Читать книгу British Cruisers of the Victorian Era - Norman Friedman - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIt used to be said of the Royal Navy that its battleships brought it command of the sea, but that its cruisers – the ships described in this book – exercised that control. Cruisers were expected to protect British trade in wartime and to run enemy commerce off the sea. In peacetime they and their lesser cousins, sloops, guaranteed what is now called ‘good order at sea’, dealing with pirates and other maritime criminals. They also provided a good deal of the power exerted by local British colonial governments and by British political officers in quasi-colonies. Historians often emphasize the accelerating rate at which technology changed. What is much less appreciated is how radically the British strategic situation changed between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the beginning of the twentieth century, which is about when the last of the ships described in this book were designed.
The Changing Strategic Environment
Geography and context remained remarkably constant from the early eighteenth century down to the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, France always being the main enemy. France presented two different principal threats: direct invasion across the Channel and trade warfare prosecuted mainly by waves of privateers operating out of French ports. French colonies abroad could also support trade warfare, as in the Indian Ocean campaign during the Napoleonic Wars. French fleets could also attack valuable British colonies, as Villeneuve threatened to do in the Caribbean during the run-up to Trafalgar. Such threats were generally intended to force the British to relax their blockade of French or allied ports.
What did the Victorian Royal Navy consider a cruiser? At the upper end of the scale were battleship-size ships like HMS Powerful, seen here steaming at 18kts, probably as newly completed. She wears the classic Victorian livery of black hull, white superstructure (and gun mountings), and buff funnels. Ships assigned to hotter climates had white hulls. The cruiser classification appeared, perhaps for the first time, in the 1 January 1878 edition of Classification of the Armoured and Unarmoured Ships and Vessels Constituting the Fighting and Sea-Going Divisions of the British Navy. It divided unarmoured cruisers into three classes, the first of which were frigates (new and old) and the Bacchantes. The second class were the big new corvettes. The third were smaller corvettes. The official 1880 armament list included not only unarmoured ships described as cruisers, but also armoured cruisers. As might be expected, the latter included the five belted cruisers, but also the ironclads Warrior and Black Prince as well as Achilles and Repulse and the smaller Hector, Valiant, Defence, and Resistance. The 1886 list split armoured cruisers into two classes, the first including the new Orlandos and the five earlier belted cruisers – and the big but obsolescent ironclads. This classification may reflect an abortive project to re-engine the big ironclads to make them into large fast cruisers. It is more difficult to understand inclusion of the smaller ironclads (the 1886 list omitted Resistance), which in 1886 were second-class armoured cruisers. The ironclad cruiser categories had been dropped by 1888 in favour of a distinction between first-, second-, and third-class cruisers (whether or not protected). Earlier lists, at least as late as 1875, distinguished armoured ships from unarmoured ships retained for sea service, the latter including the old screw frigates.
The most valuable British overseas asset (not yet a colony) was India, from which the British had only recently, at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, largely ejected the French. Throughout the nineteenth century, the two poles of British policy were the need to maintain security in Europe and the need to maintain access to, and control of, India (and hence of valuable possessions and connections further east).
India was too large to attack by sea. The route from Britain to India was another story. The quickest route was by sea to Egypt through the Mediterranean, overland to the Red Sea, and thence by sea to India. This route made the Mediterranean a vital British interest, even before the Suez Canal made the route far more efficient. Thus the closest Napoleon came to threatening British control of India was his campaign in Egypt, which was intended to distract the British from intervening against France in Europe.
In the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, the world changed. The British gained bases in the Mediterranean (Malta and, more temporarily, the Ionian Islands) which gave them a permanent naval presence there; previously they only had Gibraltar, near the French end of that sea. The sea/land/sea route to India became more important, as the British consolidated their rule and began to use India as a base for operations further east. British interest in the Mediterranean, and therefore in the Ottoman Empire, which (at least nominally) controlled the eastern end of the sea, including Syria (meaning present-day Syria, Lebanon, and Israel) increased. For decades the Russian Empire had been moving south towards and beyond the Black Sea at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. It became a staple of British policy to maintain the Ottoman Empire despite its increasingly decrepit state, both to maintain a balance of power in Europe and to keep the Russians from direct access to the Mediterranean, hence to the sea route to India. By 1840 the Admiralty considered the Mediterranean second in importance only to the Channel.
The French were the principal threat to the route to India via the Mediterranean. In 1830 they established themselves on its southern shore in Algeria. At its eastern end they became involved in Syria and Egypt in 1840. They also became involved in Italian politics leading to the consolidation of that country. The British could see these steps as moves towards French domination of the Mediterranean. By 1840 the largest active British fleet was in the Mediterranean, not the Channel.
The Spanish colonies in South America became independent countries which could, for the first time, trade openly with Britain. The United States began to expand, and it too was an enormous market. The combination of finance provided by the City of London, the British-based industrial revolution, and British shipping created an explosive increase in British ocean trade. In the past, colonies producing particular materials or goods (such as spices or sugar) had been key to national prosperity. Now colonies, except for India and connections further east, became less important economically, particularly after slavery (which had made Caribbean sugar production lucrative) was abolished in the British Empire. Trade itself coupled with manufacturing became much more important. As the centre of the industrial revolution, Britain had goods the world increasingly wanted. The British Government increasingly saw free trade as key to national prosperity.
The British Government adopted free trade policies, abandoning protective tariffs. Perhaps the most important case was the Corn Law, protecting British farmers, abolished in 1846. In addition, in 1849 the British Government abandoned the Navigation Acts, which had limited shipping between Britain and her colonies to British ships. The latter had been tolerated as a way of maintaining a large merchant fleet. British policy had been to keep a large fleet of ships in reserve, expecting to activate the ships in an emergency largely with crews of merchant seamen. In effect, abandoning the Navigation Acts favoured British shipbuilders and engine-makers, because in the 1840s and 1850s Britain absolutely dominated world shipbuilding in the new primary material, iron, and also the engine-building industry. The effect of abolishing the Corn Laws was gradually to move British food production offshore, an early example of what is now called globalization. Those who voted to abolish the Corn Laws expected that corn (wheat) would be imported mainly from Russia (Poland, which Russia controlled, was then the main productive region), but with the collapse of shipping costs, it turned out that Britain was fed mainly from North America and, to a lesser degree, Australasia.
This development changed the meaning of wartime trade protection. During and before the Napoleonic Wars, British merchant ships mainly carried manufactured goods and the raw materials to make them, such as cloth and cotton. Sinking or seizing the ships would certainly affect the British economy, but it could not destroy Britain, which was largely self-sufficient in food. Once Britain relied heavily on foreign sources of food, cutting British seaborne trade threatened starvation: the imported food had to reach Britain by sea. Furthermore, the new industries relied heavily on raw materials brought by sea from abroad. Cutting that traffic could destroy the ability to produce the weapons needed to defend the British Isles. The Victorian Royal Navy found it difficult to arouse public interest in so abstract an issue as trade defence. Too many in the United Kingdom equated defence simply to defence (by army and militia) against invasion.
During the same period, Russia became the greatest wheat-exporting country in Europe. Before about the 1850s grain production was centred in the Baltic. By the 1850s, however, the Ukraine, with its rich black soil, was growing three times as much as the Baltic. This grain was exported through the Bosporus, the Turkish straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Quite aside from the exports, the Russians had long sought control of the straits. However, by the latter part of the nineteenth century exports through the Bosporus were their chief source of foreign exchange. That certainly sharpened Russian determination to control the straits, inevitably at the expense of Turkey. The situation was further complicated by the Russians’ position as the centre of Orthodox Christianity, hence as the protectors of many Christians living in Turkish territories in the Balkans on the edges of the Black Sea. The Russians viewed themselves as successors to the Byzantine Empire (‘the third Rome’), hence chosen to reverse the Turks’ victory over Byzantium (Constantinople) four centuries earlier. Byzantium had been a maritime empire controlling the eastern Mediterranean. Thus Russian interests made collision with the British inevitable, given British sensitivity to any challenge in the Mediterranean, on the other side of the Turkish straits.
Further down the scale were second-class cruisers like HMS Minerva. By the late 1890s they were by far the most numerous British cruisers. Minerva was placed in Chatham Reserve upon completion, then used for boiler trials in 1899-1903 as part of the Cruiser Training Squadron. She was later assigned to Devonport (1903-4), and then attached to the Mediterranean Fleet battle squadron in 1904-12 (during which she underwent a 1908 refit). She was then assigned to the new Third (reserve) Fleet’s 11th Cruiser Squadron. serving as temporary depot ship for the 6th Destroyer Flotilla in 1912-13. On the outbreak of war the 11th Cruiser Squadron was mobilized for the West Coast of Ireland patrol (Minerva captured an Austrian merchant ship off Cape Finisterre in September 1914). She was assigned to the East Indies and then to Egypt in 1914-15, serving at the Dardanelles (she sank the Turkish torpedo boat Demirhissar off Chios on 17 April 1915). She remained in Egyptian waters through 1916, helping to defend the Suez Canal against a Turkish attack. Once that threat had gone, she served in East African waters in 1916-18, and at the Cape in 1918. She was sold in 1920.
In the 1890s speed became the great distinction between cruisers – ships which could operate with the fleet – and the mass of cruising ships which maintained good order at sea and in British possessions. Until about 1885, however, many cruisers (corvettes) were not very fast at all. The corvette HMS Rapid was originally classified as a sloop, then rerated as a corvette, illustrating the fluid state of warship designations in the 1880s. The formal distinction was that a cruiser was a Captain’s command, a sloop a Commander’s.
(Allan C Green via State Library of Victoria)
Probably because Russia was a key grain exporter, the Russians particularly well understood how dependent the British were on grain imports. It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a key OPEC member contemplating the vulnerability of Western oil-consuming states to an interruption in the flow of oil. As early as 1863 (in the context of a crisis over Russian suppression of a revolt in Poland), the Russians saw commerce warfare as a natural part of any war against the British. That year Russian squadrons visited New York and San Francisco. Americans saw the visit as valuable support during the Civil War. However, the point of the visit was to show the British that Russian warships could leave the Baltic (to attack their commerce) without the British observing them at all (the British seem not to have gotten this point). Once outside Russian waters, moreover, the squadrons could raid British commerce despite any blockade the British imposed (Russian geography, then and later, made it relatively easy to block access to the open sea). During the 1877-78 crisis the Russians sought to evade British blockade altogether by assembling the Russian Volunteer Fleet of commerce-raiding merchant ships in foreign ports.
There was a counter-current to British fears of trade warfare: by the 1850s British governments increasingly interested in commerce were less and less anxious to seize private property on the high seas. That applied particularly to the greatest free-trade country of all, the United Kingdom. For example, during the Crimean War – which contemporaries called the Great Russian War – no blockade was imposed. (It might, however, be suggested that the main goods the Russians imported by sea were manufactured goods from England, and that the British government of the day was not anxious to damage its own economy.)
The great scourge of previous wars had been privateers, privately-owned ships carrying special authorizations (letters of marque). Any civilian ship could be used in this way, so the number of commerce raiders could be immense. Similarly, all existing ports could be used as privateer bases. In 1859 the Treaty of Paris, signed by all the major sea powers except the United States, outlawed privateers. The potential scale of the commerce-raiding problem was dramatically reduced; navies had to choose between devoting resources to battle fleets and devoting them to war against trade.
The Treaty of Paris might even be read as abandonment of blockade. The British surrendered their ‘ancient right’ to seize enemy cargo carried in neutral ships. It seemed that shipowners could protect themselves in wartime simply by fleeing to other flags (as many did in 1914). Many in the Royal Navy thought this abandonment of the ancient rights of the maritime power had rendered sea power almost pointless. The treaty also limited what goods could legitimately be interdicted, food being an important exception. As the nineteenth century wore on, few British naval officers continued to believe that a ruthless enemy would care about either new rule – for them, enemy attacks on commerce increasingly carried the threat of starvation. The First World War showed that they were entirely correct.
Liberals led by William Gladstone sometimes argued that there was no point in planning for trade protection because the threat had been so dramatically reduced. At the least that made Gladstone, no friend of the Royal Navy, inclined against a fleet designed for blockade operations. Gladstone’s first administration spanned the period 1868-74, which was exactly when the presence role of cruisers was far more important than the trade protection role. Naval officers pointed to the depredations of raiders operated by the Confederates during the American Civil War to show that the threat to trade – to British food – was still very real. Alabama and other successful Confederate raiders showed just how effectively a steam-powered cruiser could attack merchant shipping, which in the 1860s was still overwhelmingly sail-powered.
Meanwhile the geography of British sea power changed. British naval dominance of Europe depended largely on the fact that the British Isles blocked the exits from the Channel and from the North Sea and, by extension, the Baltic. Fleets based in the British Isles could blockade enemy bases in all these places, as indeed they had during the Napoleonic Wars. Once Britain had Gibraltar, she gained control (at least in theory) of the outlet of the Mediterranean. Any potential enemy with bases outside the area blocked by the British Isles and Gibraltar presented a new and potentially devastating threat, particularly to British trade. At the least it was a much more expensive threat to counter. That was certainly the case with the United States, whose naval policy through most of the nineteenth century was to be prepared to counter Britain, her traditional enemy, with a combination of trade warfare and coast defence. The United States had to be taken seriously as a danger because of its potential threat to Canada, which it had exercised (albeit not successfully) in 1812. Once the United States reached the Pacific, the British also had to deal with threats associated with the US–British Columbia border there.
Russian expansion into East Asia similarly brought them outside European geography. During the Crimean War, the Royal Navy raided the sole Russian Pacific base, Petropavlovsk. It had only limited value, as it was not large and also as it was closed by ice for much of the year. In 1860, however, the Russians set up an ice-free Asian port, Vladivostok, which posed a year-round threat to British Pacific trade.
Once the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the route to India and points east through the Mediterranean became far more important. The opening of the Suez Canal unfortunately roughly coincided with Russian denunciation of the clauses of the Crimean War settlement barring them from recreating a Black Sea Fleet. The two guarantors had been the two wartime allies, Britain and France, and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) paralysed France. The British alone were unwilling to enforce what the Czar of the time considered a gross humiliation. Grain exports did not figure in the Czar’s comments, and the Russians did not immediately build up the Black Sea Fleet. However, it must have been obvious that once they did they could exert considerably more pressure on the British in the Mediterranean.
The Suez Canal was a Franco-Egyptian venture, but once in office in 1874 Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli saw it as a vital British interest; he bought a controlling share by buying up the Egyptian Government’s holdings. Although nominally part of the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire, Egypt was effectively independent, its government constantly in need of money.
Not too long after Disraeli bought the Canal shares, the Russo-Turkish crisis of 1875-77 threatened to place a Russian satellite state (Bulgaria) on the Mediterranean, within range of the Canal.1 In 1878, with Russian troops threatening Constantinople, a British battle squadron made the dangerous ascent of the Bosporus in a snowstorm. The Russians had no real Black Sea Fleet, but the British ironclads were placing themselves to shell the Russian troops if necessary (the threat forced a Russian withdrawal). This fleet was commanded by Admiral Sir Geoffrey Phipps Hornby, who had commanded the Flying Squadron, and who would be a key figure in the agitation leading to the Naval Defence Act of 1889.
Although the ascent of the Turkish straits was a great success, other aspects of the British response were not. In addition to the standing Mediterranean Fleet, the Admiralty decided to assemble a fleet to penetrate the Baltic. To so do without removing the Channel Fleet (i.e., without presenting the French with the opportunity to invade), it tried to mobilize reserve ships and form them into a Baltic fleet. Mobilization proved difficult and far too slow. Intelligence had been collected, but at the crucial moment it could not be found. It proved impossible to maintain contact with Russian cruisers, which would have preyed on British trade had war broken out.
Ultimately the need to secure the Canal helped draw the British into making Egypt a quasi-colony.2 At this time British colonies (apart from India) were generally fairly distant from anyone else’s, approachable only by sea. Egypt was a very different proposition. It was close to other European colonies in North Africa, and it could be approached through Africa. Britain and France almost went to war in 1898 because French troops probing north met British troops at Fashoda in southern Egypt, suggesting that some larger thrust was planned (war orders were drafted, and one consequence of the war scare was a supplemental naval program). In this sense Egypt was analogous to India; in both cases defence included the defence of land frontiers. In both cases the land frontiers were considerably less approachable than maps suggested to governments in London.
British seizure of Egypt without French involvement made it difficult for the British to resist attempts by other European powers to seize parts of Africa. This scramble for Africa provided colonies the Germans, previously without colonial possessions, hoped to use as bases for cruisers during the First World War. The British found themselves seizing the German colonies not because they had enormous inherent value, but to deny them as bases for use against vital British trade.
The Mediterranean became so vital that the Mediterranean Fleet became the most important British naval formation of the late nineteenth century. With French bases circling much of the Mediterranean, it faced unusual conditions which brought forth special tactical solutions, not least for cruisers. As CinC of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir John Fisher conceived many of his key ideas, which led in turn to the revolutions he pushed through at the Admiralty at the close of the period covered by this book.
Through the mid-nineteenth century the Russians drove south into Central Asia towards India. It might not be possible to overthrow British power in India by sea; the country was just too large. However, the British thought that the Russians planned to turn both Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan into vassal states, and it was conceivable that Afghans pouring across the northern frontier of India might have begun its conquest. This land threat was the substance of the ‘Great Game’ celebrated by Kipling and others. The naval aspect was that the best way for the British to counter Russian moves in Central Asia was to apply naval pressure in the one place most vital to the Russians: the Baltic.
HMS Egeria was a Fantome class sloop, the size just below corvettes (which were later rated as cruisers). This class introduced the composite construction which DNC Sir Nathaniel Barnaby later applied to the Satellite class corvettes. Built at Pembroke, Egeria was launched on 1 November 1873. Designed displacement was 894 tons, but the ships displaced 949 as completed; the difference may have been due to miscalculation involving the new type of construction (dimensions: 160ft × 31¼ft × 12½ft). Armament comprised two 7in 90cwt and two 64pdr, all muzzle-loading rifles on slides (these were the largest British warships with an all-traversing armament). One 7in was between funnel and mainmast and one on the quarterdeck, both with ports so that they could fire on the broadside. The only major armament modification was to replace wooden with iron slides after the first commission (Egeria later had her armament reduced as a surveying ship). Ships like this needed sail power for endurance. As a sloop, Egeria was slower than Barnaby’s corvettes: on trial she made 11.303kts on 1011 IHP. The class was rated at 1000nm at 10kts. Machinery comprised three cylindrical boilers and a two-cylinder compound engine (these were the first sloops with compound engines). Ballard described the class as easily handled under sail, free from yaw when running before a heavy sea, buoyant when lying-to, and stiff enough not to require any ballast. They did not hold a good lee, however. They were never faster than 11½kts even when scudding before a high wind. These sailing qualities mattered; like other Victorian sloops, they made their long passages under sail. Complement was 125. Egeria served initially on the China station (1874-81, receiving a relief crew in 1878). She grounded badly off Hainan in a fog in 1879, but was refloated successfully (she lost most of her false keel in the process). On her return she went into reserve for two years, and was then selected as a surveying ship, her 64pdrs and 7in guns replaced by four 20pdrs (to deal with pirates). She was ready in 1886, and she was not brought home until she had to be reboilered (in 1894). She was paid off at Esquimault in 1911.
The next Anglo-Russian crisis after 1878 (1885) was prompted not by a thrust towards the Turkish straits, but by a Russian probe into Afghanistan, which bordered India.3 Without a large standing army, the only response available to the British was naval. In 1878 a fleet was sent up the Bosporus while another was mobilized to enter the Baltic. In 1885 there was no Mediterranean response, but a Baltic squadron was again mobilized, this time commanded by Admiral Phipps Hornby. When the immediate threat dissipated, the squadron was retained for manoeuvres, which were intended to test new technology. By this time the Russians had invested heavily in torpedo craft, and some of the exercises tested the fleet’s ability to seize and maintain a base in the Baltic in the face of torpedoes and mines. Lessons learned deeply affected cruiser development. The 1885 exercises were considered so valuable a test of tactics and technology that they were made a nearly annual event. As in 1877-78, mobilization was not entirely successful, although there were notable improvements. For example, this time the navy was able to shadow Russian ships, precluding a major Russian offensive against British trade.
The French gained an ability to operate outside blockadable waters as they seized colonies in East Africa (such as Madagascar) and in Asia (Vietnam). Among other things, in the 1860s both the Russians and the French built second-rate armoured ships specifically to operate in Eastern waters, far from their concentrated fleets. Viable British presence in the Pacific required that cruisers be backed by armoured ships. This requirement created the first ships rated by the Royal Navy as armoured cruisers (though quite unrelated to the armoured cruisers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).
HMS Penguin was an Osprey class composite screw sloop, Barnaby’s follow-on to the Egeria class. She had another two 64pdr guns. The embrasures for stern fire ran about half way along her poop. They are barely visible in this photograph because the hull was painted black. These ships came out light, the surplus of 35 tons being used for more coal. In effect these ships were half-scale models of contemporary composite corvettes, with the same kind of profile and embrasures at bow and stern (for end-on fire) and with the corvettes’ sharp end lines and full midsections. Like Barnaby’s corvettes, they had knee bows. The sharp tapering to the ends was accompanied by sharp rise of floor. This combination made them handy (as intended) but did not confer the desired speed. The lines did, however, make them remarkably suitable for meeting weather from any direction. In the worst gale they would rise or scud equally well under steam or sail. They did, however, roll too quickly to be efficient gun platforms, which suggests that metacentric height was greater than expected due to too low a centre of gravity (underestimated weights). Initially the ships had a light poop and forecastle, both open at the break, the poop covering two cabins with a chaser between them, and the forecastle covering the heads and another chaser. After the first commission both were strengthened and fully enclosed and machine guns mounted on top. Machinery divided the hull in two lengthwise, a narrow communication passage running along the starboard side through the upper part of the boiler and engine rooms, with a watertight door at each end. This was the first class to have glass scuttles in place of the older square hanging ports or ‘rat hole’ plug scuttles. Like the larger cruisers, these ships started out with two heavy guns, in this case 7in 4½-tonners on slides, one between funnel and mainmast and the other on the quarterdeck, both intended to fire on the broadside. They had two 64pdrs on the broadside and two more under the forecastle and poop as chasers. This combination gave them a heavy broadside, but using it put so much weight on one side (the heavy guns would be traversed to bear) that the ship heeled. Of this class, Wild Swan and Pelican were rearmed with breech-loaders. They were given two 6in at quarterdeck broadside ports, four 5in at broadside ports, and two 5in chasers firing through embrasures at bow and stern. Penguin received a pair of 5in breech-loaders on her poop instead of the single 64pdr below it. Osprey and Cormorant were never rearmed, because new guns were not available until they were too old. Due to the unusual hull form, space for the horizontal engines could be found just half-way between bow and stern, so the engines were, unusually, forward of the mainmast rather than abaft as in other three-masted Royal Navy ships of this period. That made for an unusually long propeller shaft, a source of trouble, and the mainmast had to be stepped on the main deck instead of the keel. Like Egeria, Penguin was relatively slow (she was the slowest of the class, making 9.875kts with 666 IHP; her Devonport-built sister Pelican made 12.241kts on 1056 IHP). After her first commission her machinery was replaced by Devonport-built compound engines. Built under contract (by Robert Napier and Sons), Penguin was launched on 25 March 1876. Displacement was 1130 tons (170ft pp × 36ft × 15ft 9in). Complement was 150. Penguin went to the Pacific on completion in 1877, returning in 1881 to have her machinery replaced. Unlike her sister Wild Swan, which went into the yard at the same time, she was not rearmed at this time with breech-loaders due to a shortage of guns. She went into reserve, recommissioning in 1886 for the East Indies. On return in 1889, she was selected for conversion to a survey ship, all her guns except a pair of broadside 64pdrs being removed. Space left vacant by the 7in guns was used for deckhouses and her boat complement was increased. In this form she commissioned in January 1890, not being paid off until March 1907, in Sydney, where she was reduced to harbour depot ship – the last of her class to remain at sea. She was transferred to the new RAN.
HMS Doterel was the name ship of a class very similar to the Penguins, distinguishable by their vertical stems. They displaced 1130 tons (170ft pp × 34ft × 15ft) and were armed with two 7in 90cwt guns plus four 64pdrs, all on pivoted slides, plus four machine guns. They had three cylindrical boilers feeding a horizontal compound engine: Doterel made 11kts on 900 IHP. Endurance under steam was 1480nm at 10kts. Doterel was launched at Chatham on 2 March 1880. She was lost on her maiden voyage, exploding and sinking off Sandy Point, Punta Arenas on 26 April 1881.
(Allan C Green, courtesy of State Library of Victoria)
Given the emergence of foreign colonies as potential raider bases, British war planners of the late nineteenth century envisaged attacks on them. This was not the colonial warfare of the past, in which colonies were worth seizing for their rich resources; rather it was a coldly strategic counter to commerce raiding. Thus when the British contemplated war against France in 1898 their arrangements included convoys of troops (escorted by cruisers) to seize French naval bases abroad. This anti-raider mission is why, for example, the British were so anxious to seize Tsingtao in China and German East Africa in the opening phase of the First World War. Without bases, enemy raiders at sea would not last for very long, whether or not they were sucked into a focal area. The German squadron based at Tsingtao certainly caused considerable havoc when it was forced to sea, but it seems unlikely that it could have remained at sea for very long with limited resources – many of which the Admiralty indirectly controlled.
It was bad enough to face the French or the Russians, but beginning in the 1880s the two threats merged, particularly in the Mediterranean.4
In the 1850s and 1860s the British also faced the possibility of conflict with the United States due, among other reasons, to disagreements over the border with Canada. For example, in 1858 there was a considerable scare as the French seemed about to match or even to surpass British naval strength. First Naval Lord Admiral Sir Richard Dundas pointed to the possibility that the United States would feel encouraged to attack British possessions in North America in the event of a war with France.5 Second Naval Lord Admiral Martin considered that the United States might fight if the Royal Navy imposed a blockade against France. At this time the French navy nearly equalled the Royal Navy in size, and France had more frigates (though fewer smaller cruisers). Thus it could be argued that France could blockade England (which was already importing much of her food) quite aside from the usual threat of a direct invasion by the large French army.
The US Navy had a long-standing war policy of raiding British commerce, as it had no hope of challenging the British fleet. In the past it had built unusually large fast frigates like USS Constitution in hopes of overwhelming British convoy escorts. In 1854 it announced plans for five new fast screw frigates and a screw corvette. The British were led to design their own fast screw frigates as answers to these ships; in the process they pushed wood hull construction as far as it could go. It turned out that the British frigates were much faster than their US counterparts, but also that their powerful engines overstrained their hulls. There was a real possibility of war against the United States several times during and immediately after the American Civil War, but it was always averted. The United States disappeared as a naval threat only when the large fleet built up to fight the Civil War was allowed to decline precipitously in the early 1870s.
Trade Protection
During the centuries leading up to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy relied heavily on convoy to protect seaborne trade. Convoy Acts forced merchant ship owners to submit to Royal Navy orders and to join convoys with escorts. Many historians have observed that this apparently successful policy was discarded after 1815, and it is often suggested that the Royal Navy’s failure to protect vital shipping from U-boats in 1914-17 could be traced to a lack of interest in trade protection and to the abandonment of a previously successful policy in favour of an emotionally satisfying offensive (rather than defensive) strategy. None of this seems to match reality. For the Royal Navy, perhaps the most interesting lesson of the American Civil War was the striking success of Confederate raiders. Blockade could not deal with them, because they were built and armed abroad (British connivance in Confederate raiding was a major source of post Civil War tension). The closest approach to blockade, which netted the very successful CSS Alabama, was to station the cruiser USS Kearsage off the port of Cherbourg, in the expectation that the Confederate ship would have to put into port for resupply. There was no hope whatever of patrolling the open Atlantic, and the Union Navy lacked resources for any kind of convoy strategy
It is difficult to trace the evolution of British thinking about trade protection, because responsible officers only rarely had to explain themselves to civilians, such as the First Lord of the Admiralty, who were not already familiar with their thinking. The considerable volume of the program to build small cruisers (frigate down to gun-vessel) during the 1840s and 1850s suggests an attempt to maintain the small-ship force which in the past had escorted convoys. In 1858 Surveyor Captain Walker commented that the size of the French steam frigate force, roughly equal to the British, suggested an intent to conduct trade warfare, and he decried the inability of the Royal Navy to concentrate its forces in the Channel due to the need to protect British trade as well as British possessions overseas.
In two cases British cruisers were built specifically to run down fast cruisers built by the United States explicitly to operate as raiders in wartime, in accordance with settled US naval policy. In 1854 the US Navy announced plans to build five large steam frigates and one large steam corvette, and the Royal Navy responded with large fast frigates of its own. It turned out that the US ships were not nearly as fast as had been expected. The British ships were not repeated because they were so expensive; commerce protection, certainly as then understood, demanded numbers. During the American Civil War, Confederate raiders like CSS Alabama devastated Union merchant shipping. The Union response was a series of what were expected to be very fast cruisers capable of running such raiders down. They were also potential commerce raiders, and again they demanded a British response. It came in the form of a program for six large fast steam frigates, only three of which were ultimately built (Inconstant, Raleigh, and Shah). Again they were too expensive to be constructed in any numbers.
It is not clear when British naval officers realized that the combination of an explosion in the sheer number of British merchant ships and the nature of steam power (in the 1870s and early 1880s cruisers could not match the endurance of merchant steamers) made the old convoy policy obsolete. Nor was the lesson of the Napoleonic Wars entirely clear. One witness before the Carnarvon Commission, an experienced and thoughtful shipowner, explained that a convoy attacked by overwhelming force would be annihilated – as had happened on several occasions. An effective convoy defence would have required that each convoy be escorted by a force capable of beating off the most powerful enemy ships. It may be that the ability simply to crush an enemy’s ports seemed for a time a sufficient guarantee against large-scale commerce raiding.
The first internal document formally laying out the desired cruiser force seems to have been a statement prepared by First Naval Lord Admiral Milne in December 1874 for the First Lord, in connection with the First Lord’s attempt to frame a rational naval program.6 Milne’s paper on unarmoured ships was written to help the First Lord frame estimates. It is impossible to say whether it reflected widely-accepted ideas, which were not expressed on paper because they were not worth writing down. Explaining the navy’s thinking to a civilian First Lord was a different proposition.
Milne mentioned both the need to protect the trade on which the country relied, and also what might now be called presence missions, such as suppressing the slave trade and piracy. Milne distinguished between the main fleet, which for him included fast frigates and corvettes, for general war and also for commerce protection, and smaller unarmoured ships for foreign and home service, surveying, despatch duty, and coast guard service. He also produced a paper on trade protection, perhaps the earliest one formally to advocate what was later called a policy of patrolling focal areas. ‘It is well known to foreign nations that our trade is our great point of weakness, and that it is open to the attack of the cruizers of any enemy.’ Recent intelligence showed that the Russians had planned to attack the Australasian trade during the 1863 crisis.
Milne argued that any seaman trying to destroy British trade would know the main trade routes, and would seek targets in particular places where they were concentrated. He identified eighteen such places, Each of these eighteen stations should be occupied by two or three ships, making a total of forty to fifty cruisers. Adding reliefs ‘and separate ships for obtaining information’ gave the total of fifty to sixty cruisers he sought.7 By cruisers Milne meant frigates and corvettes, which he thought would soon be rerated as cruisers of the first, second, and third classes. Only a few of them were really fast.
Milne proposed a fleet of 20 frigates, 25 to 30 first-class corvettes, and 30 second-class corvettes, aside from lesser craft (sloops and gunboats). He considered this a low estimate, and pointed out that a quarter would probably always be under repair or defective at any time. However, the figures seem to have been unaffordably high, so in a marginal note Milne called for a war establishment of 30 frigates and 25 corvettes, a total of 55 such ships. Actual numbers were falling rapidly. Of 26 frigates on the Navy List, 14 were fit only for harbour service, and of the remaining 12, 6 would have to be repaired or replaced within four years. Against a wartime requirement for 30 corvettes, 32 were on the list, but 11 had already been condemned. Of the remaining 21, 14 were in commission, and Milne expected three to be found unfit within three years. Another seven sloops had been commissioned as second-class corvettes, six of which had recently been repaired. No frigates were building, but three first-class and nine second-class corvettes were under construction, in addition to nine sloops and lesser vessels not considered in this book.
Milne pointed to the destruction of US commerce by Confederate raiders, most famously CSS Alabama, only about a decade before. He pointed to the failure of the US Navy to find sufficient ships to run down this Confederate raider. The British cruiser force was shrinking as the wooden ships of the 1850s and 1860s were being condemned much faster than they were replaced. Since 1 January 1868, 19 frigates had been stricken, and 3 built; 16 corvettes had been stricken, and 12 built; and 19 sloops had been stricken, and 12 built. As a minimum, Milne wanted an immediate program of six Boadicea class frigates to be laid down in 1875, another six following in 1876. The 1875 proposal was apparently vetoed by the Cabinet.
Focal area defence was part of a larger strategy. French bases abroad would be attacked so that they could not be used as bases for commerce raiders. The troopships used for such attacks would be convoyed, and some other unusually valuable ships might also be protected directly. The issue of convoy was whether such protection could be or would be extended to the mass of merchant shipping. The conclusion was clearly that such extension was impossible and unaffordable.
The enemy force which got to the focal areas had to be restricted; the British had to neutralize the French battleships. That was not too difficult in European waters, but it became far more difficult as the French gained colonies in Africa and in Asia. The British had to station their own armoured ships in the Far East specifically because a single French armoured ship could destroy the unarmoured cruisers which would execute the trade protection mission in wartime. Hence the British (and French) policy of building second-class armoured ships, many of them classed as armoured cruisers, for foreign service. The nature of these ships is obvious partly because their Ships’ Covers are clearly marked ‘second-class ironclad’ rather than ‘armoured cruiser’.
Milne also pointed to the varied peacetime (presence) roles of unarmoured British warships, such as presence missions for the Foreign Office and suppression of piracy and of the slave trade. He was embarrassed that he could not provide ships; there was no reserve apart from the Channel Squadron and the Detached Squadron.
It is not clear to what extent Iris and Mercury were intended to meet Milne’s needs. Certainly he did not get the large cruiser program he wanted. The British cruiser program continued to consist mainly of relatively slow corvettes through the early 1880s.
In the aftermath of the 1878 crisis with Russia the Carnarvon Committee met to examine the ability of the Empire to maintain the food supply of the United Kingdom in the face of foreign attacks on British trade. It spent relatively little of its effort examining naval efforts to deal with enemy commerce raiders, concentrating instead on the defence of British colonies and coaling stations. Most of the world’s steaming coal was in exactly these places. Without coal, an enemy raider would soon be rendered immobile.8 The Carnarvon Committee did collect statements from some prominent shipowners attacking the earlier trade protection tactic of convoy, which had apparently already been abandoned.
In 1885 the Foreign Intelligence Committee (now in effect a naval staff) issued a comparison of trade protection by focal area patrol and convoy.9 The unpleasant reality was that the Royal Navy had no cruisers capable of working with really fast merchant ships. Very few had the combination of speed and high-speed endurance needed to convoy even 10kt freighters, which were quite common by that time. Even sailing merchant ships would be difficult to convoy, because they might easily be becalmed. Their owners considered them so vulnerable that they would be laid up in wartime. The alternative of directly protecting the trade routes by flanking them with cruisers along their whole length had been already rejected as impossible. That left only the focal area concept Milne had laid out a decade earlier. The 1885 paper advocated employment of 83 cruisers and 75 merchant auxiliaries; it also offered a reduced version requiring 38 cruisers and 37 merchant auxiliaries. The main later development was to analyse trade routes to decide exactly what areas demanded cruisers. A formal Admiralty Memorandum on protection of British trade in wartime was drafted in November 1898 and printed in February 1900 so that it could be issued to merchant ships in an emergency. It restated the focal area policy: protecting squadrons would be stationed ‘where the convergence of the important ordinary trade routes offers to the enemy great opportunities for making captures’. This pamphlet explicitly stated that convoys would not be formed except under special circumstances (i.e., of ships, such as troopships, whose loss could not be tolerated – but that was not said).
Milne’s focal area strategy was not for public consumption: any offensive trade protection strategy implied that the British merchant fleet would face heavy losses early in a war. After a few months the enemy raiding force would have been destroyed, and losses would cease. That is what happened to the German cruiser force intended to destroy British commerce during the early months of the First World War. Things later went badly wrong because the anti-raider strategy, so little discussed prewar, was ineffective against U-boats, which could not easily be hunted down. The economics driving the strategy – that there were too few ships for effective escort – explains the Admiralty’s attempt to revive hunting in 1939, when it thought that the advent of Asdic had made the earlier strategy viable again. In each case the key failure was not to understand that a primary requirement, the ability of a cruiser or other ship on station to detect a raider at a distance and kill it, had been lost. The US Navy revived offensive anti-raider strategy when it sought to deal with Soviet nuclear submarines during the Cold War; again, there was little prospect of building enough escorts of sufficient capability. Moreover, a convoy too lightly escorted became a tasty meal for a raider. That had become evident during the Napoleonic Wars, and the unpleasant experiences of such convoys were cited during the 1878 hearings of the Carnarvon Commission on colonial defence and on protecting British seaborne trade.
The Doterel class sloop Espiegle rearmed with ten 5in Mk III breech-loading guns in shields, four of them (in shields) on VC and six (on the broadside) on VB mountings. The Mariner class were similar but slightly larger, completed with breech-loading guns (eight 5in). They displaced 970 tons. Two ships of that class (Mariner and Racer) participated in the 1885 fleet exercise, proving that they were far too slow (rated at 11.5kts on 850 IHP) to work with a battle fleet. The Mariners were laid down as gun-vessels, but reclassified as sloops on 26 November 1884, while under construction.
It did not help that the Royal Navy’s rivals did not have to match its numbers. For example, the Royal Navy squadrons deployed in the Far East had to deal with a Russian threat to trade mounted from Vladivostok. A Russian raider might appear anywhere in the area, so any of the deployed squadrons there had, at least in theory, to be able to counter the most powerful of the potential raiders. British numbers were set by the number of places that had to be covered. It did not take large numbers of potential Russian (or, for that matter, French) raiders to force up the size of the ships the Royal Navy had to deploy in the Far East, hence the cost of the Royal Navy.
The number of vulnerable focal areas increased as the French and the Russians gained bases outside the area the Royal Navy could expect to dominate. Just before the turn of the century the French seem to have been particularly keenly aware that building limited numbers of armoured cruisers would place intolerable financial burdens on the Royal Navy. By that time a big armoured cruiser cost about as much as a battleship, so a Royal Navy forced to build a large number of such ships (to cover the focal areas) would be building, in effect, two battle fleets. It was time to find a new way to handle the problem. Admiral Sir John Fisher seems to have seen the way: use intelligence to find the enemy cruisers, and build overwhelmingly powerful large fast cruisers to run them down. That was a key rationale of the battlecruisers which Fisher hoped would replace armoured cruisers.
Conversely, it was argued that by stationing powerful cruisers at focal areas, the Royal Navy would be forcing enemies to limit their attacks on trade to their most powerful cruisers, and in that way much reducing the scale of the attack.10
When he became First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher rethought trade protection.11 He again rejected convoy, partly because an entire convoy could be lost if its escorts were overwhelmed. It would be impossible to keep formation of a convoy secret, and the mass of smoke it produced by day (and the lights it would have to show at night) would attract attack. Probably the worst problem was that there were just not enough cruisers to escort convoys and to do ‘the far more effective work of hunting down the enemy’s commerce destroyers’. It seemed that most of the large number of merchant ships, each proceeding unpredictably, would escape a small number of enemy raiders.
Recent analysis had shown that even famous raiders of the past, such as CSS Alabama, had not been very productive. A US analysis conducted after the Civil War showed that Confederate raiders had destroyed only about 5 per cent of the Union merchant fleet; another 32 per cent had been lost as shipowners fled to neutral flags. The latter loss proved permanent due to onerous post-war taxes rather than to anything the Confederates had accomplished directly. Alabama herself had accounted for about three ships each month of her raiding lifetime.
The Royal Navy was increasingly arguing that the main defence of trade was control of the sea, to be gained by seeking out and destroying the enemy’s fleet. There had to be a fallback defence of trade to deal with enemy cruisers escaping from the British fleet, but it should be be minimized because the needs of the fleet came first.
For the moment, Fisher retained the focal area strategy. It was affordable, in terms of numbers of cruisers required and in terms of coal and wear and tear on the ships. It made concentration of force (when needed) practicable. Given a squadron operating in a focal area, the officer in command could readily react to information. Merchant ships under threat would know where to run. As pointed out above, Fisher soon became interested in an alternative to focal areas, using fast cruisers to run down raiders based on intelligence – a strategy which became possible with radio. This strategy in turn helped engender the battlecruiser, as a replacement for armoured cruisers.
Naval Presence
With its rise as the centre of world finance, the City of London became an important element of the British economy and hence a factor in policy-making. It did not speak with any single voice, but in effect it demanded that successive British Governments understand that they had a vital interest in keeping the peace abroad so that international trade, and British traders in particular, could flourish. That role was not too different from what is sometimes now called the vital peacetime mission of ‘maintaining good order at sea’. In practice the Royal Navy had to maintain cruiser squadrons on foreign stations. Such squadrons were not necessarily a means of protecting trade. Rather, they were a way of maintaining what would now be called presence. For example, when the Peruvian ironclad Huascar mutinied and became piratical in 1877, she was hunted down and disarmed by the local British squadron headed by HMS Shah – which fired the first self-propelled torpedo to be used in action against the ironclad (it missed).
Shah was not defending British colonies, but rather the British-centred trading system which kept Britain alive. The City was in effect the centre of an informal empire defined by trade. Unlike the formal empire, it was not generally garrisoned by the small British professional army, and it did not figure in formal defence arrangements. In effect the City could and did apply pressure to maintain the naval presence which protected the British traders abroad and which reassured the governments of the informal empire when they favoured policies which helped international trade – which usually meant trade financed by the City. Whether Britain should have a formal empire at all was a matter of intense debate in mid-century, but the informal empire was not, and could not, be debated at all. It was the informal empire which demanded all those cruisers on foreign stations. The formal empire is largely gone, but not the City and therefore not the vital foreign trading interests. That should, but does not, suggest that the presence mission is still vital, quite unaffected by the demise of formal empire.
Ships intended primarily for the presence role did not necessarily have to be very fast, but they needed long endurance, heavy armament, and survivability. Nearly all the masted cruisers built for the Royal Navy before about 1880 shared these characteristics.
It was not obvious to all in British government that global naval presence was worth while. It was certainly expensive; battleships were often maintained in reserve at home, but cruisers on foreign stations had to be manned and maintained and refitted periodically. In times of crisis, the Admiralty also questioned the value of dispersed ships conducting presence operations. In 1858 the French navy approached the size of the Royal Navy, and in at least one category (frigates) they were superior. The naval members of the Board wanted the fleet concentrated in home waters to deter the French from any idea of invasion, some members suggesting in addition spoiling attacks on the French Channel ports (Cherbourg in particular was being fortified as a fleet base).
The Royal Navy was probably the largest single item in the British national budget of the time. William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister during much of the late nineteenth century, was an ardent anti-imperialist hostile to naval spending. In 1861, well before he became Prime Minister for the first time, he argued since steam made it possible to reach out to the world rapidly and reliably, the bulk of the fleet could be maintained in home waters. Implicit in Gladstone’s argument was that the ships (cruisers) on foreign stations were there to protect British colonies. Gladstone could accept a reduced fleet capable of responding to crises, but not naval presence. He would have dramatically reduced the peacetime British cruiser force, which provided presence. Once Gladstone was in office in 1868, he tested the idea. His First Lord, H C E Childers (who famously disregarded professional naval opinion) argued that money saved by eliminating most of the ships on station could be spent instead on more ironclads in home waters and in the Mediterranean. This idea corresponded to Gladstone’s preference for home defence over Empire defence (he was a ‘little Englander’). The idea was tested by sending a Flying Squadron commanded by Rear Admiral Geoffrey Phipps Hornby abroad in 1869. Among the drawbacks to the idea were the low speed of existing ships and their very limited coal endurance. Phipps Hornby later described the Flying Squadron as a valuable means of training officers and men (largely under sail) and of showing the flag (cruising under sail also minimized dependence on foreign coal). Despite its prestige, the squadron could not be in more than one place at a time: the United Kingdom still needed a large cruiser force continuously on station.
Presence, and the somewhat similar imperial police role, required large numbers of small ships, ranging downwards from cruisers capable of fleet operations to steam sloops, gun-vessels, and gunboats. About 1860, for example, large numbers of shallow-draught sloops and gunboats were required for China, even though China was not in any sense a British colony. These small units were never really expected to engage enemy cruisers, but they seemed absolutely essential; during the nineteenth century after 1815 they saw much more action than larger and more capable warships. They were caught up in the financial problems the Royal Navy faced by 1900, as the cost of adequate warships escalated while resources did not. Hence Admiral Fisher’s famous call, upon becoming First Sea Lord in 1904, to scrap all the small ships abroad which could ‘neither fight nor run away’.
In effect Fisher was saying that he could no longer include the cost of the Imperial maritime police force in the Royal Navy budget; in order to maintain a navy adequate for war, he could not continue to pay for assets really needed by the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. He probably hoped that they would realize that they needed the small warships badly enough to be willing to pay for them, but that did not happen (on the other hand, surprisingly few of the sloops were scrapped). The problem has continued to haunt navies, when maritime solutions to national problems other than naval warfare pop up. If that seems abstract, think about strategic submarines. Both in Britain and in the United States, Polaris submarines and their successors did the national job formerly done mainly by land-based bombers. They did not contribute to conventional naval missions. However, in neither country did governments pay for the new strategic weapons out of the budgets formerly allocated to the land-based bombers. Instead, the submarines were paid for by cutting general-purpose naval forces.
The Shape of the Fleet and the Changing Role of the Cruiser
Nineteenth-century cruisers are often regarded as direct descendants of the frigates and sloops of the age of sail. That is not quite true. Sailing frigates and sloops were generally faster than the line-of-battle ships, to the point that they could escape from such ships. As long as steam engines were bulky and inefficient, steam-powered battleships were generally as fast as (if not faster than) most steam frigates and lesser craft. It took a large frigate (often filled with machinery) to outrun a steam-powered battleship when both ships were under steam. Frigates lost their place in fleet engagements, although they certainly retained their roles in trade defence and attack. Only in the mid-1870s did the combination of steel hulls and more efficient machinery restore the cruiser’s speed advantage. It took about a decade more for the cruiser to regain a place in the battle fleet, partly because the nature of the fleet itself was changing.
Even the term cruiser (sometimes spelled cruizer) was not widely used as a ship type until the 1880s. Before that ships were classified as frigates, corvettes, sloops, gun-vessels, and gunboats, of which only the first three figure in this book. The categories were left over from the sailing ship era. In 1878 frigates and corvettes were first officially redesignated cruisers, but the earlier designations survived well into the 1880s in official documents. Sloops remained as a separate category, and so did the lesser cruising vessels.
The evolving roles of cruising ships were intertwined with radical changes in the character of the fleet and of naval warfare. There were three distinct naval roles. One was to protect trade, either directly (by convoy) or by denying an enemy the ability to deploy raiders (blockade and attack at source, i.e., raids on ports harbouring raiders), or by destroying the raiders individually at sea. A second was the destruction or neutralization of the enemy’s main fleet. It made the first type of operation possible, by limiting the scale of threat that escorts or blockaders or harbour attackers had to face. A third was to capitalize on control of the sea (secured mainly by battlefleet action) to move troops to strategic places and thus to upset an enemy’s position ashore. For example, the British fleet victory at Trafalgar (which effectively finished the French and Spanish battle fleets) secured free use of the sea, which the British used first for an unsuccessful descent on the Dutch North Sea coast and then to support Wellington’s Peninsular campaign. Without Trafalgar, there could have been no Peninsular campaign. Trafalgar also made the blockade of various French ports effective. Despite Trafalgar, the Royal Navy had to keep hunting down French raiders until the end of the war.
Steam dramatically changed the situation. A steam warship was independent of the vagaries of the wind. It might no longer be necessary to operate ships in the dense line-ahead formations of the past. Until the 1880s or even later, steam plants were extremely inefficient. For example, it was common in the 1840s and 1850s to design steam warships with a coal endurance of about two weeks and a stores endurance of five months, the assumption being that the ship would spend most of her time cruising under sail. The protracted blockades of the age of sail were no longer practical.
Moreover, sailing ships had been governed by prevailing winds, so that in effect the winds created highways in the otherwise trackless sea. That is why we can read about a British fleet well out of sight of land waiting for the Spanish gold convoy to approach, or an attack on some other large convoy. Steamships could manoeuvre much more freely. In a world without radio, the best way to locate – to destroy – an enemy’s warships was at or near their port. As in the sailing ship era, the alternatives were to enter the port (a cutting-out expedition) or to blockade it. The effect of the new steam and other (e.g., heavy gun) technology was to limit the number of ports which could support major warships, and thus to limit the number of ports which had to be dealt with. During the sailing ship era, blockade was far preferable to direct attack on a fleet in port because ships generally could not engage the fortifications protecting the port. Fortifications were, moreover, relatively inexpensive; the French fortified not only their fleet bases but also the ports which supported privateers preying on British trade.
The Crimean War changed this perception. French armoured floating batteries successfully engaged Russian forts (the British built similar batteries, but did not bring them into action during the war). Unarmoured British gunboats were also successful against forts. This lesson was repeated during the American Civil War. More powerful guns which appeared after 1865 presented the even more attractive possibility of destroying an enemy fleet by shelling it from just outside the protected port. It now became far more profitable to attack an enemy port than to blockade it. Both the Royal Navy and the French navy built ‘coast defence’ ships which might more properly be described as coast (or port) attackers.12 The French wrote about their ‘seagoing siege train’. To the extent that harbour attack became the favoured tactic in the Royal Navy and in its French counterpart, the fleet in the Channel was no longer the long-range seagoing entity of the past, with its scouts arrayed ahead of it. Because they had vital interests far from the British Isles, the British also needed seagoing armoured ships which would be deployed at long range. However, once they arrived at their destinations, they, quite as much as the shorter-range coastal ships, would be attacking an enemy fleet in port.
A fleet crashing into an enemy port to destroy everything inside had only a limited need for scouts. For example, the fleet which ascended the Turkish straits in 1878 included no cruisers (the sole cruiser in the area, HMS Raleigh, was among the ships which remained at Besika Bay).
HMS Dolphin. Dolphin and her sister Wanderer were the first British sloops to be armed with breech-loading guns. Originally classified as gun-vessels, they were reclassified as sloops while under construction. These photographs were taken when the ship was completed, armed with two 6in and two 5in breech-loaders. The stern view shows closed ports (embrasures) on either side of the ship’s stern, a feature of many British sail-and-steam warships of this period. Guns on slides could be moved between the embrasures and side ports. Embrasures made it possible to fire dead astern (there were similar ports forward) without fouling the trunk into which the ship’s single propeller was hoisted when she was under sail. Sailing qualities were essential to ships which would spend much of their time under sail so as to conserve coal and thus to achieve the long endurance demanded of cruising warships. These ships displaced 925 tons (157ft pp × 32ft × 14ft). Dolphin had a 720 IHP compound engine and was rated at 11.3kts; endurance was 1700nm at 10kts. Both ships were built under contract by Raylton Dixon of Middlesbrough; Dolphin was launched on 9 December 1882. She became a sailing training ship in 1899, when the larger corvettes of the Training Squadron were discarded. In 1907 she was hulked as an accommodation ship for submarines; in 1912 she became a submarine depot ship.
This did not change the need to protect trade and interests abroad. Both the British and the French built second-class battleships (which in the Royal Navy were superseded for a time by armoured cruisers) for individual operations on distant stations. They had both a cruising role and a port defence role; they backed unarmoured cruisers.
The situation began to change as underwater weapons developed. The American Civil War showed that underwater attack, e.g. by mines, could damage or sink large ships in confined waters. It might be difficult or even impossible for the coast defence ships to approach an enemy port to destroy the fleet inside. With all its difficulties, a fleet operating well offshore might be the only viable means of wielding sea power. That in turn demanded creation of a steam equivalent to the earlier sailing battle fleet, capable of fighting in the open sea. The further from a port the fleet had to remain, the more it would need scouts – fleet cruisers.
A fleet forced (by the torpedo and mine threat) to stand well outside the port containing an enemy fleet badly needed scouts. The attacking fleet also wanted to be able to use torpedoes, and cruisers turned out to be better torpedo platforms than battleships: they enabled an admiral to wield his two disparate weapons, gun and torpedo, flexibly. Too, a British fleet waiting for an enemy fleet to come out might well find itself pursuing that fleet. In 1884 the Merseys and their immediate successors were described as adjuncts to the ironclads capable both of scouting and of forcing a faster enemy fleet to action (the French in particular seemed to be building faster capital ships). That justified arming them with heavy guns. As the manoeuvre experience described below shows, the cruiser was soon seen primarily as a scout – and it was wanted in ever-increasing numbers.
The cruiser role changed again beginning in 1896, when DNC Sir William White sold the Admiralty Board the idea that new lightweight armour made it possible to produce a cruiser with battleship protection – in effect, the battlecruiser.
Fleet Operations: The 1884 Analysis
The rising role of cruisers within fleets is evident in an 1884 analysis of the fleet Britain would need in a war against France, at that time the most powerful potentially hostile sea power. It was conducted by Captain W H Hall, head of the Foreign Intelligence Committee.13 Hall’s work seems to have been an attempt to stave off increasingly loud voices arguing that the Royal Navy had fallen behind the French. Hall’s analysis offers a contemporary professional picture of the sort of naval war the Royal Navy expected to fight.
There must still have been advocates of convoy operations: Hall took pains to reject both convoy and other proposed means of trade protection as impossibly expensive (and also as unacceptably defensive). A modern reader might be surprised by how little of the French navy was normally active. Most of it, like most of the British fleet, was in various levels of reserve, awaiting activation by called-up reservists (the idea of nucleus crews was far in the future). Thus the offensive concept was to deal with the active enemy fleet at sea while rushing blockading squadrons to seal the rest in before they could be activated to the point of steaming out. Since reservists came from the merchant fleet, and since the British had a far larger merchant fleet than the French, it was reasonable to imagine that the British could mobilize more quickly. For that matter, mobilization would be a war warning.
Hall advocated mounting an immediate offensive against French forces overseas and already active in the Mediterranean (which might otherwise attack British shipping) while blocking the main French ports (containing the bulk of the [unmobilized] French fleet), destroying French shipbuilding facilities, and also destroying overseas coaling stations and bases.
Aside from ships deployed on foreign stations, the active French fleet consisted of an Evolutionary Squadron based on Toulon and an Eastern Squadron based in the Levant, looking after French interests in Syria. The Evolutionary Squadron consisted of two first-class and four second-class armour-clads, one despatch vessel (to link it to the command ashore), a gun-vessel, and two torpedo boats (it seems unlikely that the latter could go very far to sea; they were presumably to ensure that the squadron could get to sea in the event a hostile fleet appeared). A fifth second-class armour-clad was in 1st Reserve at Toulon, hence could probably get to sea to join the squadron. To deal with this squadron Hall envisaged a British fleet consisting of two first-class and six second-class armour-clads plus two corvettes and six torpedo vessels. The corvettes were presumably the fleet’s scouts, and the expectation probably was that the French would be caught in Toulon. The French Eastern Squadron consisted of a frigate and two corvettes, against which Hall envisaged a British squadron headed by a frigate and three corvettes (first-class rather than second).
Hall did not envisage sending fleets into French harbours. Each of his blockading fleets included both means of defence against the torpedo boats (torpedo vessels, which soon emerged as torpedo gunboats) and scouts (typically a frigate and two corvettes). Hall did not say so, but presumably the frigate would normally watch the port, the corvettes linking her to the armoured squadron further offshore. The exceptions were Cherbourg, for which Hall allocated one first-class and three second-class corvettes; Rochefort, for which he allocated two corvettes. At the time it appeared that the French were building much larger torpedo craft in the form of avisos, capable of operating well offshore on a sustained basis and thus denying all British ships, even corvettes, a clear view of the ships in a harbour or even of the harbour entrance.
Hall’s strategy of trade protection required instant destruction of every French force abroad, because every such force could be used against British trade. Thus he listed each British foreign station with the ships normally present and the corresponding French foreign station. There were obvious imbalances, because the two countries valued their overseas possessions rather differently. For example, the British squadron on the Australia station consisted of a second-class ironclad, a corvette, two sloops, and three gunboats. Facing this force at New Caledonia, the French had a fast sloop, a gun-vessel, and two small gunboats, hardly a match. Hall thought a corvette, a sloop, and two gun-vessels would suffice to overwhelm the French. He clearly separated fleets into categories, seeking equality or superiority in each category. Thus he accepted that any ironclad could overwhelm every unarmoured ship, but he does not seem to have accepted that even several gunboats or gun-vessels would have no chance against a corvette or frigate, hence that the attacking British force did not have to include small unarmoured craft.
French foreign interests were clearly concentrated in China (their force included one second-class ironclad and three third-class, plus five corvettes) and in a second Pacific force based at Tahiti (one second-class ironclad, a corvette, and two sloops). At this time the British counted what would later be called armoured cruisers as second-class ironclads, so the apparent deficit in such ships was a deficit in cruisers.
Hall classified unarmoured ships as frigates (with a covered battery) of first or second class (speed at least 14½ or 10kts, respectively, and of at least 3000 and 2500 tons, respectively), as corvettes of first, second, and third classes (first: at least 3000 tons, speed not less than 14½kts; second, at least 1700 tons, speed not less than 12kts; and third class, at least 1400 tons, speed not less than 11kts), plus sloops, gun-vessels, and gunboats.
Hall’s analysis showed the Royal Navy with a deficiency of 14 armour-clads (first and second class), 37 frigates and corvettes, 97 torpedo vessels, and also auxiliaries. The British had too many third-class armour-clads (10), coast defence armour-clads (5), small unarmoured ships (sloops and below: 37), and torpedo boats (20). The coast defence armour-clads could be employed in some of the operations envisaged, but not the old third-class armour-clads, whose belts could be penetrated by even moderate-calibre guns. They were in effect the left-overs of the building race with France twenty years earlier, and the deficit in more modern armour-clads could be blamed on the habit among successive governments to count the entire British armoured fleet as equivalent, hence to downplay obsolescence. The excessive number of small unarmoured ships could be traced to the need to maintain a maritime police force in a large maritime empire. Nine of them might replace second-class corvettes, albeit inefficiently.
The Royal Navy could not execute all of Hall’s envisaged operations simultaneously, but it could begin by attacking all French ships in commission. The French ships active on foreign stations were clearly the most dangerous to British trade, as they could be sent on that mission ‘by a flash of the telegraph’. With the exception of China, the British already had powerful enough forces on foreign stations to deal with the French; that was the case even in the Mediterranean. China was a worse proposition. Not only were the French more powerful, but some of their cruisers were faster than anything the British had. Thus the French had the options both of attacking Hong Kong and of attacking British commerce in the Far East. Hall’s only solution was to commission six of the fastest British merchant steamers using crews taken from the collection of unarmoured ships already in the Far East. The merchant ships might not be as fast as the French cruisers on a short-time basis, but they would be able to sustain full speed for very much longer, and would not have to coal nearly as often. Once the French squadrons abroad had been dealt with, the remaining British forces would deal with French coaling stations and commercial ports, thus dramatically reducing further French ability to attack British trade.
The British armour-clads in home and Mediterranean waters could meanwhile attack the French ports. This was not blockade, but rather something more like the direct attack of the past. For example, Hall suggested that the five armour-clads in commission in the Channel and First Reserve Squadrons plus the coast defence armour-clad in commission at Portsmouth could form a squadron to attack Cherbourg, the strongest of the French Channel ports, by day, and then disperse to attack the rest simultaneously. After those attacks it would reform as an observation (not blockading, in Hall’s words) force off Cherbourg, to prevent the ships there from coming out. If the initial bombardment sufficiently damaged the ships in Cherbourg, the squadron might proceed to attack Brest. Hall wrote that he deliberately avoided using the term blockade because he considered it impossible to establish a true blockade by any squadron which did not include torpedo vessels (i.e., torpedo gunboats).
The Mediterranean ships in commission would watch Toulon. Some of these ships might be sent to reinforce the China station. The Mediterranean would be reinforced by armour-clads in reserve at home and at Malta.
All of this suggests that at this time the French did not yet have sufficient ocean-going torpedo boats to prevent a force from bombarding a port from just outside, but that earlier ideas of actually entering the port in force to destroy the ships inside were no longer practicable.
In effect Hall showed that the existing British force could fight a naval war against France as long as it did not try to execute all necessary offensive operations simultaneously. There was one essential caveat. The necessary blockades could not be enforced so long as fleets had to stay well out to sea at night to avoid French torpedo boat attacks. Thus Hall’s most important recommendation was the mass purchase of what he called torpedo vessels, anti-torpedo boat ships. He noted in passing that some of the French cruisers were considerably faster than their British counterparts, and the only solution he could offer in the near term was to take up and arm large liners. Hall also pointed out that his war plan required that several British squadrons keep the sea for a sustained period; to do that he advocated large fast auxiliaries carrying stores, ammunition, and, most important, coal. As there was no way of transferring coal in the open sea, Hall proposed doing so either in protected waters or in neutral ports (where the usual restrictions on what neutrals could supply in wartime would not apply).
Hall listed deficiencies in terms of his plan for simultaneous operations. They amounted to 5 first-class and 9 second-class armour-clads; 2 frigates; 8 first-class and 35 second-class corvettes; and lesser craft (these numbers did not take into account the replacement of some corvettes by sloops). Hall’s program was not affordable, but it seems to have shaped what was done. For example, the need for nine second-class armour-clads may well have been met by the construction of the seven Orlando class belted cruisers plus Imperieuse and Warspite, which were seen as small battleships. The two frigates were, in effect, the big first-class cruisers Blake and Blenheim. Eight Leander and Mersey class cruisers, which Hall might have considered first-class corvettes, were already under construction. Within a few years the Royal Navy would have a substantial fleet of third-class cruisers which might fill Hall’s requirement for second-class corvettes.14 The deficit in ironclads was considerably reduced (but the cruiser situation complicated) as the French tried a new naval strategy (jeune école) based on a combination of base and harbour defence by torpedo boat and commerce warfare (guerre de course) abroad.
It was accepted that in wartime the Royal Navy would need far more cruisers than it could afford to build in peacetime. The solution often advanced was to take up merchant ships from trade and arm them. DNC Nathaniel Barnaby described what would be needed.15 For a time the parsimonious Gladstone administration seems to have imagined that armed merchant ships were viable substitutes for all cruisers. The British first tested the armed merchant cruiser idea during the Anglo-Russian crisis in 1877-78, HMS Hecla being retained in effect as a test case. Several fast liners were chartered in 1885 during another war scare. The only one commissioned into the Royal Navy, Oregon, performed impressively. Within a year or so, possibly due to a change in administration, it seems to have been accepted that, although they would be useful in wartime, fast armed merchant ships were no substitutes for real cruisers.
Fleet Manoeuvres and Their Lessons
The first formal large-scale British naval manoeuvres (June–July 1885) provide an idea of contemporary tactics.16 The fleet (the Particular Service Squadron) had been assembled for Baltic operations, and it was known that the Russians had large numbers of torpedo boats. The fleet was commanded by Admiral Sir Geoffrey Phipps Hornby, probably the most skilled living British operational commander. He had fourteen ironclads (the term battleship was not yet used). Six unarmoured ships were lookouts when the fleet cruised: Conquest (right ahead), Mercury (on starboard bow), Leander (on port bow), Racer (on starboard quarter), Mariner (on port quarter), and Cormorant (right astern). Mercury was the first of the new fast steel cruisers, and Leander was a larger and somewhat slower successor. Conquest was a considerably slower protected cruiser (corvette). Mariner and Racer were 970-ton sloops, and Cormorant was an 1130-ton sloop. The fleet was accompanied by the torpedo depot ship (converted merchantman) Hecla and eight torpedo boats. It was later joined by the torpedo ram Polyphemus. The 8kt average fleet speed while manoeuvring was too fast for the sloops Mariner and Racer to keep station.
Berehaven played the part of a Russian port the fleet might blockade. The fleet anchored outside, protected (it was hoped) by controlled mines it laid, by a boom, and by searchlights. The corvette Conquest was sent out with four torpedo boats to watch the port. The corvette squadron (Conquest, Mercury, Racer, Mariner) and four torpedo boats represented the inshore squadron of a blockading fleet. The ships in port were to sortie while torpedo boats (the other four first-class boats and four second-class from the ironclads) drove off the blockading squadron. The blockaders were to keep in touch with the escaping squadron long enough to be sure of their course. The three escaping ironclads were spotted by a torpedo boat. At daylight they had Mercury and Mariner on either side, out of gun range. A passage to Blacksod Bay proved that the torpedo boats working with the fleet could hardly be considered seagoing.
HMS Swallow was a composite-built Nymphe class sloop. All later sloops had steel hulls. She was not too much smaller than ships classified as corvettes (cruisers) a few years earlier, displacing 1140 tons (195ft pp × 28ft × 12ft 6in), and she had about the same speed as Calypso class cruisers (13.5kts on 1570 IHP). She was armed with eight 5in guns and eight machine guns. Swallow was built by Sheerness, launched 27 October 1885. She was sold for scrap in 1904.
A temporary base would have been created so that an anchored fleet and its service vessels (including colliers and transports) could shelter from Russian torpedo attacks. The fleet tested a combination of booms and mines (both contact and controlled). Admiral Phipps Hornby wrote that ‘a boom to [rams] is as a bit of pack-thread’ – Polyphemus smashed the boom at Berehaven. It would take mines to deal with rams.
Existing torpedo boats (Nos 21 and 22) were unable to attack Mercury when the latter was steaming in open water at 16kts. Mercury was deemed to have sunk one of the torpedo boats by the fire of her stern and machine guns.
In a second phase of the exercise, the fleet split into attacking and defending squadrons. The attackers had six ironclads plus the torpedo ram Polyphemus. Their six lookouts were the fast cruiser Mercury, the sloop Racer, the seagoing gunboat Express, the coastal gunboats (each with a heavy gun) Medina and Snap, and the tug Seahorse. One object was to see whether small handy ships like the gunboats and the tug could defend a fleet against night torpedo attack. The gunboats proved slow, particularly in a seaway (Admiral Phipps Hornby: ‘during the forenoon we had striking evidence of what a clog on the speed of the squadron the heavy-gun gunboats become, invaluable as they are in narrow waters and for many purposes’). For the long passage the gunboats had to be towed by the armoured ships, badly reducing their speed. Finally the fleet included the torpedo depot ship Hecla with four first-class torpedo boats. The defenders (seven ironclads) had four lookouts: the fast converted liner Oregon (taken up from trade due to the war emergency), the corvette Conquest, and the sloops Mariner and Cormorant. It included two gunboats (Medway and Pike) and four first-class torpedo boats.
Other exercises had the attacking fleet running at night to elude surveillance by the fast armed merchant cruiser Oregon. Phipps Hornby noted: ‘the only thought in everyone’s mind was “Where is she?” If she caught sight of us our chance was gone, as we had nothing fast enough to prevent her from dogging our steps and acquainting her admiral what place we were steering for.’ However, the exercise proved that no one could prevent a squadron of ironclads from getting to sea in thick weather, even when nights were short. The enemy fleet’s object was to get 30 to 35nm offshore before daylight, for which 8kts sufficed. The line of eight ironclads was only 8 cables long (one cable was a tenth of a nautical mile) and the width 2 cables, ‘a small space to find in thick weather’. It was pointless to maintain a blockading squadron of ironclads at sea off a port, burning down their coal supply. They would be better off sheltering in a nearby port with bunkers full, waiting for a scout’s report.
HMS Mutine was one of the last sloops built for the Royal Navy. She built under contract by Laird, launched on 1 March 1900. She was one of six Condor class, which were followed by six Cadmus class. These ships survived to fight during the First World War. Armament was six 4in QF: two on the forecastle, two in the waist, two on the poop. Twenty years before, her steaming performance would have matched that of a Comus class cruiser – 13.5kts (1400 IHP) – but by 1900 cruisers were making 20kts or more. Thus Mutine and her like were considered specialist maritime police ships. She was steel-hulled and entirely unprotected.
A few cruisers offshore were not enough. Ideally there should be a line of torpedo vessels (i.e., torpedo cruisers) between port and blockading fleet, at the least to warn the fleet that the enemy was sending torpedo boats against it. The line of patrols should be as far as possible from the fleet. Although sloops like Mariner and Racer were both handy and well-armed, they were not fast enough. Mercury was fast but too large and expensive to risk against a torpedo boat. She would have to move so far from the port mouth at night to avoid attack by a torpedo boat so as to make her a useless picket.
Phipps Hornby concluded that he wanted (i) fast vessels, (ii) seagoing torpedo boats in numbers, and (iii) the means to shelter the fast torpedo boats while coaling, so that they could accompany the fleet overseas. To some extent the first two requirements were combined in torpedo cruisers and also in faster cruisers.
Captain J A Fisher, the future First Sea Lord, accompanied the fleet as Captain of HMS Excellent, the gunnery school (and ordnance experimental establishment). He supplied both the detailed narrative in the official report and detailed conclusions. Ironclad squadrons (six ships) should be accompanied by at least four fast unarmoured ships (cruisers) with moderate heavy gun power but with numerous quick-firing guns (to deal with torpedo craft). They would serve both as lookouts and as supports for the torpedo boat destroyers (torpedo boats armed mainly with guns, the first time this term was used) working with the ironclads. ‘It is obvious that they cannot perform these duties efficiently or avoid certain destruction by the modern fast ironclads unless their speed is also great and approximate to that of the first-class torpedo boats.’
Each ironclad squadron should also be accompanied by at least two seagoing torpedo boats plus a fast torpedo depot ship with commanding speed (such as the Oregon) carrying second-class torpedo boats, and also stores (mines and booms) to defend a temporary fleet anchorage. The torpedo boats should have an alternative gun armament to beat off torpedo boat attacks (Fisher used the phrase ‘torpedo boat destroyer’ for this role). Half the boats, equipped for defence, should be placed ahead of the squadron on going into action, the others (attackers) steaming astern of their ironclads, ‘ready to act in the smoke and confusion when the opposing ironclads pass each other’.
Fisher foreshadowed much of the cruiser development which followed soon after. His fast cruisers were the Medeas and their successors. His seagoing torpedo boats were the torpedo cruisers and then the torpedo gunboats. Fisher specifically rejected building a special-purpose torpedo depot ship, but his idea for her was embodied in the depot ship/cruiser Vulcan.
There were no 1886 manoeuvres, but in 1887 they followed the Queen’s Jubilee Review off Spithead.17 The fleet was organized into three cruising squadrons (A, B, and C) and four coast defence flotillas. Squadron A was ten ironclads (including Imperieuse) and four cruisers (including Curlew); B was another ten ironclads and four cruisers, and C was six cruisers (including the slow Calypso). The coast defence units included both ironclads and first-class torpedo boats plus, in some cases, gunboats. The general idea was that British squadrons had lost touch with an enemy fleet which had put to sea to do maximum damage to English ports in the Channel and in the Thames and Medway while avoiding any engagement. The enemy was represented by the second divisions of A and B squadrons: five ironclads, Archer and Curlew (A) and five ironclads and the cruisers Amphion and Mohawk. The first division of A defended against the second division of A, the first division of B against the second division of B. C squadron was to try to pass through the North Channel without being discovered or, if so, attacked by the coast defence units. A second exercise had two cruisers entering the Irish Channel to attack commerce in the face of four British cruisers and the coast defence units. The defending element of B squadron spotted the attackers by their smoke and managed to use its cruisers to hold contact with them for 21 hours, so that it could bring the attackers to action. The A squadron defenders had no such luck (its enemy succeeded in attacking Falmouth, but failed to attack the Thames, where it would have been trapped). Torpedo boats proved effective in attacking the C cruisers during their first operation.18
The trade protection exercise must have been sobering. Calypso was soon captured by the faster cruiser Rover, but Volage was never captured (she narrowly avoided HMS Inconstant). She claimed 16 vessels off Liverpool, 5 off the entrance to the Clyde, and 36 in Kingstown harbour. Of the 57 in total, there were 14 steamers (but only 6 of any importance), 14 coasters, and 21 yachts. Most of the ships captured at Liverpool were lying off the bar waiting for the tide (capture required that the cruiser remain within a mile of the prize for half an hour, then stop for an hour, the latter representing the time to board a vessel, examine her papers, and put a prize crew aboard or sink the vessel). Umpires pointed out that Volage claimed 14 ships at the same time, which was unrealistic. Even simply sinking the ships would have taken longer. The umpires also doubted that Volage could have operated freely in the face of the coast defence flotillas envisaged in the other phases of the exercise. She had to get too close to them, and to fixed defences, to find her prey. Cruisers generally proved considerably slower than expected. Against trial (measured mile) speeds of 15.1kts and 16.2kts for Volage and Inconstant, actual speeds (when the ships were doing their best) were 12 and 11.8kts. However, Rover and Calypso attained 14¼kts and 13¼kts, respectively, which were much closer to trial speeds.
A, B, and C squadrons were attacked by torpedo boats. Anchored at Spithead, A squadron relied on nets, guns, and rifle fire, plus outlying small craft and torpedo boats. An attack by twenty-two torpedo boats led by the torpedo gunboat Rattlesnake failed. B and C were anchored at Portland, with a boom, wire hawsers, and mines laid across the mouth of the anchorage, plus fixed searchlight beams and small craft. Most of the torpedo boats managed to cut through the boom. However, they were considered put out of action either by the patrolling craft or by the guns of the outer line of ships. It seemed that the problems of torpedo defence raised by the 1885 manoeuvres had been solved.
HMS Avon was a Beacon class composite gun-vessel, the category below a sloop. These ships and the larger Plovers were conceived as replacements for decayed Crimean War gunboats, particularly for action in China. About thirty of these earlier ships were sent to China to fight in the wars of the 1850s and 1860s. They proved useful, although the ten which attacked the Peiho forts were beaten off with the loss of three of their number. Because the Crimean War gunboats were built of unseasoned timber, they had to be discarded within about a decade. Thus by 1863 work on a replacement was urgent; the Plovers were the first new cruising vessels laid down after the mass cancellations of large screw frigates. The engines were still good, and they featured in the Avon class replacement ships (four ships did get new engines). The main lesson of the Chinese operations was that the 32pdr armament of the Crimean War gunboats was inadequate. On the one hand something heavier was needed to deal with forts; on the other something firing faster was needed to deal with armed junks and with pirates. Draught had to be limited, so Robinson and Reed selected twin rather than single screws. The Plovers were of conventional wooden type, but for the smaller follow-on Avons Reed combined an iron frame with wooden planking – the first British composite hull. The hull was flat-bottomed and square-bilged for about three-quarters of her length; Admiral Ballard described her as almost on the lines of an elongated packing case. The result was a steady gun platform and a buoyant sea boat, and the flat bottom made it easier to deal with frequent grounding. On the other hand, the ships steered erratically in a following sea, and they could not avoid drifting sideways in a strong cross-wind. As the first ships below battleship size with iron frames, they were also the first such ships with watertight bulkheads. Planned armament was two 68pdr smooth-bore muzzle-loaders and two 20pdr breech-loaders at the ends, but ships had one 7in 6½-ton (between funnel and mainmast) and one 64pdr (between funnel and foremast: both muzzle-loading rifles) instead of the two 64pdrs (they retained the 20pdrs). The two different calibres of heavy guns were adopted because two 64pdrs would have been inadequate and two 6½-ton guns too heavy to carry; later the Admiralty planned to replace both with the new 7in 4½-ton (90cwt) gun, but that was done only for Rocket, Lynx, Hornet, Flirt, and Rifleman. Avon, Elk, and Frolic each had their 7in gun replaced by the lighter type. Although the ships were designed for river service, they first had to get to China (or other rivers: ships also served in West Africa and in South America) on their own bottoms, which meant sailing. These ships displaced 603 tons (they had been designed for 584); dimensions were 155ft × 25ft × 11ft. Eighteen were built under the 1867-68 program, and another four under the 1871-72 program. Avon was launched at Portsmouth on 2 October 1867, and discarded in 1890. She served in China, in West Africa, and in South America.
The first conclusion was that a squadron needed more than two scouts, to search a wider area, to allow for breakdowns, and to allow for ships absent while coaling. Ships needed better-trained and more numerous signal staff, with more practice in distant signalling by day and night. Local defensive squadrons would greatly assist in the protection not only of British ports but also of trade, which would inevitably concentrate off the ports. Rapid coaling was essential, and the battleships of a squadron should all have the same speed. Above all, manoeuvres should be conducted on an annual basis.
The 1888 manoeuvres were staged while the Naval Defence Act of 1889 was being framed. They were far more sophisticated than those of 1887. At the sudden outbreak of war, two enemy squadrons (fleet B) in ports some distance apart were preparing for action.19 The British (fleet A) established blockades of both bases, and the blockaded forces tried to emerge. Each fleet consisted of battleships, fast cruisers, and torpedo boats. The fleet A was numerically stronger than the enemy (B). A1 was based at Pembroke, A2 at Lamlash Bay; B1 was based at Berehaven and B2 at Lough Swilly. England and Scotland were friendly to A, Ireland to B. The object of the B fleet was (1) to attack commerce off the coast of Ireland, in the Irish and entrance to the Bristol Channels and in the English Channel, (2) to attack ports on the west and south coast of England, other than those counted as heavily fortified, and (3) to land troops on any unfortified position.
A1 consisted of seven ironclads and seven cruisers (including the torpedo cruiser Rattlesnake). A2 consisted of another five older ironclads, six cruisers (including the torpedo cruisers Tartar and Mohawk and the torpedo gunboat Grasshopper) and twelve first-class torpedo boats. In cruising order the A1 cruisers were dispersed ahead and astern of the two columns of ironclads. Those ahead were to stay ‘within signal distance’; the two ships astern were to stay within two miles. A collier trailed the ironclads. When A1 and A2 steamed together, a column of six cruisers steamed alongside the main body, other cruisers being dispersed before and abaft the main body. Against A1, B1 had six ironclads (including the armoured cruiser Warspite) and five cruisers (including the torpedo cruiser Cossack and the gunboat Sandfly). B2 was four ironclads and five cruisers (including the torpedo gunboat Spider).
The blockading force off Berehaven consisted of an inner line of lookouts (six torpedo boats and a torpedo gunboat), an inner cruiser squadron, and an outer squadron of ironclads, plus one cruiser and one torpedo boat at each of two telegraphic centres, to which Admiralty intelligence would be sent.20 If the enemy broke out without being followed, the two A fleet squadrons would rendezvous.
Once the enemy had broken out, in effect A adopted a focal area strategy. A division was assigned to watch Liverpool for two days, after which it would leave a force (two ironclads, a cruiser, and a torpedo boat) to guard that port, falling on Milford Haven in the face of a superior enemy force. The rest of this division was to guard the western part of the English Channel. Cruisers were detached to protect merchant shipping between the North Foreland and Land’s End.
HMS Ringdove was a Redbreast class screw gunboat armed with six 4in guns. She displaced 805 tons (165ft pp × 31ft × 11ft) and could make 13kts (1200 IHP). She was launched on 30 April 1889, and was discarded in 1906 as part of Admiral Fisher’s program of scrapping ships which could ‘neither fight nor run away’.
(Allan C Green, courtesy of State Library of Victoria)
Objects were to determine (1) the most efficient distribution of a blockading squadron both day and night; (2) the best means of maintaining communication between scouts and the main body of a fleet; (3) the relative advantages and disadvantages of keeping the main body of a fleet off a blockaded port using an inshore squadron, or of keeping it at a nearby base, maintaining a cruiser and torpedo boat force off the blockaded port, ‘with means of rapid communication with the Fleet’ (radio did not yet exist); (4) the best means of keeping a blockading fleet supplied with coal; (5) the best means of using torpedo boats, both with and against a blockading fleet; (6) the best means of keeping track of hostile cruisers attempting to attack trade; (7) the best kind of identification signals for a fortified port and minefield; and (8) how to deal with the special dangers to which a blockading squadron would be exposed. These were not too different from the problems laid out in the 1885 manoeuvres.
A Squadron reported that the exercise rules much favoured the blockaded fleet: it was impossible ‘to put a torpedo boat out of action except through the stupidity of the officer in charge of her ... and cruisers could with impunity brave the fire of the blockading force’. Fleet A considered its best blockade disposition to be with seagoing torpedo vessels innermost, then fast cruisers, and only then ironclads, the ironclads having cruisers on their flanks. The ships should be end-on to the shore, never exposing their broadsides, with their heads offshore if possible so that they could chase any emerging enemy force. This position would also make ramming much more difficult. To guard against ramming, ships should keep up full steam – which would run down their coal. Ships standing offshore should be able to protect themselves against torpedo attack using nets, but ‘in the whole fleet there is not an efficient net defence that could, if down at sea, be raised quickly clear of gun fire; and very few nets that would be safe down, if steaming 4 or 5kts’.
Two torpedo boats and one catcher (torpedo gunboat) should be attached to each ironclad. The blockading fleet should have 50 per cent more ironclads than its enemy, and twice as many cruisers (and those of the highest possible speed). The inner blockade force should include a proportion of torpedo boats and catchers kept with the fleet to carry despatches, to scout, and for other purposes. Torpedo boats should work in pairs, if possible supported by catchers.
Given the fragility of torpedo boats, a refuge should be set up for them on the nearby coast. Torpedo catchers (torpedo gunboats) were far more serviceable than torpedo boats, and could work in much worse weather. They were not nearly as exhausting for crews. Commanding B Squadron, Admiral Tryon considered catchers ‘of very great value. I have a very high opinion of them.’
Cruisers and certain ironclads should be assigned nightly to chase and run down any enemy ships that might escape, special care being taken to assign enough to make capture certain. The chasing ships should be accompanied by catchers, which could report back to the admiral commanding the blockading squadron.
Any enemy ship seen escaping should be followed by torpedo catchers (torpedo gunboats or torpedo cruisers), which would shine their searchlights on them while signalling the fleet, not giving up the chase until relieved by ships of the outer line. If enemy ships escaped in fog, a captive balloon would be a great help, determining which ships were still in harbour. It should be flown by a ship far enough offshore to be safe from enemy fire. In moderate weather, ships should be visible, particularly from aloft, three or four miles away.
A telegraph ship should be attached to the blockading squadron, and a cable laid from the home base to it.
It seemed most efficient to keep in touch with scouts via fast cruisers (‘in which we are at present sadly deficient’). Unless there was a nearby anchorage, the ironclads had to be kept constantly under way. To keep them fuelled, the fleet should include 10kt colliers, which would coal ships at their temporary base. Ships should fuel at every opportunity. Seagoing torpedo vessels were vital to the blockading fleet, as they could prevent the enemy from launching harassing torpedo attacks designed to break up the blockade. The enemy would be forced to seek a general action, in which case the torpedo vessels would fall back on the main body of ironclads.
There was no real hope that the blockaders could rest in a nearby port while the enemy was watched by cruisers and torpedo vessels. Enemy ironclads could drive them off and then get away in fog.
The chief dangers facing a blockading fleet were (1) running out of coal, (2) torpedo attacks, and (3) surprise by a second fleet working with the blockaded fleet. Squadron A was weakened daily by ships detached to coal, sometimes in a bay 60 miles away. It had a cruiser at Lamlash waiting for telegrams, a torpedo boat away for repairs, and a ship watering torpedo boats in a sheltered area. This was quite aside from accidents. In good weather the blockading fleet could coal at sea, a ship taking on 20 to 30 tons an hour from a collier. Special fleet colliers might be built.
Ships were not fast enough, and the official fleet handbook (Steamships of England) overstated what they could do. The chief defects in the fleet were in boilers, generally due to using forced draught ‘which in my [commander of A Squadron] opinion, is the ruin of them. Forced draught is not supposed to be used unless in emergency, but having the power, emergency is certain to arise some time or other. This, and a very inferior class of Stokers, as well as Engineer Officers being strange to machinery, which they have had to work at high speeds without much experience in many of the ships, were the causes of failure in boilers and engines.’
Of the cruisers, only Mercury maintained anything like her reputed speed. Mersey was reduced to 12kts after running 300nm at 17kts. Thames never attained more than 15kts, and stopped continually to deal with defects in steam pipes. Arethusa was good for 15kts. The Archer class torpedo cruisers were all reduced to 11 to 13kts. These ships were too heavily armed; the weights of their heavy guns fore and aft made them pitch excessively. In many cases (not just in cruisers) coal was very inferior and smoky. Tryon (B Squadron) commented that ‘ships are now apt to be too complicated and unnecessarily so. Everything should be as simple as possible. There is often a want of good means of communicating with the engine-room ... Electrical fittings and arrangements have been largely used in substitution of mechanical fittings and appliances, and they failed far too often.’ Tryon also complained that ships were too beamy, as a result of which they could steam well in a calm but not in even a moderate sea. He particularly cited the armoured cruiser Warspite, which he wrote had been criticized in comparison with foreign ships five years earlier.
In September 1888 the Admiralty appointed a special committee to draw lessons from the manoeuvres, presumably ultimately for Cabinet and parliamentary consumption.21 The report was submitted on 21 November. The first key conclusion was that steam and torpedoes had made blockade so dangerous that a blockading fleet had to be in the proportion of 5 to 3 to the fleet being blockaded, to allow for casualties which the fleet in harbour would not be risking. An even larger margin would be needed if the area covered by the blockaders were extensive, since in that case the entire blockading fleet might not be concentrated in one place. If the blockading fleet could lie in a nearby port, the proportion might be reduced to 4 to 3. The proportion of cruisers should be at least 2 to 1 in favour of the blockaders, so that any enemy cruisers trying to break out could be run down without weakening the force off the port; at the least, there should be a cruiser to each battleship. Torpedo gunboats would be of ‘incalculable value’ to the blockading fleet, but first-class torpedo boats would be useful mainly to those being blockaded. They would be worthwhile if they could be carried on board a special ship (superior to Hecla; for some reason there was no mention of Vulcan, then being built). On occasion the second-class torpedo boats aboard battleships would be useful (but the committee much preferred the new picket boats, which could be armed with torpedoes, as they were better seaboats).
It seemed to the Committee that the A and B squadrons fairly represented the full British and French forces in home waters. These two squadrons together were the entire British naval force available for general purposes in wartime – to reinforce the Mediterranean and distant squadrons, to maintain superiority in the Channel, and to maintain a considerable light squadron off the Irish coast. The manoeuvres implied that the Channel Fleet had to be powerful enough to blockade the French Atlantic ports, leaving a sufficient reserve to hold the Channel and protect the coasts and commerce of the United Kingdom, with sufficient battleships and cruisers to reinforce squadrons abroad and to form detached squadrons.
As of July 1888, the British had in home waters (in commission or in reserve) 22 battleships and 23 cruisers and gunboats. In the Mediterranean were 8 ironclads (including the torpedo ram Polyphemus), 4 cruisers, 3 sloops, 4 gunboats, and a despatch vessel. Including ships in reserve but ready for commissioning in Toulon, the French Mediterranean fleet consisted of 15 ironclads, 2 armoured gunboats, 5 first- and second-class cruisers, 11 third-class cruisers and gunboats, 4 torpedo cruisers and avisos, and 7 seagoing torpedo boats.
Had war broken out, to give the Mediterranean Fleet equal forces, 9 ironclads and 13 cruisers would have had to go there, leaving 13 battleships (including 3 coast defence ships) and 10 cruisers in the Channel and reserve squadrons. They would be watching a French fleet in Cherbourg of 5 seagoing ironclads, 6 coast defence ironclads (including 2 gunboats), 6 cruisers, 8 avisos (including 4 torpedo avisos), and 4 seagoing torpedo boats. In addition, the French had ships at Brest (2 ironclads, 4 first- and second-class cruisers, 1 third-class cruiser), Lorient (7 cruisers, 6 of them third-class), and Rochefort (5 third-class cruisers and avisos).
The total British force was ‘manifestly altogether inadequate’ against France alone; ‘and should the fleets of one other Power – say of that Great Power [Russia] whose Imperial interests may be said to clash most with those of the British Empire – have been joined to those of France against Great Britain at that time, the balance of maritime strength would have been most decidedly against her’. As an emergency measure, the old but still serviceable ironclads should be brought into condition to be activated in an emergency. The system, in force since 1870, of recommissioning ships abroad over and over again ‘has, in great measure, brought about a dearth of reserves’.
None of the analysis took into account ships under construction, and the Committee thought the situation would be better in 1890-91; but no ironclads had been laid down since 1886 (i.e., since the Northbrook Program) and ‘as there is nothing, in our opinion, to justify the belief that the days of ironclad battleships are over’, further new construction was urgent. Since England could not control the question of peace and war, at any time a maritime power might challenge her; so ‘we are decidedly of opinion that no time should be lost in placing the Navy of England beyond comparison with any two powers’.
‘Putting Russia beside the question, there can be little doubt but that, were England involved in a war with France, and she were to resume her natural rights as a belligerent [i.e., rights of blockade and of seizing neutral ships with enemy cargoes on board], which appear to have been voluntarily laid aside by the Declaration of Paris, troubles with the United States would inevitably ensue, and her whole commercial position, and the immense carrying trade by which it is sustained, would be jeopardized at the outset were war to be forced upon her at a time when her Navy was weak.’
France had both military and naval power, but the British position depended entirely on naval supremacy, ‘which has never seriously been challenged since the close of the last Great War [i.e., against Napoleon]. The defeat of her Navy means to her the loss of India and her Colonies and of her place among the nations.’
To the Committee, the arrangements made by A squadron to protect commerce, and those by B squadron to attack it, were much those that would be made in wartime by the admiral commanding the sole British Channel squadron and an enemy force. The B admiral at Berehaven judged that he was justified in breaking out both to attack trade and to attack major coastal cities, causing panic and inflicting great damage. He did so by attracting attention to his main body coming out of harbour while three of his cruisers escaped unobserved. He took a considerable risk, and almost lost two of his ironclads to torpedo attack, but the cruisers got out. B squadron cruisers also managed to break out of Lough Swilly unobserved; they also raided shipping and coastal towns. The British admiral blockading these fleets had decided that if as many as three ships broke out, he was unjustified in continuing the blockade and leaving the approaches to London, the heart of the Empire, uncovered. He also detached ships to cover Liverpool. That freed up the enemy forces, which merged and seized Liverpool. It seemed clear that the British fleet had not had enough cruisers to watch the enemy force, and thus to bring them to battle (as nearly happened off Liverpool, the British force having recently left). The British defending force had never had enough ships.
The blockaded force had an important advantage: continuous access to telegraph lines and thus to current intelligence, so long as it remained in port. Off Bantry the blockading admiral was 200 miles from the nearest telegraphic centre (and for purposes of the manoeuvres he was cut off from the natural source of intelligence, the Admiralty).
Overall, there could be no doubt that any maritime enemy ‘would adopt every possible means of weakening her enemy; and we know of no means more efficacious for making an enemy feel the pinch of war than thus destroying his property, and touching his pocket’. The British admiral trying to protect British commerce was badly hampered by the lack of intelligence (under manoeuvre rules) and also by the absence, under his command, of coast defence ships which would otherwise have prevented single enemy cruisers from getting close to defended cities near which shipping would concentrate (i.e., he could not mount a focal area defence). The B fleet won. By definition, B had no floating commerce worth attacking, and the British could not spare any force to attack its capital and its coastal towns.
No cruisers could be spared to protect British commerce. Had Britain been fighting France, all such ships in commission would have been required by the Channel Fleet, watching the French naval ports, preventing their escape, and helping bring them to action if they broke out. Assuming that the enemy did not arm privateers, British commerce would have been relatively safe near British shores. It would be necessary to arrange convoys for the slower steamers (12kts or less); sailing ships would presumably be laid up. The Committee suggested further that groups of merchant steamers with strong bows, steaming together, might give a good account of themselves against unarmoured enemy cruisers, using their bows as a weapon. Without enough unarmoured cruisers to form detached squadrons off the entrances to St George’s and the English Channels, and on the fishery grounds, merchant ships would have to be taken up from trade for that purpose.
The Royal Navy needed many more fast cruisers, in addition to the battleships the Committee obviously wanted. This mass of cruisers appeared in the Naval Defence Act of 1889, which might be seen as the outcome of the 1888 manoeuvres (and other efforts). A supplementary report examined the behaviour of various classes of ships; its remarks are given in the discussions of the Leander, Mersey, and Archer classes in later chapters.
The 1889 manoeuvres tested the extent to which a British fleet could mask an enemy fleet from strategic bases, its scouts keeping watch on the enemy’s fleet in its own bases. This was very different from the close blockade envisaged earlier. It demanded much more numerous scouting forces plus ships linking the scouts to the main British fleet (there was no radio). In the first phase of the manoeuvres an enemy force trying to pass up the Channel was intercepted. In the second phase the enemy force evaded contact, passing around the north of Scotland into the North Sea, and bombarding East Coast towns before being defeated by a superior British fleet.22
The 1890 manoeuvres placed an enemy fleet on an important trade route.23 The British fleet sought to engage it (the enemy fleet tried to avoid engagement). A secondary object was to find the best way to employ the considerable body of scouting cruisers on both sides. Each side could put cruisers to sea before the outbreak of war in order to watch the other fleet. At the outbreak of war the main British fleet was at Plymouth, a reserve British fleet was at Portland; it was allowed to move from one port to another as necessary. The enemy fleet was at Berehaven in Ireland (later it also used a base at Shannon). Upon declaration of war, the enemy fleet would enter the Channel from the West, the British fleet seeking to engage it. One artificial restriction was that cruisers, which in previous exercises had attacked trade directly, were limited to scouting and despatch (i.e., linking) services. The hostile fleet established a torpedo boat base (boats plus the cruiser [sloop] Curlew, other cruisers later joining) at Alderney in the Channel Islands to operate against any British fleet trying to use the Channel. The design of the exercise was somewhat complicated by the need not to interfere with actual shipping in the Channel.
The main British fleet was commanded by Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon, at that time the leading British tactician. He had nine battleships and thirteen cruisers and lesser craft, including the old unarmoured cruiser Inconstant, the armoured cruiser Shannon, and several torpedo gunboats. A second British fleet was created from the mobilized Reserve Squadron and based at Portland as a kind of coast defence force: six battleships and coast defence ships, the torpedo depot ship Hecla, and only three cruisers (the old cruiser Active and two torpedo gunboats). The Portland force also included twelve torpedo boats. The enemy had eight battleships, twelve cruisers, and twelve torpedo boats. The enemy fleet managed to get to sea unobserved. In the past, enemy fleets had generally been intercepted by British fleets lying off their bases, waiting for them to emerge. Once an enemy fleet lost itself in the trackless sea, the only hope of catching it was to guess its destination (or to gain intelligence of that destination). In 1798 Nelson found the French at Aboukir only by learning of their movements from ships in the Mediterranean, and it was crucial that they stayed at Aboukir long enough for him to get there. By 1890 the Admiralty was assembling operational intelligence, which could be distributed by telegraph to special signal stations around the British coast. Without radio, which did not yet exist, an admiral afloat had to rely on linking ships (or on ships steaming out from the coast) to provide him with that sort of information – i.e., on fast cruisers.
Tryon did have an important advantage. Like Milne, he knew that the only profitable place for an enemy to attack trade was in a focal area, so he concentrated his cruisers there. He also arranged to be in almost constant communication with the English coast, hence with the Admiralty intelligence centre. His first move was to send three powerful cruiser divisions to await the enemy fleet in the focal area. He soon sent a battle force out to back up the cruisers. Tryon’s dispositions blocked a possible enemy run up the Channel. Tryon was thus the first to test the ability of modern materiel to combine an adequate defence of a vital spot of trade, to maintain regular and frequent communication with a base, and to keep the Channel clear of an enemy.
Tryon failed; he never brought the enemy fleet to battle. The two fleets were never closer than 300nm, and at the end of the manoeuvres they were 1700 nm apart. The umpires praised Tryon’s use of his cruisers; the hostile fleet clearly did not consider cruiser scouting a primary object. The cruiser force Tryon wielded was not strong enough. An enemy who managed to get out of his port unobserved could still get away altogether. To the extent that there was a solution, it had to be more and faster cruisers, not least to link deployed scouts with the main body of a fleet.
The 1892 manoeuvres had a Red fleet in two separated divisions, trying to join up in the face of enemy (Blue) torpedo attacks – of the sort the French could and would mount from their side of the Channel against a British fleet whose bases were still dispersed (the Irish Channel played the part of the English Channel). The torpedo boats were backed by coast defence ships and cruisers. Opposite the Blue torpedo base was a Red base with torpedo boats, catchers (torpedo gunboats), and coast defence ships. This Red force tried to cover the juncture of the two Red divisions by attacking the Blue base and force.
Again, each fleet and each division included a large cruiser force. The Red first division consisted of eight battleships, two armoured cruisers, seven second-class cruisers, and two torpedo gunboats. Red’s second division was seven more battleships, one armoured cruiser, six second-class cruisers, and two torpedo gunboats. The Red covering squadron consisted of four coast defence ships backed by a second-class cruiser, eight torpedo gunboats, and six torpedo boats. Blue had three coast defence ships, the three oldest armoured cruisers, six second-class cruisers, three torpedo gunboats, the depot ship Hecla, and twenty-one torpedo boats. Cruiser operations began even before hostilities, each side’s cruisers watching the other’s fleet in harbour. As long as the observers remained outside the three-mile limit, they could not be driven off before hostilities began. The umpires pointed out that not much could or would be seen, either, unless the observed party sent out ships to challenge the observers. Moreover, the observers always ran the risk that the observed party, having declared war, could jump them. It surprised the Blue commander that the Red Covering Force, which was not far from his own, made no pre-emptive attack using its own torpedo boats, but instead retired from the Irish Channel. Blue never engaged it at all; it might as well not have been present. The day of coast defence/coast attack ships was over: they could not live in the presence of torpedo boats.
Like the French fleet, Blue enjoyed a considerable superiority in torpedo boats. That had surprisingly little impact on Blue’s behaviour, because the superiority counted for so little among Blue officers. The official report sympathized that there was no record of battle experience on which to base confidence or its lack, but he considered it important that Blue showed ‘a tendency to consider the torpedo boat as something not to be included in the ordinary naval strength of a country ...’ The Red divisional commanders certainly were impressed, the torpedo boat threat delaying their junction by about 43 hours (had it not been thought necessary to have a long period of daylight after the junction [to stave off a night torpedo attack], the delay would have been 37 hours). The delay could be attributed to caution considered necessary when entering waters in which hostile torpedo boats might be operating. Red was clearly impressed with the torpedo boat threat, which was probably exactly what the French hoped. The umpires thought this an important illustration of likely wartime behaviour.
Blue could have chosen either to concentrate its force (as it did) or to distribute its torpedo craft along the coast to harass Red. It concentrated and was destroyed. The exercise report suggested that the special characteristics of torpedo boats made dispersal the wiser course. It also seemed that Blue had been foolish to use its torpedo boats to search for the enemy; they should have been kept in hand for a surprise attack as the enemy approached. Torpedo boats were most successful, it seemed, when they were sent to attack an enemy whose location had already been found – most likely by a cruiser working with the torpedo boats. British and foreign exercises tabulated over five years showed that when the position of the objective was not known at all, the boats succeeded three times; when it was approximately known, six times; and when it was exactly known, sixteen times.
‘The number of cruisers to be attached to a Fleet is fixed according to the service on which the Fleet is employed rather than the number of battleships which it contains.’ A memo on cruiser organization (for the second division of the Red Fleet) distinguished lookout cruisers (which should be paired) from scouts. Scouts would form a Detached Squadron. There was no allowance for repeaters or links from scouts back to the main body: Scouts could never stray far from visual range.
In the 1894 manoeuvres, each fleet (Red and Blue) was split in half, each trying to unite its two squadrons before being destroyed in detail. Red had six and Blue had eighteen torpedo boats. Red had battleships in both its fleets, as well as strong cruiser forces. Each fleet was in three groups, with six ships each in the first two, and torpedo gunboats in the third. The first group consisted of three battleships and three fast cruisers (Blenheim was in the first group of the first Red fleet). Each of the second groups consisted of six cruisers. Note the disparity between cruiser and battleship numbers. One of the Blue fleets had seven battleships in its first group, with seven cruisers in the second; the other had only cruisers and torpedo gunboats. The four-fleet situation was something like that between Britain and France in the Mediterranean. In wartime the British would try to unite the Channel and Mediterranean Fleets, and the French their Brest and Toulon Fleets. The Brest fleet was weighted heavily towards cruisers, for raiding in the Atlantic, whereas a classic battle fleet (to contest control of the Mediterranean) was based at Toulon. As in 1892, much attention was paid to the effectiveness of torpedo boats. The commander of TB 80 wrote that boats trailing a fleet in order to attack had been unable to regain position once lost due to the speed of the fleet. This may have been the first indication that high fleet speed in itself would be an important protection for a fleet passing through a narrow strait at night. It was again clear that torpedo boats had to work with cruisers which would find and report the enemy.
The 1896 manoeuvres again examined the problem of watching a hostile fleet in a nearby port. Red Fleet A watched Blue Fleet C, while Red Fleet B mobilized in another port. As in 1894, there was also a Fleet D, which would try to join Fleet C. This was not too different from the problem of the Mediterranean Fleet (A) watching the French Toulon Fleet (C) while the British Channel Fleet (B) tried to join it, and the Russian fleet (D), newly allied to the French, tried to even the odds. C’s object was to destroy A before B could arrive or, failing that, to destroy B before the two Red fleets could join. The commander of A knew the strength of C, but not vice versa. His primary purpose was to defeat C by meeting it at sea. C did not know the strength of B, which was mobilizing, and D was also mobilizing, its strength unknown to A. Overall, A was superior to C and faster; C was superior to B; and B was faster than, and equal to, D. On meeting at sea, C would have to return to its port if it met A. Similarly, A could force D back into its port. However, C plus D were superior to A. If A met C after having defeated D, it would have to return to base. However, if it joined with B before meeting, C would have to withdraw. There would be no decisive result if B met D. ‘Meeting’ was taken to mean battleship squadrons within 3nm of each other for two hours.
All of this was very much a scouting problem, hence a cruiser problem. Thus Fleet A consisted of five battleships, seven second-class protected cruisers, four torpedo gunboats, and ten destroyers. Fleet B was four battleships (the cruisers Blenheim, Hermione, and Charybdis played battleships), two second-class cruisers, two third-class cruisers, four torpedo gunboats, and ten destroyers. Fleet C consisted of five battleships, two armoured cruisers, five second-class cruisers, and five torpedo gunboats. Fleet D comprised four slow battleships, three second-class cruisers, a third-class cruiser, and four torpedo gunboats. C was inferior to A ‘so long as the Battle Squadron, which alone counts, is intact’. At the outset, cruisers and destroyers of Fleet A would be watching Fleet C in its base. An engagement between the cruiser Thetis and a torpedo gunboat leading a torpedo flotilla demonstrated once again that it was nearly impossible to execute a torpedo attack in daylight against a fast cruiser armed with quick-firing guns.
C joined D as soon as possible, A being unable to prevent that. Nor were A and B able to prevent the united enemy fleet from reaching the base it sought. The umpires added that ‘with regard to the use made of cruisers and destroyers for obtaining and communicating information, nothing has reached [us] which enables us to give an opinion’. That was exactly the problem. The manoeuvres demonstrated a frightening failure of both scouting and communication.
The search problem evidently attracted considerable interest, because the instructions for the 1897 manoeuvres (held between roughly equal forces which had been mobilized for the Diamond Jubilee) include a discussion of the curve of search on the open sea for an enemy whose speed was known, and whose position at some particular time was known. In this case a fleet put to sea before the opening of hostilities, one cruiser being left behind to bring the news that war had begun. This cruiser was to meet the fleet at a set rendezvous. She was to be intercepted by two opposing cruisers intent on finding the enemy fleet, so that it in turn could be intercepted. Without wireless, the rub was that once they saw the enemy fleet those two cruisers had to turn back to report (the instructions for the exercise assume that the cruiser, once caught, would give up the rendezvous). The cruiser carrying the news would run at 12kts on an unknown track, the intercepting cruisers at 17kts. Hence the search curve. The test failed because the fleet commander chose to send a cruiser force back to escort the cruiser carrying the news of war. This was considered a hostile act before the outbreak of war.
British shipbuilders, particularly Armstrong, constructed many of the world’s cruisers between about 1880 and 1910. Armstrong built Ching Yuen for China. Completed on 23 July 1887, she was one of two sisters ordered for the Chinese Peiyang Fleet in October 1885. Like other Armstrong cruisers of the time, she was armed with unusually powerful guns, in this case three Krupp 8.2in (two forward, one aft), plus two 6in/36 Armstrong guns (in the waist), eight 6pdr QF, two 3pdr QF, six 1pdr QF, and four 14in torpedo tubes (two training tubes on the broadside and bow and stern tubes (the bow tube is barely visible above water). No other ships had the unusual combination of a twin mounting forward and a single mounting aft, although it featured in an abortive Armstrong design for cruisers for the Australian state of Victoria. Some of the 1pdrs are visible in the fighting tops fore and aft. She displaced only 2310 tons (250ft × 38ft × 15ft) and was designed to make 18kts under forced draught (5500 IHP). On trial she made 18.5kts on 6892 IHP. Under natural draught she made 15.26kts on 3733 IHP (she was designed to make 3300 IHP under natural draught). Here she flies an admiral’s flag.
The 1898 manoeuvres were intended to determine the best way of employing a large cruiser force with a fleet, with secondary objectives of helping indicate the relative advantages of speed and fighting strength, and also to obtain more information about the operations of destroyers and torpedo boats.24 A convoy (C) of slow ships would be escorted by a fast cruiser from Halifax (in Canada) to Milford Haven. A fast hostile squadron (A) lying in Belfast would seek to intercept and capture the convoy. At some point a slower but superior British squadron (B) would be sent to protect C, meeting it at a pre-arranged rendezvous. The coast of Ireland was considered hostile (A) territory, containing A’s torpedo boat bases. The English and Welsh coasts were B territory, including several destroyer bases. Obviously a great deal depended on intelligence available to A, and the manoeuvre instructions included special notes on the distribution of that intelligence, each fleet having its own Naval Centre with outlying despatch stations and signal stations. As yet there was no wireless, so once ships went to sea they could communicate with the land-based intelligence organization only via linking ships. Both fleets had numerous cruisers attached: Fleet A (Red) had three first-class cruisers and sixteen second- and third-class. Fleet B (Blue) had four first-class cruisers and sixteen second- and third-class. Fleet A also had torpedo boats led by torpedo gunboats; B had destroyers.
The result was another failed search exercise. It turned out that A was searching in the wrong place; the convoy was 63nm outside the area A planned to search, and at no time was any A cruiser closer than 120nm to the convoy. B met the convoy as planned, and brought it into port. Nothing was learned of the best way to employ a large cruiser force, but it seems clear that those planning the exercise hoped that by adding cruisers they could make A’s search effective.
Further manoeuvres in 1901, in which two fleets fought for control of the Channel, showed that neither fleet had enough cruisers for the necessary scouting and look-out duties, particularly after a cruiser action notionally sank so many on each side.25 ‘This action points decisively to the great advantage either side would have obtained if supported by modern armoured cruisers.’ Further, ‘the fact of a heavy Cruiser action being fought on the first day of hostilities prevented, in a great measure, the necessary opportunities for practising one of the most important of a Cruiser’s duties, i.e., scouting and getting touch of the enemy’s Main Fleet.’ The umpires much regretted that there had been no opportunity to test the value of a mass torpedo attack on a battle fleet, ‘though often prevailing misty and foggy weather would seem to have been particularly favourable for such an attack, if either of the Fleets could have been quickly informed of the other’s movements’.
Initially Armstrong’s great competitor was Thomson (Clydebank) of Glasgow. The company built the Spanish Reina Regente, seen here at the Columbian Naval Review (May 1893). Thomson became the John Brown shipyard, but the company’s independent design capacity was abandoned. Thomson’s last export success was the Japanese armoured cruiser Chiyoda, and the only other cruisers it built for export were the Confederate screw corvette Canton (which became the Spanish Pampero), the Chilean screw corvette Abtao, and the Spanish torpedo gunboat Destructor. The Armstrong (Elswick) design which lost out to Thomson was reportedly sold to the United States, to become the basis for the US cruisers Baltimore and Philadelphia (purchased through Humphreys, Tennant). Unfortunately, Armstrong records for the period before about 1910 have been lost, and it is impossible to say which foreign-built cruisers the company designed. For example, it is impossible to say whether ships built by the company’s Italian subsidiary owed anything to the British home office. Later Armstrong records suggest that the company often acted as design agent for other yards. There was apparently a boom in British-built paddle warships through the early 1850s, after which most British warship exports were either ironclads or small gunboats. That would be consistent with the relative status of capital ships and steam frigates, the latter important mainly to attack or defend seaborne trade. Some British yards exported small numbers of cruisers after 1860; the list which follows is probably incomplete. R & H Green of Blackwall built the composite corvettes O’Higgins and Chacabuco (launched 1865-66) and Magallanes (1874) for Chile, and Rainha de Portugal and Mindello (1875) for Portugal. Thames Iron Works built the Spanish unprotected cruisers Gravina and Velasco (1881).
(Courtesy Ted Stone via NHHC)
Thus scouting was recognized as more and more important, and cruiser scouts would be opposed by the enemy’s cruisers. They were unlikely to succeed unless they were backed by powerful armoured cruisers. Quite aside from any argument for trade protection against cruiser raiders, the 1901 manoeuvres showed that the main British fleet absolutely had to include a powerful fast armoured cruiser force of ships at least equal to any foreign counterparts.
Programs and Shipbuilders
Until 1889, the Royal Navy relied primarily on the Royal Dockyards for major warships such as cruisers: Chatham, Deptford, Devonport, Pembroke, Portsmouth, and Sheerness (Woolwich was closed as a dockyard, being confined to gun and boiler production, and in the 1880s Sheerness was closed altogether). The large commercial British shipbuilding industry, which often built warships for foreign governments, was considered a mobilization resource. For example, large numbers of gunboats were built under contract under emergency programs during the Crimean War. That mobilization bankrupted at least two builders, because it caused great wage and price inflation. Private builders were also brought in to introduce commercial technology not previously mastered by the Royal Dockyards, the most striking example being iron hull construction in the 1840s and 1850s. The effect of the 1889 Naval Defence Act was to stabilize warship construction programs and thus to attract private builders.
The British fiscal year began on 6 April. Through the 1860s the programs at the Royal Dockyards were generally described by a Program of Works (PW) dated by the fiscal year, e.g. PW 1860. PW 1860 was financed by the 1860-61 Estimates, which in this book is referred to as the 1860-61 program. Ships were typically ordered as early as possible in the fiscal year, although in some cases they were inserted later. In at least two important cases the planned programs were increased by Supplementals: 1884 (Northbrook Program) and 1898-99 (due to the Fashoda war scare). The 1885 crisis also brought forth a supplemental program, but it did not include new cruisers.
Changing Technology
During the period covered by this book ship design gradually changed from art towards science, one indication being the formation of the Institution of Naval Architects (later the Royal Institution) in 1860. The Royal Navy formed a series of professional schools for naval constructors, ultimately creating a course at Greenwich which educated not only important British constructors, but also many foreign ones. In 1883 it formed the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, which was intended to design all British warships. All Directors of Naval Construction from 1923 on were products of the Greenwich course. Probably the most important development of this period was the work on resistance (to motion through the water) carried out by William Froude, who later ran the Royal Navy’s experimental testing tank. Froude’s work made it possible for the first time to predict (albeit not always precisely) how fast a ship of given dimensions, with a given hull form and with a given power plant, would be. The insights he gained made it possible to compare British ships with foreign ships which ran their trials under very different conditions conducive to much higher trial speeds. Without that insight, the Royal Navy would have found itself much more frequently pursuing higher speeds.
There were several waves of technology, beginning with steam power in its initial inefficient form (which greatly limited endurance under steam, and demanded that ships be powered by a combination of sail – for long endurance – and steam power). The next and roughly simultaneous waves were the telegraph and iron, rather than wood, hulls. The telegraph offered a new kind of naval strategy based on rapid reaction to events half a world away, and also (as indicated by the manoeuvre notes) to intelligence-based operations.
The next series of radical changes were the advent of efficient steam engines (compound engines), the appearance of breech-loading guns, the introduction of self-propelled torpedoes, and the advent of steel hulls, all about 1875-85. After that came a revolution in the rate at which guns could fire and shortly afterwards the appearance of lightweight (Harvey and Krupp) armour, in the 1890s. Although many of the cruisers in this book benefited from it, radio (introduced from about 1900 on) had little impact on their designs. The revolutionary impact of radio on the shape of the fleet, and on its tactics, came during the Fisher era, from 1904 on.
The most dramatic consequence of changing technology was that the effective life of a ship shrank, while the cost and complexity of individual ships increased. Although design and construction practices certainly evolved during the sailing ship era, they did so relatively slowly. HMS Victory could serve as Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar in 1805 although she had been launched in 1765. In 1900 it would have been inconceivable that a 40-year-old capital ship would have any first- or even third-line role; indeed, any 20-year-old capital ship was profoundly obsolete by that time.
These realities condemned the late nineteenth-century Royal Navy to a continuing financial crisis in which cruisers generally figured. Had technology not been changing, the size of the British cruiser force would have been the number bought each year multiplied by the lifetime of the ships. British naval administrators often grossly overestimated the important factor of lifetime, because they thought in terms of the durability of the ships, their hulls and their machinery. Unfortunately, in a time of rapid technological change the important issue was how quickly a ship became obsolete.
Guns
The Royal Navy designated its guns in three quite different ways: by nominal weight of projectile (e.g., 25pdr or 68pdr); by weight of gun (e.g., 95cwt, one cwt [abbreviation of hundredweight] being 112lbs, 20 of which made a standard [long] ton); or, as is now common, by calibre in inches. The latter seems to have become standard only after breech-loaders were re-introduced from 1881 on. One reason was that such guns could easily fire projectiles of different lengths, hence weights. In the 1830s, when the first ships in this book were begun, the usual designation was by nominal weight of projectile, based on round solid iron shot (guns did, however, differ in length). Projectile weight (hence gun calibre) was ultimately limited by what a gunner could lift. Much larger and more powerful guns were needed to penetrate armour, and they in turn required power loading or lifting. Guns were increasingly designated by their weight, so that in 1866 plans called for arming the new cruiser Inconstant with 12½-ton guns – at that time the heaviest in the Royal Navy.
The guns of the Napoleonic Wars, those mounted on board the earliest cruisers in this book, were smoth-bore muzzle-loaders, typically 18- , 24-, 32- and 42-pounders. Line-of-battle ships typically mounted 32pdrs on the gun deck and 18- or 24pdrs on the upper deck(s), plus short carronades (24- or 32-pdrs).26 The first proposals for a uniform armament of 32pdrs (with shorter guns on the upper deck to save weight) came in the 1820s. The standard early nineteenth-century cast-iron 32pdr was 9ft 6in long and weighed 55cwt 2qr [quarters]. Beginning in 1830 many guns were bored out to 32pdr calibre (6.25in); some ships were rearmed. New types of 32pdr were being developed.27
Apart from carronades, these guns were all mounted on wheeled trucks, the entire truck recoiling with the gun. There were no fixed mountings. Ships’ sides generally had gun ports cut into them, and guns were placed at the ports. Chasers (guns firing right ahead and astern, used when the ship was in chase or being chased) were placed at bow or stern ports, but were not fixed there. In some cases guns were wheeled from broadside positions to act as chasers. Chasers are sometimes described as pivot guns. That generally meant guns on slide mountings pivoted at one end, the gun recoiling along the slide. Typically the slide had rollers running along fixed deck racers. Most chasers of 64pdr size and below were on trucks which could be rolled to fire from ports in the bow or stern. This type of mounting made it simple to rearm ships; until ships had mountings built into them, armaments were hardly permanent. Needing less space to recoil, carronades were typically mounted on slides pivoted to the deck.
There was considerable interest in heavier solid-shot guns, but they required larger crews to manhandle them, and these extra men in turn crowded gun decks. The Royal Navy standardized on 32pdr solid-shot guns, with the sole exception of the 68pdr 95cwt (8in) gun introduced by Colonel Dundas, which was adopted in 1838. The 68pdr also became the Royal Navy’s standard shell gun, firing a 51lb shell or a 56lb plugged solid shot. It was generally used as a chaser, but by the 1840s some ships mounted only 68pdrs on their gun decks.28
In the 1850s the argument about manpower was turned around. With men somewhat scarce, it was argued that ships should mount fewer heavier guns, all 68pdrs if possible. On this basis a large frigate (with a single gun deck) might be as powerful as a three-deck ship of the line armed entirely with 32pdrs and carronades.
Intense interest in large-calibre shell-firing guns dated back to proposals by French artillery officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans published in 1821-22.29 Many agreed with him that shell guns could burn out or shatter wooden warships, which in the past had been able to absorb considerable damage from heavy solid shot (that is why so few large ships were sunk by gunfire during the age of sail). In 1839 the Admiralty decided to place shell guns on board thirty ships of the line and forty frigates. In addition to the 68pdr, the Royal Navy later adopted a 10in gun which fired only shells (84lb projectiles).30 Armour was adopted largely to solve the shell problem, although in retrospect it is not clear how destructive shellfire really was.31
A 40pdr Armstrong breech-loader on a truck mounting on board the screw frigate HMS Narcissus (the standing officer obscures the breech). In battery the gun was lashed to the side of the ship, as shown, but the carriage could be wheeled to a bow or stern port. The 40pdr (4.75in) weighed 1 ton 15cwt (35cwt) and was 10ft 1in long (its bore was 22.39 calibres long); it fired a 40lb shell at 1160ft/sec. There was also a 20pdr breech-loader for sloops and for boats (3.75in calibre, muzzle velocity 1000ft/sec, bore 54in long, 15cwt; 13cwt for boats). The initial main deck battery of Narcissus was twenty-two 32pdr and eight 8in 65cwt shell guns. On her upper deck were one 68pdr 95cwt chaser on a pivoted slide plus two 8in shell guns and eighteen 32pdrs. All of these weapons were smooth-bores, but soon Armstrong breech-loaders like this one were available (the 40pdr was officially adopted in 1859). Apparently one 7in (110pdr) breech-loader replaced the chaser and eight 40pdrs replaced the other upper deck guns. Notes on the 1857 plan for the ship suggest that 110pdrs replaced the main deck 32pdrs (the numbers are not known and it is not certain the planned changes occurred). In November 1864 Controller Rear Admiral Robinson listed Narcissus among the first ships to be given the new 64pdr muzzle-loading rifled guns, 150 of which would soon be available. As refitted, the ship’s main deck battery was fourteen 8in shell guns and the twelve 64pdrs. Aurora and Liverpool were first in priority for rearmament (12 guns each). Of the others, Narcissus was seventh. The remainder, in priority order (number of guns in parentheses), were: Cadmus (8), Arethusa (12), Constance (12), Scout (8), Bristol (12), Octavia (12), Challenger (8), Jason (8), Satellite (8), Undaunted (12), Immortalite (12), and Topaze (12), a total of 160. In 1865 a list of ships to have the new 6½-ton (7in) muzzle-loader included three screw frigates, each with four of them: Mersey, Orlando, and Endymion. Later the Amazon class screw sloops were added. On commissioning (20 December 1860) Narcissus joined the Cape of Good Hope station; in April 1865 she became flagship of the South East Coast of America (South America) station. Beginning in December 1870 she was flagship of the Detached (Flying) Squadron, described alternatively as a training squadron and as an attempt to replace the deployed units on different stations. She ended this service in May 1877. Narcissus was reduced to coast guard service at Greenock on 20 July 1877, paying off on 8 May 1878.
(National Maritime Museum A7807-019)
An Armstrong 7in 110pdr breech-loader on board HMS Narcissus. The gas seal consisted of the steel vent-piece (inserted from the top of the gun) screwed tight by the two handles (shell and charge were inserted through the opening between the handles). In action it was not always possible to be sure that the handles were tight enough, and vent-pieces sometimes flew out. The Armstrong breech-loaders, particularly the 110pdr, gained a bad reputation after Vice Admiral Kuper’s squadron shelled Kagoshima on 14 August 1863: 21 Armstrong guns suffered 28 accidents while firing 365 rounds. The lead coating of their shells fouled the rifling, rendering them inaccurate. The 110pdr was officially withdrawn early in 1864, to be replaced by the lighter muzzle-loading 64pdr rifle, but some ships still had them as late as 1872 (by 1874 they were gone). In 1872 data for the 7in breech-loader were: weight 4 tons 2cwt (82cwt), overall length 10ft, projectile 90½lbs, muzzle velocity with maximum charge 1125ft/sec. Comparable data for the 7in muzzle-loader were: weight 130cwt, extreme length 11ft, bore 15.88 calibres, projectile weight 115lbs, muzzle velocity 1325 ft/sec. There were two different types of 64pdr, Mk I (71cwt) being a conversion of an existing 68pdr smooth-bore and Mk III (64 cwt) newly-built (Mk II was not used). Both versions were 6.3in calibre. Mk I was 10ft 2.72in long (bore was 16.42 calibres long) and had a muzzle velocity of 1260ft/sec with a full charge. Mk III was 9ft 10in long (bore was 15.47 calibres long) and had a muzzle velocity of 1390ft/sec with its heavier full charge (10 vs 8¼lbs). The true replacement for the 110pdr was the 7in rifled muzzle-loader (6½ tons or 130cwt; after 1872 there was also a 90cwt cruiser version). Guns like the 110pdr could not handle charges as great as those of contemporary muzzle-loaders because their breeches could not withstand as much pressure. Before about 1880 powder burned quickly, so a gun gained little or nothing from having a longer barrel (the longer the barrel, the more friction slowed the shell passing from it). The later slow-burning powders reversed the situation, since it took a long barrel to make full use of the available energy. According to the 1885 gunnery manual, the need for long barrels became clear in 1873-79. They could not be muzzle-loaders because long guns could not be run back far enough into a ship to be reloaded at the muzzle. That was quite apart from the lesson of the explosion of an accidentally double-loaded muzzle-loader on board HMS Thunderer.
(National Maritime Museum A7807-011)
Quite aside from improved guns, the Royal Navy of the 1830s and 1840s benefited from systematic improvement in gunnery. The naval gunnery school HMS Excellent was established at Portsmouth in 1830; its improvements were evident during the Syrian crisis of 1840, which was also the first important operational use of British steam warships. In addition to training British gunners, Excellent was in effect the centre of British gunnery expertise (and also torpedo and mine expertise, until the foundation of HMS Vernon). Her CO was in many ways the Royal Navy’s senior armament expert, and his opinions were sought when ships were designed. Future Admiral Sir John Fisher was CO of Excellent at a crucial time in the 1880s.
The other major new development was rifling, which considerably increased maximum accurate range. The Royal Navy adopted the Lancaster rifled cast-iron muzzle-loader in 1855. It imparted spin to its elongated shell using a twisted bore of elliptical cross-section. The Lancaster gun proved unreliable during the Crimean War. William Armstrong, later Lord Armstrong, was far more successful. In 1854 he proposed a built-up breech-loader to the Minister of War. It was tested in 1856, and adopted in 1859 on the 1858 recommendation of the Committee on Rifled Cannon. Types were 7in (110pdr), 40-, 20-, 12-, 9-, and 6pdrs. From 1861 on the 7in replaced the 68pdr as the standard navy chaser. The Armstrong guns can be recognized by the handle used to rotate the breech. There was no means of withdrawing the breech without removing it entirely from the gun, and the process of breech-loading and reloading was cumbersome. Unfortunately there was no way to be certain that the breech was fully closed, and there were serious accidents (Armstrong also produced rifled muzzle-loaders). In competition with Armstrong, Whitworth produced a muzzle-loader with a hexagonal cross-section. Armstrong’s guns beat out Whitworth’s in an 1863 trial, and in 1864 the British forces formally adopted rifled guns. Armstrong received the ordnance contract for both the Royal Navy and for the British army. However, a series of disasters showed that the adoption of breech-loading was premature. Armstrong was dismissed, but under the contract negotiated with him when he was hired, he retained the factory built for him. He turned to the export market, and began building cruisers as well as guns. Armstrong’s cruisers figure prominently in this book.
Gun construction for both army and navy was then concentrated in the Royal Gun Factory at Woolwich Arsenal. Woolwich argued that only muzzle-loaders were safe. Its muzzle-loading rifles (MLR) were adopted about 1865. Other navies, such as the French, continued to use breech-loaders, and some Royal Navy officers wondered whether they had not taken the better decision. For example, Controller Rear Admiral Robinson visited the 1867 Paris world’s fair, together with Reed and with the Admiralty’s gunnery experts Admiral Cooper Key (DNO) and Captain Hood (Captain of HMS Excellent).32 The naval exhibits provided by the Admiralty and by the French made it relatively easy to compare practices in the two navies. Robinson was clearly impressed with the French breech-loaders, which seemed (to him) to be well adapted to firing longer and therefore more accurate shells. Key took pains to claim that the British muzzle-loaders were superior, in part because they could be fired more rapidly. He pointed out that with their higher-powered powder, the British guns could be lighter than the French for the same penetrating power (which he measured by muzzle energy per inch of calibre).
As a means of quickly producing rifled guns, in the mid- 1860s (i.e., as Armstrong was rejected) the Royal Navy adopted the Palliser system of inserting a steel inner tube into an existing cast-iron gun. The guns involved were the 32pdr 56 and 58cwt, the 8in 65cwt shell gun, and the 10in 95cwt shell gun. They survived into the 1870s. During that period they were extensively mounted on board cruisers and smaller ships. Prior to conversion they had flintlocks and muzzle notch fore sights, but upon conversion they were given friction tubes and drop fore sights, with rear sights modified for the new trajectories and greater ranges. Carriages were not changed. Note that the name Palliser was also associated with chilled iron armour-piercing shot, which the Royal Navy used into the 1890s.
Much more powerful (hence heavier) guns appeared as the Royal Navy adopted (and faced) ironclads. They could hardly be manhandled on wheeled trucks. Instead, they were mounted on slides, which could be moved about a ship’s decks along racers, curved tracks let into the wooden deck. Some racers were laid in intersecting patterns, so that a gun could fire out of any of several ports cut in the ship’s side. The gun recoiled along the slide, which was slightly inclined (so that the weight of the gun would return it to battery after it recoiled). When the Royal Navy reverted to breech-loaders, its first cruiser mountings were Vavasseurs (named after their inventor and manufacturer, Charles Vavasseur), which were, in effect, developed slides. Typically a Vavasseur was anchored at one end by a fixed pivot in the deck. The other end was wheeled, so the entire mounting could swing back and forth. The main part of the mounting was the steeply angled track up which the gun recoiled after it fired, gravity returning the gun to position. These were powerful guns, and they needed more than gravity to absorb the energy of firing. Vavasseur therefore provided a friction brake. Later centre-pivot and pedestal mountings were more compact.
As of 1875, British unarmoured ships mounted six types of gun.33 The most powerful was the 9in 12½- ton MLR, essentially a capital ship weapon, which armed the armoured cruisers or second-class ironclads of the Shannon and Nelson classes. It fired a 250lb shell and was mounted on an iron slide. One step down were 7in 6½-ton and 4½-ton MLRs firing a 120lb shell, on a wooden or iron slide (these guns were often characterized as 110pdrs). The standard broadside gun was the 6.3in 64pdr 64cwt, firing a 64lb shell; there was also a 71cwt version. Two breech-loaders survived: the 4.75 in 35cwt firing a 40lb shell and the 3.75 in 15cwt firing a 20lb shell. Both were Armstrong types with screw breeches.
As of 1885, with rearmament with breech-loaders beginning, the heaviest MLR guns on board British cruisers were 10in of 18 tons (Mk I) or 20 tons (Mk II), 13 ft long (i.e., 15.6 calibre). They fired a 410lb projectile at 1370ft/sec. There were five Marks of 9in 12-ton MLR (initially described as 12½-ton), 12ft long (16 calibre). A typical 9in gun fired a 256lb projectile at 1440ft/sec. There were three Marks of 8in 9-ton gun, 11ft long (16.5 calibre), firing a 18lb projectile at 138 ft/sec (or a 181lb shell with a 17.7lb burster). There were three Marks of 7in 6½ tons, 11ft long (18.9 calibre), firing a 115lb projectile at 1525ft/sec. In 1885 these wrought iron guns were restricted to target practice. The newer 7in 90cwt gun (4.5 tons) was 10ft 11in long (18.7 calibre) and fired a 115lb projectile at 1361ft/sec or a 159lb shell (13.4lb burster) at 1161ft/sec. The smallest major guns then in use were 64pdrs. There were three Marks of 64pdr 64cwt guns (3.2 tons), about 10ft long (19.3 calibres); the latest Mk III fired a 6.22in projectile (65lbs) at 1200ft/sec. The 64pdr 71cwt gun (3.55 tons) fired a similar projectile at 1125ft/sec. There were also small-calibre 9pdrs and 7pdrs.
These guns were all short because they used high-explosive powder. Its energy was quickly exhausted, so making the barrel longer than necessary merely slowed the projectile by friction. The barrel lengths quoted are somewhat deceptive: they refer to the overall length of the gun, including considerable metal at the breech end to contain the explosion. Thus the 8in gun was 16.5 calibres long overall, but 14.8 long internally.
Given Woolwich’s insistence that only its muzzle-loaders were safe, it was ironic that the Royal Navy abandoned muzzle-loading due to a major accident. The heavy muzzle-loaders of the 1870s demanded power-loading; typically a turret gun was depressed to line it up with a power rammer operating from below decks. HMS Thunderer was the first ship with such power-loading. On 2 January 1879 she accidentally double-loaded a gun (it was impossible to see whether a charge and projectile were in place). The gun could not possibly survive the resulting explosion. Neither could reliance on Woolwich and its muzzle-loaders. There was already considerable sentiment favouring a return to breech-loaders, and Woolwich itself was designing one. The return to breech-loaders was associated with the adoption of slower-burning powder. In 1878 Sir Andrew Noble began experimenting with the longer guns (which had to be breech-loaders) which could fully exploit slow-burning powder. Armstrong (Elswick) was already making such guns for export.
The Royal Navy found itself relying on commercial suppliers again. Both services joined in an Ordnance Committee formed in 1881 to determine which guns should be developed and which designs to adopt. Designs for 16.25in, 13.5in, 9.2in, and 8in guns were approved that year. The rearmament of the fleet began, but it was a lengthy process (according to the 1885 official gunnery handbook, it was expected to take fifteen years). Adoption of breech-loaders increased the rate of fire about five-fold in guns of the same weight. Because a breech-loader was heavier than a muzzle-loader (it needed much more material around its breech), the weight of fire for roughly comparable ships trebled. Rearmament of existing cruisers began in 1884. At this time the army continued to buy guns for the Royal Navy, a practice which ended in 1888.
As of 1885, the new cruiser guns were the 5in, for sloops, gun-vessels, and some corvettes; the 6in, for large cruisers (it was the largest gun in corvettes); and the 8in and 9.2in (for heavy cruisers). Internal lengths were about 25 calibres. For example, the 8in 11-ton gun was 18ft 6.5in long (outside dimension: 28 calibres). It fired a 210lb (rather than 180lb) projectile at 1953ft/sec. The most powerful of the new cruiser guns was the 24-ton 9.2in gun, 25ft 10in long (33.7 calibres externally, 31.5 calibres internally), firing a 389lb projectile at 2060ft/sec. As Robinson had pointed out in 1867, there was really no limit on the length of a breech-loader, since it did not have to be brought back inside the ship to be reloaded. The 31.5-calibre 9.2in gun replaced a 27-calibre gun, and later guns were 40 or even 50 calibres long.
Also in the 1880s, it became possible to combine projectile and powder in a single round, using a brass cartridge case. When the gun was fired, the case expanded to seal the chamber against gas leakage. When the cartridge case cooled, it contracted, and it could be extracted relatively easily. Since it no longer had to seal the chamber very completely, the breech mechanism could be simplified and could operate much more rapidly. Cartridge cases had first been used in breech-loading rifles. In 1881 the Admiralty sought tenders for a 6pdr gun firing 12 rounds per minute. It was classified as quick-firing (QF). Initially it seemed that QF guns and their smaller cousins, machine guns and multi-barrel guns, were vital mainly as a defence against torpedo boats. However, within a few years larger-calibre QF guns were being produced, a 4.7in type being tested at Portsmouth in 1887. Some cruisers had their 6in guns converted to QF operation as QFC guns. Ironically, it soon turned out that a 6in gun with a ‘bare’ cartridge (i.e., without metal) could be made to fire quickly enough, using an improved breech mechanism, that QF operation was no longer needed above 4in or 4.7in calibre.
A second important development was much-improved gun mountings, which made it possible to fire even heavy guns quite rapidly. In the 1880s or early 1890s it seemed that a fast cruiser armed with heavy QF guns might tear up the sides of a battleship whose 12in or heavier guns might fire only once in several minutes. Soon after 1900 the same gun could fire once or twice a minute, and the big cruiser was much less viable, at least in a fleet action.
Steam Power34
Cruisers demanded a combination of high power (for speed) and long endurance at lower speed. All but one of the ships in this book were powered by reciprocating (piston) engines, and most of these engines were coupled directly to paddle wheel or, in most cases, propeller. Until engines and boilers became efficient, long endurance meant endurance under sail. Propellers or paddles created undesirable drag, and early screw cruisers were designed to hoist (retract) their propellers when they were not needed, and often also to collapse their funnels to make it easier to handle sail. That limited them to a single screw, and it demanded that space be left above the propeller into which it could retract (this space made it difficult to mount stern chasers).
The idea of the screw propeller originated well before 1800, but it became practicable only in the late 1830s. In England Francis Petit Smith built a 6-ton demonstrator, which ran successful sea trials for the Admiralty in 1838. Before adopting screw propulsion, the Admiralty asked for trials of a ship of at least 200 tons; Smith had the Archimedes built. Successful trials included a race across the Channel against the fastest of the paddle mail steamers of the time. By the spring of 1840 the Board was clearly convinced that the future lay with the propeller, and by 1844 the Admiralty was ordering screw frigates, although it continued to buy paddle warships.
Combining screws with wooden hulls entailed problems. A wooden hull flexed in a seaway, but the propeller shaft and its bearings had to be kept rigid over a considerable length (the French solved the problem using universal joints, but the British did not). As the propeller turned, its blades bit into the stream of water coming off the hull, causing the hull to vibrate. That vibration could damage a wooden hull. Finally, a bluff stern, such as that in a line of battle ship, could block the run of water to the propeller and thus make it inefficient. Propellers turned at higher speeds than paddles, so the engines driving them had to run at faster rates, and vibration became a problem. Once protective decks were introduced, cylinders had to be kept short enough to fit under those decks (initially the requirement was that the machinery lie completely below the waterline, where it was relatively safe from gunfire). Pistons had to run faster, and that increased vibration. In some ships cylinders were set horizontally, their dimensions limited by the ship’s beam.
Through the nineteenth century merchant ships, particularly the large Atlantic liners, led in engine and boiler development. The Admiralty naturally took a conservative point of view: it could not afford the consequences of large-scale failure. However, it did pioneer important improvements. In 1860 Engineer-in-Chief Thomas Lloyd told a Parliamentary Committee on marine engines that the Admiralty had led in the shift from flue to fire-tube boilers; the direct-acting instead of the beam engine; the screw propeller in place of paddles; and fast-running engines instead of slow-acting geared-up engines.35
The ships in this book burned coal. Each furnace was fed by hand, and a stoker could move only so much coal per hour. Boiler arrangements had to allow not only for stokers standing in front of them, but also for access to the mass of coal that each stoker used. Boiler spaces had to be massive, and high-powered ships needed large numbers of boilers. Coal was also an essential part of the protection of many British cruisers. Oil, whose advantages included ease of handling and a much higher energy content, was proposed as early as 1865, but was not adopted until after the turn of the twentieth century, mainly because coal was so much less expensive, and because large supplies of the best steaming coal were available in Wales.
As might be imagined, engines came in a bewildering variety of forms, which are not described in any detail in this book. Through the 1870s warship engines typically let into one or more cylinders (in parallel) and then condensed. Low-pressure steam did not have enough residual energy after the first expansion to be worth re-using. Some engines had double-acting cylinders, steam being let in alternately to one and then the other side of the single piston.
The associated boilers were, in effect, oversized teapots, vessels (often called boxes) filled with water and heated externally from below. Hot gas passed through flues below and around the mass of water and then up the funnel. Steam was drawn off at the top. These boilers could not withstand pressures much beyond 20lb/sq in (pounds per square inch, or psi); the boilers of the 1830s and 1840s operated at about 5psi. At such low pressures, engines operated by having their pistons driven by atmospheric pressure against a vacuum created when steam on the other side of a piston condensed. Boilers used sea water, which left a salt scale in them; it protected some iron parts (not the steam spaces, which pitted due to oxygen liberated from the water surface as it boiled) but also reduced heat transfer from flues to the water inside.
A 10in 18-ton muzzle-loading gun aboard HMS Sultan. This weapon armed the armoured cruisers Shannon, Nelson and Northampton. It was the heaviest muzzle-loader which did not require elaborate below-decks machinery for loading. The mounting is a pivoted slide, its rollers running along tracks (racers) laid in the deck. Slide carriages were common in the Royal Navy of the 1860s through the 1890s. Typically each gun port had a fighting bolt to which the front of the slide could be secured. In many cases guns could be rolled between sets of deck tracks (the installation in Sultan was clearly permanent, as it included a geared track) when the fighting bolt was disconnected. Often there was a permanent stowage bolt on the ship’s centreline, around which a gun pivoted to be placed at different ports. Once at the port, the stowage bolt was disconnected and the slide connected instead to the fighting bolt at the port. Guns were connected to the fighting bolts by pairs of bars carried on the slide. The gun carriage ran along the slide on gunmetal rollers. External compressor plates helped slow the gun’s recoil. The standard 64pdr 64cwt cruiser gun was mounted either on a truck or on a wooden (oak) slide, which moved on cross skids rather than on the metal rollers shown here. For the 18-ton gun, gearing elevated and traversed the gun, which recoiled along the slide. Ships later had more sophisticated Vavasseur pivot mountings in which gun and (shorter) slide were more integrated.
It seems to have been understood by the mid-1850s that a boiler working at high enough pressure could leave considerable energy in the steam exhausted from a cylinder.36 That turned out to be the key to greater efficiency. A double-expansion or compound engine exhausted the steam from its high-pressure cylinder into a low-pressure cylinder. The first practical double-expansion engine in the Royal Navy was installed in the steam frigate Constance, launched in 1862. She successfully raced her sister ships Arethusa and Octavia between Plymouth and Madeira in 1865. Compound engines first went to sea in the 1830s and were introduced in merchant ships in 1853. The French preceded the Royal Navy by ordering such an engine from its British inventors, Charles Randolph and John Elder, for the sloop Actif (which ran trials in 1862). Constance had an alternative type of compound engine, on ‘Woolf’s Principle’. The 1872 Committee on Designs strongly favoured compound engines for all future British warships.
Compounding became worthwhile for pressures above about 40psi. That in turn required stronger boilers and a more efficient way of turning heat into steam. By the 1850s a solution had been conceived in the form of a tubular or fire-tube boiler.37 Hot gas passed through fire-tubes inside the mass of water, sucked up by a funnel or smokestack. The area of boiler water touched by hot gas was far greater than in a kettle boiler. Flat-sided box boilers could not take the higher pressure, so from the 1860s on boilers were being made oval or cylindrical. Oval boilers could handle pressures up to about 75psi; above that boilers had to be cylindrical. Designers resisted this change because the new cylindrical (Scotch) boilers wasted considerable space in a flat-sided stokehold.
By about 1890, most battleships and large cruisers typically had single-ended return-tube boilers with four furnaces each (some earlier cruisers had double-ended boilers). Second-class cruisers typically had three-furnace boilers, some with single and some with double ends. All had one combustion chamber per furnace. Single-ended boilers made it easier to subdivide power, but were heavier. Return-tubes meant that the nested fire-tubes passed back and forth through the water volume before exhausting. A typical fire-tube might be 2½ins in outside diameter, with a 7in water space down the middle of each nest of tubes. The grate area on which coal was burned was about 3 per cent of total heating area (i.e., the area of the fire-tubes), the latter typically amounting to 2.5 square feet per IHP at natural draught.
To generate more heat, hence more steam, boilers needed more air. Fans were used to build up air pressure and hence air volume in a closed stokehold. In mid-century advocates of such forced draught claimed that they could increase steam output by 30 or 40 per cent, even with low-quality coal. Greater temperatures in turn increased stress on the boiler itself. Typical British (and, presumably, foreign) naval practice limited machinery weight by using thinner boiler plating than in commercial practice. Boilers had to be rigid, to contain steam pressure, but they also had to expand at high temperatures (typically they were corrugated, to allow for expansion). This was not a good combination. To avoid bursting boilers, the Admiralty typically limited forced draught runs to a few hours, and it distinguished between a ship’s performance using forced versus natural draught. During the 1880s and 1890s DNC Sir William White often claimed that foreign cruisers reached high speeds by using high rates of forcing which could never be repeated in service; the rated speeds of the cruisers he had designed for the Royal Navy were far more realistic because they reflected much more realistic conditions. In its 1892 report the Boiler Committee recommended that specified forced draught be limited to 25 per cent beyond specified natural draught power for standard navy boilers, and 45 per cent for torpedo gunboats (presumably meaning for locomotive boilers).
With high enough steam pressure, enough was left at the outlet of the second cylinder to make a third or even a fourth cylinder worth while: triple or quadruple expansion. Higher pressure and more cylinders meant greater efficiency and thus longer range. Each boost in steam pressure bought greater economy.38 Because triple expansion increased the number of cylinders, it made crankshafts easier to balance and thus reduced vibration.
The most extreme fire-tube boilers were the locomotive boilers installed on board small fast ships from the 1870s on. In the Royal Navy, the first such boiler was on board the prototype torpedo boat Lightning (1879), and these boilers were later tried on board small cruisers. There was no pretension to efficiency; the object was to generate as much steam as possible in the smallest possible dimensions. Cylindrical boilers used relatively large-diameter fire-tubes, which could not easily be blocked by cinders from the coal fire. Locomotive boilers used the smallest possible tube diameters, for maximum heating area inside a cylinder filled with water. The tubes were straight, from firebox to smoke box (leading to funnel). Tubes could easily be blocked (and burst) by unwanted grease or cinders, but in the 1880s there seemed to be no other way to produce enough steam within small dimensions.
The alternative to fire-tube boilers was conceived (and used in a few cases) as early as the 1850s: the water-tube or tubulous boiler.39 The relationship between water and hot gas was reversed. Feed water was led through tubes passing through the furnace. Much greater water surface could be exposed to heat. Limited diameter tubes could withstand greater pressure than a large cylindrical boiler. The outer skin of the furnace did not have to withstand steam pressure. Water-tube boilers could generate higher-pressure steam, which was exactly what high-powered warships needed. As early as 1873 some liners were operating at 100psi. Proponents argued further that because the mass of water in them was relatively small, it took less heat to start them: they could start much more quickly, and they could more quickly answer demands for more steam. They were also expected to be more durable, capable of longer runs at high power. The British found themselves unable to get enough power from the available heating space, using conventional boilers.40 In 1892 the Boiler Committee recommended installing tubulous boilers in two ships for trials (Thornycroft on board the torpedo gunboat Speedy, Belleville on board the torpedo gunboat Sharpshooter), and that one at least of the new cruisers be so fitted if the trials proved successful. A third torpedo gunboat, Spanker, was fitted with French du Temple boilers. Bellevilles were chosen for the cruisers Powerful and Terrible before the Sharpshooter trials were complete because they needed so much power. The only ones considered should have relatively large-diameter straight tubes which could easily be cleaned and examined. It happened that the French Belleville fitted this description.
When the Royal Navy adopted water-tube boilers, the great advantage cited was that it was no longer necessary to force boilers to reach and maintain high power (the Germans, however, wrote that water-tube boilers were more heavily forced than cylindrical ones). The 1902 report of the Boiler Committee explained that there was greater fire-grate area for the same floor space, hence less forcing to reach full power. There would be less damage if the boiler were struck by a projectile, since there would not be a large pressurized vessel to burst. A water-tube boiler could also carry a higher steam pressure, and it was lighter for the power it generated. However, it took relatively little scale or corrosion to ruin a water-tube boiler. The Royal Navy adopted fresh water as boiler feed and its ships had to carry stocks of reserve feed water for the first time.41 With so little water in the boiler, there was no reserve to make up for slight irregularities in feed, so the rate of feeding had to be automatically controlled, and very quickly altered when more steam was demanded. Similarly, a water-tube boiler would react more sensitively to irregular stoking, and the type of fire used had to be changed. The boilers had to be fed more continuously, and with greater care than before. Water-tube boilers were not necessarily more efficient than their cylindrical predecessors – and cruisers needed efficiency as well as compact high power: the boilers worked best at a high fraction of their designed output. The solution to economical cruising was to have a large number of such boilers, only a few of which were lit off for cruising. Unfortunately, a ship in a combat zone would want most of her boilers lit all the time, so she would be quite uneconomical. Some British armoured cruisers designed about 1902 had a combination of cylindrical and water-tube boilers, the cylindrical boilers acting as, in effect, the ship’s cruising power plant.42 The agonizing period during which the Royal Navy decided both to adopt water-tube boilers and which boilers to adopt became the storied ‘battle of the boilers’. 43
A broadside 6in breech-loading gun on board HMS Imperieuse, on a Vavasseur pivot mounting with racers (tracks) laid in the deck. In contrast to earlier slide mountings, this one was a permanent installation not intended to be transferred from port to port. The Royal Navy adapted the Vavasseur for medium guns worked manually. Compared to the earlier types, it could be elevated and trained up to the moment of firing, and it required fewer men. Strain was also more evenly distributed than in earlier types of mounting. Vavassurs could be divided into broadside (as here) and central pivot mountings. The mounting consisted of a high slide with a considerable slope (7.5 deg for 6in, as here) carrying a top carriage, consisting of the cylinders of the hydraulic buffers to which the trunnions of the gun are pivoted. The carriage was a steel casting held together by transoms and a bottom plate. Elevating gear consisted of a hand wheel and shaft working in brackets on the slide, driving a worm wheel on the top carriage which in turn connected to the elevating pinion via friction plates. The friction plates isolated the gearing from any sudden blow, such as the muzzle striking the gun port on recoil. The elevating shaft did not move when the gun recoiled, hence the gun could be elevated while it was being fired. Training gear was arranged so that it could train the gun or run it in for housing behind the doors of a port. As in the past, the gun trained along a racer to which it could be clipped; the racer could hold the mounting when it fired. By the mid-1880s it seemed likely that (as happened) the simpler central pivot mountings would become standard. The Vavasseur mounting incorporated a hydraulic recoil buffer consisting of two cylinders connected by a pipe, each with a piston being attached to the slide of the gun. The trunnion boxes were part of the cylinders, so that the cylinders with their connections formed the gun-carriage, and recoiled with the gun. As the gun recoiled, liquid was forced through holes in the piston, the ports closing gradually as the gun recoiled. Compared to the big Armstrong breech-loader, the gun had a simpler breech using an interrupted screw, which requires only a fraction of a turn to open or close it.
(National Maritime Museum 59-209)
The first practical water-tube boiler was the Belleville, invented in France in the 1850s and first adopted by the French Navy in the 1880s. Its water-tubes formed a series of flattened spirals built up of straight tubes with cast-iron junction boxes connecting them. They rose from a feed box in front of the boiler to a cylindrical steam drum at the top. Most ships had economizers, which preheated the feed water and controlled steam output when it had to be changed suddenly, for example to increase speed. Pressure inside the boiler was typically 350psi, reduced to 250 for the engine (the greater pressure inside the boiler was later considered a serious defect, though it came to be commonly accepted). Observation of Bellevilles on board the French mail steamer Laos prompted the Royal Navy to try it on board the torpedo gunboat Sharpshooter and then to adopt it for numerous large cruisers, such as the Powerful class. The Belleville used large water-tubes, and it was attractive because it appeared to be sturdy, and because it was already in successful service. It offered more fire grate area (for overall size) than any other boiler then known, and its small elements did not require a large opening in a ship’s armour deck. The Admiralty did not appreciate that Bellevilles, introduced at the same time as much higher steam pressure (300psi or more instead of 160), were a considerable technological leap. There were serious breakdowns in service; HMS Hermes had to come home after only a year in commission. Europa showed extravagant fuel consumption on passage from Portsmouth to Sydney: of eighty-eight days she had to spend thirty coaling (partly due to leaky condensers and leaky steam joints). The big cruiser Terrible burned 200 tons a day on a 1902 voyage to China at an average of 11.8kts, but two years later she burned only half as much at an average of 12.6kts.
Early problems with the Bellevilles were critical because it was adopted so quickly for so many important ships. By 1900 there were calls for a Committee of Enquiry, one engineer calling the Belleville ‘the worst boiler in existence’. In September 1900 the Admiralty formed a Boiler Committee under Admiral Sir Compton Domville.44 All but one member (Chief Inspector of Machinery J A Smith) were associated with either the merchant fleet or with Lloyd’s. The first interim report was issued in 1901 and the final one in 1904. In 1904 Domville was flying his flag in the Belleville-boilered battleship Bulwark; he considered her boilers entirely satisfactory. Many of the problems attributed to the Bellevilles turned out to be due to other changes, including machinery packed too tightly together because with higher pressure it could be made more compact.
The interim report recommended fitting both cylindrical and water-tube boilers and abandonment of the Belleville as it seemed to have no particular advantages over other types. The committee listed thirty-six other water-tube boilers, of which it favoured four, already being fitted on a large scale in foreign navies: the Babcock & Wilcox, the French Niclausse, the German Dürr, and the Yarrow large-tube boiler. Of these the first two had already been tested satisfactorily in the Royal Navy, and were being adopted on a limited basis – two sloops (Espiegle and Odin) and a second-class cruiser (Challenger) were receiving Babcocks, and one sloop (Fantome) and a first-class cruiser (Devonshire) were receiving Niclausse boilers. The Babcock & Wilcox was already being tested on board the torpedo gunboat Sheldrake, but the type now contemplated was different. At the committee’s suggestion, the cruisers Medea and Medusa were reboilered with, respectively, Yarrow and Dürr boilers, as it was difficult to draw conclusions fully applicable to larger ships from torpedo gunboat trials. In addition, in 1897 and in 1899 the small cruisers Barham and Bellona were both reboilered with Thornycroft water-tube (small-tube) boilers (not as part of the Boiler Committee program). Similarly, in 1900 and in 1901 Blanche and Blonde were reboilered with Normand small-tube water-tube boilers.
For ships powered by piston steam engines output is expressed in indicated horsepower (IHP). IHP was measured using an indicator card which directly measured the work done by the engine. Although an engine produced a given IHP, by no means was all of that power transmitted to the shaft. The engine drove various auxiliaries and also had to overcome friction within it. Modern turbine engines are rated in shaft horsepower (SHP), which is the power actually available to drive the propeller. For ships described in this book it was typically 80 to 85 per cent of IHP. Yet another measure of power was effective horsepower (EHP), the power actually required to drive a ship at a given speed, which was estimated on the basis of model tests. The model basin also estimated the efficiency of a ship’s propellers, to estimate the IHP required to achieve the EHP it calculated. The overall ratio between EHP and IHP was about 50 per cent, but errors in estimating efficiency helped make it difficult to predict exactly how fast a given ship would be, even in smooth water. Blake and Blenheim seem to have been particular cases of failed estimates.
Tonnage and Cost
Until the early 1870s, ships at the design stage were described more by their burthen tonnage rather than by their displacement, as has been standard ever since. Burthen tonnage – sometimes called builder’s (old) measurement – was easy to calculate because it was based entirely on a ship’s dimensions. It was given as (L-2/3B) × B × B/2 divided by 94; one indication that it was being used in design reports was that tonnage was given as tons plus some number divided by 94. This tonnage seems to have been used initially because designers could not precisely predict the displacement of ships, perhaps partly because weights (particularly those of machinery) were difficult to estimate (but by about 1860 displacements were generally calculated, and accounts of earlier steam warships often include their displacements as well as their burthen tonnage). Burthen seems to have been considered a good way to compare hull cost. It was probably not too bad as long as ships had similar hull forms. That fell apart for ships with unusually fine hulls, which might be long but not heavy, as in the comparison between Volage, Raleigh, and Bacchante in 1871. The following year burthen was abolished as the official measure of ship size (displacement replaced it). That estimates could still be quite faulty became obvious in the unfortunate Orlando class more than a decade later.
For much the same reason, until the mid-1870s design reports gave nominal horsepower (NHP) rather than the indicated horsepower (IHP) which determined a ship’s performance. NHP was a measure of the size of the engine, not its output. It could be specified precisely, but actual engine performance seems to have been a very different matter, again until some time in the late 1860s or early 1870s. NHP was 7 × area of piston × equivalent piston speed divided by 33,000. Equivalent piston speed was based on the length of the stroke. NHP matched actual indicated horsepower for a steam pressure of 7psi and particular average piston speeds (piston speed clearly varied during a stroke). By 1866, British engineers were achieving about six times NHP in actual output (IHP).
The Admiralty in a Time of Radical Change
Alongside this series of dramatic changes in technology was an equally dramatic change in the way in which the Admiralty, which was ultimately responsible for the ships, operated. It took a much larger and more complex Admiralty to handle the new technology. The changing form of the Admiralty helps explain how decisions as to the shape of the fleet (including the size and nature of the cruiser force) and the shape of the ships themselves were reached at various times. There was no formal naval staff of the type created just before and during the First World War, hence no formal staff requirements for ships or weapons. This lack suggested to later writers that throughout the century ship development was determined primarily by the way in which technology evolved and thus by the views of technical experts such as DNCs. The reality was considerably more complex. There is certainly evidence of exactly the sort of strategic thinking later associated with naval staffs. It does not help historians that in a small Admiralty organization much of what happened was decided by face to face meetings which did not have to be written up.
The issue which most exercised naval officers was the balance between political control, exerted by the First Lord (who was responsible to the Cabinet) and professional naval thinking (represented by the Naval Lords, who were later called Sea Lords). A second issue, increasingly important as the pace of technological change accelerated, was the way in which the professional officers on the Board were connected to technological experts. The professionals on the Board set policy, but it had to be translated into ships.
The almost continuous wars ending in 1815 created an administration focussed on operations with a nearly independent Navy Board responsible for manning, supplies, and materiel. Once the war was over, operations receded. In 1832, at the outset of the steam revolution, the Navy board was abolished and the Admiralty was made responsible for both operations and resources. The new organization emphasized professional naval experience more than its predecessor. The new Board consisted of a First Lord superintending four Naval Lords (headed by a Senior Naval Lord, later First Sea Lord) and a Civil Lord (Fifth Lord), each of whom was responsible for a department through its separate chief. The First Lord was a political appointee responsible to Parliament (i.e., to the Cabinet). Although in practice he generally accepted the advice of the Naval Lords, the First Lord could issue commands without their advice or approval. Serving officers could sit in Parliament and experienced admirals were often chosen as First Lords.
The Senior Naval Lord (sometimes called First Sea Lord) was responsible for the distribution and composition of the fleet, for drawing up sailing orders, and for armament and complements of ships – as an advisor to the civilian First Lord. He performed much the same duties as his predecessor in the earlier all-operational Admiralty Board. However, he was also responsible for the Surveyor, who in turn was responsible for materiel, including ships.45 The Surveyor was envisaged as an instrument of the Board, designing (or ordering the design of) ships when asked to do so; the Board even reserved for itself decisions on the dimensions of masts and yards. In later terms the Surveyor was more DNC than anything else. In the official list of Directors of Naval Construction, Surveyors precede the first formally appointed DNC (his office was not yet called that), Sir Edward C Reed. The Surveyor had senior shipwrights (of the Royal Dockyards) under him; he had to approve the designs they submitted.
The Board did not provide the general policy guidelines envisaged. From about 1837 on the Surveyor gained autonomy. The Board as a whole seems to have been too busy with routine matters to spend time on policy and ship design issues.46 In 1837 a separate steam department, under a Comptroller of Steam Machinery, was set up to work alongside the Surveyor’s department.47
The two major Surveyors involved in this book were Captain Sir William Symonds (appointed 1832, retired 1847) and Rear Admiral Sir Baldwin Walker. Symonds was interested in curing what he considered the inferiority of British designs manifested in the Napoleonic Wars, favouring a combination of great beam and extraordinary sharpness, which made for much larger ships than their predecessors.48 He was not professionally trained, and he distrusted the new scientific naval architecture, preferring what he considered a more traditional or pragmatic approach. Symonds was unfortunate in holding office just as new technology, such as iron hulls and screw propellers, developed. From 1841 the Board of Admiralty lost confidence in him, subjecting his work to more and more scrutiny.
In contrast, Walker was a respected seaman who knew that he was no naval architect. He intended to supervise naval architects. He also had far more respect than Symonds had shown for technical expertise.49 Walker became Surveyor in February 1848. That June he made Isaac Watts his Assistant Surveyor and, in effect, his chief warship designer. In many cases, however, the chief shipwright at a yard prepared the design for a ship built there, in contrast to later (and earlier) policy in which basic design was centralized. That policy seems not to have solidified until the 1870s, under Barnaby.
With the new role of superintending the materiel of the fleet, in the spring of 1848 Lord Auckland the First Lord approved the existing practice under which the Surveyor prepared an annual program of ship construction and repair, taking into account the state of the fleet and reserves of timber in the yards. Auckland wanted the Surveyor’s projection to take account also of the number of ships currently at sea and of the numbers likely to be sent to sea during the year (Walker seems not to have gone that far). On this basis Walker was responsible for the program of steam battleship construction offered to the Board in response to French programs. Walker had been seconded to the Turkish navy in 1840 and was thus in an excellent (and appreciated) position to advise the Board when the crisis with Russia escalated in 1853, leading to the Crimean War (the Great Russian War). Walker also seems to have been co-author of plans for the Baltic amphibious assault, the threat of which may have been decisive in ending the war on Allied terms. In 1859-60 the Surveyor was finally formally authorized to submit monthly and annual programs to the Board, and he was also given the authority to issue direct orders to master shipwrights and engineers in the yards (Walker had actually issued such orders since the Crimean War, particularly when they were urgent).
In 1860 the Surveyor was formally redesignated Controller of the Navy.50 Walker was transferred out his job in 1861 to the post of commander of the Cape Station. His successor Rear Admiral (later Vice Admiral) Spencer Robinson found that he could not control shipbuilding and repair costs, so he sought to expand his powers. Cost control became more urgent because, from 1858 on, the Royal Navy was engaged in a building race with France, initially in wooden steam warships and then in ironclads. Both were far more expensive than their sailing predecessors.51 In the past, a much larger fraction of the budget had been operating costs (including repairs to existing ships), and the size and shape of the fleet had not been urgent issues. Now they were. Robinson found himself trading off the cost of repairing existing wooden ships against that of new construction. Because the building program was now so large a fraction of the overall naval budget, changes (up or down) in the budget were often concentrated on new construction.
Robinson revived an earlier idea, that the Controller should sit on the Board. That did not happen at once, but he was regularly invited to Board meetings, as he was in effect the Board’s expert on the new technology (particularly on guns and armour). He found himself disagreeing with his Senior Naval Lord, Admiral Sir Frederick Grey (in office 1861-66), who seems to have considered Robinson far too outspoken, and barred him from Board meetings. Even so, Robinson had a considerable impact on the Board in the form of comments on circulated papers. Moreover, Robinson made a very favourable impression on Civil Lord Hugh C E Childers (in office 1864-65), who shared his views on the need to centralize the Controller’s authority to enforce financial discipline.
As Controller, Robinson made his chief shipwright his deputy for ship design and construction. This deputy was initially designated Chief Constructor, and then Director of Naval Construction (DNC). The connection to Controller shows in the later formal title of Assistant Controller and Director of Naval Construction. DNC was formally the professional advisor to the Board on warship design. In a period of rapid technological change, DNC’s position had to include considerable advice to the Board as to what sorts of ships were needed, because no one on the Board had anything like the technical knowledge to translate policy into ships (though several senior naval officers tried, as will be seen). Watts retired in 1863, and Robinson chose 33-year-old Edward C Reed, who had gained prominence by publishing several ship designs in an engineering journal he edited. That Reed was a professional engineer (naval architect) rather than a product of the dockyard system (like the earlier chief shipwright, Isaac Watts) was held against him (and, presumably, against Robinson, too).
Alongside DNC was the Director of Naval Ordnance (DNO).52 Under the 1832 reorganization, Second Naval Lord was responsible both for personnel and for artillery, including the work of the gunnery establishment HMS Excellent. The guns themselves were provided by the army.
The post of Engineer-in-Chief (EinC), responsible for ships’ machinery, lapsed some time before 1870.
In December 1868 William Ewart Gladstone became Prime Minister. He was determined to cut naval spending by 10 per cent, partly by curtailing the building program. Having become First Lord, Childers pushed through the reform Robinson had advocated: Robinson became Second Naval Lord. The naval part of the Board was reduced to First Naval Lord, Second Naval Lord (Controller), and Junior Naval Lord, the latter only a Captain (previously a Rear Admiral). The Parliamentary Secretary (who became, in effect, a Board member) was responsible for finance. The Civil Lord became his assistant. Childers represented Gladstone, and neither man seems to have taken professional naval advice very seriously. In effect Childers simply dictated his reorganization (and other plans) to the Board, which met only rarely when he was First Lord. To contemporaries, the professional views of the navy, normally reflected by the Naval Lords, were being swept aside. Gladstone and his creature Childers were the enemies of British sea power. It happened that Gladstone’s long-term adversary Benjamin Disraeli was not much more anxious to raise the naval budget.
Childers enthusiastically supported Captain Cowper Coles, who proposed a new kind of ironclad (built as HMS Captain) in the face of Reed’s disapproval. The fight wore down Reed, who resigned in July 1870. He became both a commercial warship designer and, eventually, a Member of Parliament. His bitterness probably explains his public criticism of the designs produced by both Barnaby and Barnaby’s successor Sir William H White. As for Coles, Reed was vindicated when HMS Captain, Coles’s ship, capsized on 7 September 1870 (with Coles aboard). The key issue had been the ship’s stability under sail. Childers blamed Robinson and Reed, but a full parliamentary inquiry into British warship design (which survives as a useful account of designs, including that of the new large cruisers) vindicated both.53 The report was not published until 1872, and Reed’s post as Chief Constructor was left empty. By that time Robinson had left, his position impossible given Childers’ attacks. Childers left at about the same time, exhausted. The extent of Robinson’s downfall is evident in his replacement by a Captain (Robert Hall), who remained as Controller until his post was removed from the Board the following year (May 1872).
A Select Committee of the House of Lords reviewed Admiralty procedures. Childers’ successor George Goschen (appointed in March 1871) could not simply undo Childers’ reorganization, because that would have been an admission that Gladstone himself had failed. Robinson was seen by many naval officers as an interloper on the Board. His position became the obvious victim; Goschen split off the Controller from the Second Naval Lord position and dropped it from the Board. That increased senior naval representation on the Board; Goschen also created the position of Naval Secretary. It was probably far more important that he stipulated regular Board meetings and also very frequent informal meetings including the Controller (to exchange views but not to take formal decisions). He recognized that he was no Childers.
Goschen appointed a new Chief Constructor: Reed’s brother-in-law Nathaniel Barnaby, who had been running the department in Reed’s absence. Barnaby was initially styled Chief Naval Architect, and some of Reed’s powers were given to two other officers: a new Surveyor of Dockyards and a revived Engineer-in-Chief. For a time the three formed a Council of Construction, with Barnaby as chairman, but in 1875 Barnaby was appointed Director of Naval Construction (DNC). The other two offices remained, Engineer-in-Chief advising DNC and working with him.
Goschen’s First Naval Lord was Sir Alexander Milne, who had already served as Senior Naval Lord in 1866-68.54 He survived the change of administration in 1874. The new First Lord G Ward Hunt asked Milne and other senior officers for advice as to the proper size and shape of the fleet. Neither Childers nor Goschen seems to have done so; the senior officers wrote as though this was an entirely new issue. Like Gladstone, Disraeli was interested in economy, so his First Lord asked what sort of fleet Britain needed in a time of profound and protracted peace. His naval officers rather more realistically estimated what sort of fleet the country would need in war, which they assumed meant war against France. That made sense: soon after 1874 it became clear that the world was becoming considerably more dangerous. The surprise, if indeed there was one, was that the immediate threat was Russian.
Until well into the 1880s, any Royal Navy ship intended to cruise for long periods had to rely on sail much of the time. This was not simply a question of steaming endurance. A ship on a foreign station for months at a time would use up her coal no matter how efficient her engines. Until there were plentiful coal supplies throughout the world, the ship would be unable to remain at sea under steam. Much the same consideration affected the shift from coal to oil fuel (it explains why the First World War Hawkins class cruisers, conceived for distant service against raiders, were designed with both coal- and oil-burning boilers, well after the Royal Navy shifted to all-oil-burning in cruisers designed to work with the main fleet. The cruiser was very different from a steamer making a point-to-point voyage of limited duration. The need for excellent sailing qualities much affected all design decisions, such as the restriction to single screws and usually to two-bladed screws (so that they could be raised). This photograph of the corvette (cruiser) HMS Calypso was taken by Cdr Robinson (HMS Active) when the Training Squadron was ‘chasing’ down the Trade Winds between the Canary Islands and Barbados. The squadron consisted of HMS Active, Volage, Calypso, and Ruby. Calypso was unique in the squadron for having a disconnecting propeller (which revolved when the ship exceeded 4kts); the others all had lifting screws. (National Maritime Museum, photograph courtesy of Mrs Craig-Waller, whose husband was a midshipman in Calypso from December 1889 to June 1891).
(National Maritime Museum L5403)
The change to a more modern Admiralty, with a war planning staff, began with the embarrassments of the Anglo-Russian crisis of 1877-78: mobilization problems and the absence of a vital intelligence report on Russian Baltic defences, prepared shortly before the war, which could not be found. A Mobilization Committee and a Foreign Intelligence Committee (FIC) were formed after the crisis ended.55 The crisis made evident the global threat the Russians posed both to British trade and to isolated British colonies. Former First Naval Lord Admiral Milne was appointed to head a Colonial Defence Committee (CDC), which in turn led to the formation of the investigative Carnarvon Committee. In its wake the CDC was revived; among its successors was the Committee on Imperial Defence formed in 1902.
Key, who had commanded the 1878 Baltic fleet, became First Naval Lord on 15 September 1879, serving until 1 July 1885. The experience of botched mobilization (i.e., poor staff work) and poor intelligence support undoubtedly led him to turn the FIC into the Naval Intelligence Division and to entrust it with staff as well as pure intelligence duties. The need for intelligence was further emphasized when the Royal Navy found itself bombarding Alexandria in 1882 without sufficient information on the defences of the port.
The Controller once again sat on the Board (as Third Naval Lord) from 1882 on, perhaps also as a result of the lessons of the 1877-78 crisis. This was the final major change to the Board during the period covered by this book.
The most important thing did not change at all. The First Lord accepted the advice of the Naval Lords, but he was responsible to the Cabinet, which could and did veto proposed programs (such as an 1875 proposal for six fast cruisers). By the early 1880s some key British naval officers were convinced that no Government, either Liberal (Gladstone) or Conservative, was likely to solve the navy’s problems of gross obsolescence (too few new ships to embody enough new technology) and limited numbers (in an era of growing foreign fleets). The public, or at least that portion of the public to which the politicians listened, had to be engaged, not least because the cost of naval growth would be considerable. In May 1881, for example, Captain J C E Colomb RN, who became famous as a strategist, complained to the Royal United Services Institution that few in the United Kingdom understood that their lives depended on seaborne trade; if it was interrupted, they were only a few months from starvation and penury. Most Britons imagined that sea dominance had been settled at Trafalgar (or even by the victory over the Armada), and that the defence of the British Isles themselves against invasion was all that mattered.56
Admiral Phipps Hornby, the hero of the straits ascent (and the commander at Portsmouth), orchestrated a campaign to reach public opinion over the head of the hostile Gladstone government. In September 1884 the journalist W T Stead, who was sympathetic to the navy, began publishing a series of articles called ‘The Truth About the Navy’ in the influential Pall Mall Gazette. Phipps Hornby’s covert conduit to the press was Captain John Fisher, the future First Sea Lord.57 Initially First Lord Northbrook was unrattled, saying that he had no idea what he would do with any large supplemental budget. Naturally First Naval Lord Admiral Cooper Key felt that he could not say that his resources were inadequate. As the campaign gained momentum, Gladstone’s government felt compelled to give way. On 10 November Northbrook admitted in a speech at the Guildhall that more armoured ships and cruisers were needed, and that it was particularly important that the smaller ships be faster. On 2 December the government announced an additional £5.5 million for imperial defence (£3.1 million for the navy, £2.4 million for the army, naval ordnance and base fortifications) over the next five years, beginning with the 1885-86 program (reduced from the Admiralty estimate that £11 million was needed). Public opinion was so aroused that this rather large program was widely considered inadequate, Cooper Key becoming extremely unpopular within the navy for supporting the earlier government position.
The Northbrook Program amounted to 1 ironclad, 2 torpedo rams, 5 armoured cruisers, 10 torpedo cruisers, and 30 torpedo boats, beyond the normal annual programs. The money was later redistributed to buy 2 battleships (Victoria and Sans Pareil), 5 armoured cruisers (Orlando class), 6 torpedo cruisers (Archer class), and 14 torpedo boats (presumably including 4 torpedo gunboats). Among the first indications that the Northbrook Program would be carried out was the announcement of requests for tenders for six of the ten projected torpedo cruisers. Any backsliding on Gladstone’s part was prevented by the 1885 war scare, which reinforced Stead’s point that the navy was not powerful enough. From the navy’s point of view the greatest success was that Stead made the strength of the Royal Navy a permanent and prominent public concern.
The British situation was exacerbated by a gun crisis: given the recent shift from Woolwich muzzle-loaders to Armstrong breech-loaders, there was a strong perception in 1884 that guns, particularly heavy ones, were not being produced nearly rapidly enough. The French seemed far ahead, and that sense contributed to the feeling of impending naval crisis.
After the Gladstone administration fell in 1885, new First Lord Hamilton determined on a large sustained program to ensure British naval superiority over both France and Russia (which were increasingly seen, realistically, as a combined threat).
Hamilton fired DNC Barnaby, who had been associated with the penny-pinching of the past. For example, Barnaby seems to have been fascinated with the idea of pushing down the size (hence the cost) of protected cruising ships. He also became associated with the idea of arming large fast merchant ships, which in Gladstone’s terms might well be seen as a way of avoiding building expensive fast cruisers. Gladstone’s aversion to spending probably explains why, in 1885, Captain Fisher pressed for a fast torpedo depot ship, but only as a conversion of a merchant ship – because building a special warship for that purpose would cut construction of more vital ships. Under the new regime, fast merchant ships were still worth arming in wartime – but only as supplements to the core of specially-built warships.
Hamilton was looking forward to a more expansive future. He needed a visionary DNC who could and would design the large modern warships he expected to finance. He appointed William H White, who had been Barnaby’s assistant before being hired by Armstrong to design spectacular export cruisers.58 White designed so many of the ships in this book that its subtitle might almost have been ‘The White Era’. Having made a name at Armstrong (Elswick), White returned to the Admiralty as DNC, accepting a considerably reduced salary. In compensation the Admiralty shipped Barnaby’s deputy Philip Watts to Armstrong as chief naval architect. Watts in turn replaced White in 1902.
Although Gladstone returned briefly to office in 1886, Hamilton was soon back, remaining in office between 9 August 1886 and 25 August 1892. He reached his goal with the 1889 Naval Defence Act. White worked with Hamilton to develop a rolling program which would maintain a modern Royal Navy. To that end White assigned ships effective lifetimes, which were formally proposed in 1891: 22 years for armoured, protected, and partially protected ships (including nearly all cruisers), i.e., depreciation of 4 per cent per year; and 15 years (6 per cent) for corvettes, sloops, torpedo cruisers, gun-vessels, gunboats, troopships, etc.59 Lifetimes implied a regular replacement program.
White also prepared a report showing that 72 ships should be discarded between 1888 and 1891. That transformed Hamilton’s major new construction program into a far more acceptable 70-ship replacement program. On the eve of the 1888 manoeuvres, the Naval Lords were asked for a confidential report showing what the navy would need in the event of a war with France. It was to include the requirements of a war against France and Russia, should it be necessary (as in 1885) to defend Constantinople. This was Hall’s war, with Russia added. On this basis the Naval Lords asked for 65 ships – 8 first-class and 2 second-class battleships, 8 large cruisers, 25 second-class cruisers, 4 third-class cruisers, and 18 torpedo gunboats. The Naval Lords also wanted the building program reviewed no later than 1892-93, to prevent any break in construction. A program was submitted to the Cabinet about October 1888. It was soon buttressed by the post-manoeuvre report described above, which (with parts of the manoeuvre report itself) was released to Parliament in February 1889
On 7 March 1889 Lord George Hamilton introduced the Naval Defence Act: 21.5 million for 70 ships, including 8 first-class and 2 second-class battleships, 9 large Edgar class cruisers, 29 second-class cruisers (21 Apollo and 8 Astraea class), 4 third-class cruisers (Pallas class), and 18 torpedo gunboats. This multi-year program became possible when the British national debt was refinanced on favourable terms (the 32 ships to be built by contract were paid for out of the Consolidated Fund, to be spread over the seven years ending 31 March 1896, but the 38 ships to be built in Royal Dockyards were paid for out of annual votes).
By this time both the Russians and the French had bases outside Western Europe from which they could raid British territory in the Pacific. Australia was clearly increasingly at risk if war broke out. The key issue, revived again and again, was how to distribute the burden. The first Colonial (defence) Conference, meeting in 1887, proposed a deal in which the Australians would subsidize a British squadron. On this basis ships, including Pearl class cruisers, were ordered in 1888. The same conference released portions of the report of the earlier Carnarvon Committee (on colonial defence) which cast doubt on the Royal Navy’s ability to protect the Empire.
The 1889 Act (and to a much lesser extent the 1884 Northbrook Program) was treated at the time as the dawn of a new Royal Navy, rejecting the sluggish and retrograde thinking of the past. That was natural. Until 1884 the Admiralty failed again and again to get across to its political masters what was needed to maintain British naval supremacy. In 1956 Dr Oscar Parkes labelled the pre-Act period ‘the Dark Ages of the Admiralty’ in his history of British battleships. In fact there was considerable continuity, particularly in strategic thinking. There was less continuity in technology, but that was simply because the technology kept changing at breakneck speed. The main darkness of the dark ages was political: the Admiralty’s failure to gain political traction, hence the money it needed.
The 1889 Act included provision for a review of the building program not later than 1892-93, engendering the Naval Defence Act (Spencer Program) of 1893. Gladstone was back in office by this time, but he was unable to resist. Early in 1893 it seemed that no battleships at all would be included in the 1893-94 program. The public opinion which had swept in the 1889 Act was still potent. Spencer felt compelled to prove that his fleet was sufficiently more powerful than the French. The French announced a large program, including four new battleships ordered in January 1893. Spencer asked DNC White to prepare a statement listing new ships which might be laid down over the next five years to match the French. White considered six new battleships the absolute minimum to avoid critical weakness in 1896-97. When Spencer defended the existing fleet as adequate, the naval members of the Board threatened to resign as a body. Spencer found himself proposing a large program for 1893-98 (8 December 1893): 7 battleships, 2 large cruisers (Powerfuls), 6 first-class cruisers (Diadem class), 12 second-class cruisers (Talbots), 4 third-class cruisers (Pelorus class), 6 ram cruisers (Arrogants), 7 torpedo gunboats, 2 sloops, 82 destroyers, 30 torpedo boats, and one torpedo depot ship. The cruisers were reduced, the Diadems being deferred and only nine Talbots being built. The program for ram cruisers seems to have been dropped, the Arrogants having been bought before the Spencer Program began. The torpedo depot ship was also dropped. This program was financed at least partly by fiscal reform, the death duties being readjusted.
The multi-year approach did not quite capture the effect of headlong changes in technology. For example, in 1891 the Royal Navy had not one effective cruiser completed before 1878-79, and at least fifteen of the twenty built between 1879 and 1884 would be obsolete in 1894. Ships became obsolete long before they wore out. To make matters worse, the unit size, hence the unit cost, of ships continued to rise; what had paid for an adequate first-class cruiser in 1890 could hardly pay for a second-class cruiser in, say, 1898. Ships’ machinery was a particular problem. Guns could be replaced by better ones, but it was entirely impractical to re-engine (and re-boiler) a ship in order to maintain her speed relative to more modern ships. The speed issue particularly affected cruisers.
Battleships did not grow very much over the decade following the Naval Defence Act, but cruisers did. Once battleships also began to grow the Royal Navy felt increasing financial pressure. Until 1909 there was, moreover, no corresponding change in British finances to relax that pressure. Admiral Sir John (‘Jacky’) Fisher was appointed First Sea Lord in 1904 specifically to solve the problem. In the Mediterranean he had shown that he could prevail over the French and the Russians with limited forces, relying on fast striking forces directed by intelligence rather than on the blocking concepts of the past. In the Admiralty Fisher sought to cut costs by ending the focal area cruiser strategy, substituting a limited number of large fast cruisers working with smaller ones. Fisher also sought deep cuts in the smaller deployed ships which were used mainly to police the Empire and to deal with peacetime threats to shipping, such as pirates. He was certainly aware that these roles mattered, but he also probably felt that they should have been paid for out of the Foreign Office budget.
Fisher’s savings on cruisers made capital ships the single largest item in the British naval budget. They followed the same trajectory as the cruisers. Successive classes grew larger and much more expensive, so that by 1913 the Royal Navy again faced crisis, despite changes in its financing. The attempts to resolve this problem are beyond the scope of this book.
