The British Battleship. Norman Friedman

      The Empire contributed significantly to British capital ship seapower. In 1909 the Admiralty tried to persuade Dominion governments to create ‘fleet units’, which could hunt down enemy raiders in their areas of responsibility or join together to form a Pacific Fleet. Only Australia answered this call, buying the battlecruiser Australia and cruisers and submarines (the latter for home defence). New Zealand bought the battlecruiser New Zealand for the Royal Navy. It says a great deal for the strength of the British shipbuilding industry that both battlecruisers were built in addition to the eight ships of the 1909–10 programme. HMS Australia is shown as built.

      The Navy and Industry

      Capital ships were designed by DNC, but they were built largely by private yards. Typically the lead yard (which might be a Royal Dockyard) produced building drawings for a class. Sometimes, confusingly, this stage is referred to as design, so it might be said misleadingly that Armstrong designed the Invincible class.⁹ E-in-C and DNO had no corresponding design capability.

      Compared to the US Navy, the Royal Navy depended far more heavily on private shipbuilders, hence was much more deeply affected by the collapse of the naval market after the First World War. Naval leaders were well aware of the problem, but the arms control treaties and the post-war economic disaster made it impossible keep all the private yards alive. Armstrong, which before the war was the most successful British export builder, shut down in 1927, its remains being bought by Vickers, which became Vickers-Armstrong in 1928. Beardmore ceased shipbuilding in 1930. The gun/mounting and armour industries suffered similarly.

      The most important armaments firms were Armstrong (Elswick Ordnance Co. or EOC) and Vickers; typically DNO asked both for competitive gun mounting designs (he also approached the Royal Ordnance Factory at Woolwich for gun designs). In 1905 four shipbuilders (John Brown, Yarrow, Cammell Laird and Fairfield) created the Coventry Ordnance Works (COW) specifically to overcome the duopoly of the two main manufacturers. The builders were encouraged by the British Government, which wanted to drive prices down. COW was responsible for the design of the 5.5in naval gun and for several army guns. It became unprofitable after 1918 and closed in 1925. The collapse of both Armstrong and COW left only Vickers-Armstrong capable of designing and building naval guns and mountings when Britain rearmed in the 1930s. It became a major bottleneck. For example, the same draftsmen designed both the twin 5.25in mounting and the 14in battleship gun mountings, so that problems with the first seriously delayed the second and hence the King George V class. A lack of inter-war orders also reduced British armour steelmaking capacity, with consequences for quick wartime ship production.

      E-in-C did not suffer as badly, because machinery technology was shared with a lively commercial shipbuilding sector. However, E-in-C seems to have been extremely conservative during the inter-war period, with unfortunate consequences for the efficiency of British warship machinery. That translated into relatively short steaming endurance compared to US ships with higher-pressure, higher-temperature machinery. Conservatism also showed in heavier electrical installations and in retention of DC power, with unfortunate consequences for gunnery data transmission.

      Nomenclature

      This book uses British, rather than (say) US designations for decks, which may be confusing to some readers. The Upper Deck is the uppermost continuous deck. For ships with forecastles, the deck above is the Forecastle Deck. The deck below the Upper Deck is the Main Deck; below that are the Middle Deck and the Lower Deck. Below are platform decks, so called because they are not continuous, but instead are platforms between bulkheads and then the Inner Bottom. The first superstructure deck above the Upper Deck is the Shelter Deck. Above it are the first and second Platform Decks (second above first). Superstructure designations varied somewhat over time. In the King George V class of the late 1930s, for example, the deck above the upper deck in the bridge was the Signal Deck, surmounted by an Admiral’s Bridge and then an Upper Bridge topped by the Compass Platform.

      Turrets were designated by letter, fore to aft: ‘A’ and ‘B’ for the forward group (‘B’ superfiring over ‘A’), ‘P’ and ‘Q’ for midships turrets (‘P’ to port if the two were en echelon) and ‘X’ and ‘Y’ for the group aft, ‘X’ typically superfiring over ‘Y’. In HMS Dreadnought, the two wing turrets were ‘P’ and ‘Q’ and the two centreline turrets ‘X’ and ‘Y’, even though ‘X’ did not superfire over ‘Y’. When enclosed mountings were introduced for secondary guns such as 4.5in or 5.25in, the mountings were numbered fore to aft, so that the starboard mountings in King George V were ‘S.1’, ‘S.2’, etc. The ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘X’, ‘Y’ scheme was also used for machinery spaces, so that accounts of the loss of HMS Prince of Wales refer to ‘X’ or ‘Y’ boiler room or action machinery space.

      Sources

      Like the earlier histories of British cruisers and destroyers, this book is based almost entirely on primary sources, documents produced by and for the Admiralty. They include the Ships’ Covers held by the Brass Foundry outstation of the National Maritime Museum, the Constructors’ Work Books held by the Brass Foundry and numerous files held by the Public Record Office (PRO, now called The National Archives [TNA]). I have also used numerous files held by the Admiralty Library (Royal Naval Historical Branch: RNHB), personal papers (of First Lords) held by the Royal Naval Museum (RNM) and by Churchill College Cambridge (CCC) and of the computerised catalogue of Churchill papers produced by that College.

      The Brass Foundry also contains many of the surviving records of export designs produced by Armstrong and Vickers. In the case of Vickers, a key source is a notebook listing the designs, maintained by the company’s director T G Owen (who later renamed himself George Thurston). It is held by the National Maritime Museum (my copies were provided by Stephen McLaughlin). These records have considerable gaps, but they give a good idea of what the most important export builders were doing during the period just before the First World War, when various navies ordered dreadnought capital ships. I have relied on Appendix 1 of Ian Johnston and Ian Buxton, The Battleship Builders (Barnsley: Seaforth, 2013) for details of export designs offered by John Brown.

      Documentation for designs produced after 1918 is significantly better than for earlier ones. Few Constructors’ Notebooks of the pre-1918 period survive and none of them fills in gaps in the design histories of the Lion and Queen Elizabeth classes. Furthermore, with the creation of an elaborate naval staff in 1917 there was much more discussion (on paper) of issues in capital ship design.

      Examination of primary source material often shows that what has been published is misleading. The reader may be surprised that Winston Churchill’s account of the design of the Queen Elizabeth class in his The World Crisis, which has been widely repeated, is seriously misleading. He portrays an integrated design process in which adopting oil fuel made a 25-knot battleship possible as a way of crossing