British Warships, 1860–1906: A Photographic Record

weekends.

Introduction

The United Kingdom’s National Archives, housed at Kew in London, contain a collection of photographs of Royal Navy warships dating from approximately 1860 to the end of the Second World War that were formerly held by the Naval Construction Department (NCD). Although their subjects will be familiar, these photographs do not appear to have been much used by naval historians despite the fact that they document a fascinating period of warship development. This book is structured around a selection from these photographs that cover the period from Warrior in 1860 to Dreadnought of 1906.

The photographs themselves date largely from the 1880s onwards, with a few notable exceptions, and this obviously affects the ships that are depicted. Fortunately, the RN of the mid and late nineteenth century kept older ships in service perhaps longer than was strictly warranted: while this may have boosted the number of ships nominally available for service even if they were of questionable fighting value, it does mean that ships from the 1860s and 1870s survived long enough to be photographed for the collection now housed at Kew.

Ships lost before the 1880s, for example the masted turret battleship Captain, are obviously not part of the archive, but perhaps more surprising is the lack of photographs of vessels that at the time enjoyed a high profile and have continued to be well known to this day–for example, Polyphemus is conspicuous by her absence. Because of these omissions, the photographs must be supported by text if the present book is to describe adequately the story of British warship development in the period. Fortunately, there is a great deal of pre-existing scholarship on Victorian warship development on which to draw. Oscar Parkes’ British Battleships is rightly considered to be one of the seminal works in the area, while D.K. Brown’s books are perhaps unmatched in terms of both their technical content and the author’s own experience of the warship design process. At the same time, authors like John Beeler, Paul Kennedy and Andrew Lambert (under whom I was fortunate enough to study for part of my undergraduate degree) have done so much to advance our knowledge of the strategic context that surrounded the development of the warships of the period. For the details of the careers of the ships featured here in photographs, I have drawn heavily from the relevant editions of Conway’s All The World’s Fighting Ships (namely 1860–1905 and 1906–1921).

Beyond the value of these photographs as historical records, there remains the fact that, for some of us at least, simply looking at pictures of old warships holds a pleasure all of its own. Naval history has been a long-term interest of mine, and when I was offered the opportunity to write this book, I was quick to accept as I could not resist the chance to view an archive full of relatively unseen pictures of some of the most interesting RN warships of the past two hundred years. I am in full agreement with Lt Cdr Richard Barker RNR, who wrote in his foreword to Wilfrid Pym Trotter’s 1975 book, The Royal Navy in Old Photographs:

For no reason I could possibly explain, I like to know that the HMS Donegal of the 1850s had a funnel between the foremast and mainmast, while HMS Sans Pareil had one between the mainmast and mizzen; that in 1867, HMS Hector was rearmed with two eight-inch and sixteen seven-inch muzzle-loading rifled guns; and that HMS Inflexible, launched in 1881, was the first ironclad to be lit by electricity and had armour twenty-four inches thick.

On reading this passage, it was reassuring to know that I wasn’t alone!

Chapter 1

The Royal Navy 1815–60

The British Empire of the nineteenth century was based on maritime trade and communications. The key to Britain’s position was control of the sea, for it was on this medium that her trade was carried and via which her possessions could be attacked. From this maritime basis of power flowed a number of vital interests that held true throughout the period. Firstly, Britain was concerned with the maintenance of naval supremacy to ensure the safety of her territorial possessions, especially the British Isles themselves. Secondly, it was seen as vital to protect and promote British trade–retaining her existing commerce and expanding into new areas was highly important. Finally, successive governments strove to maintain an international situation that was conducive to the profitable conduct of trade. This meant avoiding another general Continental war in which European markets would become closed to British merchants. Lord Palmerston identified this in 1832 when, as Foreign Secretary, he said that a key British interest was ‘the maintenance of general peace throughout Europe’.¹ British trade with the Continent was very valuable indeed: between 1815 and 1860, Europe was still in the process of industrialisation and therefore provided huge markets for the machinery and expertise of which Britain, as the first industrialised nation, had an effective monopoly.² A general war could endanger these markets and so British statesmen were anxious to avoid such a calamity.

To support these interests, Britain relied on the Royal Navy. To discharge the varied roles required, the RN was composed of a range of ship types each suited to a particular role. The largest, most imposing vessels were the battleships or ships-of-the-line. These formed the battlefleet that was designed to confront and defeat similar enemy ships to secure command of the sea for Britain. Cruising ships, from frigates down through corvettes and sloops, provided the eyes of the fleet, and also performed the vital role of commerce protection by escorting convoys and hunting enemy commerce raiders, as well as harassing the enemy’s own trade. Finally, small gunvessels and gunboats were needed for in-shore work in shallow waters where larger ships could not safely venture.

Contemporary British policymakers were aware of the primacy of the RN in securing Britain’s vital interests. Sir James Graham, who served as First Lord of the Admiralty twice (first from 1830 to 1834 and again from 1852 to 1855), said that:

. . . if the British Navy be not ready at all times, and in all places, to sustain our greatness, to assert our rights, and to vindicate our maritime supremacy, then, indeed, is our glory departed.³

The experience of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had a huge effect on nineteenth century British strategy. Despite naval defeats such as Trafalgar, Napoleon had attempted to exploit his control of Europe’s resources and naval bases to build a large navy. Although he ultimately failed, the attempt demonstrated the conditions under which a credible challenge to the RN could be mounted.

Britain was determined, therefore, to be able to counter a similar threat should it occur again. This meant preparing for another long war against a power or coalition of powers that controlled all of Europe. For most of the nineteenth century, such a threat seemed most likely to come from a combination of France and Russia. There was a precedent for this as it had happened in 1807, when France and Russia agreed to share Europe between themselves. In 1818 the Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh, described a Franco-Russian combination as ‘the only one that can prove really formidable to the liberties of Europe’.⁴ This was the reason for Castlereagh’s declaration in 1817 of the Two Power Standard: Britain should maintain a navy ‘equal to the navies of any two Powers that can be brought against us’.⁵ In effect, this meant a fleet larger than the navies of France and Russia combined.

The desired post-war size of the RN was set in 1815 as 100 ships-of-the-line and 160 frigates. This establishment was chosen because it was estimated that 100,000 seamen could be raised in the first two years of war and this was the largest fleet that this number of sailors could man.⁶ Only fourteen of these ships-of-the-line would be in active service as guard- or flagships, the rest being laid-up in Ordinary until they were required.⁷ The strength of the RN would therefore lie not in the forces immediately available but in those that could be mobilised in time of need–an arrangement clearly aimed at a protracted conflict in which there would be sufficient time to recruit the necessary number of men.

These ambitious force levels were never actually achieved, however. In 1827, the RN possessed seventy-four battleships, of which seventeen were in service and fifty-seven laid-up in reserve (in addition to those currently building).⁸ In comparison, by 1833 France had an estimated thirty-four effective ships-of-the-line and Russia thirty-six (which were of questionable value due to their poor crew quality and lack of an ice-free port in the north) making a total of seventy.⁹ The RN battlefleet may have been smaller than the proposed establishment of 1815, therefore, but it was still sufficiently large to meet the Two Power Standard of 1817. The figure of one hundred battleships stipulated in 1815 was the maximum number of ships that could be manned, but the major factor in deciding fleet size was the comparative strengths of its likely opponents. Indeed, it has been suggested that the Admiralty in 1815 deliberately over-specified its requirements, knowing that there would be ‘a political tendency to the other extreme’.¹⁰ Better to ask for one hundred battleships and receive seventy-four than to ask for seventy-four and get even fewer! Furthermore, although the fleet was numerically smaller than the fleet proposed in 1815, the larger battleships constructed in the 1820s, especially with their uniform 32-pdr armaments after 1825, were superior in firepower to the equivalent number of 1815-vintage ships.

The RN battlefleet of 1830 was therefore better than ever in terms of the quality and quantity of ships available for service. Britain succeeded in creating a durable battlefleet with significant numerical and qualitative superiority over its rivals, and its durability was shown by the fact that many of the units built in the is period went on to serve in the Crimean War. Indeed, some went on to be converted into steam battleships and a handful survived, as hulks, until the end of the Second World War.¹¹

Technological Advances 1815–60: The Introduction of Iron Construction and Steam Propulsion

The period 1815–60 witnessed the introduction of several new technologies that had a dramatic effect on the design and construction of warships. Key amongst these were the adoption of iron as the main structural material for ships’ hulls and the widespread introduction of steam propulsion first to power paddle wheels and then later screw propellers. Of the two, steam propulsion became more widely accepted in this period: the RN fleet of 1815 was built of wood and powered by sail, and while the Crimean War of 1854–6 saw the first deployment of steam battleships alongside their sail-powered sisters, the RN’s warships were still constructed mainly out of timber. The reasons for this will be discussed below.

The Admiralty of the period has often been accused of excessive conservatism in the face of the potentials offered by these new technologies. This was not the case. That the RN did not rush into the construction of an iron-built, steam-powered battlefleet in the 1840s can partly be attributed to the pursuit of a deliberate policy of experimentation with new technology and consequently its incremental adoption starting with the smaller ships of the fleet. Britain also had a vested interest in not altering the status quo of naval technology unless she absolutely had to, because this would wipe out the massive investment that had already been made in a wooden sailing fleet. When discussing the design and construction of Warrior in 1860, the Surveyor of the Navy, Sir Baldwin Walker, explicitly spelt out this policy:

Although I have frequently stated that it is not to the interest of Great Britain–possessing as she does so large a navy–to adopt any important change in the construction of ships of war which might have the effect of rendering necessary the introduction of a new class of very costly vessels, until such a course is forced upon her by the adoption by foreign powers of formidable ships of a novel character requiring similar ships to cope with them, yet it then becomes a matter not only of expediency, but of absolute necessity . . .¹²

This was as applicable as a general comment on British naval construction policy up until the launch of Dreadnought in 1906 as it was to the specific situation surrounding Warrior. With her existing large battlefleet Britain had no interest in pioneering a naval technological revolution, but with her industrial might (or, in the period 1815–60 it might be truer to talk of industrial pre-eminence) she could afford to wait to act until the activities of other nations forced her hand and then use this power to reestablish her dominant position.

Steam Power

Practical steam-powered ships had become possible at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the end of the Napoleonic Wars saw a rapid growth of the number employed on both inland waterways and across the Irish Sea and English Channel. The Admiralty commissioned their first paddle wheel-propelled steamship, Comet, in 1821 to act as a river tug and tender, and by 1830 had eleven such ships in service, all operating in similar roles. Other nations built similar ships at the same time; the French navy completed its first steam ship, Sphinx, in 1829 and three steam warships were built in Britain for the Greeks to be used against Turkey in the late 1820s. Steam vessels demonstrated their utility on active operations as well as acting as peacetime tugs and packets–for example, the RN fleet deployed to blockade the Dutch coast in 1832 during the Belgian crisis included two steamships, whose ability to operate in-shore without dependency on wind and tide proved extremely advantageous. As a result, increasing numbers were built for the RN throughout the 1830s and by 1837 there were twenty-nine steamships in service as well as thirty-seven mail packets (government-owned ships for transporting mail).¹³

A major development in the capability of RN steam warships occurred in 1835 when the paddle sloop Gorgon was laid down. She was constructed using the wooden frames of an incomplete sailing frigate (Tigris) and, at 1,610 tons, was therefore considerably larger than the steamships then in service. Her size allowed her to mount a heavy armament, and her direct-acting engines powered her to a top speed of about 9 kts. Gorgon and a number of other steamships were deployed to the Mediterranean in 1840 for the campaign against Mehemet Ali and were described as ‘eminently useful’ by Admiral Stopford, both for moving troops along the coast and attacking fortifications ashore. A near sister to Gorgon, Cyclops, was laid down shortly afterwards and was rated a frigate. Together, Gorgon and Cyclops provided the pattern for eighteen First Class wooden paddle sloops and six Second Class wooden paddle frigates laid down before 1845. They were also followed by five First Class wooden paddle frigates, including Penelope of 1843 (a unique conversion from a sailing frigate) and Terrible (completed in 1845 and the largest paddle warship ever built).¹⁴

The RN clearly appreciated the usefulness of steam-powered paddle ships, but there were a number of fundamental limitations that made the paddle unsuitable for adoption in all classes of warship. In particular, the paddle wheels and their sponsons took up a large amount of space along the sides of the ship and consequently restricted the number of guns that could be mounted on the broadside. It was also feared that paddles would interfere with boarding operations and that they were vulnerable to enemy fire. The screw propeller, on the other hand, appeared to overcome all these problems as it could be mounted underwater at the stern of the ship and so leave the broadsides available for guns. In this position the propeller and its driving machinery would be far less vulnerable to enemy fire, and the screw would also interfere far less with the sailing qualities of the ship than paddles and sponsons. This latter point was still important as the range of steamships was limited by the amount of coal that could be carried, and as a result sail was often used on long voyages.¹⁵

As with paddles, the first screwships were commercial rather than military. In 1838, the Admiralty conducted trials using one such ship, Francis Smith, and based on favourable reports decided to commission a demonstration ship, Archimedes, to use in further tests. Of particular concern was the comparison between the performance of screw vessels and those with paddles. Archimedes carried out a number of races across the English Channel against fast mail packets, and based on the outcome of these the Admiralty ordered Rattler to conduct further trials. These took place in 1844, where twenty-eight different propeller forms were tried, and again in 1845, where Rattler competed against her paddle-powered sister Alecto. The 1845 trials included the famous ‘tug of war’ won by Rattler, where the two ships were connected by their sterns.¹⁶

1844–5 saw a major increase in Anglo-French tensions and as a result a Commission on Coast Defence was set up, which recommended strengthening the defences around naval bases with both forts and mobile batteries. It was ultimately decided to construct a number of such batteries by fitting engines and screw propellers to four old 72-gun sailing battleships and the same number of 44-gun frigates. Although originally intended to operate purely close to the coast, it was soon decided to fit the ships with a full sailing rig and as such the four ‘blockships’, reduced to sixty guns each, became the first ocean-going steam battleships. The lead ship, Ajax, was completed on 23 August 1845 and was followed by Blenheim, Edinburgh and Hogue. Ajax’s conversion cost £44,500 and Blenheim’s £74,800, which can be compared with an estimated cost of £120,000 for constructing a similar ship from scratch.¹⁷

The success of the smaller screwships and the blockship conversion paved the way for ordering the first purpose-built British steam battleship in July 1849, the wooden 91-gun Agamemnon. By the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 Britain had eight screw battleships in service in addition to the four blockships. These battleships included both new constructions like Agamemnon and conversion of existing sailing ships like the 131-gun Duke of Wellington. By comparison, France laid down her first screw battleship, Napoleon, in 1848 and had nine such ships in service by 1854. Both powers still maintained large numbers of sailing battleships as well as a steam battlefleet, however: in 1854 Britain had seventy-eight and France thirty-six.¹⁸

Iron Hulls

The relatively smooth introduction of steam power in the Royal Navy can be contrasted with the protracted adoption of iron warships. As a shipbuilding material, iron has much to recommend it over wood. Exact numerical comparisons are difficult, but one modern source calculates that an iron hull could be made approximately 15–20% lighter than the corresponding wooden hull, and the internal capacity of such an iron-hulled ship could be up to 20% greater as the internal structural members could be made less bulky than the wooden versions. In addition, the iron plates that make up the skin of the hull would be riveted together at the edges (something not possible with wooden planks), and this would increase the rigidity of the iron hull and thus prevent the seams from opening in a seaway and allowing water to enter the ship. This extra rigidity of the hull allowed iron ships to introduce watertight subdivision, something that was not possible in wooden ships.¹⁹

The first vessels to be made entirely of iron were canal barges in the late eighteenth century, leading to the first iron ocean-going ship in 1821 when the iron paddle wheel steamship Aaron Manby made the crossing from London to France. Commercial iron ship construction flourished, and in 1835 the first iron warship, the 28-gun paddle sloop Nemesis, was laid down at Laird’s in Birkenhead for the Honourable East India Company. Completed in 1840, she sailed to the Far East and survived grounding off St Ives and then a severe storm in the Indian Ocean, where the strong waves caused 7-foot cracks down both sides of her 11-foot deep hull. She went on to fight successfully in the First Opium War. At the same time, three small iron gunboats (Albert, Soudan and Wilberforce) were commissioned into the RN and thus became that force’s first entirely iron-hulled warships.²⁰

The success of Nemesis (both structurally and operationally) prompted the RN to order larger iron warships. The first of these, the Second Class paddle sloop Trident (a descendant of Gorgon described above), was ordered in 1843 and launched on 16 December 1845 as the first sea-going iron warship in RN service. She was followed two weeks later by the first iron paddle frigate, Birkenhead. The growth in size of iron-hulled ships in the RN had been rapid: Birkenhead’s displacement was 1,405 tons, which can be compared with Nemesis’s 660 tons just five years previously. Birkenhead had a comparatively short life: converted into a troopship in 1851, she sank off Danger Point (in modern-day South Africa) with the estimated loss of 455 lives, but the discipline of the troops in obeying orders to remain on-board while the women and children were rowed to safety became justly celebrated.²¹

Birkenhead was followed by a number of small iron sloops and tenders until, in late 1845, four large iron screw frigates (Megaera, Greenock, Vulcan and Simoom of 2,025, 2,065, 2,474 and 2,920 tons displacement respectively) were laid down. These were not only the largest iron warships built for the RN at that time, but were also approaching the size of Brunel’s Great Britain (laid down 1839), which displaced 3,675 tons. They were also the last iron warships constructed for the RN until the Crimean War and in the early 1850s were either converted to troopships (as with Birkenhead) or sold for commercial use.²²

The four frigates fell foul of a developing belief within the Admiralty that iron ships were not suitable for war-fighting. Initial problems that had been encountered with early iron ships included their hulls rusting from the continued immersion in sea-water, the ferrous metal of the ships’ structures causing compasses’ deviation, and the fouling of their bottoms that could not be solved by copper sheathing due to electrolytic action between the iron of the hull and the protective copper. Solutions to these were quickly found, however. Ensuring correct compass readings was so fundamental to the operation of ocean-going iron ships that a method for correction was developed, and regular docking for cleaning mitigated the fouling problem. Applying red lead below the waterline proved successful in preventing corrosion of the hull.²³

What particularly concerned the Admiralty, however, was the extent to which iron hulls could resist enemy fire. In an attempt to answer this, a series of experiments was carried out at Woolwich Arsenal in 1845–6 where 32-pdr cannon were fired at a number of targets constructed to represent the sides and deck of an iron ship. These were followed by a further experiment in 1846 when the iron-hulled harbour launch Ruby was expended as a live-fire target for the gunnery training ship Excellent. Neither of the trials were particularly damning of iron construction, but neither did they produce strong evidence in support; the Woolwich trials showed that iron plate could splinter when hit and that slow-moving projectiles produced jagged holes that would be difficult to plug, while the conclusions of the Ruby trial were limited to identifying that ships of her class were ‘unfit for war purposes’, which was unsurprising as she was a small harbour launch rather than a warship. Nevertheless, the decision was taken in 1847 to convert the four large iron frigates into troopships and this marked the end of large iron warship construction until after the end of the Crimean War. ²⁴

The Crimean War 1854–6 and the Development of the Armoured Warship

Britain had long feared Russian expansion into the area controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and so when tensions between the two Eastern powers rose in the 1853 she moved in concert with France to support Turkey by stationing a combined fleet at Constantinople. Suitably emboldened, Turkey declared war on Russia in October 1853, but Russian successes (including the destruction of a Turkish squadron at Sinope on 30 November 1853) prompted Britain and France to intervene directly in March 1854.

The two major theatres of operations in the Crimean War were the campaign in the Crimea itself, centring around the primarily land-based efforts to destroy the naval arsenal of Sevastopol, and the primarily naval war in the Baltic. The most dramatic applications of naval power were the Allied attacks on Russian coastal fortifications in both theatres, but navies also played an important role in deciding the outcome of the war by enforcing a blockade on Russia that dramatically limited her ability to conduct international trade.

The two attacks that took place in the Baltic were the attack on Bomarsund in the Åland Islands in June–August 1854 and the destruction of Sveaborg on 8–10 August 1855. Although the fortifications at Bomarsund were not finished, contemporary British observers were worried that they could one day pose a threat as a major naval base. At the time of the attack they were made up of a main fort and three armed towers, but the intention on completion was to have a circular defensive wall linking the main fort to five towers with two further towers to the north covering the deep-water harbour of Vargatafjärd.²⁵ Following the successful Allied attack, the existing fortifications were raised. By contrast, Sveaborg was a fully developed centre of naval power, and the Allied bombardment succeeded in destroying most of the arsenal, the gunboat fleet, a number of magazines and several large warehouses filled with naval stores. The result was that Sveaborg was rendered useless as a naval base.²⁶

The Development of the Armoured Warship

The Crimean War proved to be a major driver of a development that would shape warships for the next century: armour. It also provided the opportunity for the first use of