ABLE SEAMAN DOUGLAS ARTHUR LEE
ROYAL NAVY
31ST MAY 1916 AGE 18
BURIED: TONSBERG OLD CEMETERY, NORWAY
Soon after 11.30 pm on the night of 31 May 1916, HMS Black Prince, which had become separated from the main British fleet, came into contact with the German battleship Thuringen. Thuringen fixed Black Prince in its searchlights and opened fire at close range. According to German records, up to five other German ships joined in, scoring twelve hits. Within fifteen minutes of first contact, Black Prince exploded and sank with the loss of the entire ship's company of 858 men.
Eighteen-year-old Lee's mother chose his inscription: "A good life bravely ended". Frankly it's too horrible to think of how Douglas Lee's life might have ended: isolated, fixed in the enemy's searchlights, fired on at close range, who knows whether he was killed outright or trapped below deck, wounded, burnt, suffocated or drowned in the open sea. Just because a ship explodes does not mean that all life is immediately extinguished, the suffering is terrible.
All we do know is that Lee's was one of the very few bodies from the Battle of Jutland to have been recovered and identified. He is buried in the Norwegian town of Tonsberg along with twenty-one other Jutland casualties, their bodies recovered by a Norwegian submarine commander. Three of the bodies came from HMS Black Prince, two from HMS Ardent, two from HMS Fortune and one from HMS Turbulent.
Douglas Arthur Lee was the child of both his parents' second marriages. His mother's first husband, Ernest William Rathke, had been a German waiter working in Harrogate, and in the 1911 census Lee's half-brother, William Ernest Rathke, entered his nationality as German.
