SS Shenandoah (1916)

The SS Shenandoah was a British steel screw cargo steamer built in 1893 for the Chesapeake and Ohio Steamship Co. Ltd of Liverpool. She was a sizeable working freighter of 3,886 gross tons, carrying general cargo across the Atlantic rather than anything glamorous, because history likes to hide the interesting wrecks under the label “general cargo”. On her last voyage she was bound from St John, New Brunswick, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, to London, bringing wartime supplies into one of the busiest and most dangerous approaches in Britain.

On 14 April 1916, Shenandoah struck a mine laid by the German minelaying submarine UC-6, commanded by Matthias Graf von Schmettow, and sank about 1.5 nautical miles west of Folkestone Gate. Historic England records two lives lost, with the probable wreck remains lying south of Folkestone in the Dover Strait area. For divers, this is a proper First World War Channel wreck: Atlantic trade, German mine warfare, wartime cargo, and a steel steamer lost almost within sight of home. Not flashy. Better than flashy. It has that quiet, heavy, “something happened here” feel that makes a wreck worth diving.