HMS Dreadnought (1906): The Ship That Made Every Other Battleship Obsolete Overnight

Astonishing Speed-Built

HMS Dreadnought's radical design didn't spring from nowhere. In October 1904, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John Fisher was put in charge of a Committee on Designs tasked with working out what the Royal Navy's next generation of capital ships should actually look like; its dozen-odd members included the physicist Lord Kelvin, the future Grand Fleet commander John Jellicoe and a naval assistant named Reginald Bacon, who would go on to become Dreadnought's own first commanding officer once she was actually built. The committee reported back in March 1905 firmly behind Fisher's instinct for a uniform heavy-gun armament, and the keel was laid down at Portsmouth just seven months later.

HMS Dreadnought was built at HM Dockyard, Portsmouth, then regarded as the fastest-building shipyard in the world, and the speed of her construction remains truly remarkable even by modern standards: laid down on 2 October 1905, launched on 10 February 1906 and christened by King Edward VII, completing her acceptance trials on 2 December 1906 and commissioning to full complement on 11 December that year, a total build time of just fifteen months from keel to commissioning.

There is a famous explanation for that fifteen months which is worth examining, because it is only half true. The story usually told is that Dreadnought was built so quickly because her 12-inch turrets were lifted straight off the Lord Nelson-class battleships already building, leaving those two ships to wait. Something of the sort certainly happened: the Engineer-in-Chief of the Fleet recorded on 1 May 1906 that Armstrong and Vickers had taken the 12-inch gun machinery started for the Lord Nelsons and appropriated it to Dreadnought, and that the dates of the orders had accordingly become interchanged. But Dreadnought's own guns and mountings were ordered in July 1905, before she was laid down, so nothing was stolen that had not also been bought. What she got was priority. Two battleships already on the stocks were quietly moved to the back of the queue so that one ship could be finished in a hurry, which is a different thing from cheating and produces exactly the same result. The bill for all of it came to £1,783,883, which was a great deal of money and, as things turned out, much the smallest of the costs involved.

This achievement rested on intensive prefabrication work that had actually begun in May 1905, five months before formal construction started, and on a workforce that swelled to 3,000 men working gruelling 69-hour weeks, six in the morning to six at night, six days a week, with only a thirty-minute lunch break and mandatory overtime, a notably punishing pace that reflected just how urgently the Admiralty wanted this ship completed.

An All-Big-Gun Revolution

HMS Dreadnought's design represented a radical break from every battleship that had come before her. She carried ten 12-inch guns in five twin turrets, a uniform 'all-big-gun' main battery capable of firing broadsides of eight guns simultaneously, a striking departure from the mixed batteries of large and smaller-calibre guns that earlier battleships had carried.

That figure of eight, rather than a full ten-gun broadside, was itself a compromise: two of her five turrets sat out on the wings amidships, each restricted to firing only on its own side of the ship, so however impressive the arithmetic looked on paper, a fifth of her main armament was always dead weight in any single engagement. It took a few more generations of dreadnought design, starting with the Orion class in 1910, before naval architects worked out how to stack every turret on the centreline and let all ten guns bear on either broadside at once.

This uniformity solved a genuine and pressing tactical problem: at long range, the shell splashes from numerous smaller guns made it almost impossible for gunnery officers to distinguish and correct the fall of shot from the larger guns, badly hampering accurate long-range fire.

HMS Dreadnought's single calibre of main armament eliminated that confusion entirely, allowing accurate gunnery at ranges previously considered impractical.

HMS Dreadnought was also the first capital ship in the world to be powered by steam turbines, using Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company machinery producing 23,000 shaft horsepower and driving her to a rated 21 knots, actually achieving 21.6 knots during sea trials on 9 October 1906, a speed that matched or exceeded contemporary battleships while carrying dramatically heavier firepower.

None of which made her a pleasant ship to actually live aboard. Lieutenant Lionel Dawson, who served on her, remembered Dreadnought as "a very uncomfortable ship," with cramped mess-decks tucked awkwardly aft and officers' cabins scattered wherever space could be found; his own first cabin required a walk of half the ship's length just to reach the bathroom, and his second sat beside a diesel generator whose vibrations, he wrote, "made life in its vicinity very uncomfortable when it was running." The ship that rewrote battleship design worldwide, in other words, still couldn't manage a decent night's sleep for her own officers.

Admiral Fisher and his Committee on Designs had recognised that the combination of superior speed and overwhelming, uniform gunpower would make every existing battleship instantly outdated, and they were entirely correct: HMS Dreadnought rendered every pre-dreadnought battleship in every navy on earth obsolete the moment she entered service, and every capital ship built anywhere in the world from that point on became generically known, regardless of nationality, as a 'dreadnought'.

And here is the argument that has run ever since, because a good many people at the time thought Fisher had made the worst strategic blunder in the history of the Royal Navy. Britain in 1905 had something like three battleships for every one Germany possessed. That margin was the whole point of the fleet; it was the accumulated capital of a century, and it could not be caught up with quickly. Dreadnought wrote it off in an afternoon. Every one of those British pre-dreadnoughts became second-rate on the day she commissioned, and so did everyone else's, which meant the count went back to nought all round and the race restarted with Germany level at the line. Sir Frederick Richards, one of Fisher's ablest predecessors as First Sea Lord, called it the moral and material scrapping of the Fleet, and he was not being rhetorical.

The defence of Fisher is that somebody was going to build her. The all-big-gun idea was in the air on three continents: the Italian designer Vittorio Cuniberti had published it in Jane's in 1903, the Americans had South Carolina and Michigan authorised, and the Japanese had Satsuma on the stocks. The lead Britain surrendered was going to be surrendered whoever launched first; what Fisher secured was that Britain launched first and had the yards, the guns and the experience to keep launching. Both arguments are correct, which is why the question has never been settled. What is not in doubt is what came next. By March 1909 the Admiralty wanted six new dreadnoughts, the Treasury offered four, and the country, worked into a state of alarm partly by Herbert Hall Mulliner of the Coventry Ordnance Works, who manufactured gun mountings and circulated fabricated claims about how fast Germany was building, settled the matter in the street with a chant: we want eight and we won't wait. It got eight.

The Dreadnought Hoax

Dreadnought's fame made her an obvious target for one of Edwardian Britain's most notorious pranksters. On 7 February 1910, the socialite hoaxer Horace de Vere Cole, posing as a Foreign Office official named "Herbert Cholmondeley", sent the Royal Navy a forged telegram announcing a visit from a party of Abyssinian royalty and asked that a warship be made ready for their inspection. The Admiralty obliged handsomely, laying on a special train to Weymouth, where Dreadnought lay at anchor, and a full honour guard to receive the royal party.

The "Abyssinian delegation" that stepped off the train was in fact Cole and five friends in blackface, turbans and borrowed theatrical robes, among them the artist Duncan Grant, pressed into service as interpreter for an invented language cobbled together from Swahili, Greek, Latin and pure nonsense, and a 28-year-old aspiring writer named Virginia Stephen, soon to become far better known as Virginia Woolf. For a good forty minutes the party was shown around the Royal Navy's most advanced warship with full military honours, greeting each new marvel with an approving murmur of "Bunga, Bunga!" while the ship's band, having no idea what Abyssinia's actual national anthem sounded like, improvised as best it could.

The truth came out within days once it reached the newspapers, to the Admiralty's considerable embarrassment. Questions were asked in Parliament and there was talk of prosecuting Cole, though nothing ever came of it; the Navy, having already been made to look thoroughly foolish once, had little appetite for a court case that would only drag the story out further. A few of the male pranksters were instead given a symbolic caning by outraged junior officers, a punishment that pointedly excluded Woolf, and "Bunga Bunga" passed into the language as a byword for pompous nonsense: Dreadnought's second, and rather more embarrassing, claim to fame.

There is one more detail that turns the whole affair from a prank into a small domestic tragedy. The officer who received the Abyssinian party at the gangway, and who spent forty minutes escorting them round the most secret ship in the Royal Navy, was Commander William Fisher, known as Willy. He was Virginia and Adrian Stephen's first cousin. He did not recognise either of them, standing a few feet away in greasepaint and a false beard, and when he found out he took it not as a joke against himself but as an insult to his ship and his service. He never spoke to his cousins again. He went on to become an admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, and the breach was never repaired.

The Only Battleship to Deliberately Sink a Submarine

HMS Dreadnought served as flagship of the 4th Battle Squadron in the North Sea at the outbreak of the First World War, based at Scapa Flow, and took part in routine fleet operations while avoiding any major fleet engagement for most of the war.

By March 1915, Otto Weddigen was one of the most feared men in the German navy. Commanding the submarine U-9 the previous September, he had sunk three obsolete British armoured cruisers, Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, in barely an hour, killing 1,467 men; a month later he sank the cruiser HMS Hawke too, with the loss of around 500 more. Germany decorated him with the Iron Cross First Class and made him the first naval officer of the war to receive the Pour le Merite, its highest military honour.

Her one properly significant combat action came on 18 March 1915 in the Pentland Firth, when Weddigen's new command, the submarine SM U-29, surfaced directly ahead of her after firing a torpedo at HMS Neptune.

Under the command of Captain William Alderson, HMS Dreadnought gave chase and rammed the submarine, cutting it clean in two, killing Weddigen and his entire crew and narrowly avoiding a collision of her own with HMS Temeraire, which had also been attempting to ram the same target. This action makes HMS Dreadnought the only battleship in naval history ever to have deliberately sunk an enemy submarine, a particularly unique claim to fame for a ship already famous for entirely different reasons.

HMS Dreadnought missed the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, the largest naval battle of the entire war, because she was undergoing a refit at Portsmouth between April and June that year, an almost unbelievable irony given that the ship whose name defined an entire era of battleship design took no part whatsoever in the greatest clash of dreadnoughts the war ever produced.

She was relegated to coastal defence duties in the English Channel that July, before returning to Grand Fleet service in March 1918.

A Quiet End

HMS Dreadnought was paid off on 7 August 1918, briefly recommissioned as a tender to HMS Hercules for Reserve Fleet duties in February 1919, and was put up for sale on 31 March 1920. She was sold for scrap to Thos. W. Ward for around £2.10 per ton on 9 May 1921, and was finally broken up at Ward's premises in Inverkeithing, Scotland, beginning 2 January 1923.

Very few artefacts of this truly transformative ship survive today; a single gun tampion is held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, a modest physical legacy for a warship whose design triggered a global naval arms race and reshaped battleship construction for every major navy on earth for decades to come.

The name, at least, has never been allowed to lapse. It went next to Britain's first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1960 on Trafalgar Day, and it is going next to the first boat of the class that will carry the deterrent from the 2030s. That is not sentiment. It is the Royal Navy putting the name on whatever it currently believes to be the most important ship it has, which is the only tribute the 1906 ship would have recognised, and a more useful one than a gun tampion in a glass case.