By This is the 105mm naval gun from the foredeck of Germany’s WW1 torpedo destroyer SMS B.98
SMS B.98 was the lead ship of Commander Heinrich Schuur’s 2nd Torpedo Boat Flotilla, which part of the scouting force at the 1916 Battle of Jutland. During the battle, she was hit by a shell which killed two men and wounded eleven, but she survived the battle. Later in the war a Russian mine blew part of her bow off, but again, she survived. At the end of the war, when the German fleet was interned in Scapa Flow (Orkney), she served as a mail ship, bringing letters and parcels to the German ships.
However, she didn’t survive that. She ran aground in the Bay of Lopness in Sanday, where she was eventually scrapped, but not before her gun was salvaged and put on display. There it remained for almost 100 years until its care was taken over by the Scapa Flow Museum, who promptly loaned it to the Museum of the Royal Navy* in Portsmouth for their Battle of Jutland 100th Anniversary exhibition in 2016.
The deal was that before returning it, the team at Explosion!, the NMRN’s ordnance museum at Priddy’s Hard on the Gosport side of Portsmouth harbour, would clean it up. They sanded it down, sealed various holes where moisture could get in, and repainted it in the original German Navy black.
As it happened, the Jutland Exhibition was extended, which is how I came to photograph it in Portsmouth in Jan 2019.
It was sent back to Orkney for the opening of the new Scapa Flow Museum in 2023, which is where you can see it now.
* Now called Royal Navy Museums
