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The hand-thrown Lance bomb.

At the beginning of World War I, the Royal Navy had no effective means of detecting a submerged submarine and could only rely on physically sighting the periscope or its wake – and then firing on the periscope with their guns. Early anti-submarine weapons were rudimentary, like the hand-thrown Lance bomb, essentially a grenade on a stick that was hurled down by hand when the vessel was physically above or beside the submarine.

In the run-up to World War I, Britain had feared that foreign authorities might not allow its merchant ships to enter port if they were armed. But as the German submarine threat began to materialise, Britain began to arm its merchant ships with a single stern gun, equivalent to what a submarine might carry as a deck gun. Civilian captains were encouraged to use their greater speed to flee a surfaced submarine and shoot back from their more stable gun platform.

The first British merchant ship lost to a German submarine was the 866-ton British steamer SS Glitra, which was stopped by U 17 on 20 October 1914. In accordance with international maritime law, her crew were given time to launch their lifeboats and abandon ship before she was sunk. This pattern of giving crews time to abandon ship would prevail until the beginning of the following year.