The Wine-Dark Sea:
Britain’s Semi-Dreadnoughts
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
June 2021

Britain’s last pre-dreadnought battleships showed that naval architecture had reached the limitations of the type. Lord Nelson and Agamemnon, originally authorized as a class of five ships, would be overtaken by the new Dreadnought design before they had even been launched. Their origins were just as painfully extended.

The previous King Edward VII class, built under the 1902 Naval Estimates, had presented a major step forward in size and fighting power. The five ships authorized went from the 14,000 ton’s displacement of the Duncan class to 16,000 tons, and upgrading their secondary armament from a dozen 6-inch guns to ten 6-inch and four 9.2-inch guns. The 9.2-inch guns each had its own turret, while the 6-inch guns went into a central battery. Like Duncan, King Edward VII had a main armament of four 12-inch guns, in twin turrets fore and aft.

For the 1903 program, new Director of Naval Construction Philip Watts presented a much more powerful ship. Watts had claimed that he could have crammed all the fighting power of King Edward VII into the same displacement as Duncan, a boast that seems to have annoyed the Board of Admiralty that approved new warship designs.

Agamemnon, seen sometime in 1910 or 1911.

Watts offered that design to the Board, along with a number of others. The largest jumped to 19,000 tons with an armament of four 12-inch, twelve 9.2-inch and twelve 6-inch guns and a speed of 19 knots. The others varied in the number of 9.2-inch and 6-inch guns, though all retained the traditional heavy armament of four 12-inch guns. Watts also drafted the first all-big-gun battleship considered by the Admiralty, armed with a dozen 10-inch guns.

The Board expressed its skepticism at Watts’ claims of weight-saving. Watts had come to the Admiralty from Elswick, the private shipyard, where he had formed a friendship with the new First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher, who had wrangled the appointment. Watts argued that he had simply followed the usual practice of commercial yards when presenting designs to potential foreign customers: to maximize the armament of proposed ships while minimizing the “invisible” qualities.

What that meant in practice was the Watts had cut corners. His designs trimmed things like anchors, cables, food, water, fuel and ammunition. Gun turrets had smaller arcs of fire than previous designs; engines were expected to be run hot for extended periods. Ships’ boats were reduced in size, internal structural supports were reduced, and guns were listed at the weight declared by the manufacturer (before they had been mounted) rather than the shipyards.

In late July 1903 the Admiralty Board gave its chosen Watts design its formal seal of approval. Watts drafted a design on the same 16,000 tons as King Edward VII, that did away with all of the 6-inch guns, instead presenting a uniform secondary armament of a dozen 9.2-inch guns. Speed remained the same relatively slow 18.5 knots.

Almost immediately after approving the design, the Admiralty Board withdrew its seal. The Third Sea Lord, Rear Admiral May – charged with oversight of weaponry – ruled the ship too large. Without an approved design for the 1903 program, three slightly modified repeats of the King Edward VII design would be laid down instead of the three ships of the new design.

Lord Nelson.

Meanwhile, Watts spread bitter rumors about the Sea Lords not wishing to spark a naval arms race by building too powerful of a ship, while working on a new draft that would meet May’s objections. The original design had carried three twin turrets for 9.2-inch guns on either beam. The revised design replaced the middle twin turret with a single mount. That shaved enough weight to gain approval of the ship for the next building program.  Watts also presented several alternatives – one with sixteen 10-inch guns, another armed solely with 12-inch guns – that would become the basis for discussions about the new-model ship that became HMS Dreadnought. None of these were chosen.

Three ships were authorized to the Watts design, and three more for the following year. One of the initial three ships was cancelled and the money diverted to buy the Chilean ships that became the pre-dreadnoughts Triumph and Swiftsure, to keep them off the open market. The second set of three would be built to a radically different design.

Both ships were laid down at private yards in May 1905, Lord Nelson at Palmers in Jarrow and Agamemnon at Beardmore on the Clydeside. They were short ships, a result of keeping the armored citadel small to save weight by moving the main armament turrets as close to the superstructure as possible, even at the cost of a reduced field of fire. They were not very fast, and retained the old-fashioned triple-expansion engines that had powered the last generation of British battleships. But they did introduce a number of innovative features, including oil spray for their boilers to make their coal burn hotter. They had no watertight doors belowdecks; instead, crewmen had to take a lift up and out of the compartment, and then another lift down to their destination. That feature would not be repeated.

Watt’s corner-cutting meant that the ships were greatly overloaded once they took on full loads of coal, oil, feed water, food, ammunition and other supplies, as well as anchors and other gear. That pushed their armored belts below the waterline, and they would consequently have been very vulnerable in combat. They also had inadequate deck protection like all battleships of the time.

They took about six months to a year longer to complete than the King Edward VII class, as their main armament was diverted to speed completion of Dreadnought. By the time they entered service they were already obsolete, but selling them to a foreign power or scrapping them on the slipways and starting over was not possible in the political reality of the time. British battleships were the best in the world, and no admission could be made that this might not have always been true.

This Agamemnon gun crew shot down a zeppelin with their 12-pounder.

Agamemnon finally commissioned in June 1908, and Lord Nelson in December. Both went to the Home Fleet and remained there until the outbreak of war, when they were assigned to the Channel Fleet even as other pre-dreadnoughts (all eight of the King Edward VII class, and at times some Duncan-class ships) saw service with the Grand Fleet. In early 1915 they went to the Mediterranean with other surplus pre-dreadnoughts to bombard Turkish fortifications outside the Dardanelles strait, and they remained there for the remainder of the war. Both of them missed their lone opportunity for a surface action, the January 1918 sortie by the battle cruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau to attack the British monitors based at Imbros.

At no point in their service life were the ships considered worthy of modernization, and given the dense design produced by Watts they had no room to spare. Lord Nelson went to the breakers even before the Washington naval conference opened, while Agamemnon finally gave a few years’ useful service as a radio-controlled target ship before her own scrapping.

Even as workers laid the keels of the two semi-dreadnoughts May 1905, other workers at the Portsmouth Naval Dockyard began assembling steel for Dreadnought ahead of her formal keel-laying in October. The Admiralty probably would have been better off cancelling the two contracts and replacing them with the new design, but that might have revealed that a secret new battleship design was in the offing. The £3.2 million wasted on them would have paid 93 percent of the cost of two additional Dreadnought-class ships; it turned out to be an expensive secret.  It could have been worse; the Royal Navy could easily have ended up with nine of them instead of just two.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and award-winning journalist, he has published over 100 books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold. Leopold is a black 28-pound Lurcher with a ringneck, socks and white tip.

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