HMS Argyll (1904): She Beat America's Own Navy, Then Was Wrecked by a Darkened Lighthouse

A Solidly Built Armoured Cruiser

HMS Argyll was a Devonshire-class armoured cruiser built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Greenock, laid down on 1 September 1902, launched on 3 March 1904 and completed in December 1905. She displaced 10,850 tons, measured just over 473 feet in length, and could make 22 knots from two triple-expansion engines fed by a mix of Babcock and Wilcox and cylindrical boilers.

Her main armament ran to four 7.5-inch guns and six 6-inch guns, backed by a dozen smaller quick-firers and a pair of torpedo tubes, protected by belt armour up to 6 inches thick and a 12-inch conning tower, a solid, workmanlike design for a class built to scout and screen ahead of the battle fleet rather than slug it out in the line.

She joined the Channel Fleet's 1st Cruiser Squadron in 1906, one of six Devonshire-class ships built to the same broad specification, part of a generation of armoured cruisers that would prove increasingly vulnerable as naval technology moved on but were, in the mid-1900s, still a credible part of Britain's battle fleet.

Beating America at Its Own Game

In 1907 Argyll took part in the Jamestown Exposition at Norfolk, Virginia, marking the 300th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in America, and came away with an unlikely trophy.

Her ship's cutter, rowed in a boat borrowed from the American battleship USS Indiana, beat a crew from USS Illinois to win the Battenberg Cup, a rowing trophy the US Atlantic Fleet had otherwise held onto in every one of its other 51 challenges across 34 years of competition.

It remains the only occasion an American crew lost the cup to a foreign ship.

War, and a Prize Taken Early

When war broke out in August 1914, Argyll joined the Grand Fleet and lost little time making her mark, capturing a German merchant ship on 6 August, just two days after Britain's declaration of war, one of the earliest prizes taken by any Royal Navy warship in the conflict.

For the following fourteen months she settled into the less glamorous but essential work of the distant blockade, patrolling the cold waters between Shetland, the Faroe Islands and the Norwegian coast to intercept shipping trying to slip through to Germany, unglamorous, repetitive duty that nonetheless helped strangle the German war economy over the course of the war.

Wrecked by a Darkened Lighthouse

That patrol work came to an abrupt and needless end on 28 October 1915. Returning north to rejoin the fleet at Scapa Flow, Argyll approached the Bell Rock, roughly twelve miles off Arbroath on Scotland's east coast, whose light had been darkened under wartime blackout orders to deny German submarines a navigational aid.

She signalled ahead asking for the light to be lit, but the lighthouse had no radio and could only be reached by boat or visual signal; when the attempt to warn the keepers failed, nobody thought to tell Argyll.

Expecting the light to appear and steering accordingly, she ran hard onto the rock at around 4:25am and could not break free. A fire broke out aboard as she pounded on the reef, but the destroyers HMS Hornet and HMS Jackal came alongside and took off her entire crew, all 655 officers and men, without a single loss of life, a genuinely fortunate outcome for a ship wrecked in the dark on a notorious hazard to shipping.

A Long Afterlife on the Rocks

Salvage teams recovered her guns and other useful equipment, but the hull itself was a total loss, eventually broken up further by naval demolition teams after the war to reduce the danger she posed to other shipping passing the rock.

Even that was not quite the end of her: in the 1970s, divers recovered her manganese-bronze propellers from the shallows near the lighthouse, a last physical fragment of a ship that had, in the space of eight years, beaten the United States Navy at its own game and then come to grief within sight of one of Scotland's most famous lighthouses.