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 Newcastle upon Tyne on 14 September 1911 as Rio de Janeiro.

A political tug of war within the Brazilian navy over what sort of guns she should carry ended in a properly 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.

The compromise came only after a public outcry in Brazil over an even larger initial design, first announced in August 1910 at around 32,000 tons, which was scaled back to a more modest 27,500 tons before construction proper began. Even so, 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.

Churchill did not wait for the war to start. On 31 July 1914 he wrote to the King: I have taken the responsibility of forbidding the departure of the Turkish battleship Osman, late Rio, with the Prime Minister's approval. If war comes she will be called, and should Your Majesty approve, the Agincourt. Britain was still four days from declaring war, and the First Lord had already stopped the ship, chosen her new name and asked the King to sign it off.

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

Whatever flag she flew, she remained an imposing ship on paper. Fully loaded she displaced over 31,000 tons on a hull 671 feet 6 inches long with an 89 foot beam, protected by a 9 inch armour belt and turret faces up to a foot thick.

Four Parsons turbines fed by twenty-two Babcock and Wilcox boilers, burning a mix of coal and fuel oil, drove her at up to 22 knots, and beyond her fourteen 12-inch guns she carried twenty 6-inch guns, ten 3-inch guns and three torpedo tubes, with a crew of around 1,270 needed to fight and run her.

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.

Manning her was a scramble. On 3 August the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, told the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth to find her a crew from the Royal Yachts and from the active ships' companies of Majestic and Jupiter, then from spare ratings at Portsmouth, Plymouth and Chatham, and if that still was not enough, from the crews of Irresistible and Vengeance. On the 17th she was ordered out of Newcastle for Loch Ewe to find out whether her guns worked. That is the entire work-up of the most heavily gunned battleship in the world: assemble a crew from whoever is standing about, and go and fire something.

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.

Not everyone was impressed. In November 1914, with his battlecruisers thinned out by the hunt for the German East Asia Squadron, Beatty asked for Agincourt. Jellicoe refused, and his reasoning is worth quoting because it is so completely unsentimental: her comparatively low speed and rather poor radius of action made her unsuitable, and her oil fuel installation was, he wrote, practically of very little use. She stayed with the battle line. She transferred from the 4th Battle Squadron to the 1st on 24 October 1915, swapping places with HMS Superb.

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.

Her crew had a nickname of their own for her too, the Gin Palace, an affectionate play on her name and on pink gin, the wardroom favourite, that captured something of her slightly indulgent, over-specified character.

A note of caution about that lovely story, because it is a little too good to leave unexamined. The days-of-the-week names are repeated in almost every account of the ship, but the Admiralty's own paperwork simply numbered her turrets one to seven, and the as-fitted plans of 1918 do the same. More tellingly, Lieutenant Angus Cunninghame Graham, who was a turret officer aboard her at Jutland and later became an admiral, wrote his account of the battle within weeks of it and referred to No. 4 turret, not to Thursday. The nicknames were almost certainly real lower-deck usage. They were just never what the ship called them herself, which is usually how the best naval stories work.

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.

None of that dented her crew's affection for her. At Scapa Flow she developed a friendly rivalry with fellow ex-foreign battleship HMS Erin, another former Ottoman order taken over by Britain, the two crews competing at sporting events even as Erin generally had the better of her at sea.

Agincourt's own men instead took pride in keeping her scrubbed to an almost obsessive shine, and by most accounts no ship in the Grand Fleet was more genuinely loved by the sailors who served aboard her.

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 under Captain Henry Montagu Doughty, who had commanded the monitor HMS Abercrombie during the Gallipoli landings the previous year before taking over Agincourt that January.

She opened fire at 18:24 on the light cruiser Wiesbaden, engaged the battleship Kaiser around 19:15 with hits observed on her upper deck, and later put a round into the battleship Markgraf that failed to penetrate her armour, all while 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.

Her own view of her performance was rather sunnier. Agincourt's battle report expressed confidence that she had both straddled and hit enemy ships, and she came through with no hits, no casualties and nothing worse than mild splinter damage. Whether or not any of her 144 heavy rounds found anything, she had at least demonstrated that a ship carrying seven turrets could fire them all without shaking herself apart, which had been a genuine worry.

Some in the fleet had quietly worried that a ship so heavily armed for her size might struggle under the strain of a full broadside; Jutland put those fears to rest, with the flash from one of her salvoes reportedly bright enough that an observer elsewhere in the fleet briefly mistook it for a battlecruiser exploding, while Agincourt herself came through the battle undamaged.

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.

She had five commanding officers in her short life: Douglas Nicholson from her commissioning, then Doughty, then Henry Mawbey through to February 1919, then Cecil Hamilton for four months, and finally a commander rather than a captain, Vincent Bowring, to take her into reserve. Her pendant number changed three times in eighteen months at the end of the war, from 53 to 04 and then to 09, which is the sort of administrative fidgeting that happens to a ship nobody quite knows what to do with.

The Navy tried and failed to sell her back to Brazil, which turned down a repurchase offer of around £1 million in 1921, 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.