HMS Hercules (1910): She Fought at Jutland, Then Was Scrapped in a German Port

A Dreadnought Built on the Tyne

HMS Hercules was built by Palmers at their dockyard at Jarrow on the River Tyne, and launched in 1910, a Colossus-class dreadnought battleship displacing 20,000 tons and fitted with advanced turbine engines that gave her genuine speed despite carrying heavy armament and armour, the same basic recipe that had made the original HMS Dreadnought such a revolutionary design just a few years earlier. Laid down in the summer of 1909 and costing over £1.5 million, a colossal sum for the day, she was fitted early on with one of the Navy's first short-range wireless sets and, rather less impressively, had to wait until 1915 for the fire-control director she had originally been earmarked to receive back in 1913.

That delay over the director was not a piece of dockyard slowness; it was one of the sharpest arguments in the Edwardian Royal Navy, and it very nearly cost the fleet a battle. Until director firing came in, every turret in a battleship laid and fired its own guns, each gunlayer judging the roll of the ship and squeezing his trigger when he thought the sights were on. At ten thousand yards in poor visibility that is close to hopeless. Percy Scott's answer was to put one man in a control position high in the foremast, above the smoke, sighting the target for the whole ship, with all the guns following his pointer electrically and firing together on his trigger. He proposed it in 1905. Trials began in 1907, HMS Neptune was fitted in 1911, and it went into production only in 1913. Scott told Churchill in early 1913 that twelve dreadnoughts could be fitted by that autumn and was refused. Hercules was supposed to get hers in 1913 and did not receive it until 1915, which is why the timing in the article matters: she went to Jutland with the equipment, and a good many ships in both fleets did not. Jellicoe wrote afterwards that the conditions of that afternoon had converted every remaining sceptic.

She also belongs to a specific and short-lived generation. The Colossus class were the last British battleships built with the 12-inch gun; the Orions that followed them jumped to 13.5 inches and were immediately christened super-dreadnoughts, and the escalation carried on to the 15-inch guns of the Queen Elizabeths. That is five years and three complete generations of main armament, which gives some idea of how fast the arms race with Germany was moving. A ship laid down in 1909 was obsolescent in her main weapon before the war began, and she still had to go and fight in the line at Jutland alongside ships that outranged her, which she did.

On commissioning, she joined the First Battle Squadron, one of eight battleships forming a central part of the Grand Fleet, Britain's principal naval force and the ultimate guarantor of British control of the North Sea throughout the First World War. She spent the best part of a year, from July 1912 to March 1913, as flagship of the Second Battle Squadron, a spell of peacetime prestige interrupted only by a minor collision with the merchant ship Mary Parkes in March 1913, from which she escaped with little more than a dented pride.

Watching Ships Die at Jutland

HMS Hercules fought at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, under the command of Captain Lewis Clinton-Baker, engaging German forces and firing around 98 rounds from her 12-inch guns, claiming two hits against enemy battlecruisers at a range of 9,000 yards, and 15 rounds from her secondary 4-inch guns besides. Her own after-action report to the Admiralty, reproduced by naval historians since, captures the chaos of the fight rather better than any bare tally of shells fired: as she deployed into the battle line at 6.15pm, a salvo of five heavy shells straddled her forecastle without a single hit, drenching the bridge, conning tower and fore top in seawater so thoroughly that her captain wondered aloud where on earth it had come from, since only four or five distant gun-flashes were visible through the haze. Minutes later she opened fire on what looked like a disabled four-funnelled cruiser of the Roon class, then spent seven or eight salvoes engaging a hazy trio of Kaiser-class battleships. At around 6.40pm she watched what was very likely the stricken armoured cruiser HMS Warrior attempting to zigzag clear of the German fire a few thousand yards off, and not long after passed the destroyer HMS Acasta, dead in the water with her "not under control" signal flying, her crew cheering Hercules as she steamed by. Later still, at 7.20pm, she passed within two miles of a wrecked warship broken clean in half, bow and stern jutting some 50 feet out of the water with men still visible clinging to the after section, almost certainly the remains of HMS Invincible, whose magazines had detonated barely an hour before. Two torpedoes were spotted tracking in from starboard shortly afterwards; a sharp six-point turn saw one pass forty yards across her bow and the other slide harmlessly under her stern.

What her report actually describes is worth dwelling on, because it is the clearest surviving account of what Jutland looked like from the middle of the British line. She could barely see what was shooting at her; five heavy shells straddled her forecastle and her captain could make out only four or five gun flashes in the murk. She engaged what she took for a Roon-class cruiser and then a group of Kaisers she could not clearly identify. She passed a burning armoured cruiser trying to zigzag away, went by a destroyer lying stopped with her not-under-control balls up and her crew cheering, and later steamed within two miles of a battlecruiser broken clean in half with fifty feet of bow and fifty feet of stern standing out of the water and men still alive on the after part. That was Invincible, and there were six survivors from a crew of over a thousand. Hercules was not in a battle in the sense of a duel; she was moving through a fog full of wreckage, firing at shapes.

Her own part in the battle, while active, was overshadowed by what she witnessed happening to other ships around her: HMS Hercules watched both HMS Defence and HMS Invincible go down during the engagement, two of the most devastating single losses the Royal Navy suffered that day, a stark and sobering reminder of just how violently a battlecruiser's lightly armoured magazines could detonate when properly struck, even as HMS Hercules herself came through the battle largely unscathed. In the battle's aftermath she was transferred to the Fourth Battle Squadron, serving as its flagship until that formation was itself disbanded in February 1919.

The two hits she claimed deserve a caveat, and it is not a criticism of her gunnery. British armour-piercing shells at Jutland were badly made: filled with an explosive that was too sensitive, they had a strong tendency to detonate on impact rather than after penetrating, or simply to break up against German armour struck at an angle. The Navy had been told about it, in trials conducted decades earlier, and had not acted; the story is set out in the article on HMS Edinburgh (1882). British ships hit German ships repeatedly that afternoon and did less damage than they should have done, which is a large part of why the High Seas Fleet got home. Hercules firing 98 rounds for two claimed hits at nine thousand yards, in that haze, with those shells, is a perfectly respectable afternoon's work.

Escorting the Surrendered Fleet

HMS Hercules took part in one of the most remarkable single moments of the entire war in November 1918, joining a 370-ship Allied fleet that escorted the surrendered German High Seas Fleet to internment at Scapa Flow, a truly extraordinary spectacle marking the effective end of Germany's naval power and the culmination of years of North Sea confrontation between the two fleets.

A few days later, on 3 December 1918, she went a step further and sailed into the German fleet's own home port herself: escorted by the V-class destroyers Verdun, Venetia, Viceroy and Vidette, Hercules carried the Allied Armistice Commission into Kiel, flying the flags of a British, French and American admiral all at once, a rare enough sight to be remarked on at the time, before returning home a week later.

The internment she helped escort had an ending nobody in the Grand Fleet expected. The German ships lay at Scapa Flow through the winter and spring of 1919 with skeleton crews aboard and their guns disabled, while the peace conference argued over what to do with them. On the morning of 21 June 1919 the British squadron guarding them went out to exercise. Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, believing the armistice was about to expire and that his ships were about to be seized, hoisted the signal to scuttle. Seacocks and torpedo tubes were opened across the anchorage, and within about five hours 52 of the 74 interned ships had gone to the bottom, the largest loss of shipping in a single day in history. Nine German sailors were shot dead and sixteen wounded by British boarding parties in the confusion; they are generally reckoned the last casualties of the First World War, which formally ended a week later. The fleet Hercules had escorted into captivity destroyed itself rather than be handed over. Most of it was later raised for scrap, in one of the greatest salvage operations ever attempted, but seven ships were never lifted, and the three battleships and four light cruisers still lying on the bottom of Scapa Flow were given ancient monument status in 2001, the same legal protection as Skara Brae. Cardiff, the cruiser that had physically led the German line in, has her own account of the surrender in the article on HMS Cardiff (D58).

A Fittingly Ironic End

HMS Hercules was reduced to Reserve Fleet status in January 1919, her active service effectively over now that the war she had been built to fight was won, and was sold for scrap metal in 1921, purchased by a scrapping company based in Kiel, the very German naval port whose fleet she had helped escort into humiliating internment just a few years earlier, a particularly fitting, if slightly ironic, final chapter for a battleship whose career had been so thoroughly bound up with the rise and fall of German naval ambition in the First World War.

Her own disposal a year and a half later had nothing to do with irony and everything to do with arithmetic. Britain came out of the war with an enormous fleet of battleships, most of them designed before 1914 and all of them expensive to man in a country that was effectively bankrupt; the Geddes economies of 1921 and 1922 took an axe to public spending, and the Washington Naval Treaty then capped capital ships outright and forced the scrapping of a great many more. Ships of Hercules's generation were the obvious candidates: too slow, too lightly gunned and too coal-hungry to keep, with no war in prospect to justify them. She was sold in 1921 at eleven years old, having spent four of them at war and having fired her guns in anger on exactly one afternoon. That was a fairly typical career for a British dreadnought, and it is worth remembering when the class is described as the most expensive weapons of its age.

Even her ship's bell outlived her by well over a decade: as late as 1934, it was still sitting unclaimed in Admiralty stores, offered for sale to any interested naval officer for the princely sum of £10, provided the buyer could put in writing just how much the old bell meant to them.