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HMS Victoria

Laid Down: 1885

Launched: 1887

Completed: March, 1890

Displacement: 11,000 tons

Main Armament: two 16.25 ” guns (one twin turret)

Secondary Armament: one 10” gun, twelve 6” guns (individual mounts)

Speed: 16 knots

Major Actions: None

Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty

Fate: Rammed and sunk, June 22, 1893

In 1861, HMS Warrior set the state of the art in Line of Battle Ship. Combining steam engines, advanced guns, and an iron hull, she was substantially superior to her ironclad counterparts in France and the United States. The Royal Navy developed the ironclad type for the next twenty years, with the Colossus class of 1882 being the first to resemble what became known as the classic “pre-dreadnought.” Experimentation on the battleship form continued until the Royal Sovereign class of 1891, which set a new template for battleship construction. Between 1891 and 1905, nearly all the battleships in all navies in the world followed the pattern set by Royal Sovereign; four heavy guns in two turrets, one fore and one aft, with a heavy secondary armament, reciprocating engines, and a speed of around 16 knots.

HMS Victoria preceded Royal Sovereign by four years, and was originally intended to carry the name HMS Renown. In a decision that would become heavy with irony, the Royal Navy determined to honor Queen Victoria on the occasion of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee by renaming the ship after her. Victoria was the first battleship to use vertical triple expansion engines, which significantly reduced her coal consumption. The enormous 16.25” guns were not directly comparable to later naval artillery; the expected range of engagement was no longer than a couple of miles. Loading took five minutes for each shot. Successor ships carried smaller, more easily manageable weapons.

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HMS Victoria in 1887. From the book, Life of Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon KCB by Rear Admiral C. C. Penrose Fitzgerald

Upon commissioning HMS Victoria became flagship of the Royal Navy Mediterranean squadron, which represented an overwhelming concentration of naval power. The Mediterranean squadron was intended to offset the growth of the Italian Navy, which had recovered from the embarrassment of Lissa to field a squadron powerful enough to threaten British communications (via Suez) with India. In 1891 the Mediterranean Fleet fell to Admiral George Tryon, an innovator whose main enthusiasm was signaling. The Royal Navy system of signaling, the Admiral felt, had ossified since the days of Nelson, leaving the captains of individual ships little room for initiative and threatening an entire system collapse in response to unforeseen events during battle. Accordingly, Admiral Tryon pursued a much simpler system of signal that gave credit to the professionalism of captains and allowed them some command latitude.

On June 22, 1893 the Mediterranean squadron was engaged in maneuvers off Tripoli (part of modern Lebanon). Deployed in two columns, the fleet was returning to anchor when some confusion arose. The exact details remain unclear; Robert Massie suggests that Admiral Tryon was attempting a complex maneuver that involved the two columns weaving into one another, while Andrew Gordon makes the altogether more plausible argument that Tryon simply miscalculated the distance between the columns. In any case, the maneuver set HMS Victoria on a collision course with HMS Camperdown, the lead ship of the second column. Several officers on both Camperdown and Victoria suggested that the maneuver might be quite dangerous, but Admiral Tryon was inattentive, and Admiral Markham (commander of the second column) did not wish to cross Tryon. By the time that Tryon realized what was happening, a collision was unavoidable.

Plan drawings of HMS Victoria, from court-martial proceedings.

HMS Camperdown, equipped with a ram bow, struck HMS Victoria on the starboard side, then reversed engines to disengage. This doomed Victoria, as Camperdown left an enormous hole below the waterline. Thirteen minutes after the collision, Victoria rolled over and sank, carrying 358 sailors with her. Admiral Tryon did not survive, and his innovative system of signaling was discarded following the accident, even though it had not contributed to the collision. HMS Victoria now sits in five hundred feet of water just off the coast of Lebanon, with her bow buried in the sand and her stern pointing toward the surface.

Commander John Jellicoe escaped the sinking Victoria seconds before her loss. Just short of twenty-three years later, Jellicoe would command the Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland, where poor signaling would contribute to the loss of three British battlecruisers and to the escape of the High Seas Fleet.

TERRIBLE NAVAL DISASTER. - SINKING OF H.M.S. VICTORIA, July 1, 1893. The Illustrated Australian News. Courtesy of State Library of Victoria

Author’s Note

As far as I know, HMS Victoria is the only ship ever named after a sitting monarch to sink during the reign of that monarch. For obvious reasons, warships are only rarely named after reigning monarchs; another example is the Alfonso XIII, renamed España after the deposition of King Alfonso XIII.

I wonder how Queen Victoria reacted to the news of the loss of her namesake. The queen was seventy-four years of age in 1893, but had demonstrated the typical attentiveness of a British monarch to naval affairs. One would hope that whomever argued for changing the name of the ship from Renown to Victoria suffered some degree of professional mishap.

HMS Victoria is an interesting ship with respect to the evolution of the battleship type. The character of the line of battle ship was in flux until the early 1890s. After that point, it became remarkably programmatic, both within navies and around the world. The battleships of 1907 were superior to those of 1892, but resembled them very closely in basic form. That would change radically in the years after 1905 .

Related Entries

Inspired… USS Oregon

Nearly killed the future commander at… Jutland

Shared a naming convention with… España