HMS Terrible (1895)
|
|
|---|---|
 HMS Terrible |
|
| Overview | |
| Type | Protected cruiser |
| Shipyard |
J. & G. Thomson , Clydebank , Building No. 272 |
| Keel laying | 1894 |
| Launch | May 27, 1895 |
| delivery | March 24, 1898 |
| Whereabouts | Sale for demolition July 1932 |
| Technical specifications | |
| displacement |
14,200 tn.l. |
| length |
pp: 152.4 m (500 ft ) |
| width |
21.6 m (71 ft) |
| Draft |
8.2 m (27 ft) |
| crew |
894 men |
| drive |
|
| speed |
22 kn |
| Range |
7000 nm at 14 kn (3000 tons of coal) |
| Armament |
|
| Coal supply |
3000 tn.l. |
|
Armor deck |
|
| Gun shields / barbettes |
152 mm (6 in) |
| Sister ship | |
The seventh HMS Terrible Royal Navy was a protected cruiser of the two-ships Powerful class that came into service the 1,898th The very large cruisers were primarily intended to hunt down enemy trade disruptors. The Terrible was on the way to China Station to relieve her sister ship when the Second Boer War broke out. With her sister ship on the march back, she landed troops and artillery in South Africa, which excelled in securing British positions. Then the HMS Terrible moved to China, where the crew that landed again stood out in the fight against the Boxer rebellion.
The ship, which has only been used for a few long-distance journeys since 1904 for cost reasons, was already partially dismantled at the beginning of the First World War and intended as a troop transport, but was only used as a residential ship. The HMS Terrible , which had been a stationary training ship in Portsmouth since 1919 , was renamed Fisgard III in August 1920 until it was sold for demolition in July 1932.
Development history
The ships of the class were primarily intended to hunt down trade troublemakers and defeat the cruisers of other navies in one-on-one combat. Their opponents were seen in the French armored cruisers and the Russian armored cruiser Rurik and its modified replicas.
As a heavy armament, the cruisers received two newly developed 9.2 "single guns as bow and stern guns, since this weapon was expected to have an effect against ships of the line as well. In addition, there was a battery of twelve 6" quick-loading guns in four double casemates one above the other the end positions on each side and in between two deep-lying single casemats on each side. The lower eight casemate guns were relatively close to the waterline and could only be used effectively when the sea was calm. The lighter armament was mainly placed on the upper deck.
The two sister ships displaced 14,200 tn.l. , were 500 feet in the waterline and were the first British cruisers to have four funnels in a row. The drive was provided by two four-cylinder triple expansion machines with a total of 25,000 hp on two shafts, which were supplied with steam from 48 Belleville water tube boilers .
In its acceptance test, the Terrible achieved a top speed of 22.4 knots at 25,572 PSi drive power and a 30-hour performance of 20.96 knots at 18,493 PSi.
Mission history
The Terrible , built by J. & G. Thomson in Clydebank under hull number 272, was launched on May 27, 1895 as the first of the two ships ordered as the largest cruiser in the world and the longest ship in the Royal Navy. But it did not enter service until May 24, 1898.
To test it, she made an accelerated voyage from Portsmouth to Gibraltar and Malta in December 1898 , the first section being covered with an average of 18 knots and increasing this to 21.5 knots on the second stretch. The trip also served to replace the crew of the liner HMS Camperdown . Another trip to Malta to exchange the crew of the liner HMS Royal Oak was carried out from February 22 to March 15, 1899. On the return journey during a normal march, superheated steam escaped in the boiler room, seriously injuring several stokers and claiming a fatality.
Use in the Boer War
In 1899, the Terrible was equipped for a mission in China, where she was supposed to replace her sister ship Powerful , when tensions arose in South Africa, which ultimately led to the Boer War . The Powerful , already on the march home , was then ordered to Durban . The terrible , which set out on September 19, was ordered shortly beforehand to march through the Mediterranean via Las Palmas and St. Helena and Cape Town to China. With over 1,000 men, the Terrible had a considerably strengthened crew, primarily to replace ships at the China Station. The sister ships arrived in South Africa almost simultaneously in mid-October 1899. In Simonstown met the two large cruisers together with the cruiser Doris , the guard ship Monarch and the gunboat Thrush formed the Simonstown station of the Cape Squadron, which had further units in other ports (especially Durban and Delagoa Bay ). The large cruisers formed a landing corps (Naval Brigade) of 350 men from marines and parts of their crews. At the request of the army, an independent artillery detachment with makeshift guns set on wheels was formed, which was brought to Durban by the Powerful and in October 1899 four 12 pdr 76 mm rapid-fire and two 4.7 "-120 mm guns was able to bring more than 320 km of mountainous terrain into the embattled Ladysmith , two days before the Boers locked the city in. The substitute crews on the Terrible continued on transport ships to China.
In the course of the war, more land units of the Navy were formed, for which the Terrible gradually gave 36 officers and 488 men to different units. In addition to the troops used on land and the naval guns, which for a long time were the only significant artillery of the British troops, the commander of the cruiser Terrible , Percival Scott , distinguished himself through the construction and further development of the chassis of the naval guns. One 152-mm cannon, eight 120-mm cannons and 26 12-pdr-76-mm rapid-fire guns were made mobile usable as army artillery. There were also six 120 mm railway guns. The production took place in Durban on the ship and in the workshops there.
After the relief of the beleaguered Ladysmith, especially through the deployment of further Marines of the Terrible and further naval artillery, the crew members deployed on land returned to their ships. The crew members of the Terrible as well as the cruisers HMS Forte and HMS Philomel and the torpedo cruiser HMS Tartar returned to Durban . The replenished Terrible continued the march to China from March 27th.
Use in China
The Terrible moved from March 27th to May 8th as a replacement for the sister ship Powerful via Mauritius , Colombo , Singapore to Hong Kong . She was the most modern larger ship of the China Station under Sir Edward Hobart Seymour , whose flagship was the liner Centurion . In addition, were the also the Centurion class associated battleship Barfleur , the older armored cruiser Orlando , Aurora , Undauted , the great -protected cruiser first class Endymion , the cruiser 2nd class Hermione and Bonaventure , the little cruiser Alacrity and several sloops, gunboats and destroyers stationed there.
On June 16, the Terrible left Hong Kong with 400 men on board (including three companies of the Royal Welch Fusiliers ) for northern China, where the Commander-in-Chief had started his march to Beijing on the 10th to relieve the embassies enclosed in Beijing . On the 17th the situation came to a head when the intervention troops stormed the Taku forts . On the 21st, the Terrible arrived in front of Taku, gave the transported troops, supplies and artillery as well as a landing force ashore and then relocated back across the Yellow Sea to Chefoo and later Weihaiwei . She served as the flagship of the commander of the two British bases and manufactured the necessary equipment for other naval guns on land. The Admiralty in the House of Commons contradicted the rumor that it was not operational. At the end of November the Terrible visited Yokohama , and a second visit to Japan took place in Kobe in 1901 . On December 27, 1901, the Terrible handed over the station duties in northern China to the newly arrived cruiser Argonaut .
On 29th 1902 the Terrible began the return journey to Europe via Singapore, Colombo, Aden , Suez , Port Said and Malta - where it met the British maneuvering fleet of 17 liners and cruisers - Gibraltar and Plymouth to Portsmouth, where on 18 September 1902 arrived. The Terrible decommissioned on October 24, 1902 . She was overhauled and, like her sister ship, received four additional 152 mm cannons, all of which were now stacked in double casemates.
Further missions
The cruiser was next used in the autumn of 1905. From October 8, the Terrible accompanied the 2nd class ship of the line Renown , which was converted into a yacht, on a journey of the British heir to the throne Georg with his wife Mary from Genoa to India. On May 7, 1906, the two ships returned to Portsmouth with the heir apparent.
On July 22, 1907, the Terrible ran for a trip with replacement crews via St. Vincent ( São Vicente (Cape Verde) ), Freetown ( Sierra Leone ), Ascension Island , St. Helena , Simonstown and Mauritius to China. She had more than 1000 men on board on this voyage (including a full replacement crew for the HMS Astraea ). The return journey from Hong Kong from September 13th went via Singapore, Colombo, Aden, the Suez Canal and Malta. On September 28, a propeller shaft broke; makeshift repaired, she reached Portsmouth on October 25th. She remained in service with a hull crew and was repaired, which led to critical questions in the House of Commons.
On July 31, 1909, the Terrible ran out again with 1,100 men to bring crew replacement to Colombo. She partially swapped the crews of the cruisers Psyche , Pioneer and Pyramus , who gave up sailors whose service life at Australia Station had expired. On September 7th, the crews of the Astraea cruisers Cambrian from Australia Station and Flora from China Station were exchanged, which together from Honolulu traveled the American Pacific coast from Mexico to Chile and back across the Pacific and through the Torres Strait to Colombo and returned to their wards after the exchange. This voyage of the Terrible was soon followed by another voyage with replacement for active fleet units to Colombo at the beginning of 1910 in order to also replace the crew of her sister ship Powerful , the flagship of Australia Station. In the autumn of 1911, a third trip followed with a replacement for the Australia Station to Colombo, where the Cambrian took over the replacement and largely swapped the staff itself. On this voyage, the Terrible also carried out radio tests and was able to send a radio message to the flagship of the East Indies Station, the Hyacinth , over 1,135 miles, which could not answer it.
When the war broke out, the two old cruisers of the Powerful class were only intended to be used as troop transports, but this was not carried out. In 1915 the Terrible was disarmed and housed a ship.
Final fate of the terrible
Since 1919 served Terrible in Portsmouth as living ship training facility Fisgard for craftsmen training (living) ships still on the large cruiser Spartiate as Fisgard and the old ironclads Hercules , Hindustan and Sultan as Fisgard II , Fisgard III and Fisgard IV decreed . In 1920 the Terrible replaced the Hindustan as Fisgard III . In 1930 the training facility moved ashore to Chatham .
In July 1932, the former Terrible was sold for demolition.
literature
- James J. Colledge, Ben Warlow: Ships of the Royal Navy: The Complete Record of all Fighting Ships of the Royal Navy , Chatham, London, Supplemented Edition 2006, ISBN 978-1-86176-281-8 .
- Jane's Fighting Ships of World War I. Studio Editions, 1990, ISBN 1-85170-378-0 .
- Antony Preston: The World's Worst Warships , Conway Maritime Press, London 2002, ISBN 0-85177-754-6 .
- John Roberts, HC Timewell, Roger Chesneau (Eds.), Eugene M. Kolesnik (Eds.): Warships of the World 1860 to 1905 - Volume 1: Great Britain / Germany. Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Koblenz 1983, ISBN 3-7637-5402-4 .
- George Crowe: The Commission of HMS Terrible 1898-1902 , G. Newnes, London
Web links
- HMS Terrible at battleships-cruisers (English)
- Powerful class at historyofwar (English)
- HMS Terrible at maritimequest
Footnotes
- ^ Anthony Preston: The world's worst warships , p. 45.
- ↑ Information on the 9.2 inch Mk.VIII gun
- ↑ Information on the early 6-inch rapid-fire guns
- ↑ Data on the launch
- ^ Testimony of the 1st Sea Lord in the House of Commons on February 19, 1900
- ↑ Ships of the China Station, May 1900
- ↑ HMS "Terrible" broke her propeller shaft
- ↑ CRUISE OF THE PACIFIC the return of Cambrian