Royal Navy Battleships, 1860-1910

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SPITHEAD, 26 June 1897 -- Guns thunder, bands play, and pennants crack in the breeze. HMS Renown proudly heads up a long, long line of black leviathans--the Royal Navy drawn up for review by the sovereign and the nation to salute Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.* At right, the royal yacht Victoria and Albert paddles ponderously along the precisely aligned rows of battleships, cruisers, despatch boats, and destroyers arrayed off the nation's great naval base at Portsmouth. The Prince of Wales -- the future King Edward VII--takes the salute from Victoria and Albert's quarterdeck while his aged mother watches through a telescope from Castle Osborne on the Isle of Wight. The smart "Victorian colours" of black hull, white superstructure, buff funnels and vent cowls, and brown masts are indeed mandated by the Queen herself; the red lead antifouling paint below the waterlines is dictated by the more mundane requirement of keeping the hulls clean of marine organisms. This colourful display will disappear within few years after Victoria's death in 1901, when the Navy begins experimenting with camouflage greys and blue-greys, eventually settling on the dark, neutral grey tone now known as "Battleship Grey."

After observing the fleet on maneuvers as an honoured guest, Rudyard Kipling adjusts his nib and begins to pen "Recessional," commissioned by the Times, and judged by many to be his greatest poem. Contrasting with the exuberant nationalism of the Jubilee, this poem muses philosophically over the transient nature of the festivities and draws a parallel with the transient power of empires. Kipling compares the ashes of the great bonfires seen from Land's End to Inverness with the detritus of earthly power altogether, as the hundreds of kings and princes gathered from across the world depart for their home countries; and as Britain's mechanics and milkmen resume their routine after the huge national display of unity and military pomp.

At its peak the British Empire controlled 10,200,000 square miles of the world's surface and ruled nearly 40 million people. Click here for an extravagantly illuminated enlargement.

For Britain and her empire, the Diamond Jubilee is a climactic festival, a celebration of the nation's status as "top dog" among the Great Powers of Europe which had between them divided up some 70% of the earth's surface and turned it to full-time profitmaking for the investors, capitalists, and crowned heads of Europe.

Yet for the Royal Navy, this is to be barely the midpoint of an ever more feverish dash to maintain maritime supremacy. Within a very few years the British will be feeling the heat from a spirited German bid to unseat Britain from her throne. And a great deal of the Kaiser's treasure will be poured into creating a world-class merchant marine and a state-of-the-art Imperial Navy, ready to contest with Britain for rule over the waves.

The Spencer Programme, passed in 1893, committed Britain to an ever more ambitious building schedule beginning with the Majestic class of 9 battleships. £31M was earmarked for the Navy, one-third of it for the construction of new battleships and facilities to service them. Britain had adopted the doctrine of 3:2, meaning that her fleet must at all times maintain a sufficient number of warships to fight the next two naval powers together. Though one may question the wisdom or necessity of such a radical margin of superiority, it did unquestionably keep the Royal Navy supreme, and the shipyards of Glasgow and the Tyne very busy as long as the arms race continued. In addition to the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich and the Royal Dockyards at the principal naval bases, Britain relied on the great armaments manufacturers Armstrong and Vickers for its great guns and the busy yards of Liverpool, the Tyne and the Clyde for its ships. For that matter, so did much of the rest of the world.

Britain's armaments industry quite outclassed any other country's until a bit after the turn of the century. Benefiting from a head start in iron shipbuilding, Britain was the world's pre-eminent shipbuilder and most advanced warship constructor. Royal Dockyards at Portsmouth, Chatham, and Pembroke were capable of building battleships and other large vessels in Her Majesty's Navy's own facilities, supplemented by a wealth of private yards.

For example, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, Northumberland sprawled the vast armaments plant of Sir W.G. Armstrong: the Elswick Works, which proudly boasted in its advertising "The World's Largest Warship Building Plant." Incorporating a steelworks and ordnance factory, the world's largest plant employed some 25,000 workers and included the two Walker Yards downstream, 100 acres in aggregate with an additional mile's frontage on the Tyne. Elsewhere in Britain, leading shipbuilders with a large naval workload included Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness (peak workforce around 16,000), Fairfield Engineering of Glasgow (8,500 employees), John Brown & Co. at Clydebank, Scotland (10,000), Thames Iron Works at London, Cammell-Laird at Birkenhead, near Liverpool (10,000); Swan Hunter at Wallsend-on-Tyne (~7,000); Harland & Wolff at Belfast (15,000 -- known for great liners, but not above providing engines, or building the odd battleship or cruiser) --, Beardmore's at Dalmuir, near Glasgow (10,000); and Scott's of Greenock (up to 5,000). Beyond these major players, Great Britain hosted dozens of smaller yards, accustomed to coordinating with the larger ordnance and engineering shops to meet their completion deadlines. Six of the non-battleship yards specialized in destroyers and torpedo boats: most prominently John Thornycroft & Co. Ltd. of Southampton and Yarrow & Co. of Glasgow; also White's of Cowes and Denny of Dumbarton, Scotland. These enterprises produced destroyers for all the world's navies, from Norway to Brazil, from Russia to Japan. The shipbuilding and armaments industry was supported by an impressive machine-tools sector, part of the world's most formidable industrial base, just being overtaken by Germany and the U.S. as 1900 approached. Supplementary industries supplied boilers, engines, navigational instruments, and all manner of marine components from forced-draft fans to rangefinders. And a large and influential armaments sector turned out shells and propellant -- shells which sadly proved defective in WWI, too often disintegrating on contact instead of exploding. The list of munitions manufacturers supplying the navy overlapped with the roster of private shipbuilders to a significant degree.

As for naval facilities, the strength of long tradition and usage had left the Royal Navy with dockyards the envy of every other nation at the time. The greatest naval base was at Portsmouth, near Southampton on the Sloyne, across from the Isle of Wight. Here were the fleet's greatest shipbuilding dockyard, its repair slips and graving yards, its massive provisioning dock complex. Further down the south coast were the Channel bases of Plymouth and Portland -- Plymouth home to the Royal Naval College and HMS Excellent, the navy's gunnery school. On the Medway near the mouth of the Thames were the destroyer/cruiser bases of Sheerness and Chatham, so vital in WWI. On the west coast were the building and basing facilities of Pembroke, Wales and a number of small bases in Ireland, while on the North Sea coast of Scotland, bases were maintained at Rosyth (on the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh) and Cromarty on the northerly Moray Firth. The Rosyth base was not completed until partway through the First World War, nor was the ultimate northern retreat of Scapa Flow, home port to the Grand Fleet through two world wars.

Harbors and dockyards welcomed the Royal Navy throughout the Empire: at Gibraltar and Halifax, Singapore and Hong Kong, Cape Town and Bombay; from Valletta to Vancouver, from Sydney to Simonstown. Coordinating this far-flung operation was the Admiralty, working from its Georgian offices in Whitehall, London (at right). As the 19th century drew to its conclusion, telegraph cables linked all the distant stations to London command, while the vast network of coaling stations and supply depots ensured prompt readiness for conflict -- at least on paper.

The 1890s through 1914 was the most colourful time of imperial and naval history. Browse through our pages for a look at the development of the ironclad steam warship from the mighty Warrior of 1860 to the King Edward and Canopus classes of the early 1900s. Cruisers and coast-defence rams too! For a complete inventory of BBB's pre-dreadnought info, visit our Global Site Nav engine.

*This impressionistic painting by Charles Mason (1898) - courtesy National Maritime Museum, London.