The Wobbly 8: The King Edward VII Class (1905)
As can be seen here from our views of her coming and going, HMS Hindustan -- a member of the King Edward VII class -- was one of the handsomest battleships ever launched from a British shipyard. Coming between the 1904 Queen class and the 1908 Lord Nelsons, the Edward VIIs (plan) marked an evolution away from the Majestic scheme. This was only natural for the last class designed by Sir William White, the Royal Navy's Director of Naval Construction since 1885, who originated the Majestic model and its many derivatives. The King Edwards were a bit longer and markedly lower-freeboard vessels than their predecessors, with simplified tophamper (no docking bridge, only small fighting tops on the masts) and a beefed-up secondary armament of four 9.2"/46 guns. To accommodate the forward 9.2" barrels on either beam, the ends of the oblique-sided forward bulkhead seen under the bridges of White's earlier creations, were truncated and straightened into a boxy armored structure of less prominence than in the Majestics and their many descendants. The KEVII's carried some oil fuel, used to spray over the top of the coal fires to initiate combustion and raise steam rapidly in an emergency -- a feature shared with the first dreadnoughts. In all, the King Edwards carried three calibres of big guns: the 12"/40 MK IX main armament, four 9.2" Mark IX guns in single turrets tucked into the corners of the superstructure, and the ten 6" QF secondary armament. Six of these latter were concentrated in an armored box battery amidships and four carried in sponsons, one each bow and stern on either side. Thus, the sided armament was laid out in the following order: bow 6" sponson, forward 9.2" turret, (3) 6" in battery, aft 9.2" turret, aft 6" sponson. In addition there were three sizes of anti-TB and antipersonnel weapons.
As suggested, the elaborate gunnery arrangement was not altogether satisfactory. KE VII class ships were somewhat cramped with all the additional turrets, although the other alternatives considered at the time were no better. The Mark X 9.2" breech-loading rifle (right) was the standard armored cruiser weapon in the Royal Navy at the time (the 1909 Minotaur class carried four in twin turrets). A medium velocity wire-wound gun with single-acton Welin breech, it and was a better armor-piercing weapon than the 7.5" gun originally conntemplated for the KEVII's. However, the necessity of carrying a different calibre shell (making six sizes of ammo in all, counting the anti-torpedo boat weapons) was inconvenient; this was the sort of overcomplication that led to the radical simplification of the all-big-gun dreadnoughts only a few years later. The necessity to shoehorn in the 9.2" turrets made for some design differences from the preceding Majestic knock-offs. The forward bulkhead under the bridge was shortened to allow the turrets to tuck into the corners under the bridge wings; the bulkhead made right-angled corners at the edge of the space allotted to the turret. This was a mark of visual distinction from previous classes, which had obliquely cut corners on their for'ard bulkheads.
Affecting the ships' trim and seaworthiness, the KE VII's had substantially less freeboard than the preceding Bulwark and Formidable groups, and tended to be heavy rollers and wet ships in comparison. Employing a balanced rudder, they proved reluctant to keep on a steady course, and in the Fleet were known as the "Wobbly Eight" as a consequence (see photo below). In even a moderate sea their secondary guns became inoperable, with run-out gun muzzles skimming the surface on a 14-degree roll. In fact this was quite a common disadvantage in all warships of this time, but guns continued to be mounted in this manner through WWI.
It is difficult to see why designers did not correct for it (mounting the guns higher in the ship). Part of the answer lay in the designer's attention to the vessel's center of gravity, but part may lie in the battleship's SYMBOLIC importance, as opposed to its actual war-fighting capability. Battleship squadrons were high cards in the game of bluff played by imperial diplomats in the decades leading to WWI (and later). The Great Powers had been at peace for so long that their actually duking it out on the high seas smacked of the unthinkable. Certainly accurate gunnery was not universally admired in the service; there were tales of commanders dumping their practice ammunition overboard rather than undergo the tiresome duties of target practice, so destructive of spit-polished brass and perfect paintwork.
All this was about to change with the advent of Sir Jack Fisher as First Sea Lord. In part under his influence, the technology of accurate gunnery improved by leaps and bounds. The development of the rangefinder, the Dreyer fire control table with its network of analog devices for correcting aim; telephonic communications to guns; and director firing from control tops (see the foremast in the photos) along with a renewed emphasis on practice and preparedness, spelled an end to the Victorian complacency about gunnery. As Fisher took over at Admiralty in 1905, the KEVII class were commissioning and the Lord Nelsons laid down; the Russian fleet steamed to annihilation at Tsushima in May of that year, giving the Navy battlefield data for a fleet action for the first time in a generation.
- Complete Info on the British 9.2" Gun, Marks IX - XIV - from Wikipedia
Specifications for the Wobbly Eight:
Dimensions: 457' long OA x 78' beam x 26'9" draft. Displacement: 16,350 tons std; 17,500 tons deep laden. Armament: (4) 12"/40 Mk IX (2x2), (4) 9.2"/46 Mk X (4x1), (10) 6" Mk VII, (14) 3" 12-pdr, and (14) 1" 3-pdr guns; (2) Maxim MG; and (5) submerged 18" torpedo tubes. Armor: Krupp cemented type. Belt 9"/7"/2"; barbettes and turrets 12", bulkheads 12"/8", upper belt 8", battery and secondary gun turrets 7", deck 2.5"/1.5", conning tower 12"/10". Fuel capacity: 950 tons of coal std, 2,150 tons maximum, plus 400 tons of oil, except in Zealandia. Propulsion: Coal-fired water-tube boilers with oil-spraying nozzles; inverted vertical 4-cyl. triple expansion engines developing 18,000 hp, shafted to twin screw. Speed: 19 kts. (20 with oil assist.) Operational radius: 5,270 nautical miles @ 10 kts. Crew: 777 (peacetime), 815 (wartime).
Ships in class: King Edward VII · Commonwealth · Dominion · Britannia · Hibernia · Africa · Hindustan · New Zealand (later Zealandia)
Metric Specifications:
Dimensions: 139.3m OA x 24m x 8.2m Displacement: 16,350 tons std; 17,500 tons deep laden. Armament: (4) 305 mm/40 Mk IX (2x2), (4) 234 mm/46 Mk X (4x1), (10) 152 mm Mk VII, (14) 76 mm 12-pdr, and (14) 25 mm 3-pdr guns; and (2) Maxim MGs; and (5) submerged 45 cm torpedo tubes. Armor: Krupp cemented type. Belt: 228/178/50 mm; barbettes and turrets 305 mm, bulkheads 305/203 mm, upper belt 203 mm, battery and secondary gun turrets 178 mm, deck 64/38 mm, conning tower 305/256 mm. Fuel capacity: 950 tons of coal std, 2,150 tons maximum, plus 400 tons of oil, except in Zealandia. Propulsion: Coal-fired water-tube boilers with oil-spraying nozzles; 1800-HP inverted vertical 4-cyl. triple expansion engines developing 13,423 kW, shafted to twin screw. Speed: 35.2 km/hr (37 with oil assist.) Operational radius: 9,760 km @ 18.5 km/hr. Crew: 777 (peacetime), 815 (wartime)
About the Boilers
The KEVII class carried a mixed complement of boilers, some Babcock & Wilcox and some cylindrical "Scotch boilers" with a different arrangement in practically every ship, but with a uniform working pressure of 200 psi across all combinations. The Babcock boilers were equipped with superheaters. The mixed-boiler experiment over all was not successful and further British designs specified a single boiler type in each ship -- usually B&W or Yarrow --, with good results. Coal consumption in the Wobbly Eight averaged 15½-18 tons at full power, and eleven tons an hour at 12,000 hp. Economical speed was around 16 kts., and the Babcock-boilered ships with superheaters were found to be considerably more economical of fuel than the others.
In the early years of WWI, the Wobbly Eight served as a Home Guard protecting the Thames and London, augmented by HMS Dreadnought. This unit was rather a sop to public dissatisfaction after the surprising and scary German bombardments of coastal towns at the end of 1914: Scarborough, Yarmouth, and Whitby were damaged by Hipper's battlecruisers, which successfully evaded the British forces sent out to catch them. The prestige of the ships assigned mollified public opinion without appreciably weakening the Grand Fleet. And in February 1915 Beatty's battlecruisers did intercept Hipper's squadron on its way in for another "insult bombardment." At the ensuing Battle of Dogger Bank, Beatty caused sufficient damage to deter further German adventures of the sort.
With the muting of the coastal threat and the far-flung commitments of world war on the Royal Navy, the ships of the Home Defence Squadron were peeled away for diverse duties in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. As fate would have it, King Edward VII and Britannia became casualties of war. The name ship of the class hit a floating mine off Cape Wrath, Scotland in January 1916 and sank while under tow back to base, mercifully without loss of life. The kill was claimed by the German commerce raider Möwe, a converted fruit freighter that became one of the deadliest raiders of all time.* Britannia had the bad luck to be the last British warship lost in the War. She was torpedoed in the North Atlantic only two days before the Armistice and sank Nov. 9, 1918, with the loss of 50 killed and 80 injured, mostly in a cordite fire in one of the 9.2" magazines. The remaining six ships in the class survived to be scrapped in the early 1920s.
Development of Naval Aviation
The KEVII class played a notable part in pioneering flight at sea. The Africa wrote history when she became the first British warship to successfully fly-off an "aeroplane" in 1910, from a runway track built from her bridge down over her forward 12" turret and bows (right). Early planes were equipped with floats for landing on the sea, whence they would be retrieved by cranes on the warship's deck. Another member of the class, the Hibernia, scored an even more important first: the first ship to fly-off an aircraft while under way, steaming at 12 knots (see photos below). Although the Royal Navy had developed naval aviation considerably by the time of the First World War, and had a seaplane carrier -- HMS Engadine -- attached to the Grand Fleet, while the Germans had an observation corps of zeppelins, aerial reconnaissance was barely and ineffectually used in the great clash of the dreadnought fleets. Early attempts at air raids in the Great War were wildly unsuccessful on the whole, although fair numbers of early aviators were recovered, against all odds. Britain's naval planes were responsible for the defense of the realm after all of her Army aircraft were shipped to France in 1914. Audacious raids were launched from the makeshift carriers against coastal German zeppelin bases starting at the end of that year; in July 1918 Britain's first purpose-built carrier, HMS Furious, conducted a successful air raid on the zeppelin base at Tondern. For an essay on Britain's first wave of aircraft carriers, click here.
It was mechnical failure that forced down the lone scout plane sent up by Beatty's division at Jutland, before its pilot sighted the High Seas Fleet formations heading straight for Britain's Grand Fleet. It was similarly mechanics which soon outpaced the KE VII's and rendered them obsolete. The ships' piston steam engines simply could not deliver the reliable performance at speed that turbines could. The largest battleships afloat in 1904-5, within a decade the King Edwards found themselves dwarfed by battleships nearly double their size, packing three times their firepower. They were nonetheless strikingly good-looking ships, useful in war, and quite popular with the public.
* Deadly in the sense of numbers of ships captured and sunk. The Moewe's captain retained to the end the reputation of a perfect gentleman. Like many German surface cruiser officers, and initially most submariners as well, he operated scrupulously under the "Cruiser Rules," neither sinking without warning or failing to make provision for passengers and crew of his prizes. It was to prove an archaic extension of chivalry into an era when submarine warfare on both sides began to operate on the basis of "shoot first, ask questions later."
The name ship, then the biggest battleship afloat, stirringly envisioned in a patriotic chromolithograph. The artist has drawn attention to the businesslike grey of his subject by emphasizing the hues of sea and sky. The flock of circling gulls and the boisterous whitecaps lend a seagoing atmosphere to this brisk portrait of a great warship.
Hibernia, riding calmly at anchor during flight tests in 1912. She was the first ship in the Royal Navy to fly off an aircraft while underway: that same year, while steaming off Weymouth, England at 15 knots, Cdr. Charles Rumney Sampson took off from this deck in a Sopwith Pup. His plane can be seen poised on top of A turret. It was launched off the bow on the wooden rails seen here, with the ship turned into the wind. Sampson was tragically killed in combat in 1917. By that year, Britain was operating a half-dozen converted carriers and building three more, and was the most advanced practitioner of naval aviation of the time. Japan, France, Russia, and the U.S. all operated planes at sea during the Great War.
An early seaplane, hoisted aboard Hibernia by the foremast cargo boom, roosts atop A turret. Click for model showing takeoff apparatus in detail.
Standard practice in World War I was for plane to be stored in a canvas hangar atop a turret. Turret would be turned into the wind for takeoff. Here, one of HMS Tiger's Sopwith Pups. By 1918, every capital ship in the British and American navies had at least one aircraft for scouting and spotting.
A naval aviation first: Squadron Cmdr. Edmund Dunning touches his Sopwith Pup down on the deck of HMS Furious, Aug. 2, 1917. This was the first ever aircraft landing on the deck of a moving ship. A series of follow-up exercises confirmed its feasibility.
- HMS Furious - Britain's First Full-Size Aircraft Carrier
- Elevation drawing of the Sopwith Pup - Standard British Naval Aeroplane of WWI
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