The Whale Island authorities bundled Tirpitz into a van – “it took 10 men” – and returned the wayward pig to the custody of Captain John Luce, former commander of HMS Glasgow and now commodore of the Royal Naval Air Service Training Establishment at Cranwell in Lincolnshire (which would become RAF Cranwell upon the foundation of the Royal Air Force in 1918).

It is difficult to be sure what Luce felt about this reunion, but a short article in The Times in late 1917 gives a clue. “On the instruction of Commodore Luce,” it reported, “the animal will be offered for sale for the benefit of the British Red Cross.” Tirpitz was to be sold along with a couple of properties on the estate of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Charles Chetwynd-Talbot. In the days before the charity auction, …read more