HMS Hood (1891): The Battleship That Still Lies at Portland Harbour

Built Under the Naval Defence Act

HMS Hood was laid down as part of the substantial naval construction programme authorised by the Naval Defence Act of 1889, launched on 30 July 1891, and fully commissioned on 1 June 1893, a Royal Sovereign-class pre-dreadnought battleship that deployed immediately to the Mediterranean Station on entering service.

The Act that produced her deserves a moment, because it changed the shape of the century. By the late 1880s the newspapers had worked themselves into a state about the condition of the fleet, and in May 1889 Lord Salisbury's government responded with the Naval Defence Act, which did two things. It committed £21,500,000 over five years to ten battleships, forty-two cruisers and eighteen torpedo gunboats, by a distance the most ambitious peacetime naval programme anybody had ever attempted. And it wrote down, formally, the two-power standard: the Royal Navy would maintain a battlefleet at least equal to the next two navies in the world combined, which in 1889 meant France and Russia. That single sentence governed British naval policy, foreign policy and a good deal of British public spending for the next twenty-five years, and it is the direct ancestor of the naval race with Germany that helped bring on the First World War. Hood was one of the ten. She cost £849,242, which was a great deal of money for a ship that spent most of her life alongside.

Unlike her sister ships, HMS Hood was built with a distinctly lower freeboard, the vertical distance between her waterline and her upper deck, which was not a choice made for its own sake: she alone of the class carried her main guns in closed revolving turrets rather than open barbettes, and turrets are far heavier and sit higher, so the freeboard had to be cut back to keep her stable, leaving her a ship heavier than Royal Sovereign rather than lighter and one notably poorly suited to rough conditions in home waters, restricting her useful service to either the calmer Mediterranean or static duties in sheltered ports for much of her career.

The argument she was built to settle is one of the great technical rows of Victorian naval architecture, and she lost it. Through the 1880s the Admiralty was divided over how to carry a battleship's heavy guns. One camp wanted barbettes: an armoured ring, open at the top, with the gun mounting inside it, which is light, sits high, and leaves the crew exposed to plunging fire and weather. The other wanted turrets: a fully enclosed armoured box that revolves, which protects everybody inside it and weighs a great deal more. The First Naval Lord, Admiral Sir Arthur Hood, was firmly for turrets; most of the committee, having looked hard at how badly earlier low-freeboard ships behaved at sea, wanted high-freeboard barbette ships. The compromise reached was that one ship of the first three would be built the other way as a test. That ship was this one, drawn up under the Director of Naval Construction Sir William White, and she came out at 14,780 tons. She was the last old-style turret ship Britain built and the last low-freeboard battleship the Royal Navy ever had. The barbette had won, and the five sisters proved it every time the weather got up.

A Steady, Unremarkable Career

HMS Hood saw largely routine service in the Mediterranean until around 1902, when she suffered serious rudder damage after running aground, requiring repairs back in England before she joined the Home Fleet.

The grounding is worth pinning down, since the usual accounts leave it vague. On 4 October 1902 she was leaving Argostoli, in the Ionian Islands, and dragged her rudder along the seabed on the way out, which is an embarrassing thing for a battleship to do and an expensive one. She was patched up at Malta and then had to go home to Chatham, the yard that built her, for a proper repair. She rejoined the fleet on 25 June 1903, relieving the old ironclad HMS Collingwood in the Home Fleet, and lasted eighteen months there before going into reserve at Devonport in January 1905. She was twelve years old. Dreadnought was laid down the following October and made every battleship then afloat, Hood emphatically included, into scrap metal with a caretaker aboard.

By 1905 she had moved to the Reserve Fleet at Devonport, and in 1910 relocated to Queenstown in Ireland to serve as a receiving ship and flagship, before transferring to Portsmouth in January 1913, where she took on a truly useful late-career role as a test bed for experimental anti-submarine bulges, technology that would go on to play a significant part in protecting capital ships from torpedo damage in the years ahead.

The bulge work was by a distance the most useful thing she ever did, and it is worth explaining what she was actually for. A bulge is a false outer skin built onto a ship's side below the waterline, part of it void and part of it filled with water or fuel, the point being that a torpedo detonates against the outer plating with several feet of nothing much between it and the hull proper. The gas bubble expands into the void, the liquid layer absorbs what gets past it, and the ship's real side is still there afterwards. Nobody knew whether it worked, so through 1913 and 1914 the Navy took an obsolete battleship nobody wanted and set about firing torpedo charges at her in secret to find out. Hood was the target. The results went straight into service: bulges were fitted to a batch of elderly Edgar-class cruisers at the beginning of the war, then to monitors, and eventually to almost every capital ship in the fleet, and the torpedo defence system of every battleship built afterwards is the descendant of what was learned by blowing holes in her. A ship that could not fight had finally found a use, which was to be shot at by her own side.

Scuttled to Block a Harbour

HMS Hood's final act came on 4 November 1914, just months into the First World War, when she was deliberately sunk as a blockship at Portland Harbour, positioned beside the entrance to the South Ship Channel between the harbour's inner and outer breakwaters to help prevent submarine attack on the naval base within.

Portland was worth blocking. The harbour is entirely artificial and it was built by convicts: the foundation stone of the southern breakwaters was laid by Prince Albert in July 1849, HM Prison Portland had opened the year before specifically to supply the labour, and the Admiralty quarries fed something like ten thousand tons of stone a week down to the works. It took twenty-three years. When the Prince of Wales declared the southern arms complete in August 1872 it was the largest man-made harbour in the world, and by 1914 it was one of the principal bases of the Channel Fleet, which meant that on any given night a good proportion of Britain's pre-dreadnought battle strength could be found lying at anchor inside it with nothing between them and the open Channel but a gap in a wall.

The scuttling itself did not go to plan, and the plan was not complicated. She was towed into the southern entrance on 4 November 1914 and her seacocks were opened, the intention being that she would settle gently and upright across the channel, sitting on the bottom like a cork in a bottle. She filled far too slowly. The tide turned while everybody stood about waiting, and began carrying eight thousand tons of unmanageable battleship out of position, at which point somebody made the entirely reasonable decision to hurry things along with explosives. A charge was set off against her side, she flooded very fast indeed, rolled over to port and went to the bottom completely upside down. She has been there ever since, keel to the sky, not quite where she was meant to be and rather more thoroughly in the way than intended, which is arguably the most effective thing she ever did by accident.

It was a practical use for an ageing battleship whose limitations made her unsuited to front line service but whose sheer bulk made her ideally suited to blocking a channel against exactly the kind of submarine threat that had emerged as one of the war's most dangerous new developments.

HMS Hood's wreck remains at Portland to this day, more than a century after she was scuttled, a permanent and rather striking underwater monument to a ship whose active service career, hampered from the start by her unusual design, ultimately found its most lasting purpose not in battle, but in quietly guarding a harbour entrance long after her fighting days were over.

The fear that put her there was entirely justified, and it was proved within two months. On the night of 31 December 1914 the pre-dreadnought HMS Formidable was at sea with her squadron off the south coast; in the early hours of New Year's Day 1915 the German submarine U-24 put two torpedoes into her off Start Point and she went down in heavy weather with the loss of somewhere over five hundred men, the first British battleship sunk in the war. Portland was one of the ports that fleet used. Whoever ordered an obsolete battleship sunk across the South Ship Channel in November 1914 was thinking about exactly the thing that happened nine weeks later, and it is fair to say that the decision aged rather well.

She is an unusually complete illustration of how a navy actually works, which is to say by trial, error and a good deal of thrift. She was built to settle an argument and settled it by being the wrong answer. She spent her useful years in the Mediterranean because she was no good anywhere else, put her rudder on the bottom of a Greek anchorage, and was in reserve before she was a teenager. Then she was blown up on purpose to find out how to protect better ships than herself, and finally sunk on purpose to protect a harbour full of them. It is not a distinguished career and it is a genuinely useful one. The name did better on either side of her: the 91-gun ship of 1859 never went to sea at all, which is set out in the article on HMS Hood (1859), and the battlecruiser of 1918 became the most famous warship in the world before ending in the Denmark Strait, which is in the article on HMS Hood (51). Of the three, only this one is still where the Royal Navy left her.