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 sluggish gestation even by the standards of Victorian battleship construction.

Problems securing her armament is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. What it means is that the Royal Navy ordered a pair of battleships before it had a gun fit to put in them. The 12-inch breech-loaders for the Colossus class were to be built at Woolwich with a breech mechanism supplied by Elswick, and they simply were not ready. Colossus went down the ways in 1882 and did not have her full four until 1886, and the delay in making those guns accounts for most of the protracted building times of both ships.

The gun was a forty-three-ton weapon designed around a four-hundred-pound charge of black powder. That came down to two hundred and ninety pounds, and then to about two hundred and twenty after the guns were found to jam after sixteen rounds, which is the sort of revision that tells you a design is in difficulty. On 4 May 1886, firing three-quarter charges on trial aboard HMS Collingwood, one of them burst, the inner A tube breaking into pieces in front of the coils wound around it.

The Admiralty had eleven of them. Orders went out that the remaining ten were not to be fired, which left Collingwood, Colossus and Conqueror sitting in harbour carrying some of the heaviest guns afloat and forbidden to use any of them. The whole batch was withdrawn, strengthened with a case hoop, redesignated Mark I star and sent off to coastal defence forts, where a gun that might come apart is somebody else's problem. The ships were rearmed with the newer and stronger Mark IV, and that is what Edinburgh eventually received: the third answer to the question, arriving five years after she was launched.

None of which was the yard's fault. Pembroke, the only royal dockyard ever built in Wales, was a launching yard rather than a finishing one, a story told in the article on HMS Hannibal (1896). Nor was the episode a freak. The Navy spent two decades changing over from muzzle-loaders to breech-loaders and debugged a good deal of it at sea with the crews aboard, as the article on HMS Imperieuse (1883) sets out. It does leave Edinburgh with a rather neat shape to her life, though. She began it waiting five years for British ordnance that could be trusted to fire, and she ended it as the target that proved British ordnance could not be trusted to explode.

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.

The en echelon arrangement is worth a moment because it was a dead end, and an instructive one. The problem the Victorian constructors were trying to solve was how to get all your heavy guns to bear both ahead and on the broadside from a ship that still had masts, boats and a funnel in the way. Staggering the two turrets, one to port and one to starboard, looked like the answer on a drawing board. At sea it meant that firing across the deck blew the ship's own fittings apart, and that the two turrets fouled each other's arcs in exactly the directions you most wanted to shoot. Within twenty years everybody had abandoned it for turrets on the centreline, one behind the other, which is where they have stayed ever since. Edinburgh is a fossil of the argument.

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.

Markham is worth stopping for, because he had already had two entirely separate careers before he ever set foot on Edinburgh's quarterdeck, and a third that he would rather have done without. He was born at Bagneres in France in November 1841 and entered the Navy at fifteen. In 1869, as first lieutenant of HMS Blanche on the Australian station, he was asked in a thoroughly informal way whether he could suggest a distinctive flag for New Zealand. He drew a blue ensign with four stars of the Southern Cross on the fly, it was gazetted on 23 October 1869, and it became the national flag in 1902. It is still flying today. Very few officers get an entire country out of an afternoon's doodling.

Six years later he took HMS Alert north as part of the British Arctic Expedition under Nares, and in May 1876 he led a man-hauled sledge party, no dogs, to 83 degrees 20 minutes 26 seconds north. It was the farthest north any human being had reached, and it stood as the record for nineteen years until Nansen beat it in 1895. He was a cousin of Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society, the man who later put Robert Falcon Scott in the way of a polar expedition, a meeting recounted in the article on HMS Rover (1874). Polar exploration ran in that family the way medicine runs in others.

The third career is the one everybody remembers. On 22 June 1893, as rear-admiral second in command of the Mediterranean Fleet with his flag in HMS Camperdown, he was ordered by Sir George Tryon to turn his line inwards towards Tryon's own, in a great deal less sea room than the manoeuvre needed. He hesitated, was signalled sharply, and obeyed, and Camperdown put her ram through the fleet flagship. That afternoon is set out in full in the article on HMS Camperdown (D32). He was found to have been acting under superior orders and was not censured, but it followed him for the rest of his life.

So the flag that flew over this ship from November 1901 belonged to a man who had designed a national flag, stood further north than anyone then alive, and rammed a British battleship in peacetime. He was made KCB in 1903, retired in 1906 and died in London a fortnight before the Armistice. Edinburgh, for her part, had spent five years waiting for guns she could safely fire and had been ruled sunk by shore batteries off Belfast. Ship and admiral were reasonably well matched.

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. Converted into a target hulk in 1908, she was fitted two years later with modern armour plate, replicating the protection of a contemporary battleship rather than her own three-decade-old belt, so the Admiralty could see how high-explosive, armour-piercing shells filled with lyddite, the standard British explosive of the era, actually performed against up-to-date armour rather than her own.

The results, gathered under the Controller of the Navy at the time, the future Admiral John Jellicoe, were alarming enough that on 28 October 1910 the Ordnance Board formally minuted a request for a redesigned armour-piercing shell, one that could strike armour obliquely, punch clean through it, and still detonate properly on the far side rather than breaking apart or failing to explode at all, precisely the fault the Edinburgh trials had exposed.

It is worth being precise about what was actually wrong, because the phrase failed to detonate has done a lot of vague work over the years. A British armour-piercing shell of the period was filled with lyddite, which is picric acid: powerful, spectacular, and far too sensitive. Struck against face-hardened armour at an angle, the filling had a strong tendency to go off on impact, before the shell had got anywhere; and the fuzes fitted behind it had no proper delay element, so a shell that did punch through frequently burst in the hole rather than inside the ship. German shells used a less sensitive filling with a genuine delay, which is why they went off in engine rooms rather than on belt armour. The difference is not marksmanship and it is not courage. It is chemistry and fuze design, and at Jutland it meant that of seventeen heavy British shells that hit thick German armour, exactly one got through and worked as intended.

That request went nowhere. Jellicoe left the Controller's post before the year was out, and his successor, Admiral Sir Charles Briggs, did not pursue the matter with anything like the same urgency, so 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. Even the German side noticed: Vice-Admiral Franz Hipper's own after-action report praised British gunnery while observing that what the British "could no longer achieve is a consequence of their inadequate projectile material, in particular the ineffective explosive charge." Winston Churchill, who became First Lord of the Admiralty the following year and so inherited much of the responsibility for fixing it, later admitted candidly that he had simply assumed "our constructors and ordnance experts were the last word in their science", while Admiral Sir Charles Madden privately laid the blame closer to home, writing to a colleague that he tried to avoid discussing the shells' shortcomings "because Lord Jellicoe had more to do with the gunnery material we used than any other one man." At least one historian has since pinned the technical failure specifically on a junior ordnance officer, though even that claim rests on a single admiral's decades-later recollection rather than firm documentary proof, a reminder that assigning blame for Jutland's shell scandal remained a minor cottage industry among naval officers for years afterwards.

It is a notably 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 fix, when it finally came, took about a year and worked perfectly. From September 1917 the filling factories were changed over from lyddite to Shellite, a mixture of roughly sixty per cent lyddite and forty per cent dinitrophenol, appreciably less powerful and very much less inclined to detonate when hit; that was combined with a hardened piercing cap and a fuze with a real delay built into it. The resulting shell was painted green in the magazines and was known throughout the fleet as the Greenboy. It became widely available in 1918, which is to say roughly seven and a half years after the Ordnance Board minuted the request that the Edinburgh trials had prompted, and about two years after the fleet action it would have won more decisively. The Greenboys were never fired at a German battleship. The High Seas Fleet did not come out again.

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 particularly unusual legacy for a ship whose actual combat record amounted to nothing more dramatic than fleet exercises and ceremonial reviews.