Samuel Dresser Dicks: A Biography of a Jutland Casualty

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Stoker 1st Class Samuel Dresser Dicks, service number K17690, serving in H.M.S. Invincible, was killed in action on 31 May 1916 during the Battle of Jutland and is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial.

Family report, CWGC record and naval history sources

Early Life and Family

Samuel Dresser Dicks was born on 18 August 1892 in Richmond, Yorkshire, the son of Thomas and Sarah Jane Dicks.[file:264] He was baptised a week later, on 25 August 1892, at Kirkby Ravensworth, Yorkshire, confirming the family’s roots in the rural north of England.[file:264] In the 1901 census he was living at High Grange, also called Hind’s House, Melsonby, and by 1911 he was recorded in East Layton, Forcett with Carkin, as an eighteen-year-old single servant, indicating a working rural upbringing before he entered naval service.[file:264]

Samuel later moved south and became connected with Dover in Kent.[file:264] He married Nellie Rosina Culmer at St Barnabas, Dover, on 28 April 1915, shortly after the outbreak of war had transformed the lives of young working men and women across Britain.[file:264] The couple had no children, and the report records Nellie as his widow at the time of his death, living at 28 Mayfield Avenue, Buckland, Dover.[file:264]

Naval Service

Samuel served in the Royal Navy from 15 January 1913 until his death on 31 May 1916.[file:264] His rank was Stoker 1st Class, and his service number was K17690.[file:264] His service is linked in the report to both “Victory II” and H.M.S. Invincible, with Victory II functioning as a shore accounting base while Invincible was the operational warship on which he served at the time of his death.[file:264]

As a stoker 1st class, Samuel belonged to the engine-room branch of the Navy, whose men laboured below decks to keep a ship’s boilers fired and its machinery running.[web:259][web:269] This was exhausting and dangerous work, especially in a fast capital ship such as a battlecruiser, where sustained speed and rapid manoeuvre depended on the continuous effort of stokers and engine-room ratings.[web:269][web:259] His medal entitlement—the 1914–15 Star, Victory Medal, British War Medal and Memorial Death Plaque—reflects active wartime service and the formal recognition given to those who died during the conflict.[file:264]

Unit Context at the Time of Death

At the time of Samuel Dresser Dicks’s death, H.M.S. Invincible was serving with the Grand Fleet as flagship of the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron during the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916.[web:250][web:249] Jutland was the largest fleet action of the First World War and the principal clash between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet in the North Sea.[web:259] The battle involved enormous concentrations of men and ships, and it remains the defining naval engagement of the war.[web:258][web:259]

Naval history sources record that at about 6.34 pm on 31 May 1916, Invincible was struck by a shell that penetrated Q turret and caused a catastrophic magazine explosion.[web:250][web:259] The ship broke apart and sank rapidly, with only six survivors from a crew of more than 1,000.[web:250][web:266] Samuel was therefore among the vast majority of her company who were lost when the battlecruiser was destroyed in one of the most devastating single-ship losses of the battle.[web:249][web:250]

This is the essential military context for his death: Samuel was serving in a front-line capital ship at the centre of the greatest naval battle fought by the Royal Navy in the First World War.[web:258][web:259] The report’s phrase “Action against German Fleet. North Sea” refers directly to the Battle of Jutland and the destruction of H.M.S. Invincible in that action.[file:264][web:250] For family history purposes, this places his loss within a major national and imperial event rather than an isolated naval casualty.[web:258]

When H.M.S. Invincible exploded at Jutland, only six men survived, and over a thousand officers and ratings were lost with the ship.

Imperial War Museums community record and Royal Museums Greenwich article

Circumstances of Death

Samuel Dresser Dicks was killed in action on 31 May 1916 during action against the German Fleet in the North Sea.[file:264] The death notes in the family report record him as “Killed”, with the incident date of 31 May 1916, record number 6696/16, and duty location simply as “North Sea”.[file:264] His death was therefore one of the many immediate losses arising from the destruction of Invincible during the battle.[web:249][web:250]

The report also notes that his body was not recovered for burial, which was common in major naval losses at sea.[file:264] His widow, Nellie R. Dicks of Buckland, Dover, was the relative officially notified, a detail that anchors the vast tragedy of Jutland in one particular Kent household.[file:264] Like many naval wives and families, she was left with commemoration rather than a recoverable grave.[web:255]

Commemoration

Samuel is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial, on Panel 18, because his body was not recovered from the sea.[file:264] The Portsmouth Naval Memorial records the names of Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines of Portsmouth command who died at sea and have no known grave, including around 10,000 from the First World War.[web:255][web:268] For sailors lost in actions such as Jutland, the memorial served as the fixed place of remembrance that the sea itself could not provide.[web:255]

The report also includes his CWGC entry and Find-a-Grave memorial reference, preserving his name in both official and genealogical remembrance.[file:264] Within the family tree he is identified as the husband of a second cousin twice removed, demonstrating how military losses continue to be recovered through extended kinship research rather than only through naval archives.[file:264] His name also appears in casualty listings for H.M.S. Invincible, where the ship’s dead are remembered collectively as part of the Battle of Jutland.[web:249][web:257]

Legacy

Samuel Dresser Dicks’s story links rural Yorkshire, wartime Dover, and the Royal Navy at its moment of greatest trial in the First World War.[file:264] Born in the north, married in Kent, and commemorated at Portsmouth, his life illustrates the geographical reach of naval service and the way war bound together different regions of Britain.[file:264] His death aboard H.M.S. Invincible connects one family’s history to the most famous fleet action of the war at sea.[web:258][web:259]

Sources and Further Reading

• Compiled family report: Individual Report for Samuel Dresser Dicks.[file:264]
• Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Samuel Dresser Dicks.[file:264]
• Naval-History.net: H.M.S. Invincible casualty lists, Battle of Jutland 1916.[web:249]
• Imperial War Museums: H.M.S. Invincible at the Battle of Jutland.[web:250]
• The National Archives: Jutland – Death at sea.[web:259]
• Royal Museums Greenwich: Surviving Jutland and the loss of H.M.S. Invincible.[web:266]
• UK Government: Nation marks 100 years since great naval battle.[web:258]
• Portsmouth Naval Memorial.[web:255]