HMS Harrier (1894): From Bombarding Crete to Sweeping Mines in the Great War

Built Under the Naval Defence Act

HMS Harrier was laid down at Devonport Dockyard on 1 December 1892 and launched on 20 February 1894, a Dryad-class torpedo gunboat ordered under the Naval Defence Act of 1889, sweeping legislation that had committed Britain to maintaining a fleet larger than the next two naval powers combined. She was not completed and commissioned until 8 July 1896, a two-year wait between launch and active service that was fairly typical of the unhurried peacetime Victorian dockyard schedule.

She measured 262 feet 6 inches in length, displaced 1,070 tons and could make 18.2 knots from twin screws driven by two triple expansion steam engines producing 3,500 indicated horsepower, with a crew of 120 officers and sailors.

Her armament combined two QF 4.7-inch guns and four 6-pounder guns with a five-barrelled Nordenfelt machine gun and five 18-inch torpedo tubes, a heavy fit for a comparatively small vessel, reflecting the torpedo gunboat's original purpose of hunting down the fast torpedo boats that had begun to threaten larger, slower capital ships.

The awkward truth about the torpedo gunboat is that it did not work, and everybody knew it before Harrier was finished. The idea was sound enough on paper: a small, fast, heavily armed ship to run down the torpedo boats that had suddenly made every battleship in the world nervous. In practice the type never made its designed speed, falling short by thirty or forty per cent once she was at sea in any weather with a foul bottom, and the boats she was chasing were faster than she was. The point was proved humiliatingly in the fleet manoeuvres of 1890, when several torpedo gunboats were simply outrun and one of them, Rattlesnake, was caught and taken prisoner by the torpedo boats she had been sent to destroy. The Admiralty gave up on the concept in 1892 and tried the opposite approach instead, stretching a first-class torpedo boat until it was big enough to carry guns, and in 1893 that produced Havock, the first torpedo boat destroyer. Harrier was laid down in December 1892 and commissioned in July 1896. The answer to the problem she existed to solve was in the water before she was, and the class she belonged to was the last of its kind. What the Naval Defence Act that paid for her actually bought is set out in the article on HMS Blake (1889).

Bombarding Crete

HMS Harrier commissioned for service on the Mediterranean Station, and in February 1897, under the command of Commander Colin Keppel, a scion of the well-connected Keppel naval dynasty, deployed to Crete as part of an International Squadron assembled by Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Britain to intervene in unrest that had broken out the previous month among Cretan Christians seeking union with Greece, following Ottoman massacres of the island's Christian population.

On 21 February 1897, she took part in the International Squadron's first direct offensive action of the whole intervention, a brief bombardment of Cretan insurgent positions on the heights east of Canea after the insurgents refused an order to lower a Greek flag they had raised there, a truly uncomfortable episode of great power intervention in a complicated local conflict, the kind of action that made perfect sense to the diplomats and admirals ordering it while looking rather less straightforward to those actually caught in the middle of it on the ground.

The Cretan intervention is one of the strangest things the Royal Navy has ever taken part in, and it is almost entirely forgotten. Six great powers, several of whom would be shooting at each other within twenty years, put warships off the same island and then governed it jointly. The first British ships arrived on 9 February 1897; on the 15th a landing party of 450 sailors and marines went ashore at Canea, a hundred each from Britain, France, Italy and Russia and fifty from Austria-Hungary, and hoisted the flags of all six powers over the town. From that point the senior admiral of each nation present sat on a body called the Admirals Council, and that council ran Crete: it blockaded the island, divided it into national zones of responsibility, took decisions on policing and supply, and eventually designed a constitutional settlement, an autonomous Cretan State still nominally under Ottoman suzerainty. It held the island for very nearly two years, until Prince George of Greece arrived as High Commissioner on 9 December 1898. A committee of foreign admirals governing a Mediterranean island for twenty-two months is not a thing that happens often, and Harrier was one of the ships that made it possible.

Keppel himself left Harrier that June, and by October was on loan to the Egyptian government, personally commanding three gunboats on the Nile in an action against Dervish forces at Shendi and a bombardment of forts near Metemma in Sudan, part of the wider reconquest campaign then being waged under Kitchener, of all people, the same field marshal whose own fatal voyage this blog has already covered aboard HMS Hampshire.

Keppel is worth following, because the career that starts with a young commander shelling a hillside in Crete goes somewhere unexpected. The Nile gunboats got him a DSO and a CB, and he was still in Sudan for the Fashoda confrontation, when a French expedition on the upper Nile very nearly produced a war between Britain and France. He commanded the battleship Implacable in 1905, then the Royal Yachts, made rear admiral in 1908, and in 1911 commanded the ship that carried George V and Queen Mary to India for the Delhi Durbar. He was an equerry to four successive monarchs. And in 1915 he left the sea altogether to become Serjeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons, the officer who carries the mace and keeps order in the chamber, a post he held for twenty years. He died in 1947, aged eighty-four, half a century after the morning off Canea.

HMS Harrier continued on Mediterranean Station duty and later served in the Persian Gulf, including assignments at Constantinople and various regional ports, the kind of steady imperial policing work that occupied a great many smaller Royal Navy vessels during the decades before the First World War.

Minesweeping in the Great War

When war broke out in August 1914, HMS Harrier's first wartime posting was rather less dramatic than clearing mines: she joined the Downs Boarding Flotilla, part of the Dover Patrol's contraband examination service, stopping and searching merchant shipping off the Kent coast to help enforce the naval blockade of Germany.

The Downs work was neither quiet nor small, and the numbers are worth seeing. The Downs is the sheltered water between the Kentish coast and the Goodwin Sands, and in wartime it became the funnel through which almost all traffic to and from northern Europe had to pass and be accounted for. Between 1915 and 1917 something like 121,707 vessels were examined there, with eighty to a hundred lying at anchor at any hour of the day or night; in one six-month stretch 21,000 merchant ships went through, an average of 115 a day. Every one of them had to be boarded, her papers gone through, her cargo checked against the contraband lists and her crew looked at. The Admiralty eventually had to order boarding parties to send an engineer officer and a party of stokers down into the engine rooms and coal bunkers of neutral ships, because German nationals were working their passage home hidden in them, particularly aboard vessels out of American ports. It was the economic blockade of Germany conducted one ship at a time, in the Channel, in all weathers, by old gunboats with cold boarding parties.

She was later converted for minesweeping duties, a role increasingly common for older gunboats whose original torpedo-hunting purpose had been rendered largely obsolete by newer classes of destroyer, but whose sturdy hulls and reasonable size still made them remarkably useful for the dangerous, unglamorous work of clearing enemy mines.

Converting her to sweep mines was a response to a problem the Royal Navy had spectacularly failed to anticipate. Britain went to war in 1914 with almost nothing capable of clearing a minefield; the Admiralty had regarded mining as a weapon of the weak and had not built for it. Within weeks German minelayers had put fields off the east coast, in the approaches to the Thames and across the routes the Grand Fleet used, and a great deal of the Royal Navy's early war effort went into improvising an answer from whatever floated: requisitioned fishing trawlers, paddle steamers taken off the excursion piers, and elderly warships like Harrier whose original purpose had evaporated. Two of her torpedo tubes came out to make room for the gear. It was slow, cold, methodical, statistically dangerous work, done in the same few miles of water day after day, and the ships doing it were the least fashionable in the fleet.

As part of that conversion, two of her original torpedo tubes were removed to make room for the necessary sweeping equipment. Lieutenant-Commander James Parker took command in October 1914 and stayed with her for almost four years, one of the longest single commands of her whole career, seeing her right through to July 1918, before Lieutenant-Commander Cyril Callaghan brought her through the war's final months and into 1919.

A Quiet End

HMS Harrier was sold to T.R. Sales at Haulbowline, Cork, on 23 February 1920 for commercial use, closing out the career of a gunboat that had, over more than a quarter of a century of service, gone from bombarding Cretan insurgents alongside the combined fleets of Europe to the rather less dramatic but remarkably essential business of sweeping mines during the First World War.

Selling her to a Cork firm in February 1920 was the ordinary end for the type, and there was nothing left of it by then. Torpedo gunboats had been overtaken before most of them were finished, kept on because a hull that floats is worth something, and then used for whatever the Navy happened to need: fishery protection, harbour service, minesweeping, tenders, target towing. Harrier lasted twenty-four years from launch, of which she spent perhaps two doing the job she had been designed and armed for. What she actually did was help govern Crete, examine tens of thousands of merchant ships in the Channel and clear mines off her own coast, none of which anybody had in mind when she was ordered. That is a more useful career than most warships manage, and it is not the one on the drawings.