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" guns. They 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" MK X main armament, four 9.2" guns in single turrets at the corners of the superstructure (see the model shot below right), and the ten 6" QF secondary armament in an armored box battery amidships, cantilevered slightly over the hull. Then there were the 3 sizes of anti-torpedo-boat and antipersonnel weapons.
In practice this gunnery arrangement was not altogether satisfactory. KE VII class ships were somewhat cramped with all the additional turrets, although the other alternatives considered were no better. The 9.2" rifle (right) was the standard armored-cruiser weapon in the British Navy at the time (the 1909 Minotaur class and better carried four in twin turrets) and was a better armor-piercing weapon than the 7.5" gun originally considered. However, the necessity of carrying a different calibre shell (making 6 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. 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.
Specifications for the class: 457' long OA x 78' beam x 26'9" draft. Displacement: 15,826 tons. Armament: (4) 12", (4) 9.2", (10) 6", (14) 12-pdr, (14) 3-pdr, (2) Maxim guns; (5) 18" torpedo tubes. Armor: 7-9" Krupp cemented belt; barbettes and turrets 12", bulkheads 8-12", 9.2" gun turrets 4", decks 1.5-2.5", conning tower 10-12". Propulsion: Coal-fired water-tube boilers with oil sprayers; 1800-HP inverted vertical 4-cyl. triple expansion engines; twin screw. Speed: 19 kts. (20 with oil assist.) Operational radius: 5,270 nautical miles @ 10 kts. Crew: 777 (peacetime), 815 (wartime).
This class carried a mixed complement of boilers, some B&W and some cylindrical "Scotch boilers" with a different arrangement in practically every ship. The 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.
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 6 ships in the class survived to be scrapped in the early 1920s. 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. Early planes were equipped with floats for landing on the sea, whence they would be retrieved by cranes on the warship's deck. 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.
It was mechnical failure that forced down the lone scout plane sent up by Beatty's division. 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 dwarved by battleships nearly double their size, packing three times their firepower.
*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.
