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 displacing 4,360 tons. 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 smaller 76mm, 6-pounder and 3-pounder guns, machine guns, and three 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.

Pacific Service and China

HMS Bonaventure spent much of her active career with the Pacific Squadron under Captain Robert Montgomerie, patrolling one of the Royal Navy's most far-flung and demanding stations. Her service record credits her with involvement in what is described as the Third China War, most likely a reference to the international military intervention against the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when British and allied forces intervened in China amid the uprising against foreign influence, though the surviving sources do not spell out the precise nature of her role in that campaign in any further detail. She returned home to Devonport in May 1906 to be paid off, bringing her front-line seagoing career 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, a role she took up on completion of the conversion in April 1907. 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.

Quiet Service Through the Great War

HMS Bonaventure continued in her submarine depot role throughout the First World War, unglamorous but essential work supporting the crews and boats of what was, even by 1918, still a young and rapidly evolving arm of the fleet. 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.