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 genuinely capable design for her era, though one specifically lightened in armour compared to home fleet battleships to allow for the extra coal bunkerage needed for distant service. 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.

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 genuinely essential work protecting the movement of Canadian forces to the war in Europe.

Gallipoli and the Dardanelles

HMS Glory transferred to the Mediterranean in May 1915 to join the Dardanelles Campaign, 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.

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, supporting Allied intervention operations in a genuinely inhospitable corner of the war. In March 1918, she helped defend Murmansk against the threat of Finnish forces, landing 130 Royal Marines to reinforce the port's defences, a small but consequential contribution to keeping the strategically important ice free port secure.

A Quiet End

HMS Glory returned to Britain in September 1919 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.