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Illustrator’s Notes

The drawings in this book by myself and by Paul A Webb are based directly on official Admiralty ‘as fitted’ plans. Copies of the original plans, usually amounting to several sheets for each ship, can be ordered from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. The NMM’s historic Brass Foundry building at the old Woolwich Arsenal houses one of the world’s most extensive collections of ship plans, dating back many centuries into the age of pure sail propulsion. It also has an extensive collection of ship photographs. The expert staff at the Brass Foundry, in particular Andrew Choong Han Lin, has been extremely helpful in selecting and crisply duplicating the plan sets needed for this volume.

Many of the older original plans are now fading and, in some cases, have suffered damage over the past century and more. For some ships, only the basic hull and superstructure sheets have survived. For others, only preliminary plans remain. The actual ships experienced many changes before completion. Usually only one set of plans for one ship of a class survives. Thus the dates of depiction listed for each drawing depended heavily on what was available. ‘As fitted’ drawings are unusual in showing details not only of the exterior of a ship but also many details of the interior, all on the same sheet. For the period covered by this volume, deck plans often show details of equipment like voice pipes and fire mains that are actually below the deck depicted. Elevations usually do not show the masts beyond a few feet above the decks (in many cases the funnels are also truncated). For most of the ships in this book, rigging and/or sail plans survive, but where they did not, the masting and rigging was deduced from that of the closest contemporary classes and from photographs.

Thus the availability of high-quality photography is vital to producing plans as accurate as possible. For the first volume in this series, there was ample aerial photography, but aerial views of Victorian era ships are, understandably, extremely rare. Thus details of equipment and deckhouses behind the characteristic midships bulwarks of the ships of that time are dependent on the surviving plans, a few on-board views, and photographs of contemporary ship models. The interpretation of period warship photographs is further complicated by the paint scheme used. A black-hulled ship shows few details of her sides unless the sun is at a particularly fortunate angle.

The British-designed cruisers discussed in this book were much more cluttered in appearance than are modern warships. The necessity to provide sturdy masts, first to support sails and the portable rigging for coaling, and then to carry as high as possible the antennas for primitive radio (‘wireless telegraphy’) required extensive supporting rigging. I have left in the footropes (‘ratlines’) on the mast support shrouds to help convey the complexity of the rigging and to suggest the amount of effort by the crew needed to maintain it, although regrettably this sometimes obscures some detail of the structures behind the rigging.

The vast profusion of ships’ boats (which came in a great many different sizes and forms) also cluttered the ships’ appearance. Most of the drawings for the book show the boats in both their at-sea stowage and in their ‘swung-out’ harbour positions. Due to a lack of reference material, plan view details of the innards of the boats are only shown in the rare instances where the ‘as fitted’ plans provided them. In the plan views, the outlines for boats stowed inboard are usually shown as dotted lines so that the details of their stowage racks and deck fittings below them could be depicted. In some of the elevation views, the boat profiles are shown as dotted lines for the same reason. One reason for the large number of boats, most of them oar propelled, was that life jackets only came into use late in the period covered by this volume. Carley-type liferafts only began to proliferate during the First World War.

To provide ventilation for the ships’ engineering and accommodation spaces, the ships carried numerous cowl ventilators in a great variety of sizes and shapes. Adding to the clutter were exhaust pipes for individual coal-fired heating stoves in the berthing areas and portable supports for the vast amounts of canvas awning that was rigged when in port to keep the ships’ interiors as cool as possible. Many of these features fouled the trainable armament and had to be taken down and stowed below or on topside deck racks before the ships could go into action. Most of the elevation and plan drawings also show the portable accommodation ladders, those aft for the officers and those amidships, where fitted, for the enlisted crew; these too had to be stowed on racks amidships when the ships cleared for sea. One feature not shown on the later cruisers was the wire netting that could be rigged amidships to provide some degree of protection for gun crews from splinters caused by shell-fire hits. Another defensive feature found on later, larger Royal Navy cruisers was the complex network of booms to support anti-torpedo netting, and the shelving along the ships’ sides that was used to stow the rolled-up netting when the ships were underway.

All of the ships and powered craft in this book, even the tiny 2nd Class Torpedo Boats, were fuelled by coal, hence the numerous small concentric circles drawn on decks amidships that depict the scuttles leading to coal bunkers. Replenishing coal supplies, in addition to being a time-consuming and filthy task, also required rigging temporary lines to support gear, such as the ubiquitous ‘Temperley Transporter’ patent booms that rolled fore and aft along heavy cables slung between the masts. Numerous portable derricks and booms for coaling, bringing aboard stores, lifting out and retrieving ship’s boats, and mooring boats alongside, also added further complexity, as did the clutter of anchor-handling equipment and chains.

Well into the 1890s, carved decorations were considered vital to a Royal Navy warship’s portrayal of the power and might of the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, the elaborate bow and stern scrolling and, in some cases, figureheads, were only rarely shown on ‘as fitted’ plans. Where photos and drawings permitted, I have attempted to show some of the decorations, but for many ships that had them, the available photographs were inadequate. Also missing from the official plans were any suggestions of the equally elaborate striping on the sides of the ships, and no attempt has been made to replicate the paintwork on the drawings. In any case, as the photo illustrations show, such decorative features began to be removed from major RN warships during refits even prior to the universal replacement of black, white, and buff paint schemes with drab greys under Admiral Fisher.

The quality of the drafting on the original plans was almost invariably superb (with the exception of the earlier rigging and sail plans, which look hurried and rather sketchy). Considering that the draftsmen of the day were using ruling pens and large numbers of French curves and ships’ curves for their work and had to do all the lettering by hand, it is remarkable how handsome and decorative their final drawings appeared. Paul A Webb’s two drawings for the book were done using CAD, but the remainder employed Rapidograph ruling pens, numerous circle and oval templates, a set of ships’ curves hand-made by a distant relative just about a century ago – and several magnifying glasses and an ever-busy electric eraser.

Dr Friedman photocopied hundreds of period photo prints and also took numerous photos of ship models during his visits to archives in the United Kingdom and the USA; these were of immense help in interpreting the original drawings. Many friends contributed material from their own collections, including Robin Bursell in the UK, Christopher C Wright (editor of the quarterly Warship International), Charles Haberlein, and Rick E Davis in the USA, and Darius Lipinski in Canada, all providing invaluable help. Sufer Printing in Williamsburg, Virginia, made numerous reductions of drawings for the book, and Capture All Ltd, of Falkirk, Scotland, did the precise high-definition laser scanning to reduce the finished drawings to fit the book’s pages without loss of detail. The majority of the drawings were rendered in th of an inch to the foot scale.

Finally, I would like to add my deepest and heartfelt thanks to my wife, Anne, who patiently endured for a year and a half my several thousand hours hunched over the drafting table in our office. Without her constant support and encouragement, the work could not have been accomplished.

A D BAKER III