SS Unity (1918)

The SS Unity was a British steam cargo vessel built in 1902 by Murdoch & Murray of Port Glasgow for the Co-operative Wholesale Society. She later passed to the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Company and worked the Goole to Hamburg trade before wartime service pulled her into cross-Channel supply work. She was a compact steamer of 1,091 gross tons, measuring about 75.2 metres long, 11.2 metres in beam, and 4.6 metres deep. Practical, purposeful and unromantic, which is exactly the sort of ship history later turns into a cracking dive.

On 2 May 1918, Unity was sailing from Newhaven to Calais with a cargo of ordnance when she was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine UB-57, commanded by Johannes Lohs, around 9 nautical miles south-east of Folkestone. Twelve crewmen were lost, although her captain survived. For divers, Unity has all the ingredients of a proper Dover Strait war wreck: a working railway steamer, a dangerous military cargo, a U-boat attack in the final months of the First World War, and a wreck lying in the Channel where trade, war and tide all met in the usual civilised manner, by breaking steel.