HMS Hibernia (1905): The Battleship That Launched Naval Aviation

The Last of Her Class

HMS Hibernia was built at Devonport Dockyard, laid down in January 1904, launched in June 1905 and completed in December 1906, the final ship of the King Edward VII-class pre-dreadnought battleships to be completed.

She commissioned on 2 January 1907, initially serving as flagship of the Rear Admiral, Atlantic Fleet, before transferring to the Channel Fleet that February, and later joining the Home Fleet's Second Division and, subsequently, the 3rd Battle Squadron. Her first captain, Cecil Lambert, commanded her from commissioning until June 1908, and by the end of 1909 she was earmarked for one of the Navy's first eleven short-distance wireless sets, installed behind armour near the fore bridge, a small but telling sign of how quickly naval technology was moving even before her more famous claim to fame.

The class she completed is worth a word, because it was the last serious attempt to improve the pre-dreadnought before the pre-dreadnought stopped mattering. The King Edward VIIs were the first real change in British battleship design in fifteen years, adding four 9.2-inch guns to the standard 12-inch and 6-inch armament in the hope of putting more weight of shell into an enemy at medium range. It half worked. The extra guns meant a ship carrying five different calibres of ammunition, with all the supply and handling complication that implies, and at any distance the splashes from the 12-inch and the 9.2-inch looked so alike that a spotting officer could not reliably tell which gun had fired which. They also had balanced rudders, not used in a British battleship since the 1870s, which gave them an exceptionally tight turning circle and an equally exceptional inability to steer straight. In the Grand Fleet they were known, without affection, as the Wobbly Eight.

The First Aircraft Launched From a Ship Under Way

HMS Hibernia's place in history was secured in a single afternoon during the Royal Fleet Review in Weymouth Bay on 2 May 1912, and her captain at the time, Ernest Grafton, unwittingly presided over one of the genuinely pivotal moments in naval history.

Commander Charles Samson, already a pioneer of British naval aviation, took off from a platform fitted to HMS Hibernia's foredeck flying the aircraft 'S.38', becoming the first man in the world to launch an aeroplane from a warship that was actually under way, steaming at 10.5 knots at the moment of takeoff, rather than sitting stationary at anchor as earlier experimental launches had required. Samson was no stranger to firsts: four months earlier, on 10 January 1912, he had already become the first British pilot to take off from a ship at all, launching from a ramp fitted to the battleship HMS Africa while she sat safely at anchor in the Medway. Weymouth Bay was the altogether harder trick. Grafton handed over command just days later, on 13 May, to Captain Hugh Sinclair, who missed the historic flight by a matter of days but went on to a rather different kind of fame himself, later becoming the second head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.

It is particularly difficult to overstate how significant that single flight proved to be: it demonstrated conclusively that aircraft could operate from moving warships, the essential proof of concept that, over the following three decades, would grow into the aircraft carrier and transform naval warfare more completely than perhaps any other single technological development of the twentieth century.

HMS Hibernia, a comparatively conventional pre-dreadnought battleship in every other respect, earned herself a permanent footnote in the history of naval aviation for that one afternoon in Weymouth Bay.

Samson himself is one of the more remarkable figures in British military history and is now almost completely forgotten. He was one of the first four Royal Navy officers picked for flying training in 1911, and qualified for his Royal Aero Club certificate after seventy-one minutes in the air, which gives some idea of the standards of the day. Having made both the first British take-off from a ship and the first in the world from a moving one, he went on to command the Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps and then No. 3 Squadron of the Royal Naval Air Service; he raised and led the first British armoured cars ever used in action, in Belgium in 1914, essentially by bolting boiler plate to Rolls-Royces. He flew over the Cape Helles landings on 25 April 1915 and reported that the sea was absolutely red with blood to fifty yards out. He finished the war commanding the air group at Great Yarmouth that shot down five Zeppelins, transferred to the new Royal Air Force in 1919 and died in 1931, aged forty-seven.

The captain who missed the flight by four days is worth following too, because his later career is extraordinary. Hugh Sinclair, known throughout Whitehall as Quex, had joined the Navy at thirteen in 1886; he went into the Naval Intelligence Division in 1914, became Director of Naval Intelligence in 1919 and head of the Submarine Service in 1921, and in 1923 became the second Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, the last naval officer ever to hold the post. In the spring of 1938, with war coming and the government unwilling to find the money, he went out and bought a country house in Buckinghamshire with about six thousand pounds of his own, to serve as a wartime station for his codebreakers. The house was Bletchley Park. He died in November 1939, two months into the war, having seen almost none of what came of it.

It is worth being precise about what the Weymouth flight did and did not prove. Taking off from a ship is the easy half of the problem: a platform on a forecastle, a headwind made by the ship's own speed, and an aeroplane light enough to be airborne in a few dozen feet. Getting back aboard is the hard half, and nobody solved that for another five years, until Squadron Commander Edwin Dunning landed a Sopwith Pup on the moving HMS Furious in August 1917 and was killed doing it a few days later; that story is in the article on HMS Furious (47). What Hibernia demonstrated was that the fleet did not have to stop to fly, which meant an aeroplane could go with the fleet rather than wait for it, and that is the idea every aircraft carrier since has been built around.

War Service in the North Sea and Dardanelles

HMS Hibernia's 3rd Battle Squadron was assigned to the Grand Fleet on the outbreak of war in 1914, based at Rosyth and taking part in North Sea patrols, including operations supporting the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915.

In November 1915, she was detached for service in the Dardanelles campaign, covering the evacuation of Allied troops from Cape Helles in January 1916, a difficult and dangerous operation carried out under continued threat from Turkish guns, before returning to the Grand Fleet that February. That deployment had begun eventfully: sailing from Rosyth on 6 November 1915 alongside her sisters HMS Albemarle and HMS Zealandia, the squadron ran into a ferocious gale in the Pentland Firth that left Albemarle a genuine wreck, her bridge and chart house smashed, a turret flooded, and several of her crew killed or badly hurt, forcing Hibernia to break off and escort her crippled sister into the safety of Scapa Flow before continuing on.

The Cape Helles evacuation she covered in January 1916 deserves better than it usually gets. Gallipoli was a failure by every measure except one: the withdrawal. Something like 35,000 men, with guns, animals and stores, were taken off beaches within rifle shot of Turkish positions, at night, over several weeks, with elaborate deceptions to keep the trenches looking occupied, and the last men came off Helles on the night of 8 and 9 January 1916 without a single life lost to enemy action. The old battleships lying offshore, Hibernia among them, were there to shell anything that interfered and to be the visible threat that discouraged an attack on the beaches. It was the best-run operation of the entire campaign, and it was an operation to undo the campaign.

A Quiet Final Chapter

HMS Hibernia transferred to Nore Command by May 1916, and in October 1917 paid off into the Nore Reserve at Chatham Dockyard, where she served out the remainder of the war as an overflow accommodation ship, a considerably less glamorous role than her earlier record-setting flight had suggested might lie ahead of her, one of four elderly King Edward VII-class sisters given the same undignified conversion together at Chatham and Sheerness in March 1918. She stayed in that role even after the Armistice, not finally paid off until July 1919.

She was decommissioned in 1919, sold for scrapping to the Stanlee Shipbreaking Company on 8 November 1921, and finally towed to Germany to be broken up in November 1922, closing out the career of a battleship whose lasting legacy had nothing to do with her guns or armour, and everything to do with a single, revolutionary flight from her foredeck a decade earlier.

Being towed to Germany to be broken up was not unusual and it is worth explaining. Britain finished the First World War with an enormous fleet of obsolete battleships and no money; the German shipbreaking industry in the early 1920s had capacity, cheap labour and a currency collapsing so fast that foreign work was extremely attractive. So a good many British pre-dreadnoughts made their last voyage across the North Sea under tow, to be cut up by the people they had spent four years blockading. Hibernia went in November 1922, sixteen years after commissioning. Ten years and six months before that, a young officer had flown an aeroplane off her forecastle at ten and a half knots and changed what a navy was.