HMS Caroline (1914): The Last Ship of Jutland Still Afloat

Nine Months at Birkenhead

HMS Caroline was the name ship of the first group of the C Class light cruisers, six ships ordered under the 1913 programme for scouting ahead of the battle fleet and leading destroyer flotillas. She was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched on 29 September 1914, eight weeks after the outbreak of war, and commissioned that December.

The whole job, from laying down to completion, took about nine months, which is still spoken of as a record for a warship of her size.

She was a small, fast ship of about 4,700 tons fully loaded, 446 feet long, with turbines driving four shafts for 28 knots and a crew of about 300. As built she carried two 6 inch guns aft and eight 4 inch guns forward and amidships, with four torpedo tubes and a thin armour belt along her sides.

The C Class that followed them, nearly thirty ships in all, were the backbone of the Grand Fleet's scouting forces.

The Grand Fleet

She went first to the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow as leader of the 4th Destroyer Flotilla, and from February 1915 served with the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron. That summer she was among the ships sent after the German auxiliary minelayer Meteor, which had laid mines in the Moray Firth and was caught and scuttled by her own crew in August.

In November she moved to the 4th Light Cruiser Squadron, attached to the battle fleet itself, under Captain Ralph Crooke, and it was with that squadron that she went to Jutland.

Jutland

The Grand Fleet sailed from Scapa on the evening of 30 May 1916, and Crooke told his men that the squadron would be the most advanced of the whole movement.

When the German fleet was reported on the afternoon of the 31st, the 4th Light Cruiser Squadron, under Commodore Charles Le Mesurier, went ahead of the battleships, and for a while Caroline was close enough to Beatty's battlecruisers to be screening them against torpedo attack. For much of the main action her guns could not reach the big German ships, and the order went round to carry on smoking.

Men came up from below to watch, and cheered when British shells were seen to hit. Between a quarter past and half past seven she joined in the destroyer fighting between the two fleets.

The moment for which she is best remembered came a little after nine that evening, in the failing light, when the fleets were drawing apart. Caroline and her squadron mate Royalist, out on the western flank of the battle line, made out three large ships to the westward.

Crooke was sure they were German battleships, and signalled Vice Admiral Sir Martin Jerram, leading the 2nd Battle Squadron in King George V, for leave to attack. Jerram replied that they were our battle cruisers. Crooke answered that they appeared to be enemy ships.

Jerram's reply, as it is usually given, was: "If you are quite sure, attack."

Caroline fired two torpedoes and Royalist one. They were in fact the leading dreadnoughts of the German battle fleet, and the nearest of them, the Nassau, at once opened fire with her 11 inch guns.

One of Caroline's men wrote afterwards that the ship would have been blown out of the water if any of those broadsides had hit. None did, and none of her torpedoes hit either, though one is thought to have passed very close to Nassau and some aboard believed to the end of their lives that theirs had struck home.

It has often been argued since that, had Jerram trusted Crooke and turned towards the sound of the guns, the British fleet might have found the Germans again that night. As it was, the chance slipped away, and by dawn the High Seas Fleet was home.

Caroline came through Jutland without being hit and without a man killed or wounded. Her crew's only complaint was that they would have given much for four more hours of daylight.

The story of the battle from the flagship is told in the article on HMS Iron Duke, and that of a battleship torpedoed in the fighting in the article on HMS Marlborough.

The 1917 Refit

The photograph at the top of this page was taken in 1917 by Surgeon Oscar Parkes, the naval doctor whose ship photographs and drawings are still among the best records of the Grand Fleet. It shows her just after a refit at Fairfield in Govan that gave her a tripod foremast to carry the gunnery control top, and replaced some of her 4 inch guns with a third 6 inch gun on the centreline.

Her anti-aircraft armament was strengthened, and in 1917 and 1918 she was fitted with a flying-off platform for a light aircraft, one of the experiments by which the Grand Fleet learned to take aeroplanes to sea. In October 1917 she was among the cruisers sent out after German ships attacking the Scandinavian convoys off Norway.

Her younger sister Caradoc, seen fitting out in another of this year's prints, joined the fleet the same year.

The East Indies and the Reserve

After the war Caroline went out to the East Indies Station with her squadron in 1919. She came home and was paid off into reserve in 1922, and by then the Navy had more cruisers than the post-war treaties and budgets allowed it to keep. Most of her sisters went to the breakers. Caroline was given a second life instead.

Belfast

In 1924 she went to Belfast and was converted by Harland and Wolff to serve as the headquarters and drill ship of the Ulster Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Her engines and boilers stayed in place, but a drill hall was built over her decks aft and she was moored in Alexandra Dock.

For the next fifteen years volunteers came aboard in the evenings to learn seamanship, gunnery and signals.

When the Second World War began she became the depot ship for the patrol craft based at Belfast, and her signal and cipher offices were part of the effort to track U-boats in the Irish Sea. By the end of 1940 she was the command base for some seventy minesweeping and anti-submarine trawlers, and by 1943 destroyers, corvettes and frigates of the Atlantic and Arctic escorts were working from her.

In 1946 she went back to being the reserve's headquarters in Belfast, and from 1958 served the combined Royal Naval Reserve, becoming its Reserve Training Centre in 1993.

The Last Survivor

She remained a commissioned ship of the Royal Navy until 31 March 2011, the second oldest in the fleet after HMS Victory. Her preservation was then taken up by the National Museum of the Royal Navy with grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and Tourism Northern Ireland.

She was made wind and watertight, much of her appearance was returned to how she looked at Jutland, and her hull was repaired at Harland and Wolff. She opened to visitors around the centenary of the battle and is now a museum ship in Alexandra Dock in Belfast's Titanic Quarter.

In 2023 National Historic Ships UK named her its Static Flagship of the Year, looking ahead to 2024 and the hundredth anniversary of her arrival in Belfast.

She is the last ship that fought at Jutland still afloat. Of the cruisers of the Second World War, HMS Belfast survives in London; of the Royal Navy's cruisers of the Great War, only Caroline.

Her later sisters Caledon and Calypso have their own stories on these pages, and the other prints in the C Class cruisers collection show how the design developed through the war.