HMS Glory (1899): The Battleship That Guarded Convoys and Reinforced the Arctic

Built for the China Station

HMS Glory was laid down at the Laird Brothers shipyard in Birkenhead on 1 December 1896 and launched on 11 March 1899, a Canopus-class pre-dreadnought battleship displacing 13,150 long tons and measuring 421 feet 6 inches in length.

She carried four 12-inch guns in twin turrets, a further twelve 6-inch guns and four 18-inch torpedo tubes, and could make 18 knots from 13,500 indicated horsepower, a properly capable design for her era. Her armour was newer than it looked thin: Glory and her Canopus-class sisters used the newly developed Krupp steel rather than the older Harvey process fitted to the preceding Majestic class, a genuine improvement in protection per inch that let her carry noticeably less of it and still hold her own, freeing up weight and space for the extra coal bunkerage a distant China posting demanded.

The reason for all that careful weight-saving was a canal. William White, the Director of Naval Construction, began the design in March 1895 with one specific requirement in mind: these ships had to be able to get through the Suez Canal. A battleship that could take the short route reached Hong Kong in weeks rather than months, and could be sent back the same way in a hurry if the Far East went wrong, which in the 1890s it looked very likely to do. Everything else follows from that. The Canopus class came out around two thousand tons lighter than the Majestics that preceded them, marginally longer, faster, and with less armour on paper, and the Krupp plate quietly gave a good deal of that protection back. Six were ordered under the 1896 and 1897 estimates, and every one of them was drawn around a ditch in Egypt.

She commissioned on 1 November 1900 with a crew of 682 officers and ratings, under Captain Frederick Inglefield, and departed for China on 24 November that year, exactly the kind of far flung imperial posting her design had been built for.

A Decade in Asian Waters

HMS Glory served on the China Station from 1901 to 1905, a posting that combined genuine strategic purpose with a fair amount of diplomatic ceremony, including taking part in a naval review for the Japanese Emperor Meiji at Kobe in 1903.

Her time in Asian waters came to an end in July 1905, when she was recalled to Britain following the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, an agreement that considerably reduced the need for a heavy Royal Navy presence in the region and left ships like HMS Glory somewhat surplus to requirements there.

The decade that followed was a rather more sedate affair. She joined the Channel Fleet on her return, moved to the Home Fleet in early 1907, and after a refit that same year spent a further stint with the Mediterranean Fleet until April 1909, before finally settling into reserve, where she stayed largely forgotten until the outbreak of war in August 1914 dragged her, along with every other half-obsolete battleship still afloat, back into active service.

Guarding the Atlantic

HMS Glory was assigned to the 8th Battle Squadron on the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, but rather than joining the main battle fleet, she was detached to Halifax, Nova Scotia, serving as guard ship and squadron flagship, and escorting Canadian troop convoys across the Atlantic in October 1914, unglamorous but particularly essential work protecting the movement of Canadian forces to the war in Europe.

That convoy deserves to be described rather than summarised, because there had never been one like it. Thirty-two transports assembled in Gaspe Bay and sailed on 3 October 1914 with something like 33,000 men and 7,000 horses aboard, formed into three columns two miles apart with half a mile between ships, and an escort of Royal Navy cruisers spread around all four sides of it: Charybdis, Diana, Eclipse, Suffolk, Talbot, and Glory herself out on the flank as the heavy insurance. The battlecruiser Queen Mary joined later in place of Suffolk. Off the Avalon Peninsula a sealing steamer, the Florizel, fell in with them carrying the Newfoundland Regiment. It was the largest military force that had ever crossed the Atlantic at one time, it arrived at Plymouth and Devonport on 14 October without losing a soul, and the reason a fifteen-year-old battleship was there at all was that a convoy of that value could not be left to cruisers if a German armoured cruiser turned up.

Gallipoli and the Dardanelles

HMS Glory transferred to the Mediterranean in May 1915 and served with the Dardanelles Campaign from that June until the withdrawal in December, though her direct combat role there was comparatively limited; significant portions of her crew were instead sent ashore to help land and distribute weapons and stores to the troops fighting on the peninsula, a reminder that a battleship's usefulness in a campaign like Gallipoli often extended well beyond her own guns.

The presence of ships like Glory in the Dardanelles at all needs a word of explanation, and the explanation is unsentimental. Pre-dreadnoughts were sent because they were expendable. Every one of them was obsolete against the German battle fleet in the North Sea, so risking them against Turkish shore batteries and mines cost the Grand Fleet nothing it would miss, and their heavy guns were perfectly adequate for shelling entrenchments. Several were lost proving the point. What the campaign actually consumed, though, was not their gunnery but their people: battleships lying off the beaches became the labour force, the water supply, the hospital and the ferry service for the army ashore, and their crews were stripped out for beach parties, working parties and lighter crews. A ship's company of 682 was a considerable asset in a campaign chronically short of hands, and Glory's was used accordingly.

Flagship in the Arctic

HMS Glory took on perhaps her most distinctive wartime role in August 1916, becoming flagship of the British North Russia Squadron based at Archangel. The job was more than symbolic: Murmansk and Archangel were among the few ice-accessible ports through which Britain could keep supplies flowing to its embattled Russian ally on the Eastern Front, and keeping them open and secure fell largely to a battleship most of the Grand Fleet had long since written off.

In March 1918, with Rear-Admiral Thomas Kemp flying his flag aboard her, HMS Glory landed a party of some 200 Royal Marines at Murmansk, ostensibly to guard the Allied war stores stockpiled on the docks against the threat of Finnish White Guard forces closing in on the port. Officially unremarkable stuff, except that those Marines were the first British troops to set foot on Russian soil in the whole three-year Allied intervention that followed, a distinction rather at odds with how completely the episode has since been forgotten at home.

Her name found an unlikely second life that August, too. When the crew of the Russian cruiser Askold turned to robbing and terrorising the local population in Kola Bay, a combined force of British, French and American marines stormed and seized the ship on 3 August 1918, and a Royal Navy officer promptly claimed her for the Crown and recommissioned her as HMS Glory IV. She served as a depot ship at Gareloch on the Clyde until March 1919, before eventually being sold back to Soviet Russia in 1922, whose own inspectors decided years of neglect had left her fit only for scrap.

The Askold had earned a footnote or two before the Royal Navy ever laid hands on her. She was a Russian protected cruiser with five very thin funnels, an arrangement that had British sailors calling her the Packet of Woodbines after the cigarettes, and she had a genuinely distinguished record: at the Battle of the Yellow Sea on 10 August 1904 she broke out of a disintegrating Russian line, fought her way clear and reached Shanghai, where she was interned for the rest of the Russo-Japanese War. Glory was on the China Station at the time. Eleven years later both ships were in the eastern Mediterranean for the Dardanelles campaign, Askold's landing party fighting ashore at Kum Kale. It took a revolution, a mutiny and a shore party of three nationalities to bring the two of them together under one name, and the name they ended up sharing was Glory.

A Quiet End

HMS Glory returned to Britain in September 1919, by which point she held the rather melancholy distinction of being the last British pre-dreadnought battleship still in active front-line service, every other survivor of her generation having already been sidelined, sold or scrapped, and paid off at Sheerness on 1 November that year, her wartime service complete.

In April 1920 she was renamed HMS Crescent, freeing her original name for future use, before being sold for scrapping on 19 December 1922, closing out the career of a battleship whose service, spread across China, Canada, the Dardanelles and the White Sea, had taken her about as far and wide as any Royal Navy vessel of her generation.

The name did not stay unused for long. It went next to a light fleet carrier of the Second World War, which accepted a Japanese surrender in 1945 and then flew three tours over Korea, as told in the article on HMS Glory (R62). The old battleship spent her last two and a half years answering to Crescent, a name borrowed so that a ship not yet designed could have hers, which is about the most thoroughly naval end imaginable.