HMS Erin (1911): The Battleship Churchill Stole From the Ottoman Navy

Built for the Sultan

HMS Erin did not begin her life as a British ship at all. She was ordered by the Ottoman Empire from Vickers on 8 June 1911, initially named Reşad V in honour of Sultan Mehmed V, before being renamed Reşadiye during construction.

Her design was derived from the British King George V class but incorporated the heavier 6-inch secondary armament of the newer Iron Duke class, making her a notably formidable dreadnought by the standards of 1914, one the Ottoman government and public alike had invested considerable pride, and considerable money, in acquiring, with part of the cost raised through public donations across the empire.

That campaign was an extraordinary thing in itself, and it has generated a legend that is worth separating from the accounts. The Ottoman Navy Society, the Donanma Cemiyeti, had been founded in Istanbul in 1909 and ran a subscription drive across the whole empire: collections in cafes, in schools and in markets, a special medal struck for larger subscribers, and donations taken in kind where there was no cash, so that the fund took in tobacco, silk cocoons, hazelnuts, grain, hides and horn and sold them at exhibitions to turn them into money. Part of the deposed Sultan Abdulhamid's jewellery was sold in Paris and London to help. Millions of people in a poor empire gave something.

What the archives show, though, is that the money that actually bought the ships did not come from them. Work in the bank records and in Vickers' own files has established that Resadiye and Sultan Osman were paid for with loans from British, French and German banks and with credit extended by Vickers itself; the subscription raised a great deal of enthusiasm and a comparatively modest sum. That does not make the grievance smaller. It arguably makes it worse. The Ottoman public believed it had bought those ships with its own coins, which is why the seizure landed as a personal insult on a national scale, and the belief is still widely held in Turkey today. Britain took a battleship. What a great many people in Istanbul thought Britain had taken was their money.

Construction began at Vickers' yard in Barrow-in-Furness on 6 December 1911, though work was suspended in late 1912 during the Balkan Wars before resuming in May 1913. She was launched on 3 September 1913 and completed in August 1914, at a total cost of around £2.5 million, just as Europe stood on the brink of war.

She displaced 22,780 tons, measured 559 feet 6 inches in length, and carried ten 13.5-inch guns in five twin turrets, sixteen 6-inch guns and four torpedo tubes, driven by Parsons turbines producing 26,500 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 21 knots, a powerful addition to any navy fortunate enough to end up with her.

Seized Days Before War

Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, Britain postponed delivery of the completed battleship on 21 July, despite the Ottoman government having completed payment in full and its official delegation having already arrived in Britain to take formal possession.

Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered the Royal Navy to detain the ship outright on 29 July, and soldiers of the Sherwood Foresters Regiment formally seized her on 31 July, renaming her HMS Erin, an old poetic name for Ireland.

She did not go alone. Her larger sister ship, Sultan Osman I, mounted more heavy guns than any battleship yet built and was seized in the very same operation, becoming HMS Agincourt. Sultan Osman's own Turkish crew, some 500 strong, had already sailed to Britain to take formal delivery, and were locked aboard a nearby transport ship just before the handover ceremony was due to begin; her captain later recalled that Ottoman protests met with no response at all, saying simply that "nobody paid attention".

Churchill's justification was strategic: he wanted to augment the Royal Navy's margin of superiority over the German High Seas Fleet at a moment of maximum tension, and to ensure that a powerful, nearly complete dreadnought did not end up, by any means, in German hands instead.

The seizure generated genuine and lasting ill will across the Ottoman Empire, where the ship had been a matter of considerable public pride and had been partly funded by ordinary citizens' donations. Turkey received no compensation for either ship, a grievance that stung all the more given how directly it touched national prestige.

Historians note, however, that there is no clear evidence the seizure itself played a decisive part in the Ottoman government's later decision to enter the war on the side of the Central Powers, though it certainly did nothing to help relations at an already fraught moment.

What followed certainly didn't help either. Germany moved quickly to fill the gap, all but gifting the Ottoman Navy the battlecruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau that August, Goeben becoming its flagship under the name Yavuz Sultan Selim. On 29 October 1914, Goeben, Breslau and a scattering of Ottoman warships raided the Russian Black Sea ports of Sevastopol, Odessa and Novorossiysk, prompting Russia to declare war on the Ottoman Empire within days and drawing the Ottomans fully into the First World War on Germany's side, a chain of events that began, in one sense, with the two dreadnoughts Britain had just taken for itself.

That German gift outlasted everything on both sides of the transaction, which is the detail that finishes the story properly. Erin was scrapped in the 1920s. Agincourt went the same way. The Grand Fleet that took them was disbanded, the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, and the German navy that gave away Goeben was sunk by its own crews at Scapa Flow. Goeben herself, as Yavuz, served the Turkish Republic for the next thirty-six years: she was decommissioned on 20 December 1950, struck off in 1954, used as a stationary headquarters until 1960, and finally towed to the breakers on 7 June 1973, the work finishing in 1976. She was the last ship built for the Imperial German Navy left afloat anywhere in the world, and the longest-serving dreadnought any navy has ever operated. By the end there was no buyer and no money to preserve her, and a ship that had changed the course of a war was cut up because nobody could afford to keep her.

Into the Grand Fleet

HMS Erin, under the command of Captain Victor Stanley, joined the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow on 5 September 1914, assigned to the Fourth Battle Squadron under Admiral John Jellicoe's overall command.

She spent 1914 and 1915 on the routine, unglamorous but essential work of North Sea patrols, training exercises and gunnery drills that made up the bulk of the Grand Fleet's activity through the war's early years, transferring to the Second Battle Squadron sometime between September and December 1915.

The Only Battleship Silent at Jutland

HMS Erin took part in the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, the largest clash of battleships in history, positioned fourth from the head of the battle line as Jellicoe deployed his fleet into action, part of the 1st Division of the 2nd Battle Squadron alongside HMS King George V, Ajax and Centurion.

For all the scale of the engagement, her own participation proved almost anticlimactic. Her division ended up on the side of the British fleet furthest from where the main action actually developed, so opportunities to open fire during the chaotic, fog-bound battle were rare for a ship in her position in the line, and she managed to fire only six shells from her secondary 6-inch armament across the entire action.

HMS Erin holds the rather unusual distinction of being the only British battleship present at Jutland not to fire her main guns at all, a striking footnote for a ship that had, only two years earlier, been the pride of the Ottoman fleet.

There is a small irony worth drawing out of that. Erin had been designed to fight in the Aegean and the Black Sea, ordered by a country that expected to use her against Greece and Russia, and paid for on the strength of a national campaign about defending Ottoman waters. What she actually did, on the one day the fleets met, was steam in line four ships from the head of a British battle squadron in the North Sea and fire six 6-inch shells. The most expensive object the Ottoman Empire ever ordered spent the greatest naval battle in history on the wrong side of somebody else's fleet, in fog, with her main armament silent.

HMS Erin also took part in the inconclusive Action of 19 August 1916, after which Admiral Jellicoe grew considerably more cautious about committing the Grand Fleet to further major operations, and HMS Erin resumed patrol and training duties for the remainder of the war.

She was present at Rosyth on 21 November 1918 to witness the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet, a suitably symbolic final wartime moment for a ship whose own career had begun as someone else's national pride entirely.

Postwar Service and the End

Captain Herbert Richmond took command of HMS Erin on 1 January 1919, and by May that year she had transferred to the 3rd Battle Squadron of the Home Fleet.

She moved to the Nore in October 1919 and became a gunnery training ship by February 1920, also serving as flagship of Rear-Admiral Vivian Bernard, commanding the Reserve Fleet at the Nore, through to December 1920, with a refit at Devonport Dockyard that July and August.

The Royal Navy had originally intended to retain HMS Erin as a training ship under the terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, which sharply limited the number of capital ships each major power could keep, but this role was ultimately reassigned to HMS Thunderer instead.

HMS Erin was listed for disposal in May 1922, sold to the shipbreaking firm Cox and Danks on 19 December 1922, and broken up at Queenborough in 1923, closing out the career of a battleship whose entire existence had been shaped by a single, controversial decision made in the last frantic days before the First World War began.