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.

The builder deserves a moment, because Scotts of Greenock appears in a great many articles in this series and is almost never explained. The firm was founded in 1711 by John Scott, a timber merchant, building small wooden sailing craft for the local trade and the fishing, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating shipbuilding businesses the world has ever had. By the time Argyll's keel went down on the Clyde in 1902 the company had been at it for a hundred and ninety-one years and had moved from smacks and brigs to armoured cruisers without ever moving town.

It went the way of the rest of the Clyde in the end, and slowly. A family falling-out in 1851 had sent Charles Scott off to found a rival yard at Cartsdyke, and in 1904, the year Argyll was launched, the two halves came back together when Scott and Co and the Greenock Foundry were bought into Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering. Scotts merged with Lithgows in 1967 to become Scott Lithgow, Cartsdyke closed in 1979 and Cartsburn in 1984. Two hundred and seventy-three years, and then nothing.

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.

The cup itself has a good story behind it. In 1905 Prince Louis of Battenberg took a squadron of five British armoured cruisers on a goodwill visit to Annapolis, Washington and New York, and on getting home he posted a silver trophy to Admiral Robley Evans with a request attached: that it be competed for by the enlisted men of the American fleet in service cutters, and that British sailors be allowed to challenge for it whenever the holding ship fell in with a British man-of-war. Between 1906 and 1940 there were fifty-two challenges. Argyll's crew won the only one that ever went the other way.

The donor is worth a sentence too, because his own story turned out less happily. Prince Louis of Battenberg was First Sea Lord when the war began in 1914 and was driven out of the post within weeks by a press campaign about his German name and birth, despite having spent his entire adult life in the Royal Navy. In 1917 the family anglicised the name to Mountbatten. His son Louis went on to command a destroyer flotilla, run Combined Operations, serve as the last Viceroy of India and finish as Chief of the Defence Staff. The cup sitting in an American wardroom is named after a man the British public decided it could not trust.

The seven years between the cup and the war get skipped in most accounts of her, which is a pity, because they contain the most extraordinary peacetime job she was ever given. She was with the 1st Cruiser Squadron of the Channel Fleet at the start of 1908, refitting that January and February, went to the Atlantic Fleet's 5th Cruiser Squadron in 1909 and stayed there until 1912, recommissioned at Devonport on 5 March that year and joined the 3rd Cruiser Squadron. Standard stuff. But in the autumn of 1911 she was detached from all of it and sent to India with the King.

The Delhi Durbar of December 1911 was the ceremony at which George V and Queen Mary were proclaimed Emperor and Empress of India, and it was the first time a reigning British sovereign had ever set foot in the country. Getting them there required a royal yacht capable of the passage, so rather than send the elderly Victoria and Albert the Admiralty took up a brand new P&O liner instead. Medina had been launched at Greenock in March 1911, from Caird and Company, in the same town that had built Argyll. She was commissioned into the Royal Navy in October, given an extra mast so that the royal standard, the union flag and the admiral's flag could all fly at the correct relative heights, and painted white with royal blue and gold bands.

She sailed from Portsmouth on 11 November 1911 with four armoured cruisers around her: Argyll, Cochrane, Defence and HMS Natal. The party was back at Portsmouth on 5 February 1912. It is worth knowing what happened to that escort afterwards, because the four of them were, for a few weeks in the winter of 1911, about as prestigious an assignment as the Royal Navy had to offer. Natal blew herself up at Cromarty on 30 December 1915, eight weeks after Argyll went on the Bell Rock, killing something like four hundred people at a children's film party. Defence was blown apart at Jutland on 31 May 1916 with every man aboard. Cochrane ran aground in the Mersey on 14 November 1918, three days after the Armistice, and broke in two. Not one of the four survived the war.

Add HMS Hampshire to that list and the pattern is hard to miss. The big armoured cruiser was already an obsolete idea by 1911, too slow to run with the battlecruisers and too thin-skinned to stand in the line, and the war found that out for itself in the most direct way available. The ships that escorted an emperor to his coronation were, four and a half years later, mostly on the bottom.

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 eleven miles off Arbroath on Scotland's east coast, whose light had been darkened under wartime blackout orders to deny German submarines a navigational aid.

The rock she hit deserves properly introducing, because it is one of the most notorious hazards in British waters. The Inchcape is a strip of red sandstone eleven miles off Arbroath which shows above the water only at low tide and lies about sixteen feet under at high water, which is precisely the depth at which it will take the bottom out of a ship whose navigator does not know it is there. It had been wrecking vessels for centuries. Robert Stevenson began building a tower on it in 1807, working on a reef that disappeared twice a day, and the light was first lit on 1 February 1811. It is the oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse in the world and it is still working.

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.

What went wrong is worth setting out precisely, because it was not carelessness on anybody's part. On 27 October 1915 Argyll's captain signalled the Admiral Commanding Coast of Scotland at Rosyth, asking for the Bell Rock to be lit on the night of the 27th and 28th. That was the correct procedure and the request went through. What could not be done was the last step in the chain. The lighthouse had no telegraph and no wireless, and the only way to pass an instruction to the keepers was to put a boat out to a rock eleven miles offshore in the North Sea at the end of October. The sea was too heavy to do it. So the light stayed dark, no one was able to tell the ship it would stay dark, and a ten-thousand-ton cruiser steered confidently for a light that was never going to appear.

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.

She was also not the unluckiest of her class, which is saying something. Six Devonshires were built, and two of them came to grief in Scottish waters within eight months of each other. Argyll went onto the Bell Rock in October 1915 and lost nobody at all. HMS Hampshire struck a mine off Marwick Head in Orkney on the evening of 5 June 1916 and sank in a rising gale with the loss of all but a dozen of her company, and with Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, aboard on his way to Russia. Two ships of the same design, the same waters, the same year, and about as different an outcome as it is possible to have.

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.

The propellers are worth pinning down, because they were quite an object. There were two of them, manganese bronze, about fourteen and a half tons apiece, and they were found in 1970 by sport divers from HMS Condor, the naval air station at Arbroath, more or less on the doorstep of the men who found them. They were raised and sold for scrap. Before that the Liverpool Salvage Association had got nearly all her guns and valuable gear off using the derrick vessel Ranger, and after it the salvors kept coming back for her armour.

And that armour turned out to be worth a great deal more than ordinary scrap, for a reason nobody could have imagined in 1915. Over four hundred tons of Argyll's plate had been lifted by 1980, and the surveys noted that it carried a very low radiation count. Every atomic test from 1945 onwards put a faint radioactive signature into the atmosphere, and because making steel involves blowing enormous volumes of air through molten iron, every ton of steel produced since then carries a trace of it. Steel made before 1945 does not. It is called low-background steel, there is no way to make any more of it, and the only source is things that were built before the bomb and have been sitting somewhere ever since.

The people who want it are not scrap merchants. They are the makers of Geiger counters, particle detectors and the whole-body counting rooms that hospitals and nuclear plants use to measure how much radioactive material a person has absorbed, all of which need shielding that is not itself faintly radioactive. An Edinburgh firm, Nuclear Enterprises, put two thousand tons of pre-1945 ship steel into hospital installations around the world. So a cruiser that ran onto a Scottish reef because a lighthouse could not be told to light itself ended up as raw material for machines designed to detect a kind of danger that did not exist in her lifetime.

There is nothing left to visit. A multi-beam echo sounder survey in 2008 went over the ground west of the lighthouse and found no coherent wreck at all, and the site is now formally classified as dead. Between the Admiralty demolition parties, the salvage men and eighty years of North Sea weather in six metres of water, Argyll has been taken to pieces and carried away almost entirely. The Bell Rock light is still there, and still working, and has been for two hundred and fifteen years. The ship that was lost because the light was switched off lasted eleven years.