HMS King Edward VII (1903): The Battleship a King Insisted Must Always Lead

A Battleship With Royal Conditions Attached

HMS King Edward VII was laid down at Devonport Dockyard in March 1902, launched in July 1903 and completed in February 1905, the lead ship of the King Edward VII class of pre-dreadnought battleships and one of the relatively few Royal Navy warships whose namesake played a properly hands-on role in her creation: King Edward VII personally laid the ship's first plate and later performed her launching himself.

The royal involvement went further than a name on a bow. She was laid down at Devonport on 8 March 1902, and the first plate of her keel was laid and signed by the King in person, on the same day that Queen Alexandra was at another slipway launching HMS Queen. He came back on 23 July 1903 to launch this one himself. It took another nineteen months to finish her, and she was not completed until February 1905, by which time the ship being quietly worked up on paper at the Admiralty would render her generation obsolete inside a year. There is something faintly Edwardian about the whole business: the elaborate ceremony, the personal touch, the royal condition attached to the honour, and underneath it a design that was already at the end of a line rather than the start of one. She was the last word in a conversation that HMS Dreadnought ended in 1906.

The King attached one memorable condition to the honour of having a battleship named after him, stipulating that she should always serve as a flagship, a requirement the Royal Navy duly honoured for the entirety of her career.

She carried a powerful mixed armament of four 12-inch guns, four 9.2-inch guns and ten 6-inch guns. The class earned its nickname, "the Wobbly Eight", for a rather different reason than the guns: they were the first Royal Navy battleships since the 1870s fitted with a balanced rudder, which gave them excellent turning circles but made them notoriously difficult to hold on a straight course, a headache for anyone trying to keep station in a tidy line of battle.

The eight of them were named as a set, and the set says a good deal about how Britain saw itself in 1902: King Edward VII, Commonwealth, Dominion, Hindustan, Britannia, Africa, Hibernia and New Zealand, the last of which was renamed Zealandia in 1911 to free the name for a battlecruiser. An empire, in other words, arranged in a line of battle. The wobble that gave them their nickname was a genuine tactical problem rather than a joke: a balanced rudder gave them a tactical diameter of about three hundred and forty yards at fifteen knots, which is remarkably tight for a sixteen-thousand-ton ship, and the price was that they would not hold a course without constant correction. In a squadron trying to keep two cables apart in line ahead, that is a nuisance every minute of every watch. The design thinking behind the class, and the reason those four 9.2-inch guns turned out to be a dead end, is set out in the article on HMS Hibernia (1905).

A Career Spent as a Flagship

HMS King Edward VII commissioned on 7 February 1905 as flagship of the Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet, before transferring to the Channel Fleet in 1907 and becoming flagship of the newly reorganised Home Fleet in 1909.

On 5 March 1907 she recommissioned as flagship to Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet, and for the next two years the admiral's quarters aboard her housed one half of the most poisonous quarrel in the modern history of the Royal Navy. Beresford and the First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher, had been at odds for years, and giving Beresford the Channel Fleet did nothing to calm him. From the outset he bombarded the Admiralty with complaints that his fleet was too weak and that he had never been shown the war plans he would have to fight to; his sharpest formulation was that the Channel Fleet "has never, even for one day, been equal to the force which it might have to encounter in home waters". Whether he was right is still argued about. What is not in doubt is that a serving commander-in-chief spent two years openly campaigning against his own Admiralty, with the newspapers and a good part of the officer corps behind him, and that he did it from a battleship the King had insisted must always fly a flag.

It did not end well for either man. The Admiralty cut Beresford's nominal three-year command to two, hauling his flag down in March 1909 under the polite fiction of a fleet reorganisation, and within weeks the government had convened an inquiry of five cabinet ministers, Asquith, Crewe, Morley, Grey and Haldane, to hear him out. He gave evidence across fifteen sessions between April and July 1909. The report, when it came, neither upheld his charges nor endorsed Fisher's defence of them, which is the sort of conclusion governments reach when the honest answer would be expensive. Fisher retired the following year. Beresford went into Parliament and kept up the argument from there. King Edward VII, meanwhile, simply carried on being a flagship: Vice Admiral, 2nd Division of the Home Fleet from March 1909 until HMS Hercules relieved her in June 1911, then to the Nore with a reduced complement as flagship for the 3rd and 4th Divisions, then back to full commission at Sheerness on 14 May 1912. The King's condition was kept to the letter for eleven years. She was never once a private ship.

By May 1912 she was serving as flagship to the Vice Admiral commanding the 3rd Battle Squadron, continuing an unbroken run of senior flagship postings that fulfilled the King's original stipulation to the letter.

The Balkan Wars

HMS King Edward VII deployed to the Mediterranean with the 3rd Battle Squadron during the First Balkan War of 1912 and 1913, taking part in an international naval blockade of Montenegro and the occupation of Scutari, an operation intended to compel Montenegro to cede the city to the newly formed state of Albania, a rare example of a British battleship being used as an instrument of European great-power diplomacy rather than in a straightforward combat role.

The Scutari business deserves setting out properly, because it is one of the strangest operations a British battleship has ever been part of. Montenegrin and Serbian forces had laid siege to Shkodra, which the British called Scutari, on 8 October 1912. The Ottoman garrison of some twelve thousand under Hasan Riza Pasha, stiffened by around ten thousand Albanian volunteers under Esat Pasha Toptani, held out for a hundred and eighty-three days behind trenches, wire and field telephones. The Great Powers had already decided the city should go to the new state of Albania, and when Montenegro made it plain that it intended to keep the prize, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, proposed a naval blockade of the Montenegrin coast from Antivari to the mouth of the Drin. What assembled there in April 1913 was a squadron of a kind that would be unthinkable eighteen months later: Austro-Hungarian, Italian, French, German and British warships, anchored together, working to a common order.

Britain sent King Edward VII and the light cruiser Dartmouth. Austria-Hungary sent four ships and three seaplanes, Italy two battleships, France the armoured cruiser Edgar Quinet, and Germany the light cruiser Breslau, which sixteen months later would be racing for the Dardanelles with Goeben and helping to bring Turkey into the war. Vice-Admiral Cecil Burney had brought his flag aboard King Edward VII in April 1912, and his squadron was sent to Antivari in part so that the senior officer of the combined fleet should be an Englishman. Esat Pasha surrendered the city to Montenegro on 23 April 1913 after secret negotiations; under the weight of the blockade Montenegro agreed on 4 May to hand it over; and on 14 May about a thousand international troops went ashore to occupy it. Burney commanded that mixed force of soldiers and sailors from five navies and headed the International Commission besides, running an Albanian city for a little over six months. He would be second-in-command of the Grand Fleet at Jutland three years later.

Mine-Watcher of the Grand Fleet

HMS King Edward VII joined the Grand Fleet at Rosyth on the outbreak of war in August 1914, taking part in numerous North Sea sweeps and supporting operations around the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915.

The Grand Fleet years were less exotic and a good deal colder. The 3rd Battle Squadron went to the Grand Fleet in 1914, was detached to the Channel Fleet later that year, came back to the Grand Fleet and stayed until 1916, working out of Rosyth on the sweeps and the endless northern patrols that made up most of the North Sea war. The honest position of a pre-dreadnought by 1915 was awkward. She was too slow to keep station with a battle fleet built around the twenty-one-knot dreadnought, her gunnery and fire control were a full generation behind, and she was nonetheless far too substantial an asset simply to lay up. So the squadron got the work that did not need speed: covering, patrolling, guarding, and showing a large grey shape wherever one was wanted while faster ships did the fighting. The Wobbly Eight were, in the phrase of the time, still useful, which is not the same thing as being wanted.

By this stage of the war, older pre-dreadnoughts like HMS King Edward VII were increasingly relegated to steaming at the head of divisions of more modern, more valuable dreadnought battleships, serving in effect as expendable mine-watchers, a role that traded some of their former prestige for a grimly practical usefulness: better an older ship struck a mine first than a newer one.

Lost Off Cape Wrath

HMS King Edward VII's own mine-watching duty caught up with her on 6 January 1916, while she was en route to Belfast for a refit. The mine she struck had been laid barely a week earlier by the German auxiliary cruiser SMS Mowe, which had slipped out of Wilhelmshaven on 29 December 1915 and, navigating by the beams of the Cape Wrath and Sule Skerry lighthouses in gale-force winds, seeded more than 250 mines, half her entire load, across eleven lines squarely astride the approach route to Scapa Flow. At 10:47am King Edward VII struck one of them, the explosion tearing into her beneath the starboard engine room and leaving her with an eight-degree list; her captain, Maclachlan, tried to turn her towards the coast to beach the ship, but the helm jammed hard over and the flooding engine rooms brought her to a stop.

The ship that killed her deserves an introduction, because she was extraordinary. Mowe was a 4,500-ton refrigerated freighter, commissioned on 1 November 1915 under Nikolaus Graf zu Dohna-Schlodien and converted into a raider and minelayer: four 15cm guns and a 10.5cm, two torpedo tubes, five hundred mines, and a merchant profile carefully preserved right down to Swedish colours painted on her sides. Laying half her mines off the north coast of Scotland was only her opening move. On the same cruise she went on to take twenty-eight ships in four months, and across three voyages she captured or sank around forty vessels of more than a hundred and eighty thousand gross tons, plus the two freighters and one battleship her mines accounted for, which makes her the most successful German surface raider of either world war. The minefield she left behind became known as the Whitten Head field, and it was still catching ships weeks after King Edward VII went down.

Efforts to save her, including towing attempts by the collier Princess Melita and by HMS Kempenfelt, ultimately proved futile. The destroyer Musketeer came alongside at 14:45 to begin taking off her crew, joined by Fortune and Marne, with Captain Maclachlan the last man off, boarding HMS Nessus at 16:10. The abandoned battleship rolled over and sank at 20:10, roughly nine and a half hours after the initial explosion.

One detail explains why a flotilla of destroyers turned up at all. Nobody aboard believed it was a mine. An explosion under the engine room off a headland in heavy weather read as a torpedo, and the assumption went straight back to Scapa Flow, from which destroyers were dispatched at speed to protect the crippled battleship from a submarine that did not exist. That is why Musketeer, Marne, Fortune and Nessus were on hand to take her people off through the afternoon, and it is a large part of the reason the butcher's bill came to one man. It also means the standard account of a battleship abandoned in a gale off Cape Wrath is, at the time it was happening, an anti-submarine operation. The mine was not identified as the cause until afterwards.

Remarkably, given the scale of the damage and the difficult winter conditions off the north coast of Scotland, only one man was lost in the sinking, Able Seaman Alfred William Lewis of HMS Musketeer, who fell between the two ships during the transfer, a fortunate outcome for a ship whose entire career had, by the King's own decree, been built around always being at the front of the fleet. The same minefield went on to claim a Norwegian and two Spanish freighters over the following weeks, and its architect, Korvettenkapitan Dohna-Schlodien, was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class on his safe return to Germany, a battleship sunk for the cost of a medal ribbon.

She is still there, and she is in remarkably good order. The wreck lies upside down on a shingle seabed at 58 degrees 42.341 minutes north, 003 degrees 53.654 minutes west, in a hundred and eight metres of water, oriented roughly north to south. That depth puts her well beyond ordinary sport diving and she has been visited only by a handful of technical divers, who report a substantially intact hull with the casemate guns hanging beneath it and one of her bronze propellers still in place and plainly visible. Scattered around her is a debris field of everything that fell out when she turned over on the surface, including, in the words of one account, box upon box of 12-inch shell cases. It is worth remembering what those boxes represent: a full outfit of ammunition for the main armament of a first-class battleship, spilled across the seabed off Sutherland and never fired at anybody.

The squadron did not long outlive her. In 1916 the 3rd Battle Squadron was detached from the Grand Fleet to the Nore to watch the southern approaches, and the Wobbly Eight were dispersed to the odd jobs that elderly battleships were given: the Adriatic, the Atlantic, convoy work and guard duty. The last of them to be lost went almost exactly as unluckily as the first. On 9 November 1918, two days before the Armistice, Britannia was torpedoed by UB-50 off Cape Trafalgar; the hit started a fire in one of her 9.2-inch magazines, she stayed afloat long enough for most of her people to be taken off, and about fifty men were killed. She was the last British warship lost in the First World War. Two of the eight were lost, one seventeen months into the war and one in its last forty-eight hours; one to a mine sown by a ship that was a thousand miles away by the time it went off, the other to a torpedo from a submarine nobody aboard ever saw.