HMS Hornet (1893): One of the World's First Destroyers

A Remarkably New Kind of Warship

HMS Hornet was laid down at Yarrow and Company's yard at Poplar, London, on 1 July 1892, one of the very first Havock-class torpedo boat destroyers, a new type of warship built specifically to counter the threat of small, fast torpedo boats by being faster and better armed than the vessels they were designed to hunt.

The honour, strictly speaking, belongs to her only because Yarrow's yard built faster than the competition: Thornycroft's rival pair, HMS Daring and HMS Decoy, had actually been ordered five days earlier, but it was Havock and Hornet that were finished first, and so it fell to these two ships to give the brand new destroyer type its first proper sea trials.

The reason anybody wanted such a ship is a good deal more interesting than the ship. The self-propelled torpedo arrived in the 1870s and, within about fifteen years, had produced a genuine crisis in naval thinking: a cheap boat of eighty tons with a torpedo tube could, in principle, sink a battleship costing a million pounds, and the French had a school of thought that proposed to build hundreds of them and dispense with battleships altogether. Britain's answer, through the 1880s, was the torpedo gunboat, a larger vessel with guns aboard whose job was to hunt torpedo boats down. It did not work. The Rattlesnake, Grasshopper, Sharpshooter, Alarm and Dryad classes all suffered from boilers that would not deliver their designed power, hulls too lightly built to be driven hard in a seaway, and speeds that in practice fell short of the boats they were chasing. The humiliation came in the fleet manoeuvres of 1890, when several of them were simply outrun, and Rattlesnake, the original torpedo-boat catcher, was caught and taken prisoner by the torpedo boats she was supposed to be destroying. It is difficult to think of a more comprehensive way for a warship type to fail its exam.

What turned the failure into a new type of ship was one man in the right chair. In 1892 the Third Sea Lord and Controller of the Navy was Rear Admiral John Fisher, some sixteen years off becoming First Sea Lord and already impatient with everything around him, and he wanted a vessel that would be faster than any torpedo boat afloat, armed with quick-firing guns to kill them at close range and torpedoes of her own so that she could also do their job. The novelty was as much in the machinery as the concept: he specified water-tube boilers, which almost nobody in the Royal Navy trusted, precisely because they were the only way to get that much power into that small a hull. Orders went to the private torpedo boat builders rather than the Royal Dockyards, because the dockyards had never built anything like it and the firms had been doing it for twenty years. The name the Admiralty coined was torpedo boat destroyer, which is a description rather than a name and was accordingly worn down by the lower deck to destroyer inside a decade.

It was a category of ship so new that the very term 'destroyer' had barely entered naval vocabulary; within little more than a decade, however, the type would prove so successful and so essential that it went on to become one of the defining warship classes of the entire twentieth century.

Yarrow's is a firm worth knowing about, because for thirty years it was the most inventive shipyard in Britain and it sat on the Thames at Poplar, in what is now the middle of London. Alfred Yarrow had put a torpedo tube into a small fast steam launch in 1873, which is as good a birth certificate as the torpedo boat has, and had spent the following two decades selling extremely fast small warships to anybody with a coastline and a chequebook. His yard built the first Royal Navy vessel ever to exceed thirty knots. The business eventually outgrew Poplar entirely and Yarrow moved the whole of it to Scotstoun on the Clyde, a migration that took about two years and something between four and five thousand tons of plant, with a train of forty to fifty wagons leaving Poplar every day; the London yard closed in 1908, and the first ship down the new Clyde slipway that July was a destroyer for Brazil. Hornet was built in the London yard, a mile or two from the Blackwall Tunnel, by men who walked to work.

HMS Hornet was launched on 23 December 1893 and fully completed by July 1894, her construction taking notably longer than her sister ship HMS Havock owing to her distinctive fit of eight Yarrow water-tube boilers, an experimental propulsion arrangement that required considerably more careful building work than more conventional machinery.

The difference between the two sister-pioneers was plain to see from any distance. Havock's two conventional locomotive boilers gave her a pair of closely-set funnels, while Hornet's eight Yarrow water-tube boilers demanded four, the middle pair set close together, making her instantly recognisable alongside her sister even to an untrained eye, and giving her, funnel for funnel, twice the silhouette of the ship she was meant to be near-identical to.

An Impressive Turn of Speed

HMS Hornet displaced between 240 and 275 long tons and carried a modest armament of one twelve-pounder gun, three six-pounder guns and originally three torpedo tubes, one of them fixed in the bow. That bow tube proved something of a standing joke among destroyer crews of the period, since a torpedo fired from a ship already making better than twenty-five knots could rarely outrun the vessel that had just launched it, and it was quietly dropped, along with a second tube, by 1902.

It is worth pausing on what these ships were actually like to be in, because 27.6 knots in 1894 was a violent business. She was 180-odd feet of thin steel with a turtleback forecastle, a rounded deck curving down to the bow, intended to shed water rather than resist it. The theory was that a sea coming over the bow would simply run off. The practice was that the bow went through waves instead of over them, and the water arrived at the open conning position and the after part of the ship at speed and in quantity. There was no bridge worth the name, no shelter, and the crew of around fifty lived in a hull that whipped and hammered in anything above a moderate sea. Below, a dozen stokers fed eight coal-fired boilers by hand in a compartment with a temperature well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, shovelling into furnaces while the ship pitched, in order to keep a set of engines turning at a rate that shook the fittings loose. Structural reinforcement in 1901 was not a luxury. These were, by any humane standard, appalling little ships, and men queued up for them, because destroyer service was young, fast, informally run and commanded by lieutenants rather than captains.

Like all of the original six 26-knotters, Hornet was built with a low, rounded 'turtleback' foredeck in place of a proper forecastle, a shape meant to shed heavy water but which in practice tended to bury the bow rather than clear it, leaving anyone stationed forward thoroughly drenched in anything more than a gentle swell.

Her real distinction, though, lay in her performance: on trials, she achieved an average speed of 27.6 knots over a three hour run, a notably remarkable figure for a warship of the early 1890s and a striking demonstration of exactly what the new destroyer concept could achieve, easily fast enough to run down the torpedo boats she had been designed to counter.

A Trial by Fire for a New Kind of Boiler

Hornet's unusual boiler arrangement made her more than just a fast new destroyer: she was, in effect, a working trial for a technology the Admiralty was still deeply unsure about. Water-tube boilers of various makes, Belleville, Niclausse, Yarrow and others, were being fitted experimentally across the fleet through the 1890s, and their patchy early reliability triggered what contemporaries wryly called the 'Battle of the Boilers', a prolonged and often bad-tempered argument within the Navy and in Parliament over which type, if any, could be trusted in a proper warship.

The technical argument underneath the row is simpler than the politics it generated. A locomotive boiler, the sort Havock had, is a big drum of water with hot gas pulled through tubes running through it. It is robust, forgiving and heavy, and there is a limit to the steam pressure you dare put in it. A water-tube boiler inverts the arrangement: the water goes inside a mass of small tubes and the fire is outside them, so there is far less water under pressure at any moment, the whole thing is much lighter, it raises steam far faster and it can be pushed to pressures the older sort could not survive. That is exactly what a destroyer needs. The catch is that small tubes fur up, crack and burn through if the feed water is not kept clean and the fires are not handled properly, which in the 1890s meant that a water-tube boiler was only as good as the stokers and the engineer looking after it. Early Belleville installations in big ships gave endless trouble for precisely that reason and very nearly discredited the whole idea. Hornet, quietly, was demonstrating at sea that the concept was sound while the argument was still going on in Parliament. Every Royal Navy destroyer built between then and the arrival of gas turbines used a descendant of the boilers she was carrying in 1894.

Yarrow's own design, of the kind fitted in Hornet, ultimately won that argument comprehensively, going on to power Royal Navy destroyers for the best part of the next fifty years; ships like Hornet, launched years before the debate was properly settled, had already been quietly proving the case at sea. It was not all good news for the new technology, admittedly: on comparable trials, Havock's simpler locomotive boilers burned noticeably less coal than Hornet's more complex Yarrow set, a reminder that innovation and efficiency do not always arrive together in the same ship.

Home Waters and a Royal Review

HMS Hornet spent the bulk of her career in home waters, with a brief deployment to the Mediterranean in 1900, and received structural reinforcement to her hull in 1901, unsurprising for a turtleback-bowed ship that had spent the best part of a decade driving her nose into the sea at speed.

From 1902 she served as tender to HMS Wildfire at Sheerness, and took part in the coronation review held for King Edward VII in August that year, one of the great set-piece naval occasions of the Edwardian era and a fitting moment of ceremony for one of the pioneering vessels of an entirely new class of warship.

The review she attended is a small period piece in its own right. It had been arranged for 28 June 1902 to follow the coronation of Edward VII, and then the King developed appendicitis two days before the ceremony and nearly died of it, so both coronation and review were put off. The fleet review finally took place on 16 August at Spithead, with the King watching from the royal yacht, and it was a great deal smaller than originally planned because most of the foreign squadrons had gone home. What remained was a considerable spread of British warships, among them a good many of the new destroyers, and it is a neat marker of how fast the type had arrived: in 1892 the destroyer did not exist, and ten years later a hundred-odd of them were an unremarkable part of the fleet the King steamed past.

The End

HMS Hornet's hull condition was found to have deteriorated significantly by a 1909 survey, an unsurprising outcome for a ship built at speed with experimental machinery some sixteen years earlier, and she was sold for scrapping on 12 October 1909, closing out the career of one of the true pioneers of the destroyer type, a small, fast and largely unglamorous ship whose basic concept would go on to shape naval warfare for the rest of the century that followed her. Looking beyond Hornet herself, she was in fact the first of the original six 26-knotters to leave service. HMS Decoy, the only outright loss among the six, sank after a collision with the destroyer HMS Arun off Wolf Rock in 1904; Ferret was disposed of in 1910; and Havock, Daring and Lynx all lasted until 1912. By then, the ships that had proven the entire destroyer concept were gone from the fleet list, their pioneering work thoroughly done.

It is worth being clear about what she and Havock actually started, because it is not a small thing. In 1892 the Royal Navy had no destroyers. Within twenty years it had over two hundred, they had become the fleet's screen, its torpedo arm, its escort and eventually its anti-submarine force, and there is a direct line of descent from a 275-ton boat with four funnels and a turtleback bow to every destroyer since. The job description has barely moved: a fast ship, smaller than a cruiser, built to protect the heavy units from whatever the current cheap threat happens to be, whether that is a torpedo boat, a submarine, an aircraft or a sea-skimming missile. What the type became within ten years of her, once the turtleback had given way to a proper raised forecastle and the boats had grown enough to keep the sea, can be seen in the article on HMS Exe (1903). Hornet was sold for scrap in October 1909, worn out at fifteen, the first of the six original 26-knotters to go. She had been at sea for less time than it takes to build a modern warship, and she had helped invent a category that is still in service.