HMS Marlborough (1912): Torpedoed at Jutland, Then Rescuing a Dowager Empress From Revolution

Built at Devonport

HMS Marlborough was laid down at Devonport Royal Dockyard on 25 January 1912, launched on 24 October that year and completed on 16 June 1914, an Iron Duke-class battleship displacing 25,000 tons as designed and armed with ten 13.5-inch guns alongside a substantial secondary battery of twelve 6-inch guns, a formidable dreadnought commissioned just weeks before the outbreak of the war she had been built to fight.

From August 1914 she served as flagship of the 1st Battle Squadron within the Home Fleet, a role Vice-Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly took up that December, before the squadron passed into the newly formed Grand Fleet.

Torpedoed at Jutland, Fighting On Regardless

HMS Marlborough fought at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916 as flagship of Vice-Admiral Sir Cecil Burney's 1st Battle Squadron, engaging the German light cruiser SMS Wiesbaden and a group of Kaiser-class battleships during the action. At around 18:45 she was struck by a torpedo, thought to have been a parting shot from the crippled Wiesbaden, near her starboard diesel generator room; the hit blasted a 28-foot hole in her hull, put her over seven degrees to starboard, caused significant flooding and reduced her speed to 16 knots, killing two of her crew and wounding two more.

Remarkably, HMS Marlborough kept fighting despite the damage, going on to fire 162 main battery shells, 60 secondary rounds and five torpedoes over the course of the battle. In one particularly sharp spell she fired fourteen salvos in six minutes at the leading German battleship, probably the König, scoring at least four hits, a stubborn performance from a ship that might reasonably have been expected to withdraw the moment she was struck.

It is worth being precise about how unusual that was. Twenty-eight British dreadnoughts were in the line at Jutland and Marlborough was the only one of them hit by a torpedo. The two men killed were on watch in the diesel room and died instantly, in the compartment the torpedo came through.

Fighting on was one thing; the night was another. By the small hours she was slowing the whole fleet down, and at half past two on the morning of 1 June Vice-Admiral Burney shifted his flag across to HMS Revenge and left her to make her own way home. There was enough anxiety about her capsizing for men to be taken off her while it was still dark.

What followed was a slow crawl across the North Sea by a 25,000-ton battleship with a twenty-eight-foot hole in her side, in waters that had German submarines in them; two were sighted during the passage, eight miles off with their conning towers showing. She reached Immingham on the Humber at half past eight on the morning of 2 June. Nobody else had to bring a torpedoed dreadnought home from that battle, because nobody else had one.

Repaired, Reinforced, and Back on Patrol

HMS Marlborough received temporary repairs at the Humber before undergoing permanent repair work by Armstrong Whitworth at Jarrow, a process that ran until 2 August 1916 and included fitting an additional 100 tons of armour plating over her magazines, a direct and sensible response to the vulnerability the Jutland hit had exposed.

She resumed North Sea patrol duties with the Grand Fleet, and although HMS Revenge took over as flagship in February 1917, HMS Marlborough retained a command role through what were, by most accounts, two comparatively uneventful final years of war as both the British and German fleets settled into a far more cautious strategic posture than the one that had produced Jutland.

Rescuing an Empress From Revolution

HMS Marlborough was recommissioned on 12 March 1919 and assigned to the 4th Battle Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet, arriving at Sevastopol on 5 April 1919 and proceeding to Yalta the following day on a mission that had nothing to do with conventional naval warfare and everything to do with the chaos then engulfing revolutionary Russia.

On 7 April 1919, HMS Marlborough took aboard members of the deposed Russian Imperial Family, among them the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, mother of the murdered Tsar Nicholas II; her daughter the Grand Duchess Xenia and five of Xenia's six sons; Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaevich, the former Commander-in-Chief of the entire Russian army; and Prince Felix Yusupov, travelling with his wife Princess Irina, a niece of the Tsar, and their young daughter. Yusupov's presence added a strange footnote of its own to the voyage: barely two years earlier he had been one of the conspirators who murdered Rasputin.

The Empress herself refused to board until the British had also agreed to evacuate the wounded, the sick and any loyal civilians in the Yalta area who wanted to leave, a condition that delayed her own departure and says a good deal about where her priorities lay even in the middle of losing an empire. By the time everyone was finally accounted for, the party numbered around 80 people, along with, by one contemporary account, some 200 tons of luggage; evidently revolution was no reason to travel light.

HMS Marlborough finally weighed anchor on 11 April, carrying her passengers first to Constantinople and on to Malta, a notably extraordinary chapter for a battleship whose career had begun in the gunsmoke of the North Sea and now found her playing a central role in one of the twentieth century's great human dramas.

The rescue reads rather differently set against what had happened two years earlier. In 1917 the Lloyd George government, urged on by the Foreign Office and by the ambassador in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan, had offered asylum to Nicholas II and his family. The offer was then quietly withdrawn, after the King's private secretary Lord Stamfordham wrote to the Foreign Secretary that the presence of the ex-Emperor and Empress in Britain would be strongly resented and would compromise the position of the King and Queen. The Tsar was George V's first cousin, and they looked so alike that people confused them in photographs. In 1919 the same King sent a battleship for his aunt.

Guns Against the Bolsheviks

HMS Marlborough remained active in the region through 1919 and 1920, conducting weapons tests with high-explosive 6-inch shells off the Kerch Peninsula in May 1919 using a kite balloon for fire spotting, and providing artillery support to White Russian forces fighting against Bolshevik positions.

She later moved to Constantinople in June 1920 to support operations during the Greco-Turkish War, providing artillery support during the landing at Gemlik on 6 July that year, a further reminder of just how much irregular, politically fraught work a First World War dreadnought could find herself doing once the war she was designed for had actually ended.

Training Ship and Sacrificial Test Subject

HMS Marlborough was replaced in the Mediterranean by HMS King George V in October 1920, underwent a major refit at Devonport between February 1921 and January 1922, and served afterwards as a second command flagship before eventually transferring to the Atlantic Fleet as a training ship in March 1926.

She was decommissioned on 5 June 1931 after the London Naval Treaty of 1930 marked her for disposal, but her career did not end quietly: through the summer of 1931 and into 1932, alongside HMS Emperor of India, she was subjected to an extensive series of destructive weapons tests, including simulated magazine explosions and bombing trials using ordnance ranging from 250-pound bombs up to 1,080-pound high-explosive bombs; she was still afloat and under test at Plymouth Sound as late as 21 July 1931, absorbing blast after blast in the name of naval research.

The results were far from academic: they were incorporated directly into the reconstruction programme for the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships and influenced decisions to reinforce the deck armour of existing Royal Navy capital ships throughout the 1930s, a particularly useful final service from a ship that, in death as in life, kept contributing to the survival of others.

Broken Up at Rosyth

HMS Marlborough was placed on the disposal list in May 1932 and sold to the Alloa Shipbreaking Company, arriving at Rosyth on 25 June that year to be broken up, closing the career of a battleship that had survived a torpedo at Jutland, carried an empress out of revolution, and, in her final act, helped make the next generation of British warships safer than she had ever been herself.

The Empress herself was not finished with the sea. She stayed only briefly in Britain with her sister Queen Alexandra before going home to Denmark and the Villa Hvidore outside Copenhagen, where she died on 13 October 1928, aged eighty, having refused to the end of her life to accept that her sons were dead. She was buried at Roskilde Cathedral among the Danish kings, which was not where she had asked to be, and there she stayed for seventy-eight years.

Then, in September 2006, after an agreement between Queen Margrethe II and the Russian government, the Danish naval ship Esbern Snare carried her coffin across the Baltic to Peterhof, and on the 28th she was buried beside her husband Alexander III in the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St Petersburg. It had taken eighty-seven years, two navies and the fall of the state that drove her out, but the passage HMS Marlborough began at Yalta was finally finished.