HMS Mars (1896): From Reviewing the Fleet for Queen Victoria to Evacuating the Dardanelles

The Seventh of Nine

HMS Mars was laid down at the Laird Brothers shipyard in Birkenhead on 2 June 1894, launched on 30 March 1896 and commissioned on 8 June 1897, the seventh of nine Majestic-class battleships, a class that in its day represented the very cutting edge of pre-dreadnought design, displacing 16,060 tons and carrying four 12-inch guns in twin turrets protected by 14-inch pear-shaped barbette armour, backed up by a substantial secondary battery of twelve 6-inch guns.

Parading for a Queen and a King

HMS Mars served with the Channel Fleet from the moment she commissioned, and took part in two of the great ceremonial set-pieces of the Edwardian and late Victorian Royal Navy: Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Fleet Review in June 1897, and King Edward VII's Coronation Fleet Review in August 1902, both genuinely spectacular occasions at which Britain's naval power was put proudly, and very publicly, on display. She underwent a series of refits between 1905 and 1912 and transferred to the Home Fleet's Devonport Division in 1907, settling into the sort of steady peacetime routine that so many pre-dreadnoughts experienced in the years before the First World War rendered their whole design obsolete.

Guard Ship, Then Disarmed

HMS Mars joined the 9th Battle Squadron as a guard ship in the Humber upon the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, before transferring to the Dover Patrol that December. By February 1915 she had moved on to Belfast, where she was disarmed entirely, her 12-inch guns removed and passed on to serve aboard monitor vessels, a fate common enough among the older pre-dreadnoughts by that stage of the war, as the Royal Navy increasingly judged their big guns more valuable elsewhere than their increasingly vulnerable hulls.

Evacuating Gallipoli

HMS Mars, stripped of her main armament, took on an entirely different role as a troopship during the Dardanelles Campaign, serving from September 1915 through to January 1916, a period that included the grim, carefully managed evacuations of exhausted Allied troops from Anzac Cove and Cape Helles as the doomed Gallipoli campaign was finally, quietly wound down. It was unglamorous, thankless work, ferrying home the survivors of a campaign that had cost so many lives for so little strategic gain, but it was work that mattered enormously to the men she carried.

A Quiet End at Invergordon

HMS Mars was converted to a harbour depot ship at Chatham and recommissioned in that role on 1 September 1916, serving at Invergordon until July 1920, a fittingly steady final posting for a ship whose fighting days were now well behind her. She was sold for scrapping on 9 May 1921 and left Invergordon that November bound for the breakers at Briton Ferry, closing out the career of a battleship that had begun in the pageantry of a Diamond Jubilee review and ended in the far less glamorous, but genuinely essential, work of getting weary soldiers home from one of the First World War's most costly campaigns.