HMS Leviathan (1901): Named for a Sea Monster, Survived a U-boat

Built at Clydebank

HMS Leviathan was laid down on 30 November 1899 by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, launched on 3 July 1901 when Lady Inverclyde christened the ship, and completed on 16 June 1903, one of four Drake-class armoured cruisers built for the Royal Navy around the turn of the century. She took her name, rather fittingly for a warship of considerable size, from the biblical sea monster, and displaced 14,150 tons, armed with two 9.2-inch guns and sixteen 6-inch guns arranged in casemates along her sides, a formidable broadside for a cruiser of her era.

Two Decades of Peacetime Postings

HMS Leviathan was assigned to the China Station on completion, before serving with the Mediterranean Fleet in 1905 and 1906 and later joining the 5th Cruiser Squadron on her return home. She was placed in reserve in 1908, recommissioned in 1909 for service with the 4th Cruiser Squadron, and returned to reserve once again in 1913, the familiar rhythm of a well-built but increasingly outdated cruiser cycling between active service and reserve as the Royal Navy's priorities shifted towards the new generation of dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers.

Dodging a U-boat En Route to Rosyth

HMS Leviathan was recommissioned on 15 July 1914, joining the 6th Cruiser Squadron the day after and taking part in the Fleet Review at Spithead, one of the last great peacetime displays of British naval power before war broke out that August. She spent the opening months of the war hunting German commerce raiders and escorting convoys, briefly serving as flagship of the 1st Cruiser Squadron. On 9 March 1915, while en route to Rosyth to collect Vice Admiral George Patey, the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the North America and West Indies Station, she was unsuccessfully attacked by the German submarine U-12, a close call that failed to inflict any damage and allowed her to complete her mission, arriving in Bermuda a little over two weeks later on 26 March.

Flagship at Bermuda

HMS Leviathan went on to serve as flagship of the North America and West Indies Station, based at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda, a posting she held for three years until being relieved in early 1918. She subsequently turned to convoy escort duty between North America and Britain, shepherding vital transatlantic shipping to Liverpool and Devonport during the last, U-boat-dominated stretch of the war.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Leviathan was placed in reserve in 1919 once the fighting had ended, and was sold for scrap on 3 March 1920 to Hughes Bolckow of Blyth in Northumberland, closing out the career of a cruiser whose most dramatic moment came not in any grand fleet action but in a single, unsuccessful torpedo attack on a routine voyage to collect an admiral, a genuinely fitting reminder that even a ship named for a legendary sea monster could owe her survival, in the end, to nothing more than a German torpedo simply missing its mark.