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

Built at Hull

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 genuinely ready for sea. 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 Eric Gascoigne Robinson, a young officer who would go on to earn the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for gallantry, for later actions during the Mesopotamian campaign of the First World War, 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.

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, a genuinely 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

HMS Endymion served during the Gallipoli campaign, the ill-fated Allied attempt to force the Dardanelles and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, one of the First World War's most costly and closely studied operations, in which older cruisers like HMS Endymion found continued usefulness providing bombardment support and covering fire even as the campaign as a whole ultimately failed to achieve its strategic objectives.

HMS Endymion's war continued right up until its final weeks. On 30 August 1918, while operating at Stavros on the Greek coast, she was struck and damaged by a torpedo fired by the German submarine SM UC-37, though her crew survived the attack, a close call coming barely two and a half months before the Armistice finally brought the fighting to an end.

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 genuinely 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.