HMS Repulse, one of the Royal Sovereign class of battleships that ushered in the predreadnought era, in a grand 1893 photo showing her dressed over all and firing a salute. Her origin is clear, as an enlarged and improved Nile class battleship; her advance in size (14,150 tons, versus 12,590 for the Niles) and seaworthiness is quite striking. These were the first battleship class designed by the new DNC, Sir William White, who practically invented the pre-dreadnought era, These ships reflected the White touch both in their symmetry and their cluttered, busy look.
Following a long period of Admiralty caution which had limited vessel size and expense, the launching of the Royal Sovereigns -- a class of 7 identical battleships -- marked a return to robust assertion of Britain's hegemony over the waves. This return was made explicit by the passage of the Naval Defence Act of 1889, which sanctioned the construction of 70 ships at an expenditure of £21.5M. Spurred largely by Fleet Street scandal-mongering over naval preparedness (much of it ghost-written by then-Captain Lord Charles Beresford), the Act gave a jolt to naval construction, but unbeknownst to the parliamentarians who passed it, this was but the beginning of a long and ruinously expensive arms race which saw several plateaus and accelerations even before the advent of the dreadnought superbattleship in 1906.
But as yet, this was all far in the future.
The Royal Sovereigns were armed with 67-ton 13.5" guns mounted en barbette, as seen at right and in our sectional cutaway diagram. The barbette mounting was favored in contemporary French and Italian warships for its considerable savings in weight over the armored turret, allowing the guns to be mounted higher in a ship's fabric. However, the introduction of quick-firing guns in the 1880s spelled the end of the unprotected gun emplacement, and subsequent classes added an armored gunhouse for all-sides protection of the gun crews; these enlarged shields became colloquially known as "turrets," although the entire mounting style remained a barbette mounting with an armored cylinder protecting the magazines and ammunition hoists. See picture gallery below for views of the 13.5" barbette mounting on the Royal Sovereign class.
These were high-freeboard ships, standing a full deck taller out of the waves than the preceding Nile/Trafalgar class, and eminently seaworthy even in an Atlantic gale. By contrast, the eighth ship laid down under the 1888 estimates was constructed largely to placate the First Sea Lord, Sir Arthur Hood, who favored low-profile, heavily armored ships. This ship was named, appropriately, HMS Hood -- the last low-freeboard battleship built for the Royal Navy; her performance clearly inferior to the Royal Sovereigns as a sea-boat. While the latter could range the globe's oceans at speed, reliably, in any weather, the tubby Hood was confined to harbor by weather. After some years with the Mediterranean fleet, she ended her days as a receiving-ship at Plymouth. While seaworthy, the Royal Sovereigns proved wet in rough weather. They had a heavy roll and so were nicknamed the "Rolling Ressies"in the service.
On the Sovereigns, gun loading was limited to the end-on position for the big guns. These were hydraulically trained, with manual backup. The ammunition hoists for the 13.5 and 6-inch guns were electrically operated. In addition, each ship was outfitted with 6 electric searchlights. To steam these monsters at speed required 10 tons of coal per hour. Reducing speed from 14 to 10 knots saved approximately one ton of coal per hour.Though high-freeboard, these ships could be wet in a blow, as seen at left.
The seven Sovereigns were built at a time of transition in armor types. They were protected by compound armor in a massive belt 18 inches thick at maximum. The belt extended from 3 feet above waterline to 5½ feet below it. The following major class of British battleships, the Majestics, was equipped with Harvey armor plate, made by the second of the principal modern processes. Since 9 inches of Harvey armor was more effective than 14 inches of compound, the considerable weight savings enabled shipwrights to apply armor to a greater area. With their thick, heavy iron-and-steel armor belt, the Sovereigns were slower than their design speed at 16.5 kts.
Plans and Specifications
Specifications for the Royal Sovereign class:
Dimensions: 410'6" x 75' x 29'6" Displacement: 14,150 tons. Armament: four 13.5" BLR (2x2), (10) 6"/40 cal wire-wound QF, (16) 6-pdr QF, and (12) 3-pdr QF guns; (8) Maxim machine guns; (6) 18" torpedo tubes. Armor: Compound type. Main belt: 18"/14"; 4" upper belt; bulkheads 14"/16"; barbettes 17"/11"; casemates 6"; upper deck casemates: 5"; conning tower: 14"/12"; secondary gun ammunition hoists: 4"; deck: 3". Fuel capacity: 900 tons of coal normal; maximum 1,400 tons. 190 tons oil fuel. Propulsion: 8 coal-fired, single-ended cylindrical boilers; 4 furnaces each. (2) 3-cylinder Humphreys & Tennant inverted vertical triple expansion engines developing 11,000 IHP, shafted to twin screw. Speed: 16.5 kts; 18 kts forced draft. Crew: 670 (to 715 when serving as flagship). Initial cost: Slightly over £900,000 each at 1890 values.
Ships in class: Royal Sovereign · Empress of India · Repulse · Ramillies · Resolution · Revenge · Royal Oak
Metric Specifications:
Dimensions: 122.4m x 22.9m x 9m Displacement: 14,150 tons. Armament: four 343 mm BLR (2x2), (10) 152 mm/40 cal wire-wound QF, (16) 6-pdr QF, and (12) 3-pdr QF guns; (8) Maxim machine guns; (6) 450 mm torpedo tubes. Armor: Compound type. Main belt: 457/356 mm; 102 mm upper belt; 356/406 mm bulkheads; 432/279 mm barbettes; 152 mm casemates; upper deck casemates: 126 mm; conning tower: 356/305 mm; secondary gun ammunition hoists: 102 mm; deck: 76 mm. Fuel capacity: 900 tons of coal normal; maximum 1,400 tons. 190 tons oil fuel. Propulsion: 8 coal-fired, single-ended cylindrical boilers; 4 furnaces each. (2) 3-cylinder Humphreys & Tennant inverted vertical triple expansion engines developing 8,203 kW, shafted to twin screw. Speed: 30.6 km/hr std; 33.3 km/hr forced draft. Crew: 670 (to 715 when serving as flagship).
Class History
The name ship was launched in 1891, christened by Queen Victoria herself. Built at the Royal Portsmouth Dockyard, she served as flagship of the Channel Fleet, then the Royal Navy's most important and prestigious assignment. In 1897, she was part of the Spithead Jubilee review commemorating the Queen's 50th anniversary on the throne. Subsequently, she was the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet. In November 1901, while cruising off Greece, an accidental explosion in one of her secondary guns killed 6 crewmen and injured 20. After her return in 1902, a mmemorial was erected in Victoria Park, Portsmouth, to the victims of this mishap. The ship was refitted from 1903-04 for service in coastal defense. She remained commissioned in the Reserve Fleet until 1911, and was sold for scrapping in 1913.
The Royal Sovereigns were trail-blazers when new, but soon became obsolete due to the rapid advances in naval technology. Still gamely hobbling along at 13 kts, they remained in commission past the dawn of the Dreadnought Era, generally in the reserve fleet. It is safe to say that there would have been no dreadnoughts if the British had not had the vision to create the Royal Sovereigns 15 years earlier. The old battleships all went to the knackers' yard between 1910 and 1915 -- all but one, that is. The Majestic class of 1895 were the oldest British battleships employed in fighting WWI.
Two of the class differed from this pattern in later years. One was the Empress of India, which was turned into a target ship and subjected to a blistering cannonade in 1913. The results were carefully studied by a navy that hadn't seen much real action since the Crimean War of the early 1850s. The other survivor was HMS Revenge, which served from 1906-11 as the gunnery training ship at Portsmouth. At the end of this duty she tested out the new 13.5" guns being considered for the Orion and subsequent classes of battleship, and also for the "Big Cat" battlecruisers. Revenge spent a good deal of time in the yard due to a series of collisions, including one with the superdreadnought Orion in harbor when her mooring lines parted in a gale. Re-gunned with late-model 12"/40 artillery, Revenge went on to become the only ship in her class to see WWI combat, as a shore bombardment platform. She is seen at right shelling German positions in Belgium late in 1914. The marked tilt of the deck is due to "flooding down" -- deliberately flooding sections of the double bottom on the non-engaged side, inducing a list in order to increase the range of the main guns. In 1915 the ship was renamed Redoubtable to release her original name for the "R" class super-dreadnought that fought in both world wars. Redoubtable served with the Channel Fleet through the end of 1915, and afterwards became an accommodation ship until December 1919, when she was sold for scrapping. At that time the ex-Revenge was the last of her class still extant.
A footnote: Any historian would be remiss were he/she to pass up an opportunity to note the genesis of the class's name: the original Royal Sovereign of 1637. The flagship of Charles I's navy, this 3-masted ship-of-the-line was known as "the Golden Devil" because she was covered from stem to stern with gilded High Baroque carving, based on drawings by the Dutch master Van Dyck. The figurehead was an equestrian statue of Charles himself, posing at the extremity of the beak-head and holding aloft a laurel wreath. Built at Woolwich by master shipwright Peter Pett, she cost a fortune: just one of the extravagances that led Charles to lose his crown -- and the head he wore it on. Cut down by one deck ("razeed") and stripped of the surplus carving, the ship later made a credible line-of-battle ship in the Puritan navy. In this guise, she proved herself in battle against the Dutch. But she will always be remembered more for her decoration than her practical points.
Royal Sovereign Class Picture Gallery
HMS Revenge in 1895.
The Royal Oak in profile from abaft the beam.
HMS Resolution, a/k/a Rolling Ressie, taking the bitter with the sweet.
The Royal Sovereign's great guns in their barbette mounting. Details of the breeches show up well in this needle-sharp image. Guns rested in a conformed cradle which was used to elevate or depress them. Crews worked below the turntable and behind the breeches, in the "gun pit", some with heads and shoulders exposed when they stood up straight. Note the burly 17" thickness of the armored ring about the mount (432 mm).
Royal Sovereign celebrated in an 1892 chromo by W. Fred Mitchell. Enlarge
HMS Ramillies enters the Mare Piccolo at Taranto. A colorized version by Geoffrey Miller, author of The Straits trilogy, is available here.
Resolution cruises regally past -- stern quarter view.
Two more views of the aft barbette on a Royal Sovereign class battleship. The lower picture shows the 67-ton, 13.5" guns with their breech-blocks removed: by pressing your face to the machined metal of the breech, you could look right out the rifled barrel and get a projectile's view of the world. As may be appreciated from these views, the visible part of the barbette is little more than an armored steel parapet over which the gun barrels poke, standing on their revolving turntable. The gun crews worked on a lower level.
A handsome photo of the Clyde-built Ramillies at anchor.
