HMS Iron Duke (1870): The Ironclad That Sank Her Own Sister Ship

Constructed at Pembroke

HMS Iron Duke was laid down at Pembroke Dockyard on 23 August 1868, launched on 1 March 1870 and completed on 1 January 1871, at a cost of £208,763, the last of four Audacious-class central battery ironclads built for the Royal Navy in the late 1860s. She was originally intended to be named simply HMS Duke, but picked up the nickname "Iron Duke" during construction on account of her armour plating, a name that stuck so firmly it was formally adopted by the time she was launched.

The nickname she borrowed belonged to the Duke of Wellington, who had picked it up in political rather than military life: the Iron Duke was what the press called him during his premiership, partly for his rigidity and partly, it is said, for the iron shutters he had to put on the windows of Apsley House after a mob broke them. Wellington died in 1852, and the Navy has used the name ever since. The two ships that followed this one had rather grander careers. The dreadnought of 1912 was Jellicoe's flagship at Jutland and therefore the ship from which the largest naval battle in history was directed, described in the article on HMS Iron Duke (1912), and the Type 23 frigate of 1991 has spent most of her career intercepting drug traffickers in the Caribbean, which is in the article on HMS Iron Duke (F234). This one sank a British battleship, which is a distinction of a sort.

She displaced 6,034 long tons and measured 280 feet between perpendiculars, with a crew of 450 officers and ratings, and achieved 13.64 knots on sea trials in November 1870, a notably respectable turn of speed for an early ironclad still transitioning away from a reliance on sail.

What has not been mentioned yet is the feature of her design that killed Vanguard, and it was not an accident of construction. She had a ram: a heavy iron beak built into her bow below the waterline, designed to be driven into the side of an enemy. Every ironclad of the period had one, and the reason is a single afternoon in the Adriatic. At the Battle of Lissa in July 1866 the Austrian flagship Erzherzog Ferdinand Max rammed the Italian ironclad Re d'Italia, which rolled over and sank in about two minutes with several hundred men aboard. It was the only decisive result in a confused battle, and the world's navies drew the obvious conclusion: gunfire could not penetrate armour reliably, but a ram could open a ship up like a tin. So for the next forty years battleships were built with rams, and captains were trained to think about using them. The awkward fact, which took a very long time to be admitted, is that in that entire period the ram sank almost nothing belonging to an enemy and a considerable number of ships belonging to its own side.

First Through Suez

HMS Iron Duke served as First Reserve Guardship at Plymouth in 1871, before becoming flagship of the China Station from 1871 to 1875.

In getting there, she achieved a genuine first: HMS Iron Duke became the first ironclad ever to transit the Suez Canal, a significant milestone for a waterway still relatively new to international shipping, though the passage required the assistance of tugboats to manage her safely through the narrow channel, a reminder of just how large and unwieldy these early armoured warships could be in confined waters.

The return leg some years later was rather less impressive. To save money, no tugboats were hired this time, and she ran aground no fewer than four times over a gruelling four-day transit, scraping the canal's sides more than once along the way, proof that a lesson learned expensively the first time can still be un-learned just as expensively the second.

Being first through Suez was a bigger thing than it sounds, because the canal was six years old and nobody yet knew what it would do to naval strategy. Before 1869 a warship going to the China Station went round the Cape, a passage of three months or more; afterwards she could be in the Indian Ocean in a fortnight. That changed the entire arithmetic of holding an empire, and it also created a strategic vulnerability that dominated British policy for the next eighty years, since the shortest route to India now ran through a ditch in Egyptian territory that a hostile power could block in an afternoon. The consequences arrived quickly. In November 1875, ten weeks after Iron Duke sank her sister, Disraeli borrowed four million pounds from Rothschilds overnight and bought the Khedive of Egypt's shares in the canal company on behalf of the British government, which is how Britain ended up occupying Egypt seven years later. An ironclad being towed through the cutting in 1871 was the beginning of all of that.

A Fatal Collision With Her Own Sister

HMS Iron Duke's most notorious moment came on 1 September 1875, during a summer cruise off the Kish Bank lightship near Dublin Bay, under the command of Captain Henry Hickley, when she accidentally rammed her own sister ship, HMS Vanguard, commanded by Captain Richard Dawkins. The collision tore a hole roughly nine feet by three feet in Vanguard's side, and despite desperate efforts to save her, the stricken ironclad sank within the hour, though her crew was successfully evacuated beforehand.

The fog that morning had thickened to the point where visibility fell to little more than fifty yards, and to make matters worse, a fault in Iron Duke's steam plant had left her foghorn out of action, so she had no way of signalling her position to the rest of the squadron. Vanguard altered course to avoid a sailing vessel she could just make out ahead of her, and it was at that exact moment that Iron Duke loomed out of the murk less than forty yards off her port side, far too close for either ship to do anything about it.

It is worth being precise about how two warships in company managed to lose each other, because it is not stupidity; it is the state of the art in 1875. There was no radar, no radio and no reliable way of knowing where anybody was. A squadron in fog kept station by sound and by dead reckoning: you knew your own course and speed, you knew what the flagship had signalled before the fog came down, and you sounded your foghorn at intervals and listened for everybody else's. Every one of those failed at once that morning. Iron Duke's steam foghorn was out of action, so she could neither be heard nor answer; she was out of her proper station, so her dead reckoning position was wrong for everybody who was calculating where she ought to be; and visibility was down to fifty yards, so nothing could be corrected by eye. Vanguard, meanwhile, put her helm over to miss a sailing vessel that had appeared out of the murk, which took her across the bows of a ship she did not know was there. Nobody in either ship did anything obviously foolish. The system simply had no margin in it.

It remains one of the more particularly embarrassing accidents in Victorian naval history, two sister ships of an identical class, crewed by trained Royal Navy sailors, managing to collide fatally with one another in conditions that, while foggy, were hardly unprecedented for vessels of that era to navigate.

Whatever else went wrong that day, the evacuation itself was a genuine credit to both crews: the whole of Vanguard's company transferred safely across to Iron Duke inside twenty minutes, with discipline good enough that the only injury recorded was a single crushed finger.

Why she sank at all is the more troubling question, and Reed was making a serious technical point rather than a wry remark. A hole nine feet by three below the waterline is a great deal of water, but Vanguard was a warship with a subdivided hull specifically designed to survive that sort of damage; she should have flooded one or two compartments and stayed up. She did not, because the bulkhead doors between compartments were open, as they always were at sea in peacetime, because a ship's company cannot work if every movement between compartments involves undogging a watertight door. Water accordingly went through the hull as if the bulkheads were not there. There was also no organised damage control party in the modern sense, no drills for it and no one whose job it was to run it. Half of what the Royal Navy learned about damage control between 1875 and 1945 it learned by losing ships in exactly this way, and Reed's observation that an ironclad was more dangerous in peace than in war was the accurate one: in action the doors were shut.

The subsequent court martial produced a verdict that has struck most people who have looked into it since as distinctly one-sided. Captain Dawkins, whose main fault was in not doing more to save his own sinking ship, was severely reprimanded and never commanded a vessel again, while Captain Hickley, whose own ship had actually done the ramming while blind, deaf and off her proper station, faced no court martial whatsoever. The First Lord of the Admiralty even remarked that the Navy ought to be "rather satisfied than otherwise with the occurrence," a striking way of praising the crew's discipline that rather glossed over the small matter of an entire battleship going to the bottom of the Irish Sea. The ship's own designer, Sir Edward Reed, drew a wry lesson from the whole affair: ironclads, he observed, were often more dangerous in peacetime than in war, precisely because their watertight doors tended to be left open for the crew's day-to-day convenience rather than battened down as they would be in action.

None of it was learned quickly. Eighteen years later, on 22 June 1893, the Mediterranean Fleet was manoeuvring off the Lebanese coast when Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon ordered two columns of battleships to turn inwards towards each other in circumstances that his own staff could see, and said, would not work. HMS Camperdown put her ram into the side of Tryon's flagship HMS Victoria, which capsized and sank in about thirteen minutes taking 358 men with her, Tryon among them. The doors, again, were open. The ram, again, was the weapon. That was the accident that finally broke the Royal Navy of both habits, and it is the reason the ram bow disappeared from British warship design over the following decade and the reason damage control became a taught discipline rather than an improvisation. Two British battleships were sunk by British rams in eighteen years, and not one enemy ship was ever sunk by a British one.

A Long Postscript

HMS Iron Duke returned to serve as flagship of the China Station once again from 1878 to 1883, running aground on at least two further occasions before finally coming home, and then went on to serve with the Channel Fleet from 1885 to 1890, evidently having used up her allowance of major incidents rather earlier in her career than most ships manage.

Her final years were spent in the considerably less dignified role of coal hulk from 1900 to 1906, before she was finally sold for scrap on 15 May 1906 to Galbraith of Glasgow and broken up, closing out the career of a ship whose considerable list of accidents, culminating in the sinking of her own sister, made her a properly memorable, if not always for the right reasons, figure of the Victorian ironclad fleet.

Vanguard is still there, and she is remarkably complete. She lies in about a hundred and fifty feet of water off the Wicklow coast, heeled some thirty degrees to starboard, intact from stem to stern apart from the hole Iron Duke made and the modest damage done by early salvage attempts, with her guns, winches, capstans and screws still aboard her. The Navy tried to raise her almost at once and failed; the divers worked her for months and could not even get the guns off, and she was dismasted and abandoned. A private company was then floated to sell shares in raising her, which failed in every respect, as such companies generally do. She was left alone for a century, and she is now a protected wreck under the Irish National Monuments Act, which means a licence is needed to dive her. There is something fitting about it. The most complete surviving example of a Victorian central battery ironclad anywhere in the world is on the bottom of the Irish Sea, in one piece, put there by an identical ship in a fog on a summer morning, and the only injury anybody suffered was a crushed finger.