The Royal British Legion
Staple Branch
Charity Number 219279
Hubert William Amos
Died on 17th June 1917 Aged 19
RN HMS Tartar
Hubert Amos was born on the 2nd of October 1898 in Shatterling, Staple. His father, William, describes himself as a Market Gardener and an Employer. His mother, Edith, was a Holness and they lived next door to his cousin Cecil (also a Lost Son of Staple) who was eight years older. Hubert was the eldest son. He had two elder sisters, two younger brothers and a baby sister. His eldest sister, Dorothy, died when she was 9 and Hubert was 7.
I imagine they were all very close to their cousins next door after all, they had grown up with them and must have felt very keenly the death of Cecil on 1st September 1915.
We don’t know exactly when Hubert joined up but he wasn’t of legal age until October 1916. He joined the Royal Navy and was assigned to HMS Tartar. She was a Tribal Class Destroyer launched in 1907 and, during World War 1 she served in the North Sea and the English Channel with the 6th Destroyer Flotilla part of the famous ‘Dover Patrol’.
The Dover Patrol, from its early beginnings as a modest and poorly equipped command, became one of the most important Royal Navy Commands of the (First World) War. The Dover Patrol assembled cruisers, monitors, destroyers, armed trawlers and drifters, paddle mine-sweepers, armed yachts, motor launches and coastal motor boats, submarines, seaplanes, aeroplanes and airships! With all these varied resources it performed several duties simultaneously in the Southern North Sea and the Dover Straits: carrying out anti-submarine patrols; escorting merchantmen, hospital and troop ships; laying sea mines and even constructing mine barrages; sweeping up German mines; bombarding German military positions on the Belgian coast; and sinking the ever present U- boats.
HMS Tartar Built 1907
HMS Tartar, with Able Seaman Amos aboard, was on service off the coast of France on 17th June 1917, when she was hit by U-boat U65, commanded by Otto Steinbrinck, a highly decorated German Naval Officer who would sink 205 allied ships during the First World War.
HMS Tartar was damaged but not sunk and managed to limp into harbour for repairs. She would live to fight another day. 45 of her crew did not. Among them Hubert Amos. His body was recovered and he is buried in Boulogne Eastern Cemetery.
After the war a fund was set up to erect a memorial to the Dover Patrol. In July 1921 the memorial at Leatercote Point near St. Margaret’s Bay was unveiled. Similar memorial obelisks stand at Cap Blanc Nez on the French coast and New York harbour.
Boulogne Eastern Cemetery
U-boat U65 and Otto Steinbrinck
Dover Patrol Memorial at Leatercote Point