HMS King George V (1911): Leading Twenty-Four Battleships Into Jutland

A Repeat Orion, Until the Battlecruiser Lion Got in the Way

HMS King George V was the lead ship of four King George V-class battleships ordered under the Royal Navy's 1910 programme, and she began life as an exercise in doing as little new work as possible.

To save design time the Admiralty intended all four as straight repeats of the preceding Orion class: the same hull form, the same ten 13.5-inch guns in five twin turrets ranged along the centreline, the same general idea that had already been drawn, argued over and paid for. Then the battlecruiser Lion went to sea for her trials.

Lion had her foremast stepped between the forward superstructure and the fore funnel. It looked tidy on a drawing. In practice the spotting top on that mast, the platform from which the fall of shot was watched and corrected, sat squarely in the path of hot flue gases and clinker from the boilers.

The Royal Navy had built itself a fire control position inside a chimney and then put men in it. The four new battleships were still on the slip, so while they were building, the fore funnel was moved aft and the foremast forward of it.

That single alteration is why a King George V looks subtly wrong to anyone who has learned the profile of an Orion such as HMS Monarch.

She was laid down at Portsmouth Royal Dockyard on 16 January 1911, launched on 9 October that year and completed in November 1912 at a cost of £1,961,096.

She displaced 25,420 tons at load and comfortably over 27,000 deep, ran to a little under 598 feet overall on an 89-foot beam, and carried sixteen 4-inch guns and three submerged 21-inch torpedo tubes alongside the main battery, behind a belt of Krupp cemented armour twelve inches thick at its stoutest.

Four Parsons turbines and eighteen Babcock and Wilcox boilers were rated at 27,000 shaft horsepower for a designed 21 knots. On trials she beat that without difficulty, touching a little over 22.

The improvement that actually mattered was not in the armour but in the ammunition. Her 13.5-inch Mark V guns fired the heavier 1,400-pound shell rather than the 1,250-pound round the Orions had used, and her gunnery was worked out on a Dreyer table in a transmitting station on the main deck, fed by a nine-foot Barr and Stroud coincidence rangefinder mounted on the roof of the conning tower.

For a year or two around 1912 that combination made her and her sisters about the best-armed capital ships afloat. It is a distinction with a famously short shelf life. HMS Dreadnought had made every battleship in the world obsolete in 1906, and the trick was repeated at roughly five-yearly intervals for the next thirty years, usually at someone else's expense.

Named After a King Who Had Actually Served

She was not meant to be King George V at all. The ship was ordered under the name Royal George, and was renamed in 1910 after Edward VII died and his second son came to the throne.

Portsmouth, of all dockyards, had reason to be relaxed about losing the older name: the last great Royal George was a first rate that capsized at Spithead on 29 August 1782 while heeled over for a repair, taking Rear-Admiral Kempenfelt and several hundred other people down with her, many of them wives and children visiting the ship before she sailed.

Estimates of the dead have never been settled and range from the high hundreds upwards. It remained Britain's worst shipwreck until the Titanic.

The new name was not simply flattery either. George V had gone to sea as a naval cadet in 1877 and stayed in the Service until January 1892, when the death of his elder brother put him in the direct line of succession and ended a career he had fully intended to finish.

Of all the monarchs to have a battleship named after them, he was one of the very few who could have stood a watch on her without embarrassing himself.

A Flagship From Her First Day

She commissioned on 16 November 1912 under Captain Mark Kerr and went straight into the 2nd Battle Squadron as its flagship, which is a role she held for essentially the whole of her fighting life. Kerr is worth a detour.

He had entered the Navy as a midshipman in 1879, and while on leave from heading the British naval mission to Greece he took his Royal Aero Club certificate on 14 July 1914, becoming the first British flag officer to qualify as a pilot. He promptly flew from Phalerum to Poros and back, at the time the longest sea crossing yet made by air.

In January 1918 he was commissioned a major-general for the Royal Air Force then being formed, and served as its Deputy Chief of the Air Staff. The first captain of a coal-burning dreadnought spent the end of the same war helping to run an air force, which is as neat a summary of 1912 to 1918 as anyone could want.

In July 1914 she took part in the test mobilisation and review at Spithead, the great precautionary gathering that, purely by accident of timing, left the fleet assembled and ready when the July crisis broke. On 4 August the Home Fleet became the Grand Fleet under Admiral Jellicoe, and King George V went north to Scapa Flow to wait for a battle that took another twenty-two months to arrive.

Friends in the Past, Friends Forever

Before any of that, though, there was Kiel. In the last week of June 1914 the 2nd Battle Squadron sailed to Germany for Kiel Week with King George V flying the flag of Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender, and HMS Ajax, HMS Centurion and HMS Audacious in company.

The Kaiser reopened the widened Kiel Canal on 23 June, salutes were exchanged with the German flagship Friedrich der Grosse, and for a week British and German sailors drank, danced and boxed together in an atmosphere that reads unbearably in hindsight.

On 28 June the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo and the party stopped. Warrender took his squadron home on 30 June, and the farewell signal made from King George V is usually rendered as "Friends in past and friends forever".

Thirty-five days later the Admiralty signalled every British warship afloat to commence hostilities against Germany. One of the German officers detailed to look after the visitors that week was a gunnery specialist who spent it as Warrender's personal aide, living aboard this ship, and who was laying the guns of a German battlecruiser against the same fleet two years later. That story belongs to our article on HMS Ajax (1912) and is told there in full.

Four Months Into the War and Already in Pieces

Her first winter of the war was spent not hunting Germans but being taken apart. Jellicoe recorded it himself in his account of the Grand Fleet: King George V, having only just returned from a dockyard refit, developed condenser defects that needed partial retubing, and she was the fourth battleship to suffer the same failure in the four months since the war had begun.

He noted, with the restraint of a man choosing his words for publication, that such wholesale breakdowns caused him uneasiness.

At the end of November 1914 the 2nd Battle Squadron mustered seven ships, of which one, the squadron flagship, was listed as disabled. Her port condenser was finished on 12 December.

The starboard one was deliberately left alone, in Jellicoe's own words, owing to the small margin of superiority of the Battle Fleet over the High Sea Fleet at this time. That clause is the entire strategic position of the Royal Navy in December 1914 compressed into twenty words.

The fleet that the country had bankrupted itself to make overwhelming could not spare a single battleship long enough to finish repairing her. The second condenser was not taken in hand until the very end of the month and was completed on 4 January 1915.

Three days after the yard finished the first one, she went to sea to intercept Admiral Hipper.

Twelve Miles From Hipper

On 15 December 1914 King George V weighed at Scapa Flow at half past five in the morning with the 2nd Battle Squadron, met Beatty's battlecruisers off the Moray Firth at about eleven, and steered for a position roughly a hundred miles east-south-east of Scarborough. Warrender, as the senior officer present, had overall command of the whole force from her bridge.

Room 40 had given the Admiralty warning that a raid was coming. What it had not given, because it had misread the evidence, was any hint that the entire High Seas Fleet was at sea behind the raiders.

Ten British capital ships were steaming towards twenty-two German ones, and nobody on the British side had the faintest idea.

In the dark and heavy weather of the early hours of 16 December the British destroyer screen ran into German torpedo boats and light cruisers. The shooting was brief, confused and mostly to Germany's advantage, but the reports of British destroyers and torpedoes reaching Admiral von Ingenohl were enough.

At half past five he turned the High Seas Fleet round and took it home. The most dangerous morning of the Royal Navy's war ended before the Royal Navy knew it had started.

What followed was a comedy of signals that would be funny if Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby had not been under fire while it happened. At about ten minutes to twelve Beatty tried to recall two of his light cruisers.

His flag lieutenant, Ralph Seymour, made a blinker signal that said only "light cruiser", and Commodore Goodenough, reading it as a recall of his entire squadron, broke off the pursuit five minutes later and let the German light forces disappear into the rain. At a quarter past twelve the German cruiser Stralsund was sighted from Warrender's own division.

Rear-Admiral Arbuthnot would not open fire without the flagship's permission, the weather was closing in fast, the order never came, and Stralsund went too.

At about one o'clock King George V and her squadron reached the southern gap in the British minefields, quartered the area, found nothing and turned north. Hipper's battlecruisers had passed roughly twelve miles away.

Ashore, 137 people were dead, most of them civilians, and the recruiting posters that followed did not trouble themselves with the tactical detail. Warrender retired on health grounds in 1915. Seymour kept his job, which turned out to matter a great deal more than anybody realised at the time.

The Van Ship at Jutland

On the morning of 31 May 1916 the 2nd Battle Squadron sailed from Cromarty to join the rest of the Grand Fleet. King George V was flying the flag of Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Jerram, with Captain Frederick Field in command, and she led the 1st Division: herself, HMS Ajax, HMS Centurion and HMS Erin, the battleship Churchill had confiscated from the Ottoman navy in 1914.

When Jellicoe deployed to port that evening the 2nd Battle Squadron took station ahead of him, and King George V became the leading ship of a line of twenty-four dreadnought battleships. There is no more conspicuous position in the whole history of naval warfare, and remarkably little came of it.

She did the job well enough. Jellicoe recorded that the van hauled south-east without waiting for a signal in order to close the enemy, and that when he ordered a turn to south by divisions at ten minutes to seven, King George V had already anticipated him and turned.

At seventeen minutes past seven she opened fire on a ship taken to be the leading vessel in the enemy's line, at a range of about 18,000 yards. That was very nearly the whole of it. Across the largest clash of battleships ever fought, she fired nine 13.5-inch shells, took no damage at all and lost nobody.

Behind her, Jellicoe was fighting the battle from HMS Iron Duke, HMS Marlborough was taking a torpedo in her side, and HMS Agincourt was emptying all seven of her turrets into the murk. The ship at the very front could barely find a target.

The controversy came afterwards. At ten past eight Jellicoe signalled King George V to follow the battlecruisers, on the reasonable assumption that Jerram could see them. He could not. Jerram signalled Beatty asking for his position, received no reply, heard gunfire to the west-south-west and steered towards it.

Jellicoe later wrote that Jerram might have turned towards the enemy on his own initiative before the general signal went out, while conceding that his own earlier order for a four-point turn to port may have discouraged precisely that. Historians have argued about the handling of the British van ever since, and King George V was the ship at the sharp end of the argument.

It is a curious sort of fame: the most watched position in the fleet, occupied by a ship whose gunners spent the afternoon squinting into haze at things they could not quite identify.

A Balloon, a Tripod and a Sopwith on a Turret Roof

Jutland changed her, as it changed every British capital ship. She was fitted to fly a kite balloon, the tethered observation platform that gave a spotting officer several thousand feet of height without needing an aircraft carrier to launch him, and eighty-one tons of extra deck armour went in after May 1916 as a direct answer to plunging fire and the loss of three battlecruisers.

Early in 1917 a 4-inch anti-aircraft gun replaced one of her 3-inch, the forward hull casemates that had shipped water in any sea worth the name were taken out and plated over, the stern torpedo tube was removed, the bridge was enlarged and the anti-torpedo nets went over the side for good.

Her mast finally became a proper tripod across 1917 and 1918 and her searchlights were given armoured towers. In 1918 flying-off platforms were fitted to the roofs of B and X turrets so that a Sopwith 1½ Strutter could be launched for gunnery spotting and for chasing Zeppelins.

A ship laid down in January 1911 was flying aeroplanes off her gun turrets seven years later, which is not bad going for a design that started out as a copy of something else.

The last time she went to sea expecting a fight was on 23 and 24 April 1918, when the High Seas Fleet made its final sortie against the Norwegian convoys under strict wireless silence. The Germans very nearly got it right.

What undid them was the battlecruiser Moltke, which suffered a serious propulsion failure and had to break silence to report it. Room 40 recognised the call sign, the Admiralty ordered the Grand Fleet out, and the whole fleet cleared a fog-bound Firth of Forth in under three hours. Nobody found anybody.

On 21 November 1918 King George V was among the ships that met the German fleet as it came in to surrender, which is a rather better day than most of the ships in either line ever got.

A Burning Quay at Smyrna

With the war over she became flagship of the Home Fleet, then of the Reserve Fleet, and went out to the Mediterranean Fleet in late 1920. Captain Bertram Thesiger took command on 26 October 1920 and held her until December 1922, which put him and his ship's company at Smyrna at the worst possible moment in that city's history.

On 9 September 1922, as the Turkish army entered the city, King George V and HMS Iron Duke put landing parties ashore at six in the morning to patrol the quay. On 13 September the fire started.

It burned for the best part of a fortnight and drove enormous numbers of people down onto the waterfront with the sea at their backs, and the Allied warships lying in the harbour, which had arrived under firm instructions to stay neutral, were drawn into the evacuation regardless.

Able Seaman Wallace Besley watched it from her deck. His papers are now held by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich under the reference HSR/Z/42: nineteen items, including a postcard of the burning city and a letter of thanks from the British refugees of Smyrna, addressed to the captain and crew of HMS King George V and signed by the people who wrote it.

She had led the greatest battle line ever assembled into the greatest battleship action ever fought, and fired nine shells. The thing anybody actually put in writing to thank her for was a fortnight's work with her boats.

Sold by Treaty, and a Name That Came Straight Back

She came home at the beginning of 1923 and became a gunnery training ship, which in naval terms is being asked to coach after you have stopped playing. She was reduced to reserve and sold for scrap in December 1926, one of a good many British capital ships disposed of to meet the tonnage limits of the Washington Naval Treaty.

Ajax was sold in the same month. Fourteen years from commissioning to the breaker's list, one afternoon of battle, nine shells.

Her sisters were scattered to stranger fates. Audacious had gone first, mined off Tory Island in October 1914 and then kept officially alive on paper for four years afterwards, which was a piece of accounting rather than of seamanship.

Centurion had the oddest end of the four: disarmed and turned into a radio-controlled target ship, dressed up in 1942 as a dummy of one of the new King George V-class battleships, and finally sunk off Normandy in 1944 as part of a Mulberry harbour.

A King George V-class dreadnought finished her career as a breakwater, which is either a humiliating demotion or the most useful thing any battleship ever did, depending entirely on your view of battleships.

The name did not stay off the Navy List for long. A second King George V class was ordered in the 1930s, and HMS Duke of York, HMS Howe and HMS Anson fought the Second World War under the same royal name with 14-inch guns, radar and aircraft. Their stories are told separately: Duke of York and the sinking of the Scharnhorst, Howe from the Arctic convoys to Okinawa, and Anson, who never fired her guns in anger at all.

If you have ever taken a book off a shelf expecting Jutland and found the Arctic convoys instead, this ship is the reason. She led the line at the biggest battleship action in history and is remembered, when she is remembered at all, for a signed letter written on a burning quay.