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Researchers are confident they have identified the wreck site of HMS Stephen Furness, sunk in 1917 along with over 100 of her crew, after over a century at the bottom of the Irish Sea thanks to the Towards a National Collection project which combines expertise from 25 organisations from across the UK led by .

, an £18.9m investment from the UKRI (AHRC) has been set up to connect separate collections, dissolving barriers and unifying data in a digital ‘hyper network’ across the UK’s museums, galleries, libraries and archives.

Its Unpath’d Waters project adopted new approaches to investigate shipwreck sites and a team from ����ɫ��'s School of Ocean Sciences believe they have finally identified the possible remains of HMS Stephen Furness, missing since December 1917 after being torpedoed with the loss of over 100 lives. This discovery has only been made possible by combining existing documentary resources with new scientific datasets identified and accessed by project researchers thanks to innovative digital techniques.

The team analysed high-resolution multibeam sonar data collected by ����ɫ��’s research vessel Prince Madog to examine the dimensions of all known wreck sites in the region. Combining this information with other resources, including an account of an attack position contained in a U-boat Kriegstagebuch (war diary), meant that identifying the likely resting place of HMS Stephen Furness and several other vessels became a comparatively straightforward exercise, one that could easily be replicated elsewhere.

The wreck in question lies at a depth of ninety meters, approximately ten miles east of the entrance to Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland and was previously considered to be the remains of a Swedish cargo vessel, the SS Maja, torpedoed with the loss of nine lives, exactly a month before the war ended. The research team also believe that they have located the SS Maja’s remains lying a few miles further south. Piecing together all the evidence and information in the various collections has allowed the research team to not only identify the likely resting place of the ship following the attack but also reconstruct some tragic aspects of what followed. The Unpath’d Waters project team have notified relevant authorities of the potential discovery to ensure the wreck is protected.

On the afternoon of December 13th, 1917, HMS Stephen Furness was in the northern Irish Sea heading for repairs in Liverpool, when it was struck by a single torpedo fired from UB-64, which had been patiently stalking the Irish Sea for an opportunity such as this for several days. The impact from the torpedo resulted in a boiler explosion causing the 88m long vessel to sink within three minutes. Only twelve sailors from a crew of over one hundred survived. Since that fateful day, until now, the location of the attack and final resting place of HMS Stephen Furness has remained a mystery.

When the team took a closer look at the events that unfolded that day and its aftermath, other unexpected outcomes began to emerge. Sadly, about a month after the sinking, four of the crew who lost their lives during the attack were washed up along the coast of North Wales almost a hundred miles to the south. To better understand how this happened and examine what might happen in other similar scenarios, the team successfully incorporated archived Meteorological Office wind data from the time of the sinking into a tidal model to observe the pathways and timing floating objects would have followed in the Irish Sea given the conditions at the time. The results demonstrated the value and potential that meteorological records and hindcast models may have for identifying more precise locations for missing vessels when the only positional information available is survivors’ and rescue accounts, often provided after being adrift for many hours.

New information from this discovery will enable researchers to explore beyond simple narratives of blockade and U-Boat war, and engage directly with the people involved, the lives they led, and the sacrifices they made. The ship was a converted merchant steamer that may have been used as part of the distant blockade in the Northern North Sea. This blockade was a key component of the Royal Navy’s strategy to curtail German activity and had a significant impact on supplies of food and other essentials in Germany. In the blockade, ships like HMS Stephen Furness were part of day-to-day naval activity that contributed significantly to the direct denial of sea space to German shipping.