Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023: Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
Above we see the mighty King Edward VII class battleship HMS Britannia, circa 1908, in all her fine peacetime glory. She would give more wartime service than her sisters and came within two days of finishing the conflict unscathed, tragically sent to the bottom 105 years ago this week.
The King Edward VII class
Hitting over 17,000 tons when fully loaded and with a 453-foot overall length, the eight battleships of the King Edward VII class (King Edward VII, Africa, Britannia, Commonwealth, Dominion, Hibernia, Hindustan, and New Zealand/Zealandia) were big for pre-Dreadnoughts (more than 2,000 tons heavier and 30 feet longer than the preceding Duncan class), as well as being fast, capable of hitting 18.5 knots on a pair of triple expansion steam engines driven by as many as 18 water tube boilers.
King Edward VII, the class leader, was completed in February 1905, just 22 months before HMS Dreadnought.
Carrying a 9-inch Krupp armor belt with barbettes, turrets, conning tower, and bulkheads thickening to as much as 12 inches, they could take abuse and could dish it out as well in the form of four BL 12″/40 (30.5 cm) Mark IX guns-– which were the first large-caliber British gun to use a Welin breech mechanism that considerably shortened the loading time. Rather than the 6-inch secondary battery of the Duncans, the KEVIIs carried another four 9.2″/47 (23.4 cm) Mark Xs in single gun beam turrets and 10 6-inch casemates as a tertiary battery.
Forecastle of HMS Britannia ca. October 1914. Note the forward twin 12-inch/40 mount
Added to this were nearly 30 12- and 3-pounder counter-boat guns and a quartet of 18-inch torpedo tubes.
Jane’s 1914 on the King Edward VII class
Had it not been for the fact that Dreadnought came along in 1906, the KEVIIs would have been top-of-the-line but instead were obsolete almost as soon as they were finished. In fact, other than the two Lord Nelson-class battleships (which were just improved KEVIIs) the King Edward VII class was the last pre-Dreadnoughts ordered by the Admiralty.
Meet Britannia
Our subject is the sixth RN warship– going back to a 100-gun first-rate ship of the line launched in 1682– to carry the name of Britannia, the goddess and personification of Great Britain.
National Service Britannia poster by Septimus E. Scott Great Wr
One of the most majestic and hard-serving of the five prior ships (all sail-powered) was the 120-gun first-rate launched in 1820 and remained in the line through 1859 then endured as a training hulk for some years after.
HMS Britannia entering Devonport Harbor, 1820. Hand-colored lithograph print, from a painting by Thomas Lyle Hornbrook, (L) and HMS Britannia, a 120-gun first-rate ship of the line, lithograph by John Ward (R).
Laid down on 4 February 1904 at the Portsmouth Dockyard, our Britannia was launched that December and entered service in September 1906, just three months before Dreadnought— a short run on top!
Battleship HMS Britannia 1906 Symonds & Co Collection IWM Q 21042
Battleship HMS Britannia Photo by E Hopkins IWM Q 75235
Still, the new class of KEVIIs were majestic for a time and served as a unit with first the Channel Fleet and then the Home Fleet, with the class leader as the flag of each in turn.
Note maritime artist William Lionel Wyllie sailed with the squadron and captured them in his eye.
Battleships steaming in two columns towards the artist’s viewpoint, led by the ‘King Edward VII’class ‘Britannia’ of 1904 on the right by William Lionel Wyllie. The ships are all of the type colloquially known as pre-dreadnoughts and the date is 1906-07, since ‘Britannia’ was the only one to carry a white funnel band mid-way on each funnel and she only wore these bands in those years. Wyllie has apparently used a very large number of pins to hold the paper down, suggesting the sketch may have been made at sea. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London RMG PU9918
“No.2 / Reduce speed to 30 Revolutions’ [‘King Edward VII’, ‘New Zealand’, ‘Hibernia’, ‘Britannia’, ‘Hindustan’, ‘Africa’] by William Lionel Wyllie. Numbered and inscribed by the artist, as title, and with the ship names identifying those shown. It is one of a group of four (PAE1035-PAE1038) showing battleships of the ‘King Edward VII’ class during squadron evolutions in the period 1907-09 while serving in the Channel Fleet. The set, each within a ruled frame, was probably made for illustration use. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London RMG PV1036
A general view of Line B with the battleships at anchor during the Naval Review or Kings Review of the Fleet at Spithead. HMS King Edward VII in front, with Britannia, Hindostan, and Dominion behind. The ship on the column on the left side of the photo is the Queen. The ships were in Spithead for a naval review witnessed by King Edward VII, in July 1909. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London RMG 4793355124
King Edward VII-class battleships on maneuvers ca. 1909
By 1912, with the number of modern fast battleships filling the ranks of the Royal Navy, the eight still young but out-gunned KEVIIs made up the newly-formed 3rd Battle Squadron, where they were nicknamed “the wobbly eight” due to their slight tendency to roll in heavy seas and have issues holding formation due to their hull form.
HMS Hindustan seen astern of HMS Britannia ca. October 1914. While they had long legs, the KEVIII’s were not great sea boats
And, of course, running these coal-eating and steel-spitting leviathans required a lot of hard work.
Picture of King Edward VII battleship ammunitioning peacetime
Royal Naval Coaling Crew, HMS Britannia 12.9.09
Soon after they were ordered to the Mediterranean to stand by during the Balkan Wars but were back in home waters by 1913.
Royal Navy’s Third Battleship Squadron at Valetta’s Grand Harbour, Malta – 1st December 1912. Working from left to right HMS Hindustan (bow only), Africa, Hibernia, and King Edward VII.
War!
The 3rd Battle Squadron, under VADM Edward Bradford, spent the tail end of 1914 and most of 1915 racing around in support of the cruisers on the Northern Patrol but managed to not bump into the Germans.
Battleship HMS Britannia 1914 Symonds & Co Collection IWM Q 21043A
It was during this period that Britannia ran aground on Inchkeith in January 1915 and suffered severe damage that took her offline for repairs at Devonport. Further, Hibernia and Zealandia were detached for Gallipoli.
The squadron was permanently reduced in early 1916 when class leader King Edward VII struck a mine laid by the German auxiliary cruiser SMS Mowe off Cape Wrath and took 10 hours to sink. The remaining seven members, with Hibernia and Zealandia, returned and Britannia back from repair, screened by the 3rd Cruiser Squadron (HMS Antrim, Devonshire, and Roxburgh) and the destroyers Beaver, Druid, Ferret, Hind, Hornet, Mastiff, Matchless, and Sandfly, was left behind when the Grand Fleet went to scrap with Scheer at Jutland in May.
Post-Jutland and with the Allied effort to force the Dardanelles abandoned, there was little for Britannia and the rest of the 3rd BS to do in Northern Europe, and she and sister Africa were sent to rove in warmer waters.
Britannia left Portsmouth on 18 October 1916 for Taranto via Gibraltar and Malta, arriving in the Italian port on 20 November. She would remain there through Christmas and New Years, conducting training and sending parties ashore before shoving off on 16 February 1917 for the South Atlantic, turning left at Gibraltar and heading to Freetown, Sierra Leone then setting out to escort a six-ship convoy from West Africa to Bermuda in late March.
Returning to Sierra Leone in May, Britannia would sortie 3,700 miles down the continent to Simonstown, South Africa, beginning on 7 June 1917 in convoy with two merchantmen, passing the French cruiser Dupleix and Japanese cruiser Tsushima with their own Northbound convoys on the way. Britannia would arrive in South Africa then promptly turn back around on the 26th with another Freetown-bound eight-ship convoy, arriving there on 11 July when she hoisted the flag of RADM T.D.L. Sheppard, commanding the 9th Cruiser Squadron.
After a quick run to Ascension, Britannia would return to Freetown to pick up a 10-ship convoy to Simonstown on 8 August and remain in South African waters for a spell, shifting to Cape Town, before heading back to Sierra Leone at the end of September– with the battleship herself carrying a load of bullion north in addition to her escort role.
“Nearing Cape Town.” Portrait of a ship and the Table mountain range behind taken from the SS Durham Castle which was being escorted by HMS Britannia from Sierra Leone to Cape Town. The image is from an album chronicling the wartime experiences of Archibald Clive Irvine (1893-1974) in East Africa. During this time he would meet Dr John W Arthur which in turn would lead to his missionary work at Chogoria in Kenya.
This 8,000-mile roundtrip convoy-and-gold run would repeat another five times (November 1917, January 1918, March 1918, May 1918, and July 1918), shelping gold from South African mines to Freetown for further shipment to England from there, then returning to Simonstown with ammunition and stores that had been sent down from Europe.
In general, she would accomplish the trip in 15 days from port to port, making the 3,700-mile trip at about 10 knots the whole way. While the idea of a sole battlewagon with no other escorts shepherding a slow convoy would seem ludicrous to most in WWII, in 1917-18 it wasn’t a bad idea when you keep in mind this was off Africa and the most likely German warship encountered would have been the occasional auxiliary cruiser commerce raider of the same sort as SMS Mowe (9,800t, 4×6″, 1x 4″, 2xtt, 13 knots) and SMS Wolf (11,000t, 8×6″, 4xtt, 11 knots). It was boring work, but Britannia found a useful niche that arguably needed a pre-dreadnought battleship to fill. Meanwhile, her six sisters left behind in Europe were at this time being relegated to ignoble use as depot, training, floating barracks, and support ships.
On 20 October 1918, she set off for Gibraltar on her final convoy run.
While our battleship did not (knowingly) come across a U-boat in all of these African cruises, between June 1917 and September 1918, her deck logs noted that she put her periscope target over the side for gunners and spotters to work with while underway on no less than 39 occasions while she “exercised submarine stations.” Besides, other than the rare case of the large cruiser submarine U-154 appearing off the coast of Liberia in April 1918, no German U-boat of the Great War made it into the South Atlantic.
In fact, Britannia almost made it to the Armistice without having a bad interaction with the Kaiser’s underwater sharks.
Almost.
The Tragic Final Act
The UB III type submarine SM UB 50 under Oblt. Heinrich Kukat was roving out from the Med in November 1918 from her home as part of the Pola, Croatia-based Mittelmeer II Flotilla. Notably, U-Flottille Pola had at the time been disbanded as Austro-Hungary was rapidly leaving the war (and dissolving as a country) with the eight remaining U-boats still there on 28 October (U-47, U-65, UB-48, UB-116, UC-25, UC-53, and UC-54) scuttled by their crews.
UB 50 had already been a terribly busy and successful boat during the war, credited with sinking 39 Allied ships and damaging another 7 in just 14 months.
With both UB 50 and Britannia heading home from their respective wars, they chanced upon each other in the Strait of Gibraltar on the morning of 9 November 1918. Kukat managed to get close enough to fire two torpedoes into the Englishman while she was steaming 11 miles NNW of Cape Spartel just to the West of Gibraltar. Stopping dead in the water, a cordite explosion in one of Britannia’s 9.2-inch magazines went up and she was doomed.
HMS Britannia sinking NARA 45511435
Still, under the cool leadership of her skipper, Capt. Francis Wade Caulfeild– formerly the commander of the battleship HMS Venerable and cruisers Fox, Juno, and Royal Arthur— most of her crew (712 of 762) made it off as she sank slowly for nearly three hours. It was just two days before the signing of the Armistice and, other than the Racecourse-class minesweeper HMS Ascot that was sent to the bottom by UB 67 on 11 November, she was the last Royal Navy ship lost to combat in WWI.
Britannia was the eighth largest allied ship sunk by German U-boats during the war, coming in just behind the French battleship Danton (18,300 tons) and the 18,000-ton liners President Lincoln and Laconia.
Epilogue
At least 23 of the men whose bodies were recovered are interred at the Garrison Cemetery in Gibraltar while the others have No Other Grave than the Sea.
HMS Britannia and her lost crewmembers have been memorialized in no less than 42 locations around the UK, led by the Plymouth Naval Memorial that commemorates more than 7,200 Royal Navy personnel and 75 sailors of the Royal Australian Navy who died during the Great War.
Plymouth Naval Memorial
With her remains on the bottom of the Atlantic, the only relics of her in circulation are period postcards.
Meanwhile, Combrig has a detailed scale model of her.
Britannia, Combrig
Her last skipper, Caufield, was given command of the Bellerophon class dreadnought HMS Temeraire on 13 February 1919 then shifted to the Retired List in 1920 with the rank of Rear Admiral, capping a 28-year career. It was while on the list that he was increased to Vice Admiral in 1925. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by order of King George V in the 1936 New Year Honours.
Vice-Admiral Francis Wade Caulfeild, C.B.E passed in 1947, at age 75.
As for UB 50, she made it home to a collapsing Germany and, on 16 January 1919, was surrendered to the Allies. Awarded to Britain as a trophy ship, she was broken up in Swansea in 1922.
UB 50’s final skipper, Oblt. Kukat, who held both the EK1 and EK2 and was a Komtur of the Königlicher Hausorden von Hohenzollern, threw in with the Freikorps crowd in the violent post-war era before the Weimar Republic and, as a company commander with Marine-Brigade von Loewenfeld, was killed in a clash in Bottrop during the Ruhr uprising in 1920, dead at 29. He was the only former U-boat captain killed in Freikorps service and those who served with him during the Great War including famed evangelist Martin Niemöller and some guy named Karl Dönitz spoke highly of him.
Oblt. Heinrich Kukat is listed on the memorial marker of the Loewenfeld Freikorps in Kirchhellen. Other members of the controversial interwar partisan unit included U-boat “ace of aces” Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière and future Abwehr boss, Wilhelm Canaris.
While the name Britannia did not grace another RN warship after 1918, the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth carried the name HMS Britannia as a Naval Shore Establishment after 1906, one that was retained until 1953 when the college simply became HMS Dartmouth and the name Britannia was issued to the newly launched royal yacht HMY Britannia, which in turn remained in service until 1997.
The Royal Yacht Britannia at the 1977 Spithead Fleet Review on the occasion of the Silver Jubilee of the reign of Queen Elisabeth II. In her 43-year career, she sailed over a million miles and visited 600 ports. She is preserved as part of The Royal Yacht Britannia Trust as a pier-side museum in Edinburgh.
Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.
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