In 1900 the Royal Navy ordered five submarines from Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering of Barrow-in-Furness, designed by Electric Boat Company. The following year the first submarine, Holland 1, was launched, and the navy recruited the first three officers for the Submarine Service, Lieutenants Stephen Bowle-Evans (N) and Forster Delafield Arnold-Forster (T), under Reginald Bacon as Inspecting Captain of Submarines, on the 20th of August 1901. They were shortly thereafter joined by Lieutenant John Alfred Moreton in early October 1901. At the beginning of World War I it consisted of 168 officers, 1,250 ratings, and 62 submarines.[4] During the war it was awarded five of the Royal Navy's 14 Victoria Crosses of the war, the first was to Lieutenant Norman Holbrook, commanding officer of B11, for passing through minefields to sink the Ottoman warship Mesudiye. Late in the war, the Royal Navy introduced the large K-class submarines. In order to be fast enough to operate alongside the battlefleet, they used steam propulsion while surfaced. En route to a training exercise with the fleet in a disaster, afterwards nicknamed "the battle of May Island", two K-class submarines were sunk, with death of most of their crew, and three more and a light cruiser damaged.

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