HMS Agincourt (1913): The Battleship With a Turret for Every Day of the Week

Built for Brazil

Few battleships changed hands as many times, or as dramatically, as HMS Agincourt before she ever fired a shot for the navy whose name she eventually carried. She began life as a Brazilian project, part of a naval expansion programme launched in 1904 to establish Brazil as a genuine international naval power, and was laid down by Armstrong Whitworth in March 1910 as Rio de Janeiro. A political tug of war within the Brazilian navy over what sort of guns she should carry ended in a genuinely extraordinary compromise: fourteen 12-inch guns spread across seven twin turrets, more heavy guns and more gun turrets than any other dreadnought battleship built before or since. It was less a battleship than a floating argument that both sides had won simultaneously.

By the time she was launched, on 22 January 1913, Brazil's economy had collapsed along with the rubber boom that had funded her ambitions in the first place, and relations with neighbouring Argentina, the original rival driving the naval buildup, had eased considerably. An enormously expensive, enormously over-armed battleship was suddenly a luxury Brazil could not justify.

Sold to the Ottomans, Seized by Britain

Brazil sold the unfinished ship to the Ottoman Empire on 28 December 1913 for £2,750,000, and she was renamed Sultân Osmân-ı Evvel. Remarkably, much of her cost had been raised through Ottoman public subscription, with donations collected from taverns, cafés, schools and markets across the empire, and generous donors rewarded with a specially struck Navy Donation Medal. By the summer of 1914, she was very nearly complete, with a Turkish crew of some 500 sailors already waiting aboard a transport on the River Tyne to take delivery.

Then the First World War intervened. With war against Germany, and likely against the Ottoman Empire, looming, the British government seized both this ship and a sister Ottoman battleship, Reşadiye, while they still sat in British yards. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, authorised resistance by armed force if necessary to stop the Turkish flag ever being raised over her. The move caused deep and lasting Ottoman resentment, not least because so much of the ship had literally been paid for by ordinary Ottoman citizens, and is often cited as one of the contributing grievances that helped push the Ottoman Empire toward the Central Powers later that year.

An Awkward Fit for the Royal Navy

Renamed HMS Agincourt, the ship needed a certain amount of tidying up before she could join the fleet: her flying boat deck was removed, Ottoman-style lavatories were replaced, and for some time her instruction plates remained in Portuguese, a legacy of her Brazilian origins that meant British sailors needed a working knowledge of the language just to operate certain fittings correctly. Her first crew was a similarly improvised mix, with her captain and executive officer transferring in from the royal yacht HMY Victoria and Albert, alongside sailors drawn, among other places, from naval detention camps.

She joined the 4th Battle Squadron on 7 September 1914, an enormous, unusually gunned battleship that had, within the space of about a year, belonged to three different navies without a single one of them having intended the arrangement.

Seven Turrets Named for the Week

Agincourt's seven main gun turrets became something of a minor legend in their own right, informally nicknamed by her crew after the days of the week, running from the forward Monday turret back to Sunday aft, a wry bit of naval humour applied to what was, on paper, the most heavily gunned battleship in the world. All that firepower came at a real cost elsewhere: her armour was noticeably thinner than other British dreadnoughts, with a waterline belt of only 9 inches against 12 or more on comparable ships, since there was simply not enough displacement left over, after fitting fourteen enormous guns, to protect the ship properly as well.

Jutland, and an Underwhelming War

Agincourt's one great test came at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, serving with the Sixth Division of the 1st Battle Squadron. She opened fire at 18:24, engaging a German Kaiser-class battleship and successfully dodging two torpedoes in the confusion of the battle, before her division became separated in poor visibility. Over the course of the action she fired 144 twelve-inch shells and 111 six-inch shells, an impressive volume of fire from a ship built around exactly that kind of output, though she is not known to have actually hit anything with any of it. It was, in that sense, a rather fitting summary of her whole career: enormous potential, remarkably little to show for it in practice.

The rest of her war was quiet, largely confined to occasional North Sea sweeps and convoy cover, including an April 1918 operation alongside HMS Hercules that ultimately saw no action at all. She did, however, witness history at its close, present at the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet on 21 November 1918, a fittingly grand occasion for a ship whose entire existence had been shaped by the shifting politics of naval power.

An Undignified but Fascinating End

Placed in reserve at Rosyth from March 1919, Agincourt drifted through a series of unrealised futures. The Navy tried and failed to sell her back to Brazil, briefly considered turning her into a mobile naval base by stripping away five of her seven turrets, and then had that plan cancelled outright by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, which imposed strict new limits on battleship tonnage across the world's major navies. Paid off in April 1922, she was sold for scrap the following January for £25,000, with a contractual deadline requiring her demolition within eighteen months of the treaty's ratification.

Even her scrapping had a flourish of drama to it. As the January 1925 deadline closed in, bad weather during spring tides scuppered the shipbreakers' attempt to move her through the dockyard locks in one piece, so the Admiralty authorised cutting the hull in two instead. Within two days, the ship that had once carried more heavy guns than any battleship in history was split apart and beached in two halves for final demolition, a suitably unusual ending for a ship whose entire life had refused to follow anybody's original plan.