HMS Caesar (1896): A Pre-Dreadnought Battleship That Outlasted Two Collisions and Fought the Bolsheviks

A Battleship for the Age Before Dreadnought

HMS Caesar was built at Portsmouth Dockyard, her keel laid on 25 March 1895, launched on 2 September 1896, and commissioned on 13 January 1898, a Majestic-class pre-dreadnought battleship displacing 16,060 tons at full load.

She was floated out of No. 12 dock on a rainy 2 September 1896, christened by Lady Salmon, wife of the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, Admiral Sir Nowell Salmon, and commissioned there on 13 January 1898 under Captain John Pakenham Pipon with a complement of 757 officers and men, bound for the Mediterranean Station. Pipon's tenure was brief and sad: he asked to be allowed to resign in April 1899 and died the following month.

She carried four BL 12-inch guns in twin turrets as her main armament, backed by twelve QF 6-inch guns in casemates, sixteen 12-pounder and twelve 2-pounder guns, and five 18-inch torpedo tubes, protected by a 9-inch armour belt and 14-inch armour on her barbettes and conning tower, a formidable ship for her era even if she would soon be overshadowed by the revolutionary all-big-gun design of HMS Dreadnought, launched less than a decade after HMS Caesar herself.

The class she belonged to deserves more than a passing mention, because it is the largest class of battleships anybody has ever built. Nine Majestics were commissioned, which no navy before or since has matched with capital ships, and they were not merely numerous but genuinely new. They were the first British battleships built throughout with Harvey armour, which was some fifteen to twenty per cent better than the nickel steel it replaced and therefore allowed a deeper belt for no extra weight, and the first to carry the wire-wound 12-inch gun. That gun then stayed the standard armament of British battleships through twelve successive classes, all the way to the 13.5-inch of the Orions in 1911. Nearly every British battleship of the following fifteen years is, in some sense, a Majestic with improvements.

The design also went abroad, which produced one of the odder coincidences in naval history. The Imperial Japanese Navy adapted the Majestic for its Shikishima class, and from the Shikishimas came Mikasa, which was Admiral Togo's flagship at Tsushima on 27 and 28 May 1905, where the Japanese destroyed a Russian fleet so completely that the battle is still taught as the model of what a decisive naval action looks like. Six days later, on 3 June 1905, the ship the whole idea had started from was lying at anchor in fog off Dungeness, riding down a Liverpool barque and drowning most of her crew. A design does not much care whose flag it fights under, and it is a rare thing for the parent and the offspring to have such different weeks.

Three Collisions and a Fire

HMS Caesar served with the Mediterranean Fleet from 1898 to 1903 before moving to Channel, Atlantic and Home Fleet assignments through to the outbreak of the First World War.

By the end of 1901 she had already been fitted with one of the Navy's earliest ship-borne wireless sets, and for a few months in 1903 she was commanded by Captain Henry Bradwardine Jackson, who had made his own mark on the technology, having achieved Morse code communication between two ships by wireless as early as 1896; Jackson went on to become First Sea Lord in 1915.

Her peacetime career took its most serious turn on 3 June 1905, when, serving as Channel Fleet flagship under Captain Archibald Stoddart, she rode down and sank the barque Afghanistan while lying at anchor in dense fog off Dungeness. The Afghanistan, a Liverpool-registered vessel under Captain J. Craigie carrying general cargo from Hamburg to San Diego, went down almost immediately; seventeen or eighteen of her crew and a passenger were lost, with only about a dozen survivors pulled from the water. The fog did not spare the rest of the fleet either: two further battleships collided with each other in the same confusion, and a third fouled a passing merchant ship.

Command passed that December to Captain Sydney Fremantle, who would go on to rather more consequential business fourteen years later: as the Vice-Admiral commanding the guard force over the interned German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow, it was Fremantle who scrambled to try to stop the Germans scuttling their own ships on 21 June 1919, ultimately taking Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter prisoner along with nearly 1,800 of his men.

A second collision followed on 16 January 1911, when she was rammed in fog by the barque Excelsior at Sheerness, though this time the damage was minimal.

As if the fog hadn't caused enough trouble, she also suffered a pair of small fires in one of her oil fuel compartments at Devonport over the turn of 1911 and 1912; both were quickly put out, and The Times reported at the time that the cause was never satisfactorily established.

A third collision came on 20 September 1912, this time with the steamer City of Brussels; her then-captain, Edward Wemyss, was blamed for not being on the bridge at the time.

Between them, these mishaps were a reminder of just how hazardous crowded shipping lanes and poor visibility could be, even for a heavily armoured battleship many times the size of most of the vessels she collided with.

Guarding Gibraltar and the Atlantic

By the outbreak of the First World War her age was starting to show, one officer aboard reckoning her capable of barely nine knots at full speed. She still found brief, useful work in the war's opening weeks: on 25 August 1914 she ferried the Plymouth Battalion of the Royal Marine Light Infantry across the Channel as part of a scratch three-battalion force sent to hold the Belgian port of Ostend and its seaplane base against the advancing Germans, before the whole force withdrew within the week as the wider defensive line gave way.

Those three battalions are worth knowing about, because they were nine days old when Caesar carried them across and they became one of the oddest formations in the British order of battle. In August 1914 the Royal Navy found itself with a surplus of something over twenty thousand men, mostly reservists, for whom there were simply no ships; mobilisation had produced more sailors than the fleet could absorb. Churchill, as First Lord, ordered on 16 August that they be formed into infantry. The result was the Royal Naval Division: two naval brigades of sailors turned soldiers, plus a brigade of Royal Marines who at least were trained for it.

It kept its own manners throughout, which the Army never forgave. The naval battalions were named after admirals, Benbow, Collingwood, Hawke, Drake, Howe, Hood, Anson and Nelson; the Marine battalions after their home divisions, Chatham, Deal, Plymouth and Portsmouth. The men kept naval ranks, naval discipline and the rum ration, and remained, in their own view and in the Admiralty's, sailors who happened to be ashore. The Plymouth Battalion of the Royal Marine Light Infantry that Caesar landed at Ostend on 25 August 1914 was the first part of it ever to go anywhere.

Ostend was a false start and the rest was not. The two naval brigades were at Antwerp in the small hours of 6 October, less than six weeks after the division had been invented, in a delaying action that was finished by the 10th and cost a good many of them internment in the Netherlands. Then Gallipoli, the whole of it, where the division was in from the landings to the evacuation; Rupert Brooke, who was a sub-lieutenant in the Hood Battalion, died two days before the landing and was buried on Skyros by fellow officers including Arthur Asquith and Bernard Freyberg. What was left went to the Western Front and fought there to the Armistice. A twenty-two-year-old battleship at nine knots taking a battalion of Marines to Belgium is not a famous moment, but it is the first entry in that account.

She then settled into guard ship and gunnery training duties at Gibraltar from December 1914 to July 1915, before moving on to the North America and West Indies Station, where by late 1916 she had become the guard ship at Bermuda and, by the summer of 1917, with the U-boat and raider threat to the station long since passed, the last battleship left on it; she remained there on unglamorous but strategically important work protecting Britain's shipping across a wide swathe of the Atlantic, while the main fleets contested control of the North Sea, until 1918.

The Last Pre-Dreadnought Flagship

In September 1918, HMS Caesar earned a notable historical distinction, relieving HMS Andromache as flagship of the Senior Naval Officer, British Adriatic Squadron, at Corfu, the last British pre-dreadnought battleship ever to hold flagship status, a symbolic bookend to an entire generation of battleship design that had been rendered obsolete by the dreadnought revolution even as HMS Caesar herself remained in active service.

She was converted to a depot ship at Malta that September and October, fitted out with repair shops and recreational spaces for the crews she would support, before taking up her new duties at Mudros in October 1918 as depot ship for the British Aegean Squadron. Her wartime captain, Edward Roynon-Jones, doubled from December as Captain of the Naval Base at Constantinople. She moved on to Port Said in January 1919, and in June that year passed through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea itself, remarkably going on to support Allied naval operations there against Bolshevik forces, part of the wider, largely forgotten Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War that followed hard on the heels of the First World War's official end.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Caesar returned to home waters in March 1920, was finally paid off on 23 April that year, and was sold on 8 November 1921 to the Slough Trading Company, resold to a German firm in July 1922 and towed to Germany for scrapping, closing out a career of over two decades that had spanned the entire transition from Victorian-era battleship design to the aftermath of the First World War, and had seen her serve, in her final active role, in a conflict against an entirely new kind of adversary that her original designers could scarcely have imagined.