HMS Bonaventure (1892): From the Pacific Squadron to a Submarine Nursemaid at Cork

A Second-Class Cruiser for a Global Navy

HMS Bonaventure was built at Devonport Dockyard, her keel laid in December 1890, launched on 2 December 1892, and commissioned on 5 July 1894, an Astraea-class second-class cruiser, one of eight sisters ordered together under the Naval Defence Act of 1889, Parliament's response to growing worry that Britain's cruiser strength was falling behind rival fleets. She displaced 4,360 tons, measured 320 feet in length with a 49 foot 6 inch beam, carried a complement of 318 officers and men, and could make 18 to 19.5 knots on 7,500 indicated horsepower.

She carried a substantial mixed armament for her size, two 6-inch quick-firing guns and eight 4.7-inch quick-firing guns, backed by ten 6-pounder and one 3-pounder quick-firing guns, machine guns, and four 18-inch torpedo tubes, a fit designed to give her the reach and firepower to operate independently on distant stations, exactly the role the Astraea class had been built for as Britain policed the far corners of its empire.

Second class is the operative phrase and it was not a criticism. The Naval Defence Act of 1889 bought two quite different kinds of cruiser. A handful of very large, very fast first class ships were meant to run down enemy commerce raiders in the open ocean. The rest, the Astraeas among them, were smaller ships intended to be spread thinly across the world and left there: to sit in a colonial harbour for months, land a party if there was trouble ashore, show the flag, chart something, carry a governor, and be capable of dealing with anything short of a proper warship. Eight of them were built to do that, and the fact that Bonaventure spent twelve consecutive years on the Pacific station and got through nine captains in the process is exactly the pattern the design was drawn for.

Pacific Service and China

HMS Bonaventure spent much of her active career, from 1894 to 1906, with the Pacific Squadron, one of the Royal Navy's most far-flung and demanding stations, getting through no fewer than nine different commanding officers in that time, among them Captain Robert Montgomerie, who held command from March 1898 to May 1900.

One of her earliest crew members left behind an unusually vivid record of what that posting actually involved. Engineer officer Percy Haigh, who joined Bonaventure in December 1894 fresh from training, sailed her out towards the Pacific via Suez, Aden, the Seychelles and Bombay with a dry plate camera in hand, a gift from his photographer father, quietly making him one of the earliest amateur photographers to document a Royal Navy warship's working life from the inside.

That camera is worth a paragraph of its own, because in 1894 it was a fairly new possibility. For most of photography's first forty years the working process was wet collodion, in which a glass plate had to be coated with chemicals, exposed and developed all within about ten minutes, which meant carrying a darkroom to wherever the photograph was being taken. On a warship at sea that was, in practice, hopeless. The gelatin dry plate changed everything: the plates came ready-prepared in a box, could be carried for months, exposed whenever the photographer liked and developed weeks later ashore. It is the invention that put cameras into ordinary hands, and it is the only reason a young engineer officer could take a camera to the Pacific and come back with a record of what life aboard actually looked like rather than the formal quarterdeck portraits that survive from earlier ships.

Her service record credits her with involvement in what is described as the Third China War, a contemporary Royal Navy term for the international military intervention against the Boxer Rebellion, when British and allied forces moved to relieve besieged foreign legations in Beijing between June and August 1900. Captain Montgomerie's own command had actually ended that May, just as the crisis was breaking, so if Bonaventure really did take part it would have been under one of his immediate successors, Captain Arthur Smith-Dorrien or Captain Charles Graves-Sawle, rather than Montgomerie himself; the surviving sources still do not spell out the precise nature of her role in the campaign in any further detail.

What the phrase covered, though, is worth knowing. In the summer of 1900 the Boxer movement and eventually the Qing government itself turned on the foreign legations in Peking, which were besieged from June. The first attempt to relieve them was led by Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Seymour and was made very largely of sailors and marines landed from the allied squadrons lying off the coast: they set out from Tientsin by train, were stopped well short, and had to fight their way back. To open the river for reinforcements the allied ships stormed and captured the Taku forts at the mouth of the Hai on the night of 16 and 17 June, and the legations were finally relieved on 14 August by an eight-nation column. A great deal of that campaign was fought by naval brigades, which is to say by ships' companies landed with rifles and field guns and expected to soldier. A cruiser on the China coast in 1900 could very easily find that half her people were ashore several hundred miles inland.

Her final Pacific-station captain, Henry Torlesse, brought her home to Devonport in May 1906 to be paid off, bringing twelve years of front-line seagoing service to a close.

A New Job Minding Submarines

Rather than being scrapped, HMS Bonaventure was sent to Haulbowline Dockyard at Cork in Ireland to be converted into a depot ship for submarines, commissioning in her new role on 2 April 1907 under Captain Frank Brandt, who evidently liked the job, or was simply too useful at it to let go, since he was given command of her a second time three years later.

It was a significant vote of confidence in a still-serviceable hull at a moment when the Royal Navy's submarine service was itself brand new and rapidly expanding, and depot ships like HMS Bonaventure provided the workshops, stores, torpedoes and accommodation that early submarines, cramped and mechanically temperamental as they were, could not carry or maintain for themselves.

A submarine depot ship was, if anything, a harder job than a destroyer's. An early boat could not distil her own fresh water, could not charge her batteries without help alongside, could not carry a spare torpedo of any consequence, had no cooking arrangements worth the name and no accommodation that anybody could live in for long. So the depot ship carried the torpedoes and the compressed air to fire them, the distilled water for the batteries, the workshops, the spare parts, the sick bay and the beds, and the crews lived aboard her whenever they were not at sea. Haulbowline, on its island in Cork Harbour, had been a naval yard since the Napoleonic wars and Queenstown was one of the Royal Navy's great Atlantic bases; it would become the centre of the anti-submarine war in Irish waters in 1917, and the anchorage remained under British control as one of the Treaty Ports until 1938.

The marine artist William Lionel Wyllie captured her at exactly this work in a watercolour painted sometime between 1911 and 1914, Bonaventure flying red warning flags to keep other shipping clear while she oversaw a live torpedo exercise with the submarine C31 nearby, an ordinary day's work at the time that reads rather more poignantly in hindsight: C31 was lost with all hands only a few months after war broke out, disappearing after leaving Harwich for Belgium in January 1915.

It is worth saying what those early boats were like, because it explains a good deal about their casualty rate. The C class ran on petrol engines, not diesels, which meant a sealed steel tube containing several tons of petrol, a large lead-acid battery giving off hydrogen, hot electrical machinery and around sixteen men, all in the same space. Petrol vapour is heavier than air, collects in the bilges and is both poisonous and explosive, and boats were lost to both. Crews are recorded as carrying white mice aboard as a warning system, on the sound principle that a small animal shows the effects of bad air a long time before a man does. Being sent from Harwich to the Belgian coast in a January gale in one of those was not a small thing to ask.

Quiet Service Through the Great War

HMS Bonaventure did not stay at Cork for the duration. She moved to Portsmouth in July 1912 with the Eighth Submarine Flotilla, recommissioned there that October under Commander Stanley Willis, and by the following summer had shifted again, this time to Harwich, the Royal Navy's principal North Sea submarine and light-cruiser base, serving as depot ship to the Sixth and Seventh Submarine Flotillas and, once war broke out, to the newer C-class boats patrolling the southern North Sea. Willis stayed in command throughout, three years in all, longer than anyone else who ever held her, seeing Bonaventure safely from a peacetime training exercise into a war that would sink several of the very submarines she tended.

Her final wartime captain, appointed in October 1918, was Commander Noel Laurence, by then one of the most decorated submariners in the Navy: as a Lieutenant-Commander in 1914 he had taken his own boat, E1, on the 1,200-mile underwater passage into the Baltic, and the following year sank a German transport and damaged the battlecruiser Moltke off Riga, earning the DSO along with Russian decorations for the same actions. Commanding a depot ship at Harwich in the war's last weeks was a quiet coda to a considerably louder career.

She was finally paid off on 17 October 1919, the war over and her long service at an end, and was sold on 12 April 1920 to the Forth Ship Breaking Company at Bo'ness for scrapping, closing out a career that had carried her from the cruiser patrols of empire to the quieter, more technical demands of the submarine age.