The City of Bremen was built at Blyth in 1899 and was 234' long and registered at 1,258 tons, while en route from Port Talbot, Wales to Bordeaux, France with a load of coal she was torpedoed without warning some 20 miles from Wolf Rock in the English Channel on Apr. 4, 1915.

Thirteen men made it into one lifeboat, but four men lost their lives in the sinking, the survivors were picked up by the barkentine Fanny, a Liverpool registered ship. The man who sank her, Kapitänleutnant Rudolf Schneider lost his life on Oct. 13, 1917 when his U-87 was sunk by British warships in the Irish Sea, none of the other forty-three crewmen survived either.