HMS Hermes

Last year we posted about warships from World War II that had vanished after illegal scrappers literally cut them up and hauled the steel away. Here is a news item on theft on a different scale and with a better outcome. Recently two divers, Nigel Ingram, 57, and John Blight, 58, were found guilty of looting items from the World War I wreck of the HMS Hermes in the English Channel. The two divers stole more than 100 items,  including a torpedo hatch, launch panels, and chinaware. The total value of items stolen from the wreck was reported to be more than £150,000.

The Daily Mirror reports that the two men were apprehended while diving on the wreck of HMS Hermes by French maritime officers on September 30, 2014.  Ingram was subsequently jailed for four years and Blight for three-and-a-half years.

HMS Hermes was a Highflyer-class protected cruiser commissioned by the Royal Navy in 1899.  The ship was modified in 1913 as the first experimental seaplane carrier in the Royal Navy. During World War I, she served as an aircraft ferry and depot ship for the Royal Naval Air Service, until she was torpedoed by a German submarine, near the Straits of Dover in October 1914, with the loss of 44 lives.