HMS Princess Irene exploded off Sheerness on 27 May 1915 while being loaded with mines. The ship was destroyed and sank. The disaster killed 352 people.

Princess Irene had been a Canadian Pacific passenger liner before the Admiralty took her into service during the First World War. She was being used as an auxiliary minelayer. That placed her inside the practical work of naval war: ships, mines, dockyards, crews and men handling dangerous material close to shore.

The explosion was not a battle loss. No enemy ship had found her. She was in British waters, being prepared for service, when the mines on board detonated. Men involved in the naval and dockyard effort were killed before the ship could do the work for which she had been fitted.

Sheerness and the Medway were part of the system that kept Britain’s war at sea going. Much of that work was practical and repetitive: loading, repairing, converting, supplying and preparing ships. It did not have the public shape of a fleet action, but it carried risk.

The scale of the loss made Princess Irene one of the major British naval disasters of the war, far from combat. It also showed how much danger sat behind the fighting at sea. Mines had to be made, moved and loaded. Ships had to be adapted and armed. The war depended on that work.

On 27 May 1915, that work killed hundreds of men from Sheerness. HMS Princess Irene shows that wartime losses did not only come from enemy fire. Some came from the labour needed to send ships and weapons to sea.