H.M.S. Alexandra
Central Battery Ship (1873 / 1877)
Named for Princess Alexandra, the long-suffering wife of the Prince of Wales, who officiated at the launch in 1875, this was the last and largest central battery ship built for the Royal Navy, and the first to be launched by a royal, inaugurating what was to become nearly a sacred tradition. Alexandra sported an iron hull, weighted with nearly a foot-thick belt of wrought iron armor, and originally crowned with a three-mast square rig with bowsprit (below). Later in her career this was modified to a 3-masted military rig as seen above (circa 1891). The tall rig of early years draws the eyes and imbues the ship with something of the grace of the clipper, but the cut-aways in the hull to allow straight-ahead or -astern lines of fire become more noticeable when these distractions are removed. A modification of the traditional sailing-ship broadside gun mounting, the central battery design had grown naturally out of the armored-frigate tradition, seen in a series of increasingly larger ironclads designed by DNC Sir Edward Reed through the late 1860s. The central battery disposition reflected "end-on" battle tactics current in Navy doctrine at the time of Alexandra's design in the 1872-73 period: providing punishing fire while ramming an enemy. Tactical doctrine shifted almost immediately to favor broadside engagement, while the ship was on the ways.
In fact, the Admiralty's Committee on Designs was meeting to map out the future direction of battleship development precisely during the 4 years Alexandra was a-building -- years that marked the culmination of the 20-year "Age of Uncertainty." At the same time Alexandra was building, on a parallel slipway at the Royal Chatham Dockyard, the unique barbette ship HMS Témeraire took shape, carrying four 10" guns and two 11-inchers on broadside, plus two more 11" en barbette: Britain's first (only partially successful) experiment in barbette mounting. In the event, the Committee found both these designs wanting. Instead it settled on the Italian Caio Duilio model: two turrets mounted en échelon. Their first foray was the Inflexible and Chief Constructor Nathaniel Barnaby scrambled to oblige, finally abandoning the time-honored broadside deployment of the guns; instead following the Cerberus - Devastation line that would lead to the modern turret battleship.
Alexandra measured 325 feet long by 64 feet in beam by 26 feet 3 inches draft, and displaced 9,492 tons. She was capable of slightly over 15 knots under steam and sail, or 14½ knots under steam alone, making her the fastest battleship afloat in her time. She was one of the first battleships built with vertical engines: inverted vertical Humphreys & Tennant compound engines developing 8,500 ihp (6,337 kW) shafted to twin, outward-rotating Mangin screws; the turret ship HMS Thunderer of 1878 also trialed the vertical engine arrangement at the same time. Twelve cylindrical high-pressure boilers provided 60 psi to drive the engines at speed (30 psi had been standard steam pressure prior to that time), and her service speed was just over 15 knots, making Alexandra the fastest battleship afloat at the time. Alexandra also had a second set of 600-ihp engines used only when the ship was under sail; sail and cruising engines combined could kick her along at 14 knots under optimal conditions. She also had an impressive ship rig spreading over 18,000 sf of sail as first launched, but this was removed and replaced with a military rig in an 1890-91 refit (see photo at top). She carried a mixed armament of two 11" muzzle-loading rifles (MLR), ten 10" MLR, six 20-pounders, three 9-pounders and four torpedo carriages, deployed as shown in the diagram below. Protection consisted of 12"/10/6" compound belt armor, 12" on the main deck battery, 8" on the upper deck battery, 8"/5" on the armored bulkheads, and 1½"/1" deck. As flagship, she ordinarily carried a complement of 674.
Above, the main characteristics of the central battery ship become clear in looking at a top-view deck plan. The main guns are mounted in the central redoubt (sometimes called a citadel). Alexandra's citadel contained two box batteries on different levels. While in profile the central battery ship looked rather like the armored frigates of the 1860s, the hull shape was radically different because of the cutaways to allow direct forward or astern fire from the forward or aft-facing sides of the redoubt; these hollowed-out shapes were known in marine architects' parlance as "recessed freeboard". The upper decks were narrowed considerably to make this possible; and the hull bulged out to its full outer dimension only 8-10 feet above the waterline forward of the redoubt. In Alexandra this was not true aft, but most central battery vessels had a deep recess cut out of the hull abaft the redoubt as well. Apparently the idea that the Alexandra would need to provide covering fire while running from an enemy was considered too far-fetched to plan for. The ship's big guns trained out through enlarged embrasures in the armored sides. The guns were mounted on pivoting carriages giving broad arcs of fire as shown; the ships' heaviest armor was concentrated over these batteries and in the forward and midships belt that protected magazines and propulsion machinery. For an enlarged plan including hull profile, click here.
Metric Specifications:
Dimensions: 105m x 19.46m x 8m Displacement: 9,492 tons. Armament: (2) 283 mm MLR, (10) 254 mm MLR, (6) 20-pdr, (3) 9-pdr, and four torpedo carriages. Armor: Main deck battery 12 inches 305 mm; upper deck battery 203 mm; belt, 305/150 mm; bulkheads 200/130 mm; deck 38/25 mm. Sail rig: Ship, later modified to barque; 1,735 square meters of sail (1878). Propulsion: (12) coal-fired cylindrical fire-tube boilers; (2) inverted vertical Humpreys & Tennant compound engines developing 6,337 kW, shafted to twin, outward-rotating Mangin screws; (2) auxiliary cruising engines developing 900 kW, used only in combination with sail. Speed: 28 km/hr; 25.9 km/hr under sail and auxiliary engines alone. Crew: 674.
At left is an illustration of an 11-inch gun crew on the Alexandra bombarding Alexandria, Egypt in 1882. Alexandra was the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet from 1878 until 1889, but temporarily yielded that rôle on this occasion to the lighter-draft ironclad HMS Invincible of 1869 so that the C-in-C, Adm. Seymour, could more closely observe the effect of his fleet's gunnery on the rebel-held forts at Alexandria. In this episode, Britain took advantage of a local rebellion against the Turkish-sponsored ruler, the Khedive Tawfik, to sieze the country in Tawfik's name and elbow the Turks out. Britain thus secured complete control over the Suez Canal, which had opened under French ownership in 1869. The whole of Egypt fell to three British armies within weeks, and remained under British control through WWII, although nominal independence was granted in 1939.
However, as commonly happens in such adventures, Britain's imperial ambitions came at a price. Almost immediately after taking over in Cairo, the British found themselves unexpectedly embroiled in Egypt's colonial war 1,600 miles up the Nile in Sudan. Egyptian merchant traders and administrators had been attempting to exert control over the vast scrubland of the Sudanese interior from their capital at Khartoum, situated at the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, but had been forced back by an uprising of Sudanese tribes under a charismatic leader calling himself the Mahdi, after the Expected One prophesied in the Quran. To organize an evacuation of Khartoum's European and Egyptian residents, London in 1884 despatched Gen. Charles G. "Chinese" Gordon, a past governor-general of Sudan; but Gordon soon found himself surrounded and besieged by strong Mahdist forces. Hoping to extract Gordon from a ticklish situation, Prime Minister Gladstone sent an expeditionary force to Cairo with orders to proceed very deliberately toward Khartoum, assisting evacuees without pressing forward far beyond the Sudanese border.
In January 1885 Alexandra earned a footnote in history when a 40-man detachment of machine gunners from the ship, traveling with the British camel corps up the Nile to relieve Khartoum, fought Sudanese Mahdist rebels at Abu Klea, some 30 miles north of the besieged city. Deployed at the corners of the infantry square, the naval gunners were sabred down by Sudanese tribesmen, losing two officers, an NCO and five enlisted men, although the British were deemed the victors in this fierce 15-minute encounter. Among the wounded was Lord Charles Beresford, an Irish-born society dandy and MP who made a name for himself commanding HMS Condor at Alexandria and in the clash at Abu Klea. Having established his patriotism and courage, Beresford made a further name advocating bloated spending on the Navy from the floor of Parliament. Much later, in the early 1900s, Beresford became the leader of a reactionary faction in the Navy and government opposed to the reforms of Sir John Fisher, the father of the Dreadnought. During the Alexandria operation, Fisher was the skipper of HMS Inflexible, then Britain's newest and most technologically advanced battleship. At this time Fisher invented the armored train by bolting sheet iron onto a local choo-choo to bullet-proof engine and cars. It was used to deploy troops around the city as the British military took over.
At right, members of the Alexandra's 674-man crew pose after quelling the 'raging heathens' of Alexandria: shore parties from all the warships patrolled and fought ashore for more than a month after the celebrated Bombardment. For an enlarged view of the Alexandra's men-at-arms, click here. One more hold-over from the Old Navy, just visible in the top photo, was the gilt bronze figurehead of the Royal coat of arms mounted on Alexandra's iron prow -- a much enlarged version of the wooden carving that ornamented HMS Victory. With the abandonment of the fixed bowsprit, and now the sailing rig, the Alexandra marked one more tentative step away from the traditional sailing ship look. Although her profile in the magnificent photo at top can hardly be called modern in the 1950s sense, it certainly screams "industrial age" in comparison to the look of the Warrior built only 15 years before. Alexandra was no iron-hulled copy of a sailing clipper, but a full-blooded, frankly ugly and businesslike spawn of modern mass production techniques, with right angles and oblique cutaways borrowed from fortress architecture on land rather than a set of graceful curves conforming to the ship's own hull lines and decks, or "sheer". Like contemporary French warships, she represented the struggle of naval architects to come up with a sensible embodiment of rapidly evolving technologies. As it happened, the main line of development was to abandon the central battery model in favor of the Devastation model turret ship. Ironically, this greatest of all British central battery ships was designed by Nathaniel Barnaby, now known chiefly for his advocacy of the turret.
Following her glamour years in the Mediterranean, the Alexandra underwent modernization in 1890-1891. Her 11" guns were replaced with 9.2" breech-loaders and her sail rig was removed as shown at top. She became the flagship of the reserve fleet at Portland, doing her last sea time as flagship of the B fleet in the 1900 maneuvers. Subsequently she became an engineers' training ship from 1903-1908, and was sold for scrap in that year.
Alexandra at Valletta, during her hitch as Flagship, Med Fleet; with her in the Grand Harbour are (L-R) Colossus, Howe, and (at right) a rigged corvette or aviso such as Comus.
A Nordenfelt machine-gun crew like this one from the Alexandra fought with Kitchener's troops in the relief expedition to Khartoum, 1885. The relief arrived two days too late, but fought several fierce actions with the Mahdists on the way. Kitchener himself would return to retake Khartoum in the 1898 Omdurman expedition celebrated in the writings of Winston Churchill. Aside from Churchill, such stellar naval names as Beatty, Beresford, Fisher, and Sturdee would start their climb to fame in the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns.
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