HMS Achilles (1905): The Lucky One in a Cursed Class

One of the Best Cruisers Britain Ever Built

HMS Achilles belonged to a small, select class of ships that had a genuine claim to being the best of their kind. The naval historian Oscar Parkes rated the four Warrior-class armoured cruisers, Warrior, Achilles, Cochrane and Natal, as the best cruisers the Royal Navy ever built, an evolution of the earlier Duke of Edinburgh design with better armament layout and improved stability.

Achilles herself backed up the reputation in style, winning the Royal Navy's gunnery competition in 1907, the sort of accolade that suggested a ship, and her crew, thoroughly knew what they were doing.

She was built by Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick, laid down on 22 February 1904, launched on 17 June 1905, and finally completed on 22 April 1907 at a cost of a little over £1.19 million, a substantial sum for the time.

Even her handover had a certain Edwardian formality about it. On 19 March 1907 a navigating party of 333 officers and men, drawn from the nucleus crew of HMS Andromeda and the barracks at Sheerness and Chatham, went up to Newcastle to take her over for machinery trials, and she was commissioned at Chatham on 22 April. She recommissioned twice more before the war, at Portsmouth in June 1911 and again in June 1913.

On paper she was formidable: 13,550 tons normal displacement, rising to about 14,500 tons fully loaded, 505 feet long with a 73 foot 6 inch beam and a draught of 27 feet 6 inches, capable of 23 knots on 23,650 indicated horsepower from her triple-expansion engines and mixed Yarrow and cylindrical boilers, with a range of nearly 8,000 nautical miles at a cruising 10 knots and a complement of around 712 officers and men.

Her armament ran to six 9.2-inch guns and four 7.5-inch guns, backed by 26 smaller 3-pounder quick-firers and three submerged 18-inch torpedo tubes, with a single 6-pounder anti-aircraft gun added in 1915 as the aerial threat grew.

A Quiet, Respectable Pre-War Career

Achilles spent her early service doing exactly what a well-regarded cruiser was meant to do: showing the flag and holding her place in the fleet. She joined the 5th Cruiser Squadron in 1907, moved to the 2nd Cruiser Squadron in 1909, and paid a visit to Russia in 1908, the sort of dignified, unhurried peacetime routine that would look almost quaint from the vantage point of 1916.

The list of officers who commanded her is a rather better guide to her significance than anything she actually did. Her first captain, from February 1907, was Henry Oliver, who spent most of the coming war as Chief of the Admiralty War Staff and finished it an Admiral of the Fleet. Charles Carpendale, who had her from June 1917, retired from the Navy in 1923, was promptly hired by John Reith as his deputy, and spent the next fifteen years as Controller of the BBC, which is not the usual second act for an armoured cruiser captain.

And then there is Arthur Lindesay Cay, who commanded Achilles from April 1913 until 19 February 1915. He left her for the battlecruiser HMS Invincible. At about half past six on the evening of 31 May 1916, in the middle of the action Achilles was too busy refitting to attend, Invincible was hit, blew up and broke in two. Of the 1,031 men aboard, six survived. Cay was not among them. The luck that kept Achilles out of Jutland did not extend to the men who had once served in her.

When war broke out in August 1914, she was sent north to help reinforce the Shetland Islands, a suitably understated posting for a ship about to have a rather charmed run through the war that followed.

The small print of her war is oddly domestic. In October 1914 the Admiralty issued an order for eleven electric radiators to be fitted aboard, to heat cabins whose coal stoves could not safely be used. Rather more consequentially, a director firing system, the fire control arrangement that let a ship's guns be laid and fired together from aloft rather than turret by turret, was ordered in design for her in February 1915 and ordered in manufacture in August 1916. Competing priorities meant it was not actually installed until October 1918. She fought her entire war with the gunnery arrangements of 1907, and got the modern ones a month before the shooting stopped.

The Ship That Kept Missing Disaster

This is where Achilles' story becomes remarkably interesting, not for what she did, but for what she managed to avoid.

Her sister ships suffered three of the more painful losses of the Warrior class's war. HMS Warrior was hammered by more than fifteen heavy German shells at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 and capsized while under tow back to port. HMS Natal never even got the chance to fight: she was destroyed in December 1915 by an internal explosion, almost certainly caused by unstable ammunition, killing somewhere between 390 and 421 people while at anchor in home waters, a peacetime-style tragedy dressed in wartime colours.

HMS Cochrane, the fourth sister, survived the fighting only to come to grief in peacetime: on 14 November 1918, days after the armistice, she ran aground and broke in two while under a pilot's control in the River Mersey, and was written off as a total loss, her wreck broken up where she lay by June 1919.

Achilles missed all three of these catastrophes entirely. At Jutland, arguably the single defining fleet action of the entire war, she was simply not there, having the singular good fortune to be in refit at the exact moment her sister was being torn apart by the German High Seas Fleet.

It is hard to overstate how significant that piece of timing was: had her refit schedule fallen only slightly differently, Achilles might easily have shared Warrior's fate rather than reading about it afterwards.

Her Own Small Piece of Action

None of this is to say Achilles spent the war doing nothing. She took part in Grand Fleet sorties in August and October 1916, the sort of tense, inconclusive fleet movements that filled much of the war's middle years without producing another Jutland.

Her one genuine moment of glory came on 16 March 1917, when, alongside the armed boarding steamer Dundee, she caught and sank the German auxiliary cruiser Leopard north of the Shetland Islands, a converted merchant raider that had begun life as the captured British steamer Yarrowdale before Germany turned her into a commerce raider.

The story is better than the summary. Achilles was patrolling north of the Shetlands under Rear-Admiral Sydney Fremantle with the armed boarding steamer Dundee when, at a quarter to twelve on the morning of 16 March 1917, a steamer was sighted about nine miles off in a force four to five south-easterly with snow and rain squalls. She claimed to be the Norwegian ship Rena. She was in fact the German auxiliary cruiser Leopard, 4,652 tons, carrying five 5.9-inch guns, four smaller guns and two torpedo tubes, and until three months earlier she had been the British steamer Yarrowdale, captured in December 1916 by the raider Möwe and fitted out in Germany to prey on the trade she had once carried.

Achilles chased her down over two hours, working up to 18 knots and deliberately sheering off her wake rather than sitting directly astern, and had her stopped by two in the afternoon. At 2.35 the raider was stopped again so that Dundee could examine her, with Achilles standing off two and a half to three miles. Lieutenant Frederick Lawson of the Royal Naval Reserve went across with a boat's crew of five volunteers. They were detained. At a quarter to four the raider and Dundee opened fire on each other simultaneously, and Achilles joined in at 5,300 yards. Commander Selwyn Day handled Dundee so well that he was able to pour fire into Leopard from a thousand yards for five or six minutes before she could bring a gun to bear. Leopard went down with every one of her 319 men, and with Lawson and his five volunteers still aboard her.

Beatty's covering despatch made two further points worth keeping. The first was that the raider had clearly hoped to torpedo both British ships during the business of stopping and boarding, and had been thwarted only by careful handling. The second was quietly deflating: the object Achilles reported as a mine and Dundee reported as a submarine was, on the evidence, probably a cask, possibly of oil. The whole account stayed secret for two years. It was not published in the London Gazette until 18 April 1919, by which point the ship that fought the action was three weeks from paying off.

The action had a strategic consequence out of all proportion to its size. It was enough to persuade Germany not to risk sending another surface raider out into the Atlantic for the rest of the war.

In August 1917 she was sent across the Atlantic to the North America and West Indies Station, swapping the cold, tense waters of the North Sea for convoy escort duty, before returning for a lengthy refit that ran from February to December 1918, seeing her through to the war's very end without ever having to test her luck again.

A Gentle Retirement

With the war over and a fleet full of increasingly obsolete armoured cruisers, Achilles was quietly repurposed as a stoker training ship at Chatham, teaching a new generation of engine room crews rather than facing another German battle line.

She paid off at Portsmouth on 31 March 1919. Her pendant number had changed twice in her last year, from 24 to 00 in January 1918 and then to N.03 that April, which is roughly the level of drama the Admiralty had left for her by then.

She was finally sold on 9 May 1921, to Thos W. Ward for breaking up at Briton Ferry in South Wales, closing out a career that, for a ship built to the very highest standard the Edwardian Royal Navy could manage, was defined less by combat than by extraordinarily good timing.

Her sisters paid, in blood, for the risks that came with being one of the best cruisers in the fleet. Achilles, through nothing more than the accident of a refit schedule, simply did not.