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Majestic to Agamemnon:
Royal Navy pre-dreadnoughts in Great
War at Sea: Part 1
By David Hughes
August 2015
This Daily Content
series hopefully will help readers and players appreciate
the magnificent vessels that, all too often, are regarded
as mere feeble substitutes for real battleships. This is not
intended to be a technical study - there are plenty
of those - but an accessible summary of the main features of
each class, together with the reason why any ships in the
class were lost. I have started with the Royal Navy as it
established, some 10 years before the first Great War
at Sea scenario, the standard all pre-dreadnoughts were
measured against. The basic concept was first developed in
1884 when the first battleships of the “Admiral”
class were completed. They had a two-gun main turret at each
end of the superstructure, backed up by medium-calibre guns
sufficient to hurt enemy protected cruisers. The armour was
concentrated around the turrets and magazines, while the speed
was about 17 knots. A few exceptions followed, notably the
unfortunate Victoria class with a single forward
turret, until the definitive design emerged in the Royal
Sovereign class, laid down in 1889.
None of these appear in the series as all were broken up before
1914, except for Revenge which was used as a make-shift monitor
in the first year of the war. The Majestic class of
1894 are the earliest to appear in a scenario. They were the
first to have much improved, wire-wound guns and Harvey armour,
this being nine inches thick on the belt and as much as four
inches on part of the deck. Like virtually all British pre-dreadnoughts
they had four 12-inch guns in two turrets and twelve six-inch
guns in single mountings behind the armour along the superstructure.
They were considered to be handsome ships, with their two funnels
placed side by side. Due to this they appear, when photographed
from the broadside, to be single funnel warships. All nine ships
in the class appear in either Jutland or Mediterranean. Majestic was sunk by a U-boat at Gallipoli, a victim
of her very limited underwater protection.
The six virtually identical ships of the Canopus class (the name ship was supposed to help fight Admiral von
Spee in the Coronel scenario in Cruiser
Warfare) followed in 1897. Although their main belt
was only six inches thick it was made of much tougher Krupp
armour. As an aside, comparing armour values at this period
is tricky - you have to know the type as well as the thickness
and extent. Ocean and Goliath were both
sunk at the Dardanelles, Goliath by a Turkish torpedo-boat.
Never underestimate the capabilities of a minor navy! Next
came the three Formidable class ships, slightly faster
and now with their two funnels fore and aft, creating the
classic British battleship appearance. The armour belt was
now nine inches. They were an unlucky group, Irresistible was lost to a mine at the Dardanelles, by which time Formidable herself had already been sunk by a U-boat in the Channel.
Three identical London class battleships were laid
down in 1898, one of which, Bulwark, blew up in a
spectacular manner when moored at Sheerness in 1914. It appears
that a local fire became a disaster when it contacted loose
cordite containers left outside the magazines to increase
the rate of fire. Experts now believe that this habit was
the primary reason for the massive scale of the explosions
that destroyed three battle-cruisers at Jutland.
Usually the Admiralty did not allow foreign designs to influence
that of its own ships, but the six vessels of the Duncan class of 1899 were an exception. There was a rumour that the
new Russian battleships of the Peresviet class were
unusually fast, so the new class was given more speed (19
knots) at the cost of less protection and with the lower level
6-inch gun mountings closer to the sea and therefore prone
to flooding in bad weather (the standard arrangement was in
two levels each with three guns a side). In the game they
are shown with a speed of 1 rather than 1 slow, but with one
fewer armour factor. They were unpopular when built and proved
to be the unluckiest of any pre-dreadnought class. Montague ran aground in 1906, doomed never to be given a Great
War at Sea counter, Cornwallis was torpedoed
in 1917, and Russell sank after hitting two mines
in 1918, both of them near Malta. A major weakness of early
British pre-dreadnoughts was their longitudinal bulkheads,
installed without also providing the ability to counter-flood
when one side was mined or torpedoed, which explains why so
many capsized in a short time.
The two ships laid down in 1901, Queen and Prince
of Wales, were similar to the six members of the Formidable class. Design had by now stagnated, and there was very little
difference between the Queen and the Canopus built four years earlier, creating a group of fifteen virtually
identical battleships, backed up by the nine obsolescent Majestics and the six slightly different Duncans, all thirty
of them with a broadside of four 12-inch and six 6-inch guns.
This effective but conservative design system ended with the
arrival of the more powerful King Edward VII.
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