HMS Endymion (1891): From the Boxer Rebellion to a U-Boat's Torpedo at Stavros

Hull-Built

HMS Endymion was built by C. and W. Earle at Hull, laid down on 21 November 1889 and launched on 22 July 1891, an Edgar-class protected cruiser that did not actually enter service until 26 May 1894, a gap of nearly three years between launch and commissioning that was not unusual for the era, given how much fitting-out work, armament installation and trials a cruiser of this size required before she was notably ready for sea.

The yard deserves a paragraph, because C. and W. Earle was one of the great Humber firms and it is almost entirely forgotten. Charles and William Earle set it up in 1845, buying the Junction Foundry at Hull, and launched their first ship in 1853. In 1863 they bought forty-seven acres on the bank of the Humber and built properly. What made them was the Wilson Line, the Hull shipowners who between 1854 and 1871 bought fifty-five ships and took thirty-eight of them from Earle's, and what kept them going afterwards was a mixture of good passenger liners and warships, some of the latter built for Japan. Endymion and her sister St George were the two big first-class cruisers they produced.

It did not end well, twice. The company went into voluntary liquidation in 1900 and was sold for two hundred and seventeen thousand five hundred pounds to Charles Henry Wilson, of the same Wilson Line that had been its best customer for half a century, and he restarted it in 1901. It survived another thirty years and then went under for good in the depression of 1932. The gantry that had stood over the building berths was taken down and shipped out to Hong Kong. Shipbuilding on that scale has never come back to Hull.

She displaced 7,350 tons, measured 387.5 feet in length, and carried a distinctive main armament of two 9.2-inch guns mounted on her centreline, backed by ten 6-inch guns and four 18-inch torpedo tubes, protected by an arched armoured deck of varying thickness.

Triple expansion engines producing 12,000 indicated horsepower gave her a top speed of 20 knots, a respectable turn of speed for a cruiser intended to range widely across the British Empire's overseas stations.

The China Station and the Boxer Rebellion

HMS Endymion served on the China Station during one of the most dramatic episodes of late Victorian imperial history, the Boxer Rebellion of 1899 to 1901, in which an anti-foreign, anti-Christian uprising in China grew serious enough to draw in an international coalition of forces to relieve besieged foreign legations in Beijing and protect foreign interests along the Chinese coast.

Serving aboard HMS Endymion during this period was Midshipman Eric Gascoigne Robinson, who joined her in June 1899, aged 17, and sailed with her to China just in time for the rebellion's outbreak the following year. He served with Admiral Seymour's expedition to relieve the besieged legations at Peking, and on 27 June 1900, in the fighting at Tientsin, was shot through the left arm and mentioned in despatches. He would go on to earn the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for gallantry, for an action at Kum Kale in the Dardanelles on 26 February 1915, a notable footnote linking HMS Endymion's crew list to one of the more celebrated individual acts of courage in the Royal Navy's twentieth-century history.

What he did to earn it is worth setting out, because it is one of the odder Victoria Cross actions. On 26 February 1915 Robinson took a demolition party ashore at Kum Kale, at the southern entrance to the Dardanelles, to finish off Turkish gun batteries the fleet had already knocked about. The party were in white naval uniforms, which on a bare Turkish hillside made them, in his own assessment, absurdly conspicuous. So he left them behind and went on alone: walked into a gun position that might perfectly well have been occupied, placed a charge, destroyed a four-inch gun, walked back to his party for another charge, walked in again and destroyed the second. He then accounted for two more guns nearby. Seven weeks later he commanded the picket boats that went up the strait at night to torpedo the stranded British submarine E15 before the Turks could salvage her, and was specially promoted to Commander for it. He and Endymion were in the same campaign at the same time, sixteen years after he had joined her as a seventeen-year-old midshipman.

Following Captain Alfred Paget's appointment to command in February 1901, HMS Endymion visited Manila in December that year before beginning the long voyage home, calling at Singapore, Colombo, Suez, Malta and Gibraltar along the way, finally arriving back at Portsmouth in August 1902, an epic homeward journey spanning much of the length of the British Empire's maritime reach.

Home Waters and a Coronation

HMS Endymion took part in King Edward VII's coronation fleet review at Spithead on 16 August 1902, joining the enormous gathering of the fleet assembled to mark the new king's crowning, before undergoing a refit at Harland and Wolff in Belfast in early 1903.

She continued in service through the following decade in a rather quieter capacity, serving as flagship in Cork Harbour in 1914, right as the outbreak of the First World War was about to draw her back into more active duty.

Gallipoli and a Torpedo at Stavros

At the outbreak of the First World War, HMS Endymion was assigned to the 10th Cruiser Squadron on patrol duties in the North Atlantic, a rather less glamorous posting than the one that followed. Early in 1915 she was rearmed and fitted with protective bulges before transferring to the Mediterranean Fleet, and from February that year she took part in the Dardanelles operations, the ill-fated Allied attempt to force the strait and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, transporting troops to the Gallipoli beaches, bombarding Turkish positions to cover the landings, and patrolling to help enforce the blockade of Ottoman ports, earning the battle honour Dardanelles 1915-16 even as the campaign as a whole ultimately failed to achieve its strategic objectives.

That posting went badly, and it is the reason she ended up in the Mediterranean at all. The Edgars had been designed in the 1880s for imperial policing in warm water, and in the autumn of 1914 the Admiralty sent seven of them to patrol the gap between Scotland, the Faroes and Iceland in winter, looking for German blockade runners. They could not do it. They rolled, they leaked, they could not keep station in a gale, and their people were exhausted. On 15 October 1914 one of the squadron, HMS Hawke, was torpedoed by U-9 and went down in a few minutes with all but about seventy of her crew, which concentrated minds considerably. After a great gale in November the Admiralty gave up: on 20 November 1914 the whole lot were ordered home to pay off, and the Northern Patrol was handed to armed merchant cruisers, big liners with high freeboard and coal enough to stay out for weeks. Twenty-year-old cruisers were simply the wrong tool.

On 2 December 1915, with the evacuation of Gallipoli only days away, Endymion joined the battleship HMS Agamemnon and the monitor M33 in the Gulf of Xeros to bombard the Kavak Bridge, destroying its two central spans and badly damaging the approaches on either side, cutting Ottoman communications along the Bulair Isthmus at exactly the moment the Allies most needed the enemy's reinforcements delayed.

One of the three ships in that bombardment is still there, and anybody reading this can go and stand on her deck. HMS M33 was a monitor, which is to say a shallow-draught box with two 6-inch guns in it, built for exactly one purpose: to get close inshore where a real warship could not and shell the beach. She was built at a speed that is hard to credit now. Her keel was laid on 1 April 1915, she was launched on 22 May, her crew joined on 17 June, and she was firing at the Turkish coast within about four months of the first plate being cut.

She had a long and undistinguished afterlife, which is precisely why she survived. In 1919 she went to North Russia with five other monitors on the forlorn expedition against the Bolsheviks. In February 1925 she was recommissioned as HMS Minerva and became a tender at HMS Vernon, the torpedo school at Portsmouth, and later a floating workshop and office at Royal Clarence Yard in Gosport under the name RMAS Minerva. Nobody scrapped her because there was always some use for a shallow steel hull that did not have to go anywhere. She was finally disposed of in 1987 and taken to Hartlepool.

What she is now is the point. Restored at a cost of something like two and a half million pounds, most of it from the Heritage Lottery Fund, M33 sits in No. 1 Dry Dock at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, a few yards from HMS Victory, painted in her 1915 dazzle. She is one of only three Royal Navy warships from the First World War still in existence, the others being HMS Caroline at Belfast and HMS President in London, and she is the only survivor of Gallipoli anywhere. So the Kavak Bridge action of 2 December 1915 has one participant left: a small, ugly, immensely lucky gunboat that spent sixty years being useful in harbour and is now a museum, while Endymion went to the breakers at Cardiff in 1920.

HMS Endymion's war continued right up until its final weeks. On 30 August 1918, while lying at anchor in Stavros Harbour on the Greek coast, she was struck and damaged by a torpedo fired by the German submarine SM UC-37 under Otto Kümpel, though remarkably not one of her crew was killed, a close call coming barely two and a half months before the Armistice finally brought the fighting to an end.

The bulges in that sentence are worth pausing on, because they are the reason Endymion has a later history at all rather than a casualty list. An anti-torpedo bulge is a compartmented blister built onto the outside of the hull along the waterline, part of it empty and part of it filled: the idea is that a torpedo detonates against the outer skin, the void absorbs the gas bubble and the liquid layer distributes what is left, so that the pressure hull inside is never actually breached. In February 1915 Edgar, Endymion and Grafton were among the first ships in the world to be given them, on the reasonable grounds that they were old, expendable and about to be sent somewhere full of torpedoes. Three and a half years later, at anchor at Stavros on 30 August 1918, Endymion was hit by a torpedo from UC-37 and not one member of her crew was killed. The experiment worked, on the ship it had been tried on, in front of witnesses.

The End

HMS Endymion was sold for breaking up at Cardiff on 16 March 1920, closing out a service life spanning nearly three decades that had taken her from the imperial crises of the late Victorian era, through the Boxer Rebellion and a coronation review, and finally into the trenches and torpedo attacks of the First World War, a long and varied career for a ship whose design belonged, by the time of her final action, to a very different and much older era of naval warfare than the one she ultimately fought in.