HMS Abercrombie: The Monitor Built From a Greek Battleship's Leftovers

Born From Someone Else's Cancelled Order

Few warships owe their existence to quite as odd a chain of events as HMS Abercrombie. On 3 November 1914 the American industrialist Charles M. Schwab of Bethlehem Steel found himself with four spare 14-inch gun turrets on his hands, originally built for the Greek battleship Salamis, which was itself building in Germany and could not be delivered to anybody because of the British naval blockade.

Selling them to Britain was, strictly speaking, a breach of American neutrality, and the State Department duly lodged a protest. It made no difference. The guns were already on their way, and the Admiralty had a use for them.

Rather than let good armament go to waste, Schwab offered the turrets to Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill, never a man to turn down free heavy artillery, immediately had the Royal Navy design an entirely new class of shallow-draft monitors to carry them, with design work starting within days, on 4 November 1914.

The naming went through a similar attack of nerves. She was launched as Admiral Farragut, one of four monitors given deliberately American names, until somebody in Whitehall worked out that naming British warships after American commanders was a rather blatant advertisement for the deal that had produced them. On 31 May 1915 the Admiralty ordered her renamed simply M 1. On 19 June King George V sanctioned a proper name, and she became General Abercrombie, after Major-General Ralph Abercromby, who had died of his wounds at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801. Two days later the General was dropped as well. Her sisters went through the same shuffle, losing the names General Grant, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson to become Havelock, Raglan and Roberts.

It is not every ship that changes its name three times before its first proper voyage.

A Floating Gun Platform, Built for Function Over Form

HMS Abercrombie was built by Harland & Wolff in Belfast, laid down on 12 December 1914 and launched a mere four months later, on 15 April 1915, a remarkably quick turnaround reflecting the urgency of the war. She commissioned on 12 May 1915 under Captain Henry Montagu Doughty and was formally completed on 29 May, barely five and a half months after her keel was laid.

At 6,150 long tons and 334 feet 6 inches in length, with a 90 foot beam, a draught of just over 10 feet and a crew of around 198, she shared her building berth with her sister ship General Grant, which was only possible because the class was so unusually broad relative to its length: their hulls were fitted with large anti-torpedo bulges that made them extremely wide for their size, but also short enough that two could be squeezed into a single berth at once.

That shared berth has a rather grander pedigree than the ships that used it. She was ordered on 21 November 1914 and laid down as hull number 472 at Harland & Wolff's Queen's Island yard, in berth number 2: the same slipway on which the White Star liners Olympic and Britannic had been built. Five months later a squat grey box with a battleship turret bolted to the front went down the ways the Olympic had gone down. She was also the first of forty monitors the Royal Navy would build over the following thirty years.

Her main armament was a single turret carrying two 14-inch guns, backed up by a pair of 12-pounder guns, a 3-pounder and a 2-pounder anti-aircraft gun, and four .303 inch Maxim machine guns, with armour running to a 4 inch belt, an 8 inch barbette and a 10 inch turret face. She was, by any reasonable definition, a gun with a hull wrapped around it.

Speed was never the point: the class was designed for a modest 10 knots, and in practice some of her sisters, Abercrombie included, struggled to manage much more than half that on trials.

HMS Raglan, for instance, could only reach six and a half knots despite over 2,300 horsepower on tap, an engineering achievement roughly equivalent to a family saloon car that tops out at running pace. None of this mattered much for a ship whose entire purpose was to sit offshore and lob enormous shells at fixed positions rather than chase anything down.

One detail rather spoils the image of the class as pure floating gun platforms: all four could operate aircraft. Abercrombie, Havelock and Roberts were fitted for seaplanes when built and Raglan followed by 1917, the types carried across the class including the Short 166, the Short 184 and the Sopwith Schneider. Abercrombie herself was carrying a Sopwith Schneider in September 1917. A ship that could not outrun a rowing boat was, for a while, also an aircraft carrier.

Off to the Dardanelles

There was a specific reason the monitors were wanted in a hurry. The super-dreadnought HMS Queen Elizabeth had been providing the heavy gunfire at the Dardanelles and was recalled home, taking her 15-inch guns with her. The Abercrombies were sent out to fill the hole. Swapping a 27,500-ton battleship for four 6,150-ton boxes that could barely make walking pace was not an even trade, but the boxes could sit in shallow water close inshore, which the battleship could not.

HMS Abercrombie sailed for the Dardanelles on 24 June 1915, arriving in time to take part in the Gallipoli campaign, where her job was exactly what she had been built for: standing off the coast and providing heavy fire support for Allied troops ashore, using her enormous guns against Ottoman positions that smaller warships simply could not reach or dent.

It was slow, grinding, unglamorous work, a world away from the fleet actions the Royal Navy's more famous ships were fighting elsewhere, but it was precisely the role the Abercrombie class had been rushed into existence to fill.

She reached Mudros in July 1915 under the command of Captain Henry Montagu Doughty, whose brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie, was awarded the Victoria Cross for his own actions at Gallipoli that same year, and she served as flagship for the supporting force of monitors off the peninsula.

Through August 1915 she shelled Turkish positions at Krithia and on the heights of Achi Baba in support of the Helles front, landing at least one hit on a redoubt forceful enough to be remembered in accounts of the campaign. She did not have it entirely her own way: on 8 September 1915 she was struck several times by Ottoman 75mm shore guns, though the damage was limited enough that she stayed on station.

In September 1915 the four ships were formed into the 1st Division of the Special Squadron. Their work at Gallipoli came down to three things: shelling Turkish guns on the Asiatic shore of the straits, supporting infantry attacks on the peninsula, and finally helping to cover the evacuation, which is the one part of the whole campaign the Allies got unambiguously right.

After Gallipoli, HMS Abercrombie did not rush home. She remained on station in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean for the rest of the war and beyond, still available for shore bombardment duties as the fighting shifted, right through until February 1919, months after the armistice had already been signed.

She had three captains and no more. Doughty handed over to Captain Alldin U. Moore on 23 November 1915, and Moore to Acting Captain Robert A. Rice on 16 May 1917, who kept her until 9 May 1919. In January 1918 her pendant number changed from M.01 to M.00, which is about as much excitement as the Admiralty's bookkeeping ever generated.

She also quietly shed the last of her American origins. In May 1918 she was refitted and her two Bethlehem-built 14-inch guns were taken out and replaced with weapons made at Woolwich. The ship that had been conceived entirely around a set of foreign spare parts finished the war firing British ones.

Her later war was spread thin rather than dramatic: intermittent bombardments of Turkish positions, and a spell in support of the Allied force at Salonika. Her sisters scattered. Havelock and Roberts went home to act as guard ships at Lowestoft and Yarmouth, and Roberts outlived them all, serving as a trials ship until she was sold in 1936.

Raglan did not come home at all. On the morning of 20 January 1918 she was lying at Kusu Bay off Imbros when the German-built battlecruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim, better known as the Goeben, and the cruiser Midilli, formerly the Breslau, came out of the Dardanelles and opened fire from about 12,000 yards. Raglan got off a few rounds from her 14-inch turret before her control gear was shot away, and at around eight o'clock an 11-inch shell reached her magazine. She sank with the loss of 127 men, and the small monitor M 28 went down with her. There was a rough sort of justice in what followed: withdrawing, the two raiders ran into a minefield, the Breslau sank and the Goeben was badly damaged. It was the closest any of the Abercrombies came to fighting the kind of action the Royal Navy usually writes books about, and it lasted about twenty minutes.

Abercrombie stayed in the Aegean to the end, and got a quiet piece of history for it. When the war finished she was part of the fleet that steamed up through the Dardanelles after the armistice, passing without a shot fired through the straits that had cost the Allies a campaign, a beachhead and something like a quarter of a million casualties to fail to force in 1915.

A ship built for one specific campaign ended up quietly outlasting it by the best part of four years.

A Quiet Retirement

With the war over and no obvious further use for a slow, single-purpose bombardment platform, HMS Abercrombie was decommissioned in May 1919 and formally disarmed the following year, in June 1920, her prized 14-inch guns removed for use elsewhere.

She was first sold for breaking up in May 1921, but was retained in reserve rather than scrapped straight away, and it was not until she was resold on 25 June 1927 that she finally went to the shipbreakers Thos. W. Ward at Inverkeithing, the same firm that dismantled a great many redundant warships of her generation.

It was a modest end for a ship with such an unusual beginning: built from someone else's cancelled battleship order, renamed three times before she ever fired a shot in anger, regunned halfway through her war to remove the last trace of where she came from, and finally reduced to scrap metal on the Firth of Forth. But for the months that mattered in 1915, and for three long years afterwards, HMS Abercrombie did precisely what an oddly shaped ship built around a spare gun turret was meant to do, and did it well.