HMS Glatton and her sister ship HMS Gordon were well-armed steam-powered vessels designed to serve as coastal bombardment monitor ships. They were built by Armstrong’s Elswick yard and equipped with various guns and torpedo tubes. Their main guns could fire two shells per minute to a range of 39,000 yards. 

HMS Glatton served with the Royal Navy for only five days. She joined the Dover Patrol on September 11th 1918 and lay in harbour ready to depart for the Belgian coast. Admiral Keyes and the ship’s commanding officer, Commander Diggle, were walking on the cliffs above the harbour when Glatton suddenly, and without warning, experienced an explosion and began burning furiously. Salvage tugs tried but failed to control the fire. More importantly, the ship in the next berth was a fully-loaded ammunition ship: if Glatton blew up completely, the ammo ship would explode also, destroying the city of Dover and causing thousands of civilian casualties. 

Admiral Keyes ordered that the crew should be taken off, and after a couple of attempts Glatton was successfully torpedoed to make her sink before she could explode further. He boarded the destroyer HMS Myngs to see to it personally. 

An inquiry was immediately started, as the British were alarmed by her loss: several ships had exploded due to poor cordite during the war, but the Royal Navy was certain they had corrected the problem. 

It was established that the original explosion came from the midships 6-inch magazines, and not from the main gun cordite. The 6-inch magazines were separated from the boiler spaces just forward of them by a bulkhead, and it was thought that the ship’s stokers had piled red-hot cinders from the fireboxes against this bulkhead. However, investigation showed that the stokers actually piled their cinders against the outer bulkhead separating the boiler room from the bulge, letting them cool before sending them up the ejector, and not against the magazine bulkhead. 

Investigation into the construction showed that the outer bulkhead was lined with cork to help retard flooding from the splinters created by a torpedo explosion against the bulge. The cork was thought to have slowly overheated and caught on fire, and the fire travelled down the cork until it overheated the outer bulkhead of the magazine, causing the explosion. This seemed a bit far-fetched, as the smouldering cork would have needed a lot of time to overheat the magazine enough to cause an explosion, and there was no evidence of a smouldering fire before the explosion. 

Careful examination of the sister ship Gordon revealed the problem: in places the cork was missing, leaving air spaces that had been plugged with rolled-up newspaper by the same shipyard workers who had originally built the Glatton. In addition, rivets along the bulkheads were missing, leaving holes. Hot cinders had evidently ignited the paper, and air drawn through the rivet holes had fanned the flames. The flames found an opening into the 6-inch magazine and an explosion resulted. There was no faulty cordite, and the poor boiler room procedures would not have caused the loss of the ship had they not been combined with poor quality control at the shipyard. As construction had been rushed due to the war, the greatly-expanded workforce at the yard contained many inexperienced workers; also, the ship had been inspected and accepted for service, and the stokers ought not to have piled ashes against even the outer bulkhead. Given these facts, no litigation was brought against the shipyard. 

The wreck remained on the floor of Dover harbor until 1926, when it was raised. Her hull was placed in a deep gully dug next to the Western Pier of the Eastern dock. A hole was cut in her bottom and the bodies of those who had died on her were removed for burial. Parts of the Glatton still remain today beneath the car ferry terminal.