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. In 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 could not be delivered because of the British naval blockade. 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.

The result was the Abercrombie class, four ungainly, slab-sided ships built specifically around someone else's spare parts. Abercrombie herself went through something of an identity crisis before she even got her final name, laid down under the working name Admiral Farragut, briefly designated simply M1, then renamed General Abercrombie, before settling on the plainer HMS Abercrombie by 21 June 1915. 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 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.

Her main armament was a single turret carrying two 14-inch guns, backed up by a pair of 12-pounder guns and light anti-aircraft weapons. 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 struggled to manage much more than half that. 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.

Off to the Dardanelles

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.

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. 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 lingered on the Navy's books for a few more years before finally being sold for scrap on 25 June 1927, to the shipbreakers Thos. W. Ward at Inverkeithing, the same firm that broke up 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, and finally reduced to scrap metal on the Firth of Forth. But for four crucial months in 1915, HMS Abercrombie did precisely what an oddly shaped ship built around a spare gun turret was meant to do, and did it well