HMS Australia (1886): An Armoured Cruiser That Escorted Two Monarchs

A Well-Armoured Cruiser for the Fleet

HMS Australia was laid down on 21 April 1885 by Robert Napier and Sons at Govan on the Clyde, launched on 25 November 1886, and completed on 11 December 1888, one of the Orlando-class armoured cruisers built to combine respectable firepower with genuine protection, a combination that had not always gone hand in hand in cruiser design up to that point.

She displaced around 5,535 tons, could make an impressive 18.8 knots on trials, and carried a serious armament for her size, two 9.2-inch guns and ten 6-inch guns alongside sixteen smaller quick-firing weapons and six torpedo tubes, protected by a 10-inch armoured belt.

That ten-inch belt is the whole argument about the class, and the argument went against them. It was compound armour, about two hundred feet long and a little over five feet deep, covering the machinery spaces and nothing else, closed off at each end by heavy bulkheads. A shell arriving anywhere forward or aft of that met an unarmoured ship. The contemporary criticism, which turned out to be correct, was that the same weight of steel would have done far more good spread out as a curved protective deck running the full length of the hull, deflecting fire downwards and keeping water out of the boiler rooms. Seven Orlandos were built to test the belted idea in a cruiser of this size, and the Navy did not build any more.

There is a more specific and considerably more embarrassing reason the belt failed, and it is worth knowing. The Orlandos came out overweight. Equipment and hull weights were added during construction, as they always are, the displacement went up and the draught went up with it, and the ships sat lower in the water than the drawings had assumed. The consequence was that the top of that ten-inch belt ended up at the load waterline. Fully loaded, the armour was underwater. The Royal Navy had built seven cruisers around a belt that, in the condition the ships would actually go to sea in, was protecting the part of the hull nobody was going to hit.

The verdict at the time was blunt: a narrow waterline belt of that sort was of so little value that it amounted to carrying dead weight. And the Admiralty drew the obvious conclusion and stopped. It abandoned side armour in cruisers altogether for the next thirteen years and put its money into protected cruisers, in which the defence is a curved armoured deck running the length of the ship rather than a strip of plate along the side, until Krupp cemented armour eventually made a proper belt worth having again. So the seven Orlandos are not simply a class that did not work. They are the experiment that settled British cruiser design for more than a decade, at the cost of seven expensive ships that spent their careers being useful in ways nobody had intended.

The consequence shows in the dates. Every one of the seven was reduced to subsidiary duties or put into reserve between 1899 and 1902, after roughly a dozen years of front-line life apiece. That was not unusual and it was not really their fault. Naval technology between 1885 and 1905 moved faster than at any point before or since: water-tube boilers, quick-firing guns, smokeless powder, Krupp cemented armour, wireless and finally the turbine all arrived inside twenty years. A cruiser commissioned in 1889 could be genuinely obsolete before the boys who joined her had finished their first engagement.

Mediterranean Service and an American Review

Australia commissioned at Chatham on 19 November 1889 under Captain Martin Dunlop and sailed for the Mediterranean Fleet under sealed orders, an outbound passage disrupted by an influenza outbreak that laid up around a sixth of her crew before she even reached Gibraltar. She remained on Mediterranean service until 1893, cruising the Levant and the Greek and Turkish coasts.

That commission was not without tragedy of its own.

In May 1891, while the ship lay at Phalerum Bay off Athens, Able Seaman William Droudge was found unconscious beneath a sixty-foot cliff, badly injured, and died without regaining consciousness; the ship's doctor suspected foul play, and a formal Board of Inquiry, assisted by a detective sent from HMS Collingwood, was convened before the crew laid him to rest with full naval honours and the fleet's colours at half-mast.

The handling of William Droudge's death is worth pausing over, because it shows how the Navy dealt with a suspicious death abroad in 1891. There was no British police jurisdiction at Phalerum Bay and no question of handing the matter to the Greek authorities. The ship was British territory and the fleet had to investigate itself, so a formal Board of Inquiry was convened aboard and a detective was sent across from another British warship to assist it. That the surgeon suspected foul play and said so, and that the Navy then went to the trouble of a proper inquiry for an able seaman, is rather to its credit. Losing three men from one ship's company in a single summer, one under a cliff and two by drowning, is a reminder that peacetime service killed a steady trickle of men and always had.

Two more men from Australia's company were lost in separate accidents that same summer, drowned during a fishing expedition and a boating accident.

When she crossed the Atlantic in 1893, it was to take part in New York's Columbian Naval Review, the great international review held to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the Americas, a rare and prestigious overseas showing for a British cruiser of her era.

The Columbian Naval Review is worth setting in its context too. It was held in April 1893 in the harbour at New York, as the naval half of the celebrations surrounding the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and it was the first time the United States had gathered a large international fleet in its own waters. Warships came from Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil and Argentina among others. For Australia to lead the second line of seventeen foreign ships past the President of the United States was a genuine mark of precedence, and it is worth remembering that the American navy doing the reviewing was, at that date, a considerably smaller force than the one it was inspecting.

Australia led the second line of seventeen foreign warships as President Grover Cleveland reviewed the fleet from USS Philadelphia on 25 April 1893, her crew manning ship and firing a 21-gun salute as he passed, and the following day she landed sailors and marines to take part in a parade through the city.

She paid off at Portsmouth on 17 June 1893, having spent three years and five months in commission, 352 days of it at sea, and steamed something like 41,370 nautical miles in the process.

Guarding the Coast, and the Crown

On returning home, Australia settled into duty as coast guard vessel for Southampton Water through the 1890s and into the following decade, a role that brought her into direct royal service on more than one occasion: she escorted the royal yacht carrying Queen Victoria in 1900 and performed the same duty for King Edward VII the following year, after his accession to the throne.

Coast guard vessel is a job title that needs explaining, because it does not mean what it sounds like. The Royal Navy stationed real warships at coastguard districts round the British coast, kept in commission with a reduced ship's company. Their purpose was partly to be there, but chiefly to look after the coastguard service itself, which was manned largely by naval pensioners and reservists who remained liable for recall and who needed a ship to train in. On mobilisation those men would have gone straight into the reserve fleet. So a coast guard ship was simultaneously a warship, a training establishment and a depot for several hundred men the Navy expected to need in a hurry, and having one lying in Southampton Water is why Australia was available at short notice to escort a royal yacht.

She took part in the coronation fleet review at Spithead in August 1902, one of the grand set-piece naval occasions of the Edwardian era, and a fitting high point for a ship whose later career had become as much about ceremony as combat readiness.

A Quiet Retirement

Australia was placed in reserve at Chatham Dockyard in early 1903, her active service effectively over after roughly fifteen years, and was sold for scrap on 4 April 1905, closing out the career of a cruiser that had spent her working life alternating between serious Mediterranean deployment and the rather more stately business of escorting British monarchs along their own coastline.

The yard that built her has a claim on the history of shipbuilding that very few can match. Robert Napier is generally called the father of Clyde shipbuilding, and it is not a courtesy title: he opened an iron shipbuilding yard at Govan in 1841, and between 1843 and 1864 the firm launched a hundred and fourteen ships and grew to more than three thousand employees. Napier built the engines for the first four Cunarders, Britannia, Acadia, Caledonia and Columbia, and for nine more Cunard paddle steamers after them, which is to say that the machinery that made the Atlantic mail service work came out of his shops. The firm became Robert Napier and Sons in 1852 when he took his two surviving sons into partnership.

It did not outlive the century. Napier died in 1876, the yard was sold on, and by the end of 1899 the business was insolvent and its goodwill had been bought by William Beardmore, the Govan works being absorbed into Beardmore and Company. It went on building ships until 1900 and then the name went. Australia was launched there in 1886, roughly midway between the height of the firm and its end, and she was broken up in 1905, five years after the yard that made her had ceased to exist. The Clyde produced a great deal in the nineteenth century, including a habit of outliving the companies that built it.