HMS Edinburgh (1882): The Battleship Whose Death Foretold Jutland's Shell Problem

A Long Time Building

HMS Edinburgh was laid down at Pembroke Dockyard on 20 March 1879, a Colossus-class ironclad battleship that took an unusually long time to reach full service. She was launched on 18 March 1882, but sea trials did not begin until 11 September 1883, and completion was delayed further still by problems securing her armament, so that HMS Edinburgh was not actually finished until 8 July 1887, some eight years after her keel was first laid down, a genuinely sluggish gestation even by the standards of Victorian battleship construction.

She measured 325 feet in length with a 68-foot beam and displaced 9,420 tons, and represented a meaningful technical step forward for the Royal Navy in several respects at once. Her hull was built from steel rather than iron, and she carried compound armour rather than the older wrought iron plating, protection up to 18 inches thick around her citadel. Most notably, HMS Edinburgh was the first British battleship since HMS Warrior, launched all the way back in 1860, to carry breech-loading guns as part of her main armament, four 12-inch guns mounted in twin turrets positioned en echelon amidships, a staggered arrangement intended to give each turret the widest possible arc of fire, though it created its own practical headaches with blast damage whenever the guns fired close to the ship's own centreline. She also carried a dedicated secondary battery of 6-inch guns, establishing a design principle, a genuine mix of heavy and secondary armament, that would become entirely standard on battleships for decades afterwards. Ten coal-fired boilers drove her to a top speed of 16 knots, two knots faster than her original contract had specified.

Jubilees and the Mediterranean

HMS Edinburgh entered service just in time to take part in Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee Fleet Review on 25 July 1887, a suitably grand debut for a ship that had taken so long to reach the fleet, and went on to serve with the Mediterranean Fleet through to 1894, the era's most prestigious overseas posting for a British battleship.

Reserve Duty and Fleet Reviews

HMS Edinburgh spent much of the following decade in less glamorous roles, reduced to coastguard ship duties at Hull in 1894 and then at Queensferry from 1894 to 1897, interspersed with periods of reactivation for fleet exercises. She took part in the August 1894 fleet manoeuvres as part of the 'Blue' fleet under Rear Admiral Edward Seymour, in an exercise where she was judged to have been disabled by coastal artillery defending Belfast, a useful if slightly deflating lesson in the vulnerability of even a well-armoured battleship to shore-based guns. She was reactivated again in August 1895 for Reserve Fleet manoeuvres at Torbay, and continued cycling between reserve status and active exercises for years afterwards, including a spell as tender to HMS Wildfire at Sheerness from 1899 to 1905.

HMS Edinburgh appeared at both of Queen Victoria's later jubilee fleet reviews, the Diamond Jubilee on 26 June 1897, and the coronation fleet review at Spithead on 16 August 1902 for the newly crowned King Edward VII, and briefly served as flagship from 1 November 1901, when Vice-Admiral Albert Hastings Markham hoisted his flag as Commander-in-Chief, The Nore, giving the veteran battleship one last taste of front-rank prominence before her operational career wound down entirely.

The Trials That Foreshadowed Jutland

HMS Edinburgh's most historically significant contribution came not from any action she fought, but from trials conducted after her fighting days were essentially over. In 1908, she was converted into a target ship specifically to test high-explosive, armour-piercing shells filled with lyddite, the standard British explosive of the era. The results were genuinely alarming: the trials exposed major shortcomings in the design of British high-explosive shells, deficiencies serious enough that the Controller of the Navy at the time, none other than the future Admiral John Jellicoe, ordered that the shell design be improved.

That order, unfortunately, was never properly carried through before Jellicoe moved on to other appointments, and the flawed shell design remained substantially in use right up to the Battle of Jutland in 1916, where British armour-piercing shells notoriously failed to detonate reliably against German armour, a contributing factor in several British ships failing to inflict the damage their gunnery should otherwise have achieved. It is a genuinely striking historical footnote: a battleship built in the era of breech-loading experimentation, ending her career not in battle but as a test platform, quietly identifying a flaw that would go on to cost the Royal Navy dearly in the largest fleet action of the First World War, simply because nobody acted on the warning in time.

The End

HMS Edinburgh was sold to shipbreakers in 1910, closing out a 23-year operational life that had carried her from the transitional world of ironclad warfare, through jubilee reviews and reserve fleet duty, and finally into a role as an unwitting harbinger of one of the more consequential technical failures in Royal Navy history, a genuinely unusual legacy for a ship whose actual combat record amounted to nothing more dramatic than fleet exercises and ceremonial reviews.