HMS Centurion (1911): The Dreadnought That Spent Fifteen Years Being Shot At
Second of Four, Built at Devonport
HMS Centurion was laid down at Devonport Dockyard on 16 January 1911, launched on 18 November that year and completed in May 1913 at a cost of £1,950,671. She was the second of the four King George V-class dreadnoughts to take the water, just under six weeks after the name ship herself, and the last of the four to be built in a royal dockyard.
The class had begun as a straight copy of the preceding Orions and ended up rather better than that, because trials of the battlecruiser Lion had shown that a spotting top downwind of a funnel is a spotting top full of smoke. The whole story of that redesign, along with the ten 13.5-inch guns, the heavier shell and the Dreyer table, is set out in our article on HMS King George V (1911) and there is no sense in writing it twice.
Thirty-Six Men Off Portland Bill
Before any of that, she killed thirty-six people, and she did it before she had even been accepted into the fleet.
On the night of 9 and 10 December 1912, running moderate speed trials off Portland Bill at nineteen knots, Centurion struck the Italian steamer Derna and cut her down.
Derna was a 2,260-ton tramp of 272 feet, built in Britain and twice renamed, sailing as Girgenti and before that as Danby, and she was on passage from Memel to Port Talbot in ballast, which is to say she was going to fetch a cargo of Welsh coal and had nothing aboard but her people. Every one of her thirty-six crew was lost.
The sea gave up the evidence slowly and in pieces. Parts of Derna came ashore near St Catherine's Point on the Isle of Wight over the following days: her bridge, her bridge rails, her compass, her bell, and her wheel with her name still on it.
Her hull lies off Portland in about forty metres of water and divers visit it still. The Hydrographic Office opened a file on the collision, which sits in the official series to this day under the plain heading of a collision off Portland Bill.
Centurion went in for repair and did not come out until March 1913. It is a grim way for a career to open, and it is worth saying plainly, because a brand new battleship on trials in home waters is about as safe a place as the Edwardian Royal Navy had to offer, and thirty-six merchant seamen were killed there anyway by a ship that was not yet even in commission.
Third in the Line at Jutland
She joined the 2nd Battle Squadron and stayed with it for the whole war, which meant Scapa Flow, the North Sea, and the particular tedium of being one of the most expensive objects in the country while having nothing to shoot at.
She was out with the rest of the Grand Fleet in December 1914 in the failed attempt to catch the German battlecruisers that had shelled Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, an affair of fog and bungled signals that is told from the squadron flagship's own bridge in the King George V article.
At Jutland on 31 May 1916 she was commanded by Captain Michael Culme-Seymour and steamed third in the line of the 1st Division, behind King George V and Ajax and ahead of HMS Erin. When Jellicoe deployed to port from HMS Iron Duke, that division became the van of the entire British battle fleet, and Centurion was the third ship in a line of twenty-four dreadnoughts.
She got off four salvos at the German battlecruiser Lützow and then HMS Orion, in the division astern, came across her line of fire and that was the end of her battle. Four salvos.
It is one salvo more than Ajax managed and nine fewer than the flagship fired, and it is a fair summary of what Jutland was like for most of the ships that were there: a great deal of waiting, a few minutes of haze and gunflashes, and then somebody else in the way.
Aeroplanes on the Turret Roofs
The last year of the war changed how she looked. Her light foremast was rebuilt as a tripod, her searchlights were put into armoured towers, the torpedo nets that had festooned her sides since 1913 went over the side for good, and in 1918 flying-off platforms were built onto the roofs of B and X turrets so that a wheeled aeroplane could be launched from a battleship for spotting and for chasing Zeppelins.
It is worth pausing on that, because it is one of the genuine oddities of 1918 and the photographs make it look more absurd than it was. The aircraft could take off and could not land back on. The pilot ditched alongside, or found somewhere ashore, and the ship carried on.
It was a stopgap between having no air component at all and having proper carriers, and most of the Grand Fleet's capital ships ended the war wearing them.
She was there in the Firth of Forth on 21 November 1918 when the German High Seas Fleet came in to surrender, and after that she went south and east into the long, unglamorous imperial policing that filled the early 1920s: the Black Sea during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, then the Mediterranean Fleet, recommissioning at Portsmouth on 24 April 1922.
Three Stokers, June 1923
The official casualty returns record something that no ship's history mentions and that deserves to be written down somewhere. Over two days in the summer of 1923, three men of Centurion's ship's company died.
Stoker First Class Thomas H. Cox, official number K 58473, died of burns on 17 June 1923. Stoker First Class Joseph Dillon, K 15795, was accidentally killed the same day. Stoker First Class George L. Race, SS 122289, was accidentally killed on 18 June. Three stokers, two days, one of them burned.
The returns give the fact and not the cause, and the ship was in the Mediterranean at the time.
Battleships are usually written about in tonnages and gun calibres and salvo counts. Three men from the same mess died in forty-eight hours in peacetime, and they are worth a paragraph of their own.
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The Ship That Was Shot At On Purpose
The Washington Naval Treaty finished the class. Centurion paid off in 1924 and would ordinarily have gone the way of her two surviving sisters, sold to the breakers in 1926. Instead the Navy found her a job.
The fleet needed something to shoot at. It had been using the old semi-dreadnought HMS Agamemnon, whose own strange demotion from armistice venue to target is told here, but Agamemnon was worn out.
In April 1926 Centurion was chosen to replace her, and Chatham Dockyard took her in hand from that April until June 1927. The conversion cost about £358,088, which was a serious sum to spend on a ship whose entire future purpose was to be hit.
The engineering of it is more interesting than the idea. Her turrets and secondary guns came out under the treaty.
To replace the weight the dockyard filled some of her old coal bunkers with rocks, which had the deliberate side effect of pushing her draught down to 31 feet 3 inches, so that shells arriving at maximum range and a steep angle would be less likely to dive under her armour belt and out the bottom. Her boilers were converted from coal to diesel, because a ship with nobody aboard cannot have stokers.
Eleven separate aerials went up, with short-range wireless receivers and transmitters, and from 1927 she could be steamed by radio at up to sixteen knots with not a soul on her decks. The hand on the other end of the signal belonged to the destroyer HMS Shikari, who spent years of her life driving an empty battleship around a range while the fleet shot at it.
She was rated as a target for guns up to eight inches, which is to say cruiser calibre, since nobody was going to spend a battleship's main armament on her. Aircraft were another matter.
In September 1933 she was used for dive bombing practice and took nineteen hits from forty-eight bombs dropped, a result which, if anyone in the Admiralty had chosen to read it as a warning about aircraft and capital ships, would have saved a great deal of trouble eight years later.
A Battleship Pretending to Be a Battleship
Her last transformation was the strangest. In May 1941 she was fitted with a dummy after funnel and dummy gun turrets so that from a distance, and particularly from the air, she would pass for HMS Anson, the newest King George V-class battleship, then still fitting out at Wallsend on the Tyne and a year away from commissioning.
A gutted twenty-eight-year-old hulk with wooden guns was being used to persuade German and Italian reconnaissance that a modern battleship was somewhere she was not.
The deception was put to work in June 1942 on Operation Vigorous, the eastern half of a two-ended attempt to fight a convoy through to Malta from both directions at once. Centurion sailed with convoy MW 11 out of Haifa and Port Said on 12 June, there to be counted by enemy aircraft as a battleship.
She was attacked by nine dive bombers, damaged by near misses, and shot one of them down, which for a ship with no main armament at all is a respectable afternoon's work. The convoy was mauled, lost a cruiser, three destroyers and two merchant ships, turned back on 15 June and never reached Malta.
After that she spent the best part of two years off Suez, half deterrent and half anti-aircraft battery, a fake battleship parked where the Italian fleet could hear about her. The real Anson meanwhile went off to the Arctic and, as it happens, never fired her guns at an enemy in her entire career. The decoy saw more action than the ship she was imitating.
The Western Bastion of Gooseberry
She had one job left. The Normandy landings needed sheltered water off open beaches before the concrete of the Mulberry harbours could arrive, so a fleet of expendable old ships was assembled to be sunk bow to stern in shallow water as breakwaters.
The ships were called corncobs and the breakwaters they made were called gooseberries, which is the sort of naming the British do when they are being deadly serious.
Gooseberry 2 was laid off Omaha Beach, formed between 7 and 12 June 1944, and Centurion was scuttled into it on 9 June, three days after the landings and the only warship among them, the rest of that line being merchant ships. Thirty-one years after she had killed thirty-six merchant seamen off Portland, she was put on the bottom to keep merchant ships safe while they unloaded.
Then came the great gale of 19 to 22 June, which wrecked the American Mulberry outright and did more damage to the invasion's shipping than the Germans managed. Centurion held.
She was the western bastion of the Omaha gooseberry, and at the height of it gunners from a merchantman that had been sunk alongside her scrambled onto her forecastle to get clear of the sea. German propaganda made what it could of the wreck: a British battleship sunk with great loss of life, they announced, since only about seventy men had been seen to leave her.
Those seventy were the entire skeleton crew, every one of whom got off.
The Only One of the Four Not Cut Up
Audacious was mined in 1914. King George V and Ajax went to the breakers in the same month of 1926, a pair of fifteen-year-old capital ships disposed of by treaty.
Centurion, the one the Navy could not quite bring itself to throw away, served on for another eighteen years as a machine for absorbing shellfire, then as a lie told to enemy reconnaissance, then as a lump of steel holding the Channel off a beach. What was left of her was broken up where she lay after the war.
It is a peculiar record, and it is worth noting what it is not. She fired her guns at an enemy exactly once, for four salvos, on one evening in 1916. Every other useful thing she ever did, she did with her guns removed, and the last two of those things she did with nobody aboard at all or very nearly so.
The second King George V class would produce a ship of the same royal name that fought the Bismarck and shelled Japan. Centurion, who had spent a whole war steaming in company with the first ship of that name, ended up as a target, a scarecrow and a breakwater, and was arguably more useful in those three roles than she had ever been with ten 13.5-inch guns aboard.
She is also the only one of the four King George Vs to have served in both world wars, and about the only dreadnought anywhere that can be said to have taken part in an amphibious landing twenty-eight years after her only battle, by sinking.
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